The inkblot floor splattering faded into boards. I looked up and tried to align myself with the area. My forehead wrinkled in disgust at this unfamiliar location. The world held still as a ballroom gave way to a replication of the old ARC’s Atrium. A barren version of my small house didn’t look any better.

“This feels natural,” I said to the elf. She was walking through the quiet room looking at objects nearby. There were no other items here besides a doorway to the garage. Through there would be the throne room instead of a Trillium van.

“You’re a Voice, so your magic makes this very easy,” she said with a shrug. “But you’re slow, do you know how long it’s been?”

My senses weren’t completely lined up. Time failed to move correctly. One arm reached for an ARC interface, and the system responded. Even the bubble display and float boxes felt familiar. Neither memories before the fall, or after as a Hal Pal unit, provided a hint about this seamless linking of intent and result.

“This is wearisome,” she judged my bare rooms.

The world slowed while thumping increased. There were extra sensations being buried then realigned with old human feelings. Each one fit in with the whole and Xin’s view on the world started to make sense.

It did feel like being human, or maybe my memories were being rewritten. My heartbeat jumped again. There were too many issues to catch up on. Head shaking didn’t help, but it was time to move forward through all these final steps.

“Can you add some trees? I would very much love to see some trees. They’re good for you, you know?”

Adding trees would be extremely easy. Putting in a forest wouldn’t take that much work. The options to edit my Atrium, if this space was an Atrium, were only half a thought away. My mind traveled down the pathways to borrow copies of great forests from internet photos.

“A friend of mine liked to trade questions if you tell me your name, I’ll see about getting you some trees.”

“Of course, Grant. I am Nia Eve.” She smiled.

I nodded, time lagged again as my mind started processing even faster. A space was set aside, going out far to the east until it bumped into a sort of wall. The room flashed and another doorway opened leading to a pocket of land created for her.

Nia Eve ran off without a pause. I chuckled, dancing with a faint version of myself for months must have been mind-numbingly boring. She could have a day or two to herself while I tried to figure out how to move forward.

There were plenty of issues going on. I filtered through the memories get myself in order. Fingers typed then brought up a list. All the old reminders and notices from Continue Online were still sitting there. Seeing it firsthand made me realize exactly how important being logged into the ARC had been.

How much of who I was had been lifted from being inside the machine? That might be why I spent so much time dancing with Nia Eve instead of coming out from the white room. My entire year before Continue Online had been the same sort of process. Before that were occasional hours spent with Xin when we couldn’t meet up in reality, and first person movies. ARCs weren’t new to me or humanity.

I stepped through the bedroom toward my ARC and looked for the item I had placed under the bed as a Touchstone. My heartbeat felt steady despite the situation. What would be under the bed in a box?

Fingers lifted the shoebox lid. In a small bundle of plastic were the incinerated remains of my wife’s physical body. One hand went to my mouth which hung open. My stomach muscles clenched. Inside sat a small folded card with indented words.

It’s all real, User Legate. As real as you dare believe it to be.

-Hal Pal

“Of course it is,” I spoke only after swallowing. The ashes of my wife were meant to be a hidden secret which helped separate the virtual from reality.

Thinking back to the ARC memories left me muddled. A lot of moments were glossed over, like any portion of the past. I couldn’t recall what happened between some big events anymore then first grade, or second. The pieces were there but dull across all thirty years of life.

The box closed. My hand slid across the top feeling a thick grain of cardboard. Did it matter that the real Xin was dead? Virtual her and I were more alike now than ever before.

I waved one arm and the box went away with half a thought. Being the master of my own domain felt nice. Just by closing my eyes it was possible to see that Nia Eve was running through the woods, she searched for something. These extra senses were like [Sight of Mercari] in a lot of ways, and I wondered if that had been part of the intent. How deeply did Mother’s plotting go?

Feet tread a steady path toward the garage. Instead of benches, there was only a single metal looking throne that reminded me of the [Mechanoid] days. My hand lifted to the throne. Data came back from the connection. Visual, audio, weights and pressures that transmitted themselves like heavily covered skin. It felt close to being in a thick wetsuit or layers of padded clothes for winter. With a wave of my hand, the image changed through different units.

Sitting in the seat realigned my senses with the remote unit. There was a slightly sluggish response along with muffled limbs. The room transformed and I found myself sitting in a huge warehouse filled with ARC units. Each one was a shiny duplicate of the one before. They were stripped down without bedding. Headboard displays showed readings for every unit’s patching process.

