I returned to a higher level of awareness from my rest cycle revitalized and feeling alive. I felt more complete; more human than I’d been in—well—centuries. Not only was I in full control of my actions, and what a gift that is, I had a goal, a dream. Instead of a vague desire to answer questions and satisfy my curiosity, I had something to push me forwards. Now, all I have to do is find a way off of this forsaken planet.

Dawn light was filtering in through the dense canopy and cast rays down to our little campsite. A quick check on Dakla revealed that she was still asleep, which made sense: walking till late in the night must’ve tired her out. I, meanwhile, still had plenty of charge left in my internal power cell. Eventually I’d need to replenish it, but I wanted to wait until I came across some energy dense food. Regardless of how good Dakla’s stews and various foods had been, they didn’t cover the high daily energy deficit I was operating under at the time.

From what I’d observed and from what my historical databanks told me; these humans typically required somewhere around 10 MJ of energy per day. 10 MJ per day was something I could survive on in a pinch, but a standard day for me ran between twice and six times that—for example it was used powering the skinsuit and drone.

Those weren’t the primary consumers though, most of my daily power usage was burned during computation—around 40%. I took a quick delve through my power management settings and learned some interesting facts, for example: of the processing capabilities currently in use, only around 10% were actually busy hosting my consciousness along with the rest of the various subroutines and background processes.

As I was perusing my internal settings, a thought struck me: During the fight I’d been attacked by something I’d categorized as a malevolent mind; a crude attempt at remote neural imprinting. Unusually though, the mind had been quite complex: far more sophisticated than any preprogrammed cyber-attack AI. No, I’d categorized it as very similar to what one would get if one put one of these primitives in a neuroscanner. Maybe, I thought, it’s sapient enough to get some information from it. Furthermore, if the file is a direct image of that Paladin, I might be able to get some answers to questions Dakla can’t answer.

Mind made up, I started preparations. Hosting a second consciousness wouldn’t be too difficult: I could treat it as just another subroutine. Still, I made sure to be careful. The consciousness file had been spiked with some primitive—but aggressive—attack software and letting that stuff run rampant in a computing environment like my head wasn’t a smart move.

Next came the question of how to actually emulate it. If the file were, as I suspected, an image of the knight’s consciousness, he wouldn’t know how to interface with the communication protocols and digital handshakes that were common among my people.

So, instead of something modern, I opted for the primitive solution: a basic, endless-white-plane VR environment. It would feed the data that the consciousness required to it and keep it in a safe and sandboxed environment—that of a simulated human brain. I only hoped that whoever was contained in that consciousness file had a strong sense of self-image: otherwise, they’d be stuck in a standard VR avatar selected from my admittedly pitiful database.

A couple seconds later, preparations were complete. I spun up the VR, committed the computational resources, and linked the emulated consciousness to an androgynous, low-fidelity avatar. Then I leaned back and watched the mental fireworks.

I didn’t have any detailed mind-reading software, but I did have a live graphical depiction of the simulated consciousness. From it, I could make some basic inferences. For example, as soon as the consciousness started being simulated, it totally freaked out: bursts of color—simulated neural activity—splashed across the digital brain. Not unexpected. Mental activity was highly elevated, and a quick peek into the VR with a virtual camera revealed that the low-poly standard avatar was flailing about on the ground. I should probably give them some time to get used to it, I thought before cutting my virtual feed and accelerating time in the VR.

Around two kiloseconds of rapidly simulated time later, the consciousness had calmed down and now exhibited patterns that could be attributed to boredom. It was time for me to introduce myself. Quickly donning an avatar I had on file—me from during my university days—I closed my eyes to the real world and stepped into my hosted VR environment.

Opening my virtual eyes, I was greeted with the environment that I’d thrown together. It was superbly boring: In front of me, a white-gray plane extended to infinity and the “sky” was white with an “untextured skybox” pattern. The only break was the figure around five meters in front of me, now clearly recognizable as a woman. She must’ve figured out the avatar customization controls, and it’s unlikely that she’s the Paladin.

She was sitting, cross legged on the ground and facing away from me. Judging from her lack of reaction to my presence, I assumed that she hadn’t noticed me.

“Hello?” I asked cautiously. Given that whoever this was had taken their time to customize the generic avatar, the likelihood that they were some piece of purpose-designed attack-ware was growing less likely by the second. Still, I remained cautious and kept a mental finger on the kill-switch for this simulation and the consciousness emulation.

Upon hearing my voice, the figure positively shot up and spun to face me, adopting some sort of fighting pose. Then, when neither of us made a move, she seemed to relax a tiny bit and I tried again.

“I’m Elise, who—or what—are you?”

The woman was clearly confused, and I realized my mistake. Presumably, whoever this was, they spoke the local language. I tried again, the alien language flowing uncomfortably off my simulated tounge.

This time, she clearly understood, and relaxed a bit more before replying herself.

“I am Saint Tabris of Beckinsdale.”

“Saint?” I asked, “Is that a religious office?”

“Yes, but where are we? I’ve gathered this is some sort of constructed space.”

“This is a simulated space, yes.”

To demonstrate my point, I waved my hand and summoned in a desk from an old business-asset library I had. In front of me, a generic desk faded into existence around 10 cm above the floor. When the model was done materializing, gravity suddenly gripped it, and with an empty thunk, it fell the short distance to the floor.

“Ah!” This Saint Tabris of Beckinsdale seemingly had a minor epiphany before she flexed her arm, attempting to do—something. This went on for another couple seconds before she exhaled and looked to me with a somewhat accusatory gaze.

