*****OMEGA*****

Proprietary software brought to you by the FUN Company.

For license to all job-creators.

Description: OMEGA is an altered-reality gamification of labor, customizable to suit the requirements of any employer.

Features: Remote Installation, Automatic Updates and Expansion, Procedurally-Generated Gameworlds Entangled with Real-World Factory and Tool Command, Crypto-Farm Ready, Dynamic Dopamine Escalation, Next-Gen Bladder Suppression Technology—and Much More!

100% Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back.

Inside the brain there exists a pair of invisible hands, consumed with the never-ending construction of a house of cards. One hand holds something new: a card which the brain has never before encountered. The other hand fingers through the house they've built so far. It taps what it guesses is the card most comparable to the new one. These things are similar. I can understand them now. And the new card is then integrated into the ongoing construction, sliding in to support that which surrounds it.

For context, the house contains something like one-hundred trillion cards, give-or-take.

People trust these invisible hands to make correct choices. To steer them in the right direction. But the truth is: a brain can only guess. Compare the unknown to the house we've been meticulously building since birth and then guess where the next card should be inserted. All of it depends on the rest of it, and if just one fact goes awry, the entire house could come crashing down.

“Follow me.” Ava sighs. “We're going back to the lab.”

*****OMEGA*****

Scheduled Maintenance

OMEGA will be offline on September 9th, 2054, beginning at 4am PST for scheduled maintenance. During this time we will be migrating all servers to our new bleeding-edge data center in Brightside, CA.

This move is necessary due to the unprecedented popularity of OMEGA. The new data center has been built with redundancies ensuring our servers experience 100% uptime in the future, allowing you to keep the program running 24/7 and 365 days a year, until the end of time!

(Downtime is expected to last approximately 6 hours)

Warmest Regards,

The FUN Company

To leave the nursery Ava once again spits upon the wall and the hidden door opens. What felt like magic just a short time ago now seems like a cheap gimmick. She leads the party back along the silver corridors to Dr. Sara's lab. The door here is also invisible.

“When I open this up,” Ava says, gathering saliva to spit, “be prepared to fight.”

But when they enter, Sara is nowhere to be seen. There are no Custodians. The machinery of the lab drones on all by its lonesome. And over yonder Bach lies flat on his back, strapped to an operating table. They go cautiously as a group to be at his bedside.

“Oh God,” Uma cringes.

“Bach?” Ava says close to his ear, “can you hear me?”

He moves not a single muscle, not even to open his eyes.

“Bach?” Ava repeats. She puts her ear near his lips. He's breathing, but only softly.

“Ava,” Uri whispers, “look.”

He's pointing at Bach's right hand – or rather where it should be. His arm ends in a knotty stump at the wrist. The scars say it's an old injury, not a recent amputation, but his cybernetic hand have been removed.

“We should get the hell out of here,” Ellie warns.

“How can we move him if he won't wake up?” Uma wonders. “I think he's probably too heavy for us to carry. Is there something we could use as a sled?”

“Why move him anywhere?” Ellie argues, “he's no use to us like this. Look, she's even uninstalled his skill-chips.”

There on a surgical tray beside the bed sit disheveled microchip implants, still gunky with fleshy wads from the excisions. Ellie prods Bach's head so it turns to the right and the incision site becomes evident: shaved and sutured.

“Why would she keep him alive?” Uri wonders.

“Who cares!” Ellie stomps her feet. “She could return any second! You want us all to end up like him?”

“I already am,” Ava says, holding up her metallic hand. Ellie is quiet. “How can we wake him?”

“Gimme one sec'.” Uri works at the computer terminal beside the bed. “I think I've got it.”

And Bach comes suddenly to life, a creature reborn on the slab like something from the morbid imagination of Dr. Frankenstein.

*****OMEGA*****

Patch Notes for January 16th, 2055

Autonomous Variable Assets: Today's patch introduces the revolutionary AVA technology to the world of OMEGA. The U.S. Department of Labor has awarded The FUN Company exclusive user rights for this exciting new tech, a first-of-its-kind merging of the human brain with our proprietary procedural engine! A literal game-changer, the benefits are too numerous to list but include:

Sentient Universes: The FUN Company has always provided the largest, most immersive procedurally-generated gameworlds for your employees to explore, and now we've gone and improved upon perfection! By utilizing AVA, our gameworlds will become fully dynamic and living places. Say goodbye to scripted encounters and repetitive quests and dialogue – with AVA every NPC has been imbued with actual, sentient consciousness. They don't know they're only lines of code and neither will your workers! The result is a universe that is not only addictive and immersive, but real.

Fully-Individualized Content: Drawing directly from the memories, hopes, and fears of your employees ensures that no two worlds will be alike. We've heard you. You're fed up with workers finishing quests and dungeons early and heading out for a smoke. You need them at their workstations! With fully-individualized content, internet spoiler-sites are a thing of the past, because when everyone gets a different test, there can be no copying off your neighbor!

Additional Changes/Fixes:

Quests involving the “Self-Made Minotaur” in Guffey Gorge can now be completed(Golden Septum-Piercing added to loot table).

Shurikens may now correctly be equipped in the range slot.

New Equipment Type: Cybernetic(10,000+ items added)

New Ability Type: Psionic(2,000+ abilities added)

“What....” Bach groans, inspecting his stump, “what has she done to me?”

“She took out your chips, too.” Ellie stands with her arms folded across her bosom. She turns away as Bach comes to. He tries to sit up but the pain in his head forces him back down, clutching at the wound.

“She butchered me.”

“Bach,” Ava says, “I'm so sorry.”

“Where is she!” Again he tries to rise but it's too much too soon and he topples off the bed and clatters onto the floor. Ava kneels and helps right him into a sitting position with his back against the mechanical underside of the operating table. Out of breath, he pants, “I'll kill her!”

