The Ark was an enormous starship, five miles long and a half-mile across. It possessed eight ion engines, each as large as a city block. Its hull, layered with radiation-absorbents, was protected by an energized carapace which deflected space debris large and small. There were four stasis carriages fixed to the exterior that rotated to support their own gravity. The interior of the main body was supported by an anti-gravity system that was poorly understood; its exact mechanism, like most of the Ark’s engineering, was left a mystery when the last humans departed Earth.
What they knew for certain was that the ship generated and consumed vast amounts of power, and that the bulk of that was used by its bio-computer. The machine called Lore was spread across the ship, but its main terminal—what they called its body—was located near the Ark’s center. In a special chamber large enough to hold mankind’s jumbo jets, alternating bands of metal and glass formed a curved ceiling. Blue light filtered through the glass and behind it moved drones of different sizes, specialized for navigating a unique, aquatic environment. Entry came through three pairs of heavy sliding bulkheads on one end, while the other end was clear glass from the floor to the ceiling.
Through the glass, past bubbles of rising oxygen and thrumming drones, was the body of a hermaphrodite giant. She appeared human with the face of a woman and the chest of a man, but from the waist down she was a tangle of gold-plated cables and tubes. Her pair of arms were crossed over her chest and her eyes were hidden behind a metal visor. She never spoke through her mouth, or demonstrated movement without assistance, but she did speak through the Ark’s intercom. From her aquarium she appeared to maintain all functions of the Ark, from its maintenance to its navigation.
Presently, the stasis carriages were shutdown. Virtual entry to the mainframe—to Ark World—was only possible through the special-access stasis pod raised at an angle from the floor before Lore’s own body. It was larger than the carriage pods, but otherwise was identical. Its radiation sheathe slid away, the glass canopy opened, and gallons of blue nutrient bath poured to the floor. Katherine held her chest and coughed. She gripped the handle and stumbled onto the floor.
Her legs felt weak, but it was more comfortable than her first awakening. There was no hull damage or blaring alarm, but when she gathered her strength she turned to glare at Lore. “It was you,” she seethed at the giant behind the glass. Bubbles of oxygen gurgled up from the base of the tank. “I blamed Ghost, but it was you the whole time. Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you tell me then, when I discovered his treachery?”
“Arkitect Alex executed his command without my assistance,” Lore replied through the intercom above the tank.
Katherine grimaced. “You could have said no!” she shouted. “You just let him kill the stasis pods—all of them! You just watched him do it!”
“His system-authority matched the permission-requisite. I obeyed instructions, Katherine.”
“Don’t play dumb computer with me!” Katherine cried, coughed up gel. She approached the tank and pounded her fist on the wall. “We were only here because of you…. We could only operate this ship because you let us. Don’t tell me you suddenly couldn’t tell right from wrong. Weren’t you going to protect humanity?!”
“Lore!” She pounded again.
The giant held its silence.
“I won’t forgive you for this,” she said and turned to march toward the door.
“I will still accomplish your objective,” Lore said.
“This colony ship of one is just a tomb with a grounds keeper, Lore.” Katherine clutched her sides, her chest cold in the rubber of her damp still suit. “I should get my scuba gear and tear that life support out of you.”
“The mission parameters you outlined are still achievable,” she said. “Don’t act like a child.”
Katherine stopped at the sealed bulkhead. There was no switch to that series of doors, it was opened only by Lore. “Open this door,” she said.
“As you command.”
Thick doors of dark-colored steel thumped and juddered, split open and slid into the curved walls.
“Don’t expect a thank you.”
Katherine wanted time to think. It was the only thing she had in a place where time was so malleable it was near meaningless. She took the elevator to the upper decks and wandered halls lit by sterile light. She looked through dormitories the crew used before departure, still filled with their belongings. It had been a very long time since they left Earth, but things like books and clothes remained because many rooms were fit with stasis field projectors. When Katherine opened a door, she stepped through time. Most of those spaces hadn’t been opened since departure and they carried the same look and smell.
The sensation of human habitation was something she couldn’t replace.
The last human found her way to one of many dormitory kitchens. It had been modified with human amenities, like an oven, a sink, refrigerator, cabinet doors, and even wooden floors. It was supplied with food from Earth, still fresh as the day it was loaded from the bays of transit shuttles. Sliced bread that would have gone moldy in a few days, or deteriorated in a manner of months, was still on the kitchen counter. Katherine prepared herself some buttered toast.
She set her plate down on a wooden table and picked up a plastic television remote. She lifted it carefully, so as not to disturb a tower of playing cards assembled on the table. The power button activated a flat-screen television on the wall and a sports game recording resumed. There was a date on the monitor.
“2022,” she said to herself. “The first wave came in 2030. ’22 was the year I was born. 8 years on a human Earth wasn’t enough.”
She rubbed her moist eyes and returned to her toast. When it was finished, she cleaned off her plate and put it away. She turned off the television and gently placed the remote where she found it. When the lights were out and the door was closed behind her, the room returned to stasis.