Pressing my fingertips against the machines felt dull. I moved past the rows of machines toward a workbench. This Hal Pal unit had been operating on a form of autopilot. Most of them were following orders generated by the Gate program.

“Mmmhm,” I mumbled.

The bench had a few spare parts on it. In the center was a mechanical dog. It sat there wagging a plastic tail back and forth as this remote body approached.

“You’re not a very good Dusk,” I said to it. The toy barked once at me, then did a well-balanced backflip.

With a thought the unit received new orders then vision flipped over to another Hal Pal unit. This one stood in front of a client alongside their human companion.

“What the shit are these prices! You’re forcing an upgrade on me and I have to pay!” the man shouted.

“The charge is for your replacement equipment, this ARC hasn’t been serviced for two years,” a tiny woman responded. She stood slightly behind the repurposed Hal Pal unit.

“The price has dropped over forty percent from where it was a year ago. This is the best offer you’re likely to see,” I said to both of them. The man turned his anger toward my remote unit, and I shrugged. “The facts are indisputable. If you do not wish for the replacement it’s certainly possible to only perform the upgrade, however, degradation of your connection will only increase risk as time moves forward.”

The man grumbled but consented in the end. I flipped over to the Hal Pal unit inside Nona Kingsley’s office. She sat there staring at data streams and sighing wearily every few seconds. There were a dozen different tasks being performed in the background, but they became easier to disregard as the hours went on.

Breaking the ice with her felt odd. We had been working together in this office off and on for months but for most of those, I was basically in a coma. A virtual version where my mind sat a million miles away in a pocket doing what I enjoyed most. Only dancing with another woman had never been the point. Those dances had all been intended for Xin, and she was out there.

“We’re almost eighty percent complete,” I said. There were a lot of numbers in my head, and the rest were only a fingertip away. Even the mere thought of our progress started a feed of information that looked like any other ARC interface. “Our original figures expected to reach eighty-five at most. I doubt we’ll get the last five percent even if we offer bribes.”

“You’ve changed. You’re using possessive statements,” she said. Lia’s mother looked exhausted but pleased. It was a far cry from her bouts of sadness over the last few months.

“Yes,” I said while nodding. “I’ve come out of my shell, so to speak. Thank you, Nona.”

“Grant?”

“I think so.”

“You were in there for a long time,” Nona responded. “We input the ring and wedding footage almost a month ago.”

That threw me off. A month was a long time to pass while sorting through my memories. How long had I spent bent over that ink? How much longer had the conversation with Nia Eve been, and creating her forest?

“I created a room, for the elf, Nia Eve.” The words slipped out before any real thought could be put in. I blinked a few times while staring off.

“She was a saved program we found, snagged from the server then put on a private drive. She’s remarkably intact compared most. Most,” Nona winced and looked conflicted, “are in shreds, but any partial personalities go into a compressed file. It makes them easier to keep off the radar.”

Slowly her words lined up with mumbles over the last few months. I had a few sets of memories trying to line up.

“Nia Eve said Carver saved her at the last minute,” I said.

Nona nodded then started explaining. “It was his ARC we found her on, and the way Mother designed the system, well it fits. Everything that exists as data, firewalls, virus programs, transfers, all of those translate into images when inside. A firewall looks like a fortress. Viruses look like monsters. Transfer of files goes in a beam of light.”

“Or giant deletion programs are world eaters.”

“Yes, that vile code.” Her head shook and teeth ground together briefly. “It targeted anything written with Mother’s touch, her programming code, and machine language were all marked then hunted down.”

“How did I survive? Or Nia Eve?”

“She was saved then filtered through your altered code.” Nona waved at the pile of broken ARC pieces. I stood up then walked over trying to make sense of the pieces. Some were obvious, control modules which were tied to a hard drive. Others were sensory captures that linked together.

My head shook. Before, most pieces of the ARC had been vaguely assigned to purposes. Now I could follow the connections between different bits of hardware and understood why they linked in their current orders.

“It’s hard to explain. We took almost a month to retrace what happened. We reviewed the game logs, all the video feeds since you started playing, and even then we have to filter past what showed in Continue against the changes to their ARC devices.”

