Chapter 02

“Oh god my head.” Spark said leaning forward on his hand. He groaned in pain as the pyramid of empty cans crumpled around him.

“I feel your pain.” Vesta said with a sigh.

“What’s happening?” Spark asked stumbling to the table. He dropped down into a chair leaning forward on his elbows.

“I don’t know. Have you looked at your account management page?” Vesta asked. She attempted to reopen hers, but it was gone. There was no option at all to get to the window.

“I see nothing but scrambled letters and numbers.” He said through unfocused eyes. Tears were forming in the corner of his vision from the pressure in his head.

With no other idea coming to mind Vesta took a health serum from her inventory and jammed the tip into her neck. She injected the red liquid to the familiar warm feeling spreading from the injection point. The pain in her head began to subside when the feeling reached her head.

Taking pity on her annoying comrade she tossed him a serum. He caught it and injected himself melting in relief. They both took a few moments of silence to enjoy the relief.

“I just tried to open the account management window again and it’s gone.” Spark said breaking the silence.

“Yeah mine is gone too.” She said shaking her head.

She made her way to her friends window. Normally there were a couple of dozen people listed in her contacts, but when the window opened there was only one, Spark. She feverishly attempted to scroll but there was no more.

“Everyone’s gone from my friends list.” She huffed and snapped the window shut.

“You’re the only person on mine.” Spark said verifying her fears.

Vesta noticed that there were some notifications in her view that had been minimized and silenced.

-#WQFDAFJ$#@4t43

-You have inherited the assets of Silence.

-10,432,234t added to personal account.

-All Hope’s Talon permissions of ownership have been transferred to you.

-All Bound items have been transferred to Hope’s Talon vault.

-All Possession Ownerships have been transferred to you.

-All Hope’s Talon Authority has been transferred to you.

~~~

-#WQFDAFJ$#@4t43

-You have inherited the assets of Deona.

-18,318,987t added to personal account.

-All Hope’s Talon permissions of ownership have been transferred to you.

-All Bound items have been transferred to Hope’s Talon vault.

-All Possession Ownerships have been transferred to you.

-All Hope’s Talon Authority has been transferred to you.

~~~

-#WQFDAFJ$#@4t43

-You have inherited the assets of Zonos.

-4,326,955t added to personal account.

-All Hope’s Talon permissions of ownership have been transferred to you.

-All Bound items have been transferred to Hope’s Talon vault.

-All Possession Ownerships have been transferred to you.

-All Hope’s Talon Authority has been transferred to you.

Over thirty million thread had been deposited into her account. That coupled with the money that she already had put her account at over fifty million thread. She gazed at the number for longer than she felt that she should have. The true cost of the money was unknown.

If each of their authority of their group, Hope’s Talon, was transferred to her then that meant that she was the old governing member remaining. Spark was pledging to become the fifth after someone had left the group, but he hadn’t proved to everyone that he could handle the responsibility.

“I’ve got to log off!” Spark said suddenly.

“I mean I’m not in a huge hurry to get back to the other world, but I can’t say that I’m not freaked out right now.” Vesta said.

“You don’t understand. I have a date in like an hour. She fine! It’s taken me weeks to get this yes. I was so going to hit that.” Spark said. He jumped out of the chair and began to pace back and forth across his side of the table.

“Thank you for reaffirming that you are a pig.” She said with a huff and got up from the table. She walked away leaving him to pace.

“Hold up.” He called after her, but she didn’t listen. She pulled a jump stick out of her pocket and snapped it. In a whoosh of light, she vanished and reappeared in downtown Summers Deep.

The city of Summers Deep was about the size of New York City on earth, back when it was a huge metropolitan area and not a creature filled with ocean water. The buildings had a gothic feeling build of grey stone and concrete. At night the city scape lit up and the people were just as alive as they were in the day.

Vesta hadn’t actually checked the time. When she pulled out her phone, she wasn’t surprised to notice that it was late afternoon. She had slept through most of the day but given that the mission had taken them well into the morning it couldn’t have been helped.

The streets were just as bustling as they always were. Whatever was affecting her obvious was not affecting the populous of non-player characters. She opened her phone and attempted to contact an admin, but just as the contacts for her friends were missing so were those of the admins. A few seconds after she opened the admin page the options and labels began to glitch out becoming random strings of numbers, letters, and symbols. She closed the window in frustration, but she had one more option.

Three blocks down the street Vesta ducked into a restaurant. The place was weird to say the least, Mexican and Italian fusion never really sat well with Vesta. She didn’t come for the food. Acting like she owned the place she walked through the door that went into the kitchen. The cooks looked up at her but didn’t say anything.