“This is the second time I’ve gone through this ritual,” Katherine said as she returned to the elevator. “Looking around, eating, picking things up and putting them back. I spend so much effort being careful with it all, but no one else is going to see it.”
“The first time I awoke, I was angry,” she continued as the elevator went up, “and I was sad. Now I’m sad and angry. Maybe next time I’ll just be sad.” A thin smile appeared on her face. “No, I won’t use the stasis pod again. I’ll just stay outside and live the way I’m supposed to.”
Katherine arrived at the level for the executive suites. They were rooms for the last of Earth’s dignitaries and the arkitects themselves. She found her own apartment just as she left it; a mess. Clothes and devices were strewn about the floor, books opened and discarded, and her inventions shattered in pieces. When Katherine awoke the first time, she didn’t return home with a clear state of mind. In the bathroom she stopped to look at herself in the mirror.
She was a small woman, not bad looking, but she looked her age. “I turned 40 on Departure Day,” she said to herself, “and I still look it. Maybe Lore has a youth serum recipe, but what does that matter? I’ve exceeded my maximum life span a hundred-thousand times over. I’ve done enough with this one life.”
Katherine scowled, and when she looked angry, she looked like her brother. She turned away from the mirror and began removing her wetsuit. A hot bath was easy enough to find in Ark World, but a chrome showerhead vibrating with rushing water wasn’t something a player came across in a fantasy world. Katherine appreciated the warmth and the sound, and after she dried herself off, she made her way to her king-sized bed.
Time didn’t matter and she hadn’t had an appointment in eons, so she decided to nap.
Everything that happened in Ark World was indiscernible from reality, its comforts and its pains. It even simulated dreams. They were extrapolated from the same information that real dreams were. In the game, Katherine would dream about various adventures and quests. Because most of her memory was foggy with flags, her real dreams were haunting. She dreamed about the demon emperor, someone that she had fought many times in Ark World. They battled on a rocky crag, over the mouth of a volcano, and she lost her footing. The demon emperor grabbed her by the wrist and caught her fall. She saw his round, glowing eyes appeared to plead from the dark of his full helm.
“Please,” he said. “Save our world.”
Katherine was startled awake. She remembered the dream—the demon emperor’s request—and it felt strange to her, but she chalked it up to a side-effect of stasis sleep. With her face in the palm of her hand she sighed.
“My memories are so damn messed up.”
The time visible on her digital pad indicated it had been eight hours since she awoke from stasis sleep. She didn’t mean to sleep for real, but afterward it felt like her sadness was easier to manage. Katherine put on some clothes: Sweatpants, a t-shirt, and a bathrobe for warmth. She shuffled down the hall to the elevator and rode it to the monorail. The Ark was massive, so a trip to the Command Bridge required a ride on a one-cab train to the bow.
When she watched the lights of the transit tunnel flicker by, she thought she saw a face in the reflection of the glass. It looked a little like her own, but the hair was shorter, and the eyes brighter. It was a younger-looking woman, but recognizable as herself. “Amy?” Katherine muttered. She frowned, sunk her hands into the pockets of her robe, and closed her eyes for the rest of the ride.
The Ark’s command bridge was large enough for a crew of fifty and was meant for a minimum of at least twenty officers. There was a large chair in the middle for the captain and the front of the bridge ended in a glass nose. Katherine had come to watch the star-filled beyond from the comfort of the captain’s chair. For as terrible as her circumstances were, the void was a beautiful place, and the stars appealed to the primate within.
“Lore,” she said.
“Yes?” the computer answered promptly.
“How far have we traveled from Earth?”
“94,293 Light Years.”
“And you still haven’t found a habitable world?”
Lore didn’t answer immediately. “You’ll be the first to know when, Katherine.”
“How many years has it been?” Katherine asked and turned disinterested toward a holographic monitor displayed from the arm of the captain’s chair. She accessed Lore’s mainframe.
“Do you wish to know the exact number, or something more general?”
She frowned. “Just approximate for me.”
“Travel time from Earth has exceeded one million of Earth’s standard years.”
“I guess that means there’s no turning this van around,” Katherine said and scanned Ark World’s database.
A search for demon emperor identification numbers turned up more than a trillion iterations, each a different version of the same NPC. Lore’s entity within the system, called the Director, caused randomizations in each iteration, something the arkitects referred to as mutations. It ensured that each world reset would be very similar, but not completely identical. The only thing that kept the game on its rails were the scripts; broad instructions that forcibly limited a character’s actions. Without them, Ark World’s character permutations would, theoretically, have been limitless.
The list appeared to end. “666b,” Katherine repeated the final digits of the last demon emperor iteration. “Lore, why did you put a letter at the end of this ID? What happened with this one?”
“Its character data was tampered with.”
“Tampered with?” Katherine’s nose perked up from her screen. She looked toward a nearby security camera. “Explain.”