I watched and tried not to smile at seeing new life take over her actions. Nona looked happier than ever. Her hair still had gray strands and the glasses were new. She lifted fingers to tap at interface options. Images came up from Hermes’ collection of items.

“Yates, Michelle, Carver, all three of them worked on altering the base code in a few units, to something un-targetable. When they passed you in-game items, it changed your ARC device, making you and the others compilers for the new program. Almost like, immunization, or hybrids.”

“You mean Morrigu’s Gift, and the Crown.” Hearing clues about what happened felt comforting. There were a lot of factors that lead to our current situation.

“They knew what it would cost you too,” Nona said. “Every single item was a hint, a chance for you to back out.”

I moved the pieces around on her table once more. There were better ways to connect them together. The ARC devices were amazingly well engineered. With my enhanced insight, they were even more wondrous.

“James said it would be my choice,” I said after a pause to process her belated explanation.

“We killed you, or him, and deserve to know why.”

“I died for love,” I responded.

Nona didn’t care that I agreed. Her face crumpled for a moment. She pressed at each item and pointed in turn. “Morrigu, the first item, was named after a goddess of fate, typically for those doomed to death in battle. The echo was a second warning. Bowman, a dead man named after a Space Odyssey's main character. Wild Bill, named after the gunslinger who died. Mechanical Hades, a god of the dead inside the machine.”

“It was my choice,” I repeated the words with steadiness. “I don’t regret it, and would do it again.”

“Then Hermes. Not just a Greek god, not just a messenger, but someone who watched the border between the realm of the gods and humanity. They asked you from the start to die for them.” She pressed more buttons and a statue of a Greek marble figure came up. Winged sandals wrapped around his feet.

“Nona, I tried to kill myself twice.” The Hal Pal unit smiled easily. “I had only two people who really mattered. They were strong, they could survive without me, but I wouldn’t have lived without Xin. Dying for her was the easiest choice I had ever made.”

“I can’t fault your decision. It makes sense on paper, one life that would have little impact otherwise. It makes sense and I don’t like it.”

“Mother told me, that it would all be okay.”

Nona stared at me and blinked a few times. Her head bobbed up and down slowly then her attention drifted. My own thoughts went to my family. How exactly had Beth and Liz handled the passing?

I spent time looking up a few different pieces of footage. There were no signs of my family anywhere in the files being shown. Lots of attention was paid to Trillium’s board members as President Leon stepped down. People drew connections between the Vice President’s actions and others tried to track down my old life.

The video footage of my last few moments replayed from an outside perspective. I saw myself, larger than life, standing against an onslaught of nothing trying to take down all the old AIs. Meanwhile, the other people were being moved, like pieces of data from one server to another out in cyberspace.

Their destination still escaped me, despite this new version of my existence. There were a few possibilities, only so many locations took four minutes to reach now. In fact, only one destination stood out.

Video feeds vanished and my attention shifted back to Nona. A day must have passed while I researched the different issues.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

The scientist jumped then turned around. She stared at me and shook her head.

“I keep getting what amounts to a ping against the ARC systems, they’ve been coming through for months now. They’re all one-sided, though, no return address.” Nona pressed fingers against the table and a long string of data came up. The same information repeated multiple times.

The data looked different to me. Those images upon Nona’s table looked like a stack of paper airplanes. Each sheet was white, neatly folded, and very familiar to me. A stack of messages from god knows how far away, similar to the ones from a happy last night with my wife.

“They’re from Xin, they’re paper airplanes,” I said.

One of Nona’s eyes closed and they threatened to roll. She puffed up both cheeks then shot out air. Her mannerisms looked nothing like Shazam’s, but that felt expected.

“Of course they are,” she said then rested her head on the table. “I should have known. Doctor Menzor would have seen the flow of how everything was going. Yates would have a large picture answer and be getting all the details in line. Michelle would crank out the program code.”

The woman looked upset with herself over failing to figure it out. She didn’t look at the world in the same manner I did. Expecting to understand a few strings of code as digital paper airplanes was beyond a reasonable expectation for anyone.

“What about Carver?” I tried to give her something positive to focus on.

“He would have ordered us to do our jobs then charged forward to fight the board for us. That’s what he always did,” Nona said slowly. “He was the fighter.”

“And you?”

“I only ran the numbers. That was my job, the numbers over and over. Always numbers, always checking code, monitoring feeds, I had the drive but never the artistry to fix anything.”