“Why can’t I summon anything?” I blinked. How would whoever this is know how to interact with a VR environment? Still, assuming she does know, she can’t because…aha! She doesn’t have permissions. I gave her privileges to alter the local VR environment before instructing her to try again.

Then, she repeated her concentration exercise, and in a flash of golden light, an antique chair appeared and dropped to the ground. I was somewhat impressed, and my appraisal of this woman only rose when I checked the chair’s metadata—or tried to. That’s when I discovered that it hadn’t been pulled from a library or constructed from a file—no—this seat was something designed purely from memory and mental will. Quite an impressive and unusual skill. It also told me something about Saint Tabris: she spent a lot of time in VR environments.

I couldn’t replicate her feat—back in my university days I’d steered well clear of developing a VR addiction—but I had catalogues of chairs to choose from. A simple selection later, and an office chair materialized which I rolled to my side of the desk. There I sat and folded my hands on the desk.

The Saint pushed her chair over to the other side of the desk and sat too. Then, we spent a couple decaseconds just looking at each other. She, assuming her avatar reflected the person she was or had once been, appeared to be Homo Sapiens like all the other people I’d encountered on this planet so far. Age wise, I estimated her as middle-aged: Dakla’s age if not older. Other than that, she had unusually good skin compared to the people I’d seen so far and didn’t have as many creases in her face as the older peasants and Dakla had. Her most unusual feature though were the eyes: she’d recolored her avatar’s irises to be solid gold. I didn’t quite know what to make of this, after all, avatars in a virtual space didn’t even have to appear biological, but judging by the rest of her appearance, she’d had a rather strong self-image to base the customization off of.

Eventually, she broke the silence:

“You’re not an Infernal, are you? You certainly don’t look like one.”

Again, with me being an ‘Infernal’! “No. No, I’m not an Infernal.” I said in the most unambiguous way I could.

At this, she sighed, and relaxed back into her chair.

“You do look different though—I mean—your appearance in this space doesn’t quite match reality, does it?”

I looked at my hand. She was right. This avatar was a bit outdated; it didn’t have the subtle signs of wear nor the overt signs of upgrades that’d built up over the years.

“Yes, well I don’t have a newer image of myself.” I admitted.

At this, the Saint nodded although she didn’t quite seem to understand what I meant. Then, after a moment of awkward silence, the Saint spoke up again.

“Now—sorry if this is indelicate or rude—but what am I?”

“I’m sorry?” Shouldn’t she know that herself?

“I mean, am I your prisoner or a hostage?”

Oh. That was actually something of an interesting question, on multiple levels. Primarily, the OSPF and my personal values lean heavily towards the belief that the higher an intelligence is on the sliding scale of sentience, the more rights one should be granted. Now, AI isn’t my specialty, but to convincingly emulate human behavior, an AI level of at least three is required. So, regardless of exact classification, I’d already made up my mind to treat this “Saint” as a full person. Am I comfortable with keeping a digital prisoner?

Of course, I had plenty of options. I could just put this Saint-file on ice in the proverbial cryogenic freezer and just “unthaw” her whenever it was prudent to do so. The simplest way would be to simply freeze the passage of time in the VR, pause the emulation, and then she wouldn’t even notice any temporal discontinuities and I wouldn’t be burning any computational power keeping her running.

On the other far end of the spectrum, it might be possible to integrate this consciousness as one of my subroutines: letting it feed me information about the world from visual and other inputs fed to it. Obviously though, I wasn’t going to do that. Enslaving or co-opting a digital person after I’d just escaped my own ordeal would be the height of irony and hypocrisy. Maybe, there’s a middle-of-the-road solution somewhere here. I decided to figure it out as I went.

“Well, I have you on file and I’m currently hosting your mind, so I’d rather you see yourself as a guest, not a captive.”

This seemed to irk the Saint a bit, but she was good at hiding her emotions. After mulling this over for a second, she spoke:

“Then, if I’m a guest, can I leave?”

“I don’t know. Can you?” I asked. At this, the Saint began to visibly anger, and I realized that I probably should’ve been clearer in what I said. I tried again:

“Sorry, I don’t mean to be combative. I only meant that because I don’t know how you got here; I can’t tell you how to leave. If I weren’t hosting you at the moment in this space, you wouldn’t be experiencing time or consciousness.”

This seemed to dampen the Saint’s building anger, and only left her with a confused expression.

“What do you mean?”

“I assume that you were transferred to me with some sort of magical method?”

“Obviously.”

“Then there is the problem: I don’t know any magic.”

“What?! You’re telling me that this demi-plane—” she waved around to indicate the virtual space, “—is all… mundane?”

“Yes, it is simply an application of technology.”

“…But you said that you don’t know any magic, so was this given to you? Is this space the product of an artefact or some absurd Divine joke?”

I sensed a fundamental misunderstanding: Maybe, Dakla’s word for ‘technology’ is somehow inextricably linked with magic?

“No, this technology does not use any magic.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

I didn’t see any point lying to someone emulated on my own processing power, so I told the truth: “Yes.”

At this, the Saint leaned back, groaned, and under her breath whispered, “By Tasmian’s grace”. Then, she began to massage her temples and if I hadn’t known that it should be computationally impossible for her to develop a headache, I’d have sworn she was at that moment.

I spoke up again, “But if you help me, we might be able to figure out how to get you out—or to wherever you want to go.”

Upon hearing this, Saint Tabris froze and locked her now unreadable eyes with mine. We held gazes for a second before she looked away. She groaned, and under her breath said, “Ha, maybe you are a Demon after all…”