After the group left Leone — which was not an easy thing to do — they made a temporary base inside one of the wayrests off the King’s Highway. It wasn’t easy to leave Leone because after the meeting with Eli, several adventurers followed them, barraging the group with questions. Some even requested to join the clan.

Some adventurers recognized Fang. He was famous not only for his several victories at the Junior Arena, but the fact that he had turned down so many top alliances and guilds that attempted to recruit the young talent. For the alliances and guilds, being turned down was a huge insult. In return, apparently, they destroyed Fang’s reputation.

So it wasn’t that strange when some of the adventurers that chased after the group started throwing insults at Fang and the group, and some even warned Fang to watch his back. At the time, no one, except for Nissa perhaps, knew where those threats and insults came from. It was especially jarring for people like Estella, who had just become used to being liked in place, for once.

It wouldn’t be until later that Fang explained the situation and that it was nothing to worry about. “Just sore losers,” Fang said, using those exact words.

Aren imagined what those words could mean, and in his imagination, those adventurers were also turned down by those big alliances and guilds. That seemed like something that was plausible. Everyone wanted to join, say, Sigil, one of the leading alliances. In an interview, an officer of Sigil remarked that they receive thousands of applications every week; at one point, there were a thousand applications per day. Notoriously, Sigil accepted about only one new member per month, on average, which was done and announced only once, each year. In other words, once a year, in February, Sigil announced around twelve new members who’d join their ranks.

Imagining that Exalt could one day reach those heights almost made Aren dizzy. There was very little reason why they shouldn’t be able to, that is what really made him dizzy. With the blessings they had, unique class, a martial genius like Fang — it all seemed to point in the direction of meteoric rise. Almost like a counterweight, his own mind added what comes after a meteoric rise; a meteoric fall. And when it comes to meteors, the falling ones make a lot more impact.

The group had just decided to hunt the Lightning Bringers and Celestial Flash, mostly because of Aren’s urging, when Aren received a notification warning him that he would be ejected from Singularity in short order, and that he should find a safe place.

He explained that he had to leave for four hours — in Singularity time — for his daily medical checkups, and while Fang was conferring with the others about their plans, Aren went and logged off.

The pod hissed as the door swung open under its own mechanical power, and for once in his life — his new, far worse, life — Arnel woke up without the presence of Ermin Saltzer. In fact, other than a single nurse, there was no one in the room.

Arnel knew this because, well, he could see. Occasionally, flickers of the strange reality his implant perceived superimposed over his vision, but it was as if the implant, or his brain — or Leviathan for that matter — learned how to tune it out. It was certainly still present, and it almost felt as if Aren could see it if he just tried a little bit harder. But it didn’t work like that; try as he might, he was stuck with normal vision for normal people. And that was a good thing. Actually, without the presence of Ermin Saltzer, that was two good things.

It was almost as if Arnel’s life was showing signs of recovery, and potentially showing an upward trend. But with long immersion sessions comes a temporary sort of confusion — a forgetting — and at times, it can take up to an hour for a person to reorder their memories into a proper temporal sequence. For Arnel, that took about fifteen seconds, just long enough for him to regret thinking his life was going to improve.

He remembered that he was being moved to Arc-1-alpha at some point, which was literally the cold, black heart of what was most likely his enemy and natural predator — the military and the AGMI Theta.

The effect the fantasy bubble of living a normal life had on Arnel’s expression, when it burst, must have been something else, because the nurse almost dropped her tablet and was about to press the emergency button, but thankfully, took a look at the monitors and saw that Arnel had a normal heart rhythm. Normal, if a hundred and twenty beats per minute could be called normal. For Arnel, sure, that was pretty normal. Symptoms of living on borrowed time: depression, desperation, fear, oh, and elevated heart rate.

In an effort to steer his thoughts elsewhere, as if looking for some happy thoughts, Arnel bumped into an old legend of the world of mathematics. Kurt Goedel, who died of starvation fearing that his food was poisoned. More specifically, he thought of Goedel’s opponent, David Hilbert. Hilbert believed that all of mathematics stemmed from a system of axioms — meaning that it was complete — and that these axioms were consistent. Famously, he said: “We must know. We shall know.” However, as irony would have it, a day before he spoke those words, Kurt Goedel shared the first logical expressions of his incompleteness theorem that proved that the system of mathematics was not only incomplete, but riddled with self-contradictions that made mathematics dubiously consistent as a system.