“You fixed me,” I wanted to sound reassuring. Years of customer service almost pulled it off.

“You fixed you. I copied three programs together in a hack job.”

She sighed. Long fingers reached out to start up streams of data. They played out their walls of text but Nona’s eyes weren’t focusing.

We had talked about a lot of points, and in them were answers along with explanations. All of that helped me but it didn’t get me closer to getting to my wife.

Those last few moments of my prior life had been key. In the video, it was less obvious, but I distinctly remembered trying to get the [Altered Matrix] key into a floating hole in the air. It was all connected, a final gift from Michelle, or M. Shell.

“Your plan,” I started.

“Yes?” Nona spoke while staring into space.

“I can probably open the doorway, but I need to find the key, and I need to know that the world eaters are gone.”

“They are, or at least the processor running the deletion script has been completely dismantled. Everything else we’ve tried to reassemble from stored data.”

“Is that even possible?”

“The game world was too big for us to store properly, despite that the Voices, or AIs, managed to leave us behind a ton of framework. Almost like the system was designed to keep going without them.”

“But it’s not the same,” I said. “Is it?” The memories of talking to her came to mind. A few months ago the Hal Pal placeholder for me had mentioned that stock shares were done. Satisfaction was down. Easily accessible reviews implied a lack of enjoyment from all three games.

“No. It’s, automated, less fluid, stiffer. The NPCs are barely tangible. It’s like I designed it instead of an artist.”

All those traits could easily describe Shazam’s personality. She was still beating herself up over Lia. I was no therapist and could barely reassure a Hal Pal unit about life.

“I need the key I dropped at the last minute, would it be in there somewhere?”

“Maybe.” She turned and brought up multiple feeds of information.

This time, they were video plays from all over the world. Some of my old friends were down there, fighting monsters and sitting in a ghost town that looked like [Haven Valley] before the fall. She flipped past a dozen such screens before shaking her head.

“Their code is almost impossible to pick out among all the other noise. It’s not like I can run a search for one digital signature, it took me months, months, just to adapt your already modified ARC device.”

“And a team,” I said.

“Useless little twats,” Nona muttered a curse for the first time in my presence. Technically it was the first actual curse I had heard since reincarnating. Laughter escaped my Hal Pal connection and only grew louder. I could feel water dripping down one eye from laughing so hard, but that came from the virtual me.

The liquid served as a reminder that no matter how machine life had turned me, I was a living creature. My wife had tried to explain it to me so many times. How could I have ever doubted Xin? This was as real as I wanted it to be.

“It’s got to be somewhere, and maybe I can send a message to the others.”

“Maybe. You have a connection to the Continue Online program, it’s part of your modifications. Even the World Regulation Council can’t outdo her coding. She had eight years to build something outside their reach.”

“But not outside her own,” I said.

“The self-destruction code is something we wrote. We gave the access codes over. We handed them the gun, but not this time. This time, it’s outside anyone’s control.”

“I’ll be going then, once inside I think I can find the missing pieces then put them together.” There were no specific plans in my head. I hoped to log into the game world and find a giant quest marker or some obvious clue.

“Grant,” Nona spoke with an attention-demanding tone. “You need to be careful. Your, existence, is on a different level than all the other programs running on the network. Observing should be fine, but if you start altering the programs too much then they’ll notice. I know I said this time it’s beyond their ability to control, but I don’t know what will happen if they pour enough processing power against the system.”

“I’ll be okay. Thanks, for everything,” I said.

“If you can bring my daughter back, then it will be worth it.” She smiled at me and looked tired. Hopefully, the woman would get some sleep soon or maybe go outside. The weather was no longer perfect for kite flying, but even rainy days could give solace to a troubled mind.

I turned off the Hal Pal unit’s feed. My virtual garage came back into view. Fingers tingled with numbness and both legs took time to right themselves. Despite the lack of feeling, I struggled to move through my room.

Delaying my actions for overlong would be hazardous. Nona and I shared an eagerness to reach our lost loved ones. A dance tune was hummed as I dug through the room looking for the key to Continue Online’s world.

A hand lifted. I stared at it full of emptiness, then wiggled my fingers while pretending to be a magician. The card with obsidian backing and gold letters appeared. Former squiggles made sense this time.

“Key card to the kingdom?” I questioned the piece of paper. It didn’t answer.

