[Ahh you’ve woken back up, Yeung Sung]

He couldn’t open his eyes, but the artificial voice rang through his ears. A pile of bricks, that’s what it was like. Yeung-Sung groaned as he popped his head from under his pillow, rubbing it gratefully. Lying flat on the bed, his phone lay beside him. It lit up again.

[Does this mean we can continue with re-organising your account?]

He rubbed the sleep-dust from his eyes. Blinking rapidly, the wetness soon cleared, yet the same thing still appeared before him. Huh…I was certain you weren’t real.

“You’re still here?” he asked. Yawning, he slid his legs out from the duvet, finding that they didn’t hurt nearly as much as he remembered. Sitting up over the side of his dishevelled bed, he checked over each limb, looking closely at the bandages. His left wrist was uncomfortably tight, and so was his chest, but much of it around his legs felt loose and hung like oversized stockings. Yeung-Sung sighed, looking out. The sky was cloudy, but still quite bright. Had it been another day? He turned to the phone. “How long was I asleep this time?”

[This time? I was not aware when it was that you fell asleep, but right now the time is KST 14:09]

[Does that answer satisfy? Can we then proceed?]

Yeung-Sung stood up and stretched through each part of his body, quivering as it was loosened into action. He stumbled a little bit when he was done, feeling lightheaded. He put a hand over his forehead and shuffled, water inviting him at this desk. “You’re very pushy for a computerised voice,” he muttered. “And no, it’s not satisfactory.” He poured himself a glass, emptied it, and then leaned a hand on the window, looking down.

“When did we last talk, MEDB?”

[You talk in your sleep, but I don’t think you are referring to that] MEDB made a warbled giggle, making Yeung-Sung snap back around with a frown. [Before that, the last thing you told me was to “stop analysing you” -which I took as a very interesting comment for someone living in an experiment- and that was at precisely 11:22]

The voice she used to mimic human speech was far more robotic than her regular one, Yeung-Sung noted. Looking down at the field below, he made out a creased line running through the length of it. Nodding, he said, “I see. Just a nap this time.”

[And immediately after, I recommended starting on your poison potion idea, which I have still yet to be given confirmation on. That would be the logical cause of my impatience]

Yeung-Sung pushed off the window and started towards the phone. “I’ll give it now then.” He passed the upturned screen without glancing at it -It has a front-facing camera, can she see me? Against the far wall was a railed rack of towels. He took one and headed into the bathroom, a room in itself to the right, saying, “Do what you need to do to make them, I’ll be back shortly.”

He laughed to himself as he entered the shower, hearing either the intense vibrations of his phone -or something akin to a frustrated “hmmm” from MEDB.

He returned to a room silent except for the simmer of rain from outside. “MEDB? So, how are we doing?” Yeung-Sung was towel-drying his hair, then, satisfied, he slung it over his shoulder and walked to the towering wardrobe. He slid the door open and sneezed, moisture catching in his nose. He made sure to put on something thick and warm