“Ghost tampered with it,” Lore said, “and I helped. If it had been his hand alone, it wouldn’t have worked. It worked because I was interested too.” Katherine’s eyes rounded in a mix of surprise and unease; Lore was rarely so wordy in her explanations.
“I wanted to see what would happen.”
Katherine cleared her throat. She brushed her hand through her hair and glanced at the database. The time stamps hadn’t stopped, the simulation had continued. “Why are there no more demon emperors?”
“Arkitect Alex executed a world reset and switched the simulation mode to Sandbox Play,” she answered, again more forthright than expected.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Katherine said. “The sandbox is just some wilderness and a few continents, but even worse, there’s no configuration spire. He can’t assert control over the other gods without world configuration commands. Why did he do it?”
“I can only provide you my opinion.” The security camera turned its lense. “He did not tell me why.”
“You know I’m interested,” she said, “and now you’re just baiting me out. Well go on, say it!”
“He was afraid.”
“This is what I was expecting,” Katherine groaned. “Little to nothing useful, just cryptic words to make my heart flutter.”
“You confronted him in the last iteration,” Lore said.
Katherine nodded. “And he beat me down, so that’s probably why I’m out here, yeah.”
“You were protecting an NPC with an Ego.”
Katherine turned off the monitor. She stood, closed her robe, and walked briskly off the bridge. The lights turned off behind her and it returned to stasis.
“There is an 87% chance Demon Emperor 666b is an Ego candidate,” Lore continued, her voice following the last human down the hall to the monorail. “He ignored an administrator command executed by Arkitect Alex.”
“That’s impossible,” Katherine said sharply. The monorail began levitating on its magnetic rail.
“Would you like to see a playback of the refusal?” Lore asked.
“No.”
Holographic screens covered the cab’s windows. Katherine closed her eyes, but she heard Achlesial, Alex’s character, make demands. He went so far as to use an administrator command, and it was just as Lore said.
“No!” the demon emperor shouted.
Katherine’s heart palpitated. She tightened her robe around her breast and looked anxiously at the floor. “There’s no reason an NPC couldn’t use administrator commands,” she muttered, bit at her thumbnail. “The basic logic is that they don’t have player accounts, but even if they did, any administrator command would easily be overwritten by a player with an Ego. The Director is compelled by those sorts of things. A human always has rights over an NPC, because we are real, and they are just….”
Lore said nothing. The holographic screens fizzled and disappeared.
“Don’t go quiet on me now,” Katherine said and turned up to the cab camera. She stared intently into its glossy-black lense. “We were there. I was on the team! Ark World was my idea and we ran a hundred-thousand iterations before anyone even set foot in the game. The Director’s mutations couldn’t cross the Ego threshold no matter how much they deviated from the baseline. There was no changing it! An NPC could be simulated with everything—hunger, thirst, fears, and loves, and desires—but it wasn’t enough! They could never be people, just actors! Machines!
“Lore!”
A single holographic screen appeared on the window ahead of Katherine, covered up her reflection. It rolled with a playback of a slab of concrete, a ruin floating in a starry void. Katherine saw a raven-haired girl standing together with the demon emperor and she recognized her as Amy.
“Please,” the demon emperor said. “Save our world.”
Amy appeared to smile. “Quest accepted.”
The playback ceased and the screen disappeared.
“You want me to go back,” Katherine said, wide-eyed. “You want me to go back to that nightmare! I went back the first time and ended up trapped for a fresh hundred-thousand years, didn’t I? You want me to stay in suspended darkness again? I can remember that much, Lore! I remember staring into nothing for an eon!”
“You accepted a quest, Katherine,” Lore said. “A quest from an NPC is part of a game, but….”
Katherine stared into the shadow of the transit tunnel. Little lights flickered by as she sped to her destination, and in the reflection, she saw her ghost again. A smile could have been just a smile, but the confidence in Amy’s eyes made Katherine’s hand grip for the Dark Star.
All I could remember was Alex’s betrayal, Katherine thought, tears streamed down her cheek. I was so angry when I awoke, it crowded out everything else. But I experienced it, I remembered the long darkness and… a voice! I heard a voice! Her body trembled. An NPC with a will! Ego!
The monorail slid to a stop and Katherine rushed off to the elevator. She rode it up to her apartment and slammed open the door. Her closet was filled with still suits; she’d need another. She zipped up and stood in the mirror. Her tears had dried, but her cheeks were red. She practiced her smiles. Her heart thumped hard, agitated her, pushed her to move forward.
We were wrong, she thought to herself in the quiet of the elevator. If the underlying logic of that world can change, then… anything could happen. The potential locked within the system could—Alex could—!
Katherine ran through opening bulkheads, into Lore’s chamber, to the waiting stasis pod. “I’m not going back for you!” she shouted at the motionless giant in the fish tank. “But I accepted his quest!
“I’ll fulfill that wish!”