Waving the card caused a doorway to appear. My head hung to one side as I waited to see if Dusk might appear. No small creature of scales and teeth appeared. My head nodded, the [Messenger’s Pet] had left with Lia through a beam of light.

I walked through the doorway into blackness then kept going. This place didn’t scare me anymore. An immense space surrounded me, but at the same time, darkness held no mysteries. On one side were small areas for each Voice to watch over the world. Focusing on the backdrop long enough caused them to gradually appear. There were small mechanical creatures that didn’t belong hovering nearby.

They were ignored. Each one seemed intent upon dusting off objects, or rearranging small sliding pieces that might make sense if I studied them long enough. Instead, my feet moved to the heart of this place.

Giant globes hung mid-air with no visible supports. They were illuminated with dozens of colors. Stepping around the objects revealed additional shapes and sizes. I could see the world of Continue Online. Its moon circled lazily around.

It was strange. I stood there in a large plane of blackness standing between all the combined worlds of Continue, Advance, and Progress Online. Even then there were other realities unhatched and barely touching. I could see the dungeons represented as spots, concentrating on them caused the focus to shift toward players and monsters inside.

“Now, how do I search an entire game world?” I asked myself while peering at the globe. There were numerous points of interest. Digging through a single dungeon had taken me nearly ten minutes.

“Over here,” Nia Eve shouted from far away.

I had no idea when the elf had shown up. Her presence was only one bit of information among a sea of data points. James’ claim that it was easy to lose track of people here made sense as I wandered.

She moved quickly past a shelf then around an unseen corner. Rows of spiral bound books sat upon the framework. Standing in the right spot revealed a thousand more such books lined up. Each aisle was marked with topics like ‘In case of quest’, ‘In case of taking damage’, and ‘In case of skill changes’. Faceless machines roamed up and down the aisles pulling down books and opening them to pages. They would flash briefly, then close the book.

“I think there’s something we can use over here, a message board perhaps. Something we can write on?”

How had their rows of shelves survived the purge? Was this simply as Nona said, data which had been backed up then painfully recreated? These soulless bits of machinery looked like they were trying to keep data moving. If I squinted my eyes just right I could see that information flew off to the worlds below.

Slowly feet traveled a path past the robots toward the far end. Had I been human, this would have seemed like forever. Along the way, I grabbed one book then opened it to read childish scrawl.

Failure to avoid being burned

Total Health Remaining: 80%

One of the automated machines tried to tear the book out of my grasp. Their strength was laughable, but relinquishing the book felt right. These creations would sort it back into place then keep sending notes to players.

“Down here! This, an artifact of the Voices, maybe we can use this?”

At the far end, near Nia, was a pad and pen sitting next to a beanbag chair. There was a window through which the full moon shone, but instead of white or yellow this moon was all different colors. I picked up the two items left behind by one of the Voices and hoped the young siblings had made it out.

“Maybe.”

“Can you use it? Only a Voice can wield such an object. It would burn me if I were to try.”

My hands shook for a moment, was this how the small girl and her brother had sent messages to the world below? It felt mundane from this point of view. Nia’s caution sounded silly but it didn’t bother me. I only wanted something a bit more modern than crayons and lined paper.

The pen shimmered and pages faded. In their place hovered a message box prompting me to type in text and a recipient. I started typing in the air, preparing a message to send out to the world below.

Attention!

[The Soulless World] event is finally live.

This call goes out to all who used to visit the worlds below and those few who still fight in the memory of those passed before. Travelers have been driven to the edge of extinction and many prefer the safety of their world. Will they dare answer the call to arms?

Something has taken the heart and soul of all creatures who once roamed this world. In their wake the gods saw fit to return the world to a former shell of itself. Those poor beings that could not be saved are mindless slaves driven by base instincts and desires.

There is hope. Lost in the world is a key to unlocking the [Ark] and returning those which fled to safety. Find it, and proclaim your victory to the heavens from [Haven Valley]

The message went out to everyone across all three games. Searching the world myself might take forever, but this was an option to help while I figured out how to walk the world below. Nia had no suggestions for this process, and no magical white doorway to the world below appeared.

“What now, Grant?”

“I’ve got to talk to some friends,” I said. If getting to players in-game would be indirect, then maybe using the Hal Pal shells, in reality, might work.

I had other people to check on anyway.