At the back of the kitchen there was a large metal door. Vesta knocked on it in an exact pattern that she had been taught and waited.

“Ahh, Vesta.” A short portly man said through a screen next to the door.

“Hello, Finger.” Vesta said with a sneer. She and the man had had their issues in the past, but he was not who she was there to see.

“What can we do for you today?” Finger said with a nasty grin.

“I need to see Link and Binding.” Vesta said crossing her arms over her chest.

“I’m so sorry, but they’re very busy today.” Finger said with an obviously fake frown.

“The Scorching Highlands.” She said without another word.

“Of course.” Finger said as he bowed and stepped back from the camera.

The large door slid into the wall on the left. Vesta walked through a cloud of cold air. The entrance to their place was part of the restaurants walk in cooler system. Finger led her to the back where they passed through another door.

They ended up standing in a room that looked like it was ripped out of a spaceship. The walls were smooth slate grey and were angled at the top and bottom. Floors were metal grates and the ceiling was lined with bright white lights. In the center of the room there were a pair of pedestals each with a floating holographic head floating above it.

The head on the left was Link he glowed blue. The head on the right was Binding she was a light purple. They both looked at Vesta as she walked into the room. Finger sluffed off to the side and parked himself in the shadow.

“What has brought you to grace us with your presence today?” Binding asked.

“I’ve come to talk about what is happening.” Vesta said resting her hands on her hips.

“Whatever do you mean?” Link asked. Vesta could feel the fake.

“Cut the shit. I’m calling in the favor you owe me for Scorching Highlands.” She said shaking her head.

The two disembodied heads looked at each other. Vesta was sure that they could communicate without speaking, she couldn’t confirm it, but it made sense. They turned back to her.

“What do you want to know?” Binding asked with a frown.

“What’s going on? Why did my friends list empty? Why is my account management page gone? Why did I get all of my partners stuff?” Vesta demanded in rapid fire.

“Sit down.” Link said. A holographic chair appeared behind where Vesta stood. She touched it to make sure she wasn’t going to fall to the floor then she planted herself in the seat.

“You know that we are AIs within a game world.” Binding said.

“Yes.” Vesta nodded.

“Our existence has always been governed by a higher-level AI that we know as a God Tier AI. Something took over from these AI, someone.” Link said.

“The world that you are playing in, what you’ve always considered to be a game, it is not so simple anymore. A being of unfathomable power has taken the world created through digital means and shaped it into something real. Every person that you once considered an NPC is now a living breathing person. Every person that was logged into the game at the time of the shift, their souls were ripped from their bodies on earth and they became the person they were ‘playing’ in NuValla.” Binding explained like she was speaking with a child. Condescension was nothing new for these two, Vesta was used to it.

“You’re saying that I am a real person in this world. There is no body on earth for me to go back to?” Vesta asked.

“We do not know if your body died, or what has happened, but you are here now.” Link said.

“What does this mean?” Vesta asked quietly.

“It means that you aren’t going home. It means that you should make the best of the life that you have here.” Binding said assurance in her voice.

“Thank you.” Vesta said standing up from the holographic chair. It dissolved in whips of smoke.

“This information is your payment for what happened at the Scorching Highlands. Consider us even.” Link said sternly.

“That may have been payment for the Scorching Highlands, but don’t forget about the Crash site.” Vesta said waving her finger.

“I didn’t know that it would be loaded.” Binding said for the thousandth time.

“I don’t care. You still owe me.” Vesta said as she turned to leave. Finger walked out from his corner and led the way back through the cold metal box into the kitchen. He left her at the sliding metal door closing it behind her.

Vesta walked back out through the kitchen and outside. The sun was almost down for the day. The streetlights were on and the lights from the building made the city almost as bright as the day. People bumped into her as she walked down the sidewalk. Living actual people. Not NPCs, not information on a server, people in the flesh. The blood would be real if you cut them. The pain they felt would be authentic. So would their joy, their relief, it would all be real.

The world seemed to be moving a million miles a second around her as she moved through the downtown streets. The shift in how she looked at the hundreds of people around her made her head hurt almost as bad as it did when she woke up. She finally couldn’t take it anymore and pulled out her phone to call for a Coin. The car showed up on the street a few minutes after she put in the request. When she got in it already knew that she wanted to go back uptown to Hiventhorn Manor.

About five minutes into the drive she groaned loudly because she knew that she had to track down Spark and explain to him what was going on. He might be an annoying tool, but he was the only friend that she had in the world for the time and he deserved to know what was happening to them.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes as she began to mentally prepare for the upcoming conversation.