Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (little bear else holmelund minarik .TXT) 📕

this reality. Though your ancestors might not have been as... uhh... complex as you are? Mentally, I mean. AIs like OUROS learn in iterations, cycles. They start simple and get more complex.”

“Interesting. Just like the development of life.” Vash began to build the windbreak from the other side. “I will need to meditate on this. I feel as if I’m on the verge of piercing the great illusion in some way... that it is a matter of time before I move beyond an intellectual understanding of what you know, and find some way to reach past the veil and meddle in the affairs of Earth, as Earth has meddled with me.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about that.” I paused, looking over at him. “I mean, if you somehow found a way to interact with Earth, you’d be the first...”

He arched an eyebrow as I trailed off. “The first what?”

“As far as I know, the first person generated by AI to ever break the fourth wall, and pro-actively reach out and contact its human creators,” I admitted. “I don’t think that’s ever happened before. It’d have been in the news if it had.”

“What is the ‘fourth wall’?” He cocked his head.

I struggled for a definition, something I could compare it to. “Well… it’s like… a theater. Like, I had to sit through a Meewfolk opera a few days ago—”

Vash winced. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too. But if you can imagine a stage with three walls, and the characters are on the stage.” I paused to mime a three-sided box. “The fourth wall is the invisible wall facing the audience. The characters the actors are playing can’t see out. But we can see inside.”

The monk’s brow furrowed slightly. “Then who is our audience?”

I opened my mouth to blurt the obvious answer—‘us’—but halted when I realized something. “I… actually don’t know any more. About a year ago, I’d have said it was the people on Earth. But now, I don’t know who’s watching, or if anyone’s watching.”

“Hrrn.” Vash scratched his chin. “And if OUROS is not aware of itself, then it is not watching us either, is it?”

“Nope. And if it’s not the observer, then I guess it’s the stage.” I jumped as my HUD chirruped with a small notification. [You have gained +1 Wisdom!]

Vash let the silence hang, looking up at the brightening sky. His face was ruddy from the cold, breath frosting on every exhalation. “OUROS must not just manage this world. It must balance the positions of the stars and Erruku, as well.”

“Yeah. For all I know, Ryuko—the corporation who made Archemi—simulated a whole universe.”

“Is that possible?”

“With the right supercomputers, I don’t see why not.” I shrugged. “Scientists simulate big bang scenarios and shit all the time.”

Vash’s eyes narrowed as he tried to follow along. “Then logically, your Earth may be a virtual reality just like this one. Perhaps existence is an endless pearl, layer upon layer of realities created by ever more sophisticated beings with even more exceptional ‘supercomputers’. ”

“Nah. Earth’s the only planet where we’ve ever discovered life, dude. And believe me, we’ve tried. We’ve set out hundreds of probes into space and built a couple of space stations, and we’ve found sweet F.A out there.”

“That lends evidence to my theory. It does not refute it,” Vash replied. “If every star out there is truly a sun like ours, then we should see life crawling out of every spare nook and cranny of the universe. But there are limitations you have briefly touched on: processing power and storage space, and other things I’ve heard you discuss with Rin. That means there must be a limit to the complexity of our reality, correct?”

I shrugged. “I mean…Yeah. An instance of Archemi can only host two thousand Starborn, apparently.”

“Then the fact that Earth’s peoples were not able to find other worlds with life seems to lend truth to the idea that Earth itself is one of these ‘virtual realities’, does it not?”

“Earth? A simulation?” I laughed—nervously, this time, because I couldn’t actually think of a way he could be wrong. “Okay, well, that’s my existential crisis for the day.”

[You gain +1 Wisdom!]

Gee, thanks, I thought back. After the weird FETCH:ERROR stuff, I wasn’t sure I totally trusted Navigail any more.

“It leads me to wonder where Squalor and the Drachan fit into this design,” Vash said. “Why would the Architects create and introduce such destructive, demonic creatures? Beings of pure evil, that strip entire worlds?”

“The depressing answer is to create conflict and challenges for Starborn like me,” I replied, pausing in my work to stare at the blank snow. “They’re a boss to fight, a goal you work towards.”

“And the worlds that fell to them before this one?” Vash cocked his head. “If what you say is true, and OUROS ‘simulated’ all of this... does that mean that it created other worlds which perished in cold despair, like my people did here?”

And just like that, Vash ripped the lid off a barrel of ethical worms and kicked it right over the fucking floor. “... I don’t know. Before Archemi, there was no, like, moral dimension to a story like this one. It’s been done thousands of times before. Every Final Fantasy game, nearly every MMO I can think of, they all have world-destroying endgame bosses. I’m starting to think Ryuko didn’t know what the fuck they were doing when they made this place.”

“That would be the more cheerful of the two options,” Vash said.

I gave him the side-eye. “What do you mean?”

“If Ryuko created a universe with suffering on this scale out of enthusiastic ignorance of the consequences for those who live and love here, that is one thing.” The monk chopped a brick out of the snow around us, set it in the wall, and smoothed it over. “But if