“She's gone,” Ava says, “we're not sure where.”

“Ava, what's happened?” He gestures at her with his stump. “What have you done?”

“I had to.” She flexes the hand to show him, its pneumatic actions squealing. “There were two of these killer robots. There was no other way.”

“You overloaded?”

“I did.”

“You must be exhausted—”

“Bach,” she's cuts him off. She's not interested in his concern. She wants to know, “why did you bring me here?”

“He was working for that mad scientist,” Ellie interjects from some ways off. Bach sighs and looks at Ava.

“Well?” she asks, “were you?”

“The doctor told me where to find you, yes.” He nods slowly. “Told me Human Resources had captured an AVA.”

“What did she promise to pay you?” Ellie scoffs.

“Nothing,” Bach says, “I swear.”

“Then why?”

“Because only an AVA can defeat the dragons. Dr. Sara said she could help.”

“You're a Slayer?” Uri asks.

“Yes,” Bach replies, “and Sara claimed to be a comrade.”

“She's my mother,” Ava says, “and there are dozens of Ava's here—all sleeping and hooked up to machines—do you know why?”

“What? No – I have no idea. She only told me she'd rescued two others, and that a third would give us the power to build our own dragon.” He turns his head so he can look directly into Ava's eyes. “I swear, I don't know what she's really up to.”

Ava frowns and crosses her arms.

“Where is your flask?”

“My inside pocket.”

She slips her hand inside his poncho but the flask is not to be found.

“You're freezing,” she says.

“He's in shock,” Uri notes, “my sister and I can do nothing for his injuries until we sleep. Perhaps you can interrogate him further at that time?”

“I'm alright, Uri. I owe her answers.”

Ava closes her eyes. And she barely has to think of the ItemID before out of thin air it materializes in her robotic hand, oddly pixelated and translucent at first, and then becoming more and more solid until finally she holds a flask in her hand. She inspects it and there is the label, shimmering and mirage-like:

Her companions look at her and the flask like they are something from another world. But she doesn't have it in her to care what anyone thinks, not anymore. She twists off the cap and holds it to Bach's lips.

“Drink up,” she says, tilting the flask until he gulps. “Now tell me: what the hell am I?”

*****OMEGA*****

Patch Notes for June 3rd, 2055

REQUIRED DOWNTIME

OMEGA will be offline immediately and until further notice.

The FUN Company apologizes for this unscheduled interruption of service. Circumstances outside our control require servers to come down temporarily but we're working to restore a safe environment so your workers can get back to being productive.

Like you, we've read the unsubstantiated media reports regarding elements of OMEGA gameworlds supposedly manifesting in the real world. We have no reason to believe these reports are factual, and internally we have been unable to reproduce these supposed outcomes.

Despite this, the FUN Company is committed to cooperating with investigators from the Departments of Labor and Defense to determine what, if any, correlation exists between OMEGA and the recent instances of unexplained mayhem unfairly attributed to the program by unscrupulous media types.

The FUN Company is confident OMEGA is safe. But new technologies always carry some risk, and we're happy to welcome investigators into our data center so we can quickly put this episode behind us.

Warmest Regards,

The FUN Company

“Autonomous Variable Asset,” Bach says.

“A-V-A,” Ellie spells it out.

“Genetically engineered beings whose minds were combined to create content for a game.”

“Omega,” Ellie elaborates.

“'Genetically engineered'?” Ava asks, “what's that mean, exactly?”

“Clones,” Bach says, “with cerebral modifications making them—making you—more adept at manipulating reality.”

“The entangled mind...” Uri whispers.

“Yes,” Bach continues, “it is the exact same concept as your psionics but on a grander scale. You know the power which is possible with just two minds entangled, now imagine hundreds—”

“There's nothing they couldn't do,” Uri interjects.

“Nothing they couldn't create,” Uma explains.

“They created entire worlds,” Bach concludes.

“I still don't understand.” Ava paces, rubbing her brow with her mechanical hand before realizing how odd it feels. She stares at it, flexing the fingers and rotating the wrist. “How could a game be so.... important, I guess? Why would anyone go to all this trouble just for a video game?”

“It's hard to explain.” Bach says. He looks to the others for help but the twins can only shrug and Ellie just makes a sour face. He's on his own. “Well, to begin with, there was this thing called 'the Economy'—”

“I know what an economy is.”

“Then perhaps you know that the way it used to function was through a hierarchy of bosses and workers,” Bach explains, “but in the 2030's labor became mostly automated. The majority of work was then done by machines.”

“My father used to tell me stories about work,” Ellie says, “before my time. He was a supervisor in the Amazon.”

“With jobs being a thing of the past for most people, they had to find something else to do with their time,” Bach continues, “so they started to look around. And what they saw was a world they didn't want any part of. Now that they weren't busy at their jobs, they could really see how bad things had become. Society started to fall apart and the bosses didn't feel safe. So they made a decision: fixing the world was too difficult, so they'd make virtual worlds, instead, and the workers would line up just to escape their reality. And as an added bonus, the energy derived from workers solving puzzles in the virtual worlds could be used to power the machines doing work here in the real world.”

“Omega,” Ellie mumbles.

And just then there is a tremendous impact and the entire laboratory quakes. Bach's fleshy chips on the surgical tray rattle beside blood-stained operating instruments. The lights flicker and dirt seeps in through minuscule cracks in the ceiling.

“What was that?” Ava shields her head. Another huge impact shakes the lab.

“It's God,” Ellie says, eyes wide and hands clasped, “we're doomed.”

“There are no Gods,” Uri mutters and his sister punches him in the arm.

“It sounded like a bomb,” Ava says.

“Not a bomb,” Bach concludes, “probably just your mother.”