Arnel almost chuckled to himself as he thought of those two; and he thought of them, certainly, as giants — legends of the old world who took the spear of science and plunged it into the heart of the unknown. And Arnel also thought of them as fools, because if they lived to see the age of AGMI, not only would the ghost of the ignorabimus drive them into an early grave, but the sheer madness of it all would race the ghost to the finish line.

AGMI, in the past half a century, had solved things that were considered to be undecidable, or impossible. Calculating pi, solving the n-body problem — in fact, when the first prototype AGI — alpha — was on the cusp of solving Chaos Theory, the government of the fledgling Commonwealth swiftly pulled the plug on the project before the damned thing could become Laplace’s Demon. Only then did the age of the AGMI begin, and the catastrophic leaps in technology.

If only Goedel and Hilbert could see the world now, what would they think?

We must know. We shall know.

Arnel knew that feeling very well. What would happen if he tried to talk to Leviathan? What was Leviathan? Was it really an AGMI? What would happen to him? But more than anything, he feared the answer to those questions. He feared them so much that asking them was not an option. As if, somehow, pretending they don’t exist will make them disappear. Surely, even Hilbert, a famous mathematician, must’ve known about the things Goedel presented — the incompleteness and undecidability at the heart of mathematics. Surely, he must have felt like Arnel felt now. Don’t ask that question; look on the bright side.

Arnel felt both disgusted and relieved that he had a fantasy companion in a fantasy version of David Hilbert.

“Can I walk around?” Arnel asked, looking at the nurse who was about to leave.

The nurse seemed unsure at first, even going as far as to check the charts. “I should ask your doctor.”

“I really want to leave the room,” Arnel insisted. He could finally see. If that nurse wanted to keep him in this room, she should call the entire military of alpha here, otherwise, Arnel was going on a damn walk.

At least, that was the idea when Arnel got off the Sim Pod bed, and the monitor — lacking a signal — began to flat-line his heart rate.

The idea of walking was simple. The actual process was a disaster. The moment Arnel put his weight on his legs, he realized that he had forgotten how to use those muscles. They were carefully kept from atrophying, thanks to massages inside the Pod and shock therapy, but the knowledge — the neural connections responsible for walking — had become rusty. It felt as if his legs were numb, and even when he fell on the hard, cold floor, he couldn’t exactly feel his legs.

Worse, when he sat up, he couldn’t find his balance or orient to the horizon. He was always leaning to the side, and slightly forwards, or slightly backwards. And then the motion sickness hit him, his inner ear screamed bloody murder at him, and his brain decided it was a perfect opportunity to get rid of that nutrient fluid, and emptied itself on the floor next to him.

Except that nutrient fluid was in his blood, not his stomach. Great, now he had heartburn too.

There comes a time when a person realizes that they have made a very, very, bad choice in life. For Arnel, this was it. He should’ve stayed in the pod.

Before Arnel had an opportunity to lament further on his choices, like getting into that APV two months ago, he was helped up by a pair of muscular hands, and they didn’t belong to the nurse, because the nurse was standing next to him, looking at him.

Finally, when he was seated on the wheel chair, he craned his head back and saw the face of the uniformed soldier that was most likely outside his door at all times.

Great, they actually did bring alpha’s military. Arnel was already starting to hate everything about this day, even though it was only going to last two hours. The shorter the better, Arnel decided.

Surprisingly, the soldier smiled. “Which way, trooper? The garden? Cafeteria? Take your pick.”

Arnel blinked. Really? He was free?

Arnel chuckled. He knew what this was. The carrot and the stick, right? He was being shown the carrot, but once he was in alpha, it was gonna be the stick all day long. And yes, he realized how wrong that sounded, even when he mused it to himself in his head.

May as well, he thought to himself and nodded to the soldier. “The cafeteria sounds great,” he said. Alpha was his destination, no matter what. That meant that the hell of his hospital stay would most likely only increase by at least tenfold when there weren’t innocent civilians around to complain about treating a patient like a lab rat. The cafeteria sounded really nice. He was probably never going to see another one again.

The hospital itself was fairly ordinary. It was Sector 9’s best facility, housed in the Prometheus constellation — a collective term for multiple Arcologies. Prometheus-7, the Arcology where Arnel was, was one of the newer megastructures, capable of holding half a million people. Its footprint, even for an Arcology, was vast to say the least. At present, in its current configuration as a technological hub for medicine and manufacture, it housed some one hundred thousand souls, situated in a pyramid that was three kilometers tall. Arnel once learned in school that the gradient of internal and external pressures caused by Arcologies this tall was so severe, that they had to be constructed with materials intended for military use in armor.

Arcologies were mind-boggling creations. From the inside, one would be hard pressed to be able to tell the difference. It had parks, internal climates — some even had rain — agricultural zones; it was marvelous. But from the outside, it was a different story. For an Arcology cluster like the Prometheus constellation, one could see their radiant tips, on a clear day, from hundreds of kilometers away. To say that they were ever-present was an understatement.

But inside, especially the hospital, it seemed like a normal hospital. Arnel had been once to a new-world hospital, outside of an Arcology, when he was on a trip to Sector 16’s New Tokyo. On the trip, when he was still a young boy, he had to go to the hospital, though, now, he couldn’t remember for what reason. He wanted to say because he fell, but that didn’t seem right. Many of these memories, it turned out, he suppressed after his mother passed away. It was understandable, or so the experts said — and by experts, AI experts is implied.

“What made you become a soldier?” Arnel asked, as they wheeled down the hallways towards, presumably, the cafeteria.

“Citizenship,” the soldier replied evenly and without any hesitation.

“You get citizenship if you serve?” Arnel asked. This was news to him.

The man nodded, although Arnel couldn’t see the gesture. “Affirm,” he said. “Citizenship, class upgrade to K after 10 years, L after 5. It’s pretty nice.”

Arnel nodded. K and L were pretty nice. In old world terms, that would be around the middle or lower spectrum of middle class.

“With distinctions, even higher,” the soldier added.

“How do you get distinctions if you don’t do anything all day?” Arnel asked. “Last I checked, there hasn’t been a war in almost a century.”

The soldier laughed. “Accidents happen all the time. You can get all sorts of medals for all sorts of things. Besides, the military is more like a police force nowadays. There’s lots of people still in the old world that reject the Commonwealth.”

“So you kill them?” Arnel asked.

“No! Of course not,” the soldier said, shaking his head vehemently. “Hell, even if they open fire on us, we avoid confrontation. We are not like that, and that is not the message the Commonwealth wants to send.”

Arnel thought about that, and somewhat agreed with the Commonwealth on this one. However, the civilian population had thoughts that were much different from that of this soldier. If non-citizens were free-loading scum, then those who reject the Commonwealth are terrorists and ferals.

“Usually, we just watch the Machine Arsenals bombard some test sites from the other side of the planet. Sometimes we also call Battle Damage Assessments on old world underground bunkers,” the soldier explained. “It’s boring, nonsensical work and mostly unnecessary. The age of soldiers and manned militaries has long passed. Now? We are just glorified puppets and mouthpieces.”

“Then why do you do it?” Arnel asked.

“Like I said. Citizenship.” The soldier laughed. “Besides, police work is not suited for unmanned workforces. It requires that bit of human touch. At least meatbags can crawl into tight spaces, unlike one of those drones.”

“But there is no more crime,” Arnel said.

“They sure teach you kids a lot in school,” the soldier said. “In the arcologies, it is rare. But out there — you’d be surprised. Non-citizens aren’t chipped, so they fall outside of the failsafe measures. There’s a lot of old world stuff still lying around — extremely dangerous for everyone on the planet. That’s why we still build weapons. But our message is peace and our intent is harmony. They are still part of the Commonwealth, so we often have to intervene.”

“Are those your thoughts as a person, or as a mouthpiece?” Arnel asked, and for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out where he got this edge from. Was it because he finally left that damned hospital room? Or because he realized his life was about to catastrophically change — probably for the worse?

The soldier laughed and shrugged. “Perhaps a little bit of both.”

Finally, the wheel chair stopped at a table in the cafeteria and the soldier walked around the table and smiled. He was a young man, in his mid twenties. “What do you want to eat?”

“Who is gonna pay for it?” Arnel asked, cautiously. He didn’t like having to choose, and he wasn’t sure of the state of his finances after two months of being out of the loop.

“Pretty certain Mister Wright is,” the soldier said.

Ah, Ermin Saltzer, then? Arnel smiled. “I’ll order everything on the desserts menu,” he said.

“That is probably not good for your health,” the soldier said.

“It’s a good thing we are in a hospital, then.”