Warsinger by James Baldwin (most important books of all time txt) 📕

“Sure. Good hunting. See you soon.” I switched back to my own thoughts, tuning her out, and sighed again. “Alright, Ms. Kingdom Management System. Let's finish those tutorials.”

The screens appeared as commanded. I unequipped my armor and stripped my shirt. While Navigail fired up the tutorials, I dropped down and did clap pushups until my arms burned.

The HUD walked me through the intricacies of resource allocation and setting up supply chains, maintaining relationships with the other lords and ladies of my province, setting and collecting taxes, and even a brief overview of different kinds of governments. I was about to check out the governing system of Zaunt when my HUD purred - I had an incoming vid call from Rin.

“Hey girl, how's it going?” Hanging by my knees from the railing of Bolza’s four-poster bed, I grinned at her as the window jumped to life. It wasn't just Rin in the frame: she was sitting shoulder to shoulder with her main squeeze, Ebisa. The Royal Assassin was masked, as usual, slouched in a red sleeveless hooded jerkin that left her thin, dull grey arms bare. By contrast, Rin was an adorable little shortstack, with an open heart-shaped face, pearly silver skin, and big blue-on-blue eyes that currently blazed with worry. Like all Mercurions, both women had intricate glass winglets instead of ears. Ebisa's were made of soldered stained glass in many different shades of red. Rin's were prismatic and angular, glinting blue and gold by torchlight.

“Hector... are you upside down?” Rin asked.

“Blah! It is I, Count Dragozin!” I mimed pulling an invisible Dracula cape over my face. “And yes, I am. I'm practicing my acro-bat-ics.”

Ebisa tutted, crossing her arms. Rin laughed, high and tinkling.

“How are you?” she asked, gently. “And... is Suri...?”

I sighed. “Suri's a work in progress. We leave tonight, but I had to sort out shit in Myszno before we can leave. A huge mob turned up at the castle. We've got a double-digit list of Kingdom Quests, and we have to be in Taltos in five days’ time.”

Rin winced. “Oh no. That's not good. Do you even have a way to find her?”

“Vash gave us the idea to use Cutthroat,” I said. “She's been trying to run toward the south ever since Suri died and respawned. I made a harness so Karalti can carry her. We're going to use her like a radar.”

“Oh! That's right! She's Suri's bonded mount!” She clapped her hands together. “That should work pretty well.”

“Yeah. You take a look at that attachment?”

“I did.” Rin's delicate filigree brows furrowed. “It's... ummm... well...”

She looked to Ebisa, who shrugged nonchalantly.

“It's definitely weird,” Rin continued slowly. “And you're right, it gave me a bit of a scare. But... to be honest... I have no idea what it is, or who could have sent it.”

“You can't read the code?” I asked.

“Coding was always just a hobby for me,” she replied. “I learned the basics, you know... but I’m not a programmer. I was an environmental artist. I worked with WYSIWYG software.”

“Oh.” Right. I'd forgotten that.

“What I CAN tell you is that it looks kind of like it was written in Python?” she said, wincing. “Kind of. If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say this was something to do with A.I coding. There's some... umm... sigmoid stuff and some variables that refer to some kind of database in there, and that's something I associate with A.I. The people who'd know what they were looking at are, umm, well...”

“Dead,” I filled in.

“Yeah.” Rin deflated, looking down at her hands.

“Who would have known? No one currently in the game?”

She made a face. “Well, Ororgael would know, but he's busy possessing Baldr Hyland and trying to rule the world. Anyone on the OUROS programming team would be able to interpret this. Dinesh Jagind, Steve - your brother Steve, that is - Nicolas Bostov, Jacob Ratzinger...”

“Right.” I sighed. “Well, it scared the shit out of me. I have no idea who could have sent it.”

“I don't think it's anything to worry about. My hunch is that it's an auto-generated report of some kind,” Rin replied. “There's no admins for the game to send automatic reports to, right? So it might have run into a small error in your locale, fixed it, and tried to send the report to a moderator. When it didn't find one, it sent the report to the player who was in that locale. I know that OUROS has the capability to fix and report on things. That's why the orbital servers were viable... OUROS doesn't need human input to fix itself.”

“Huh.” I glanced at my left shoulder. Early on in the game, I’d glitched through a piece of broken wood in a wrecked airship. At some point, the wood had disappeared and left a triangular black scar on my body, a void where the flesh had never grown back. It was still there, unchanged. “Glitches happen, I guess. But I've had a couple happen to me, and never received anything like this before.”

“OUROS is adapting to the lack of Earth contact,” Rin said. “Creepy, but it's actually a good sign for us.”

“I sure hope so.” I reached up to grasp the railing, unhooked my knees, and dropped down onto the bed. “Anyway - how are things going in Litvy? Do you think you'll be able to repair the Warsinger?”

“No.” Ebisa spoke up for the first time. She had a rough, gravelly voice, like she gargled whisky and barbed wire for breakfast. “The machine is so damaged that repairs are beyond our ability, or indeed the ability of almost anyone still alive.”

“Even with Kanzo's memory stone in her, Ebisa can't make heads or tails of it.” Rin reached for her hand, squeezing it. “And neither can I. It's almost... biological.”

“It's not. It is a machine,” Ebisa said. “But it’s a very complex machine, even more anatomically complex than a Mercurion body.”

I scooted forward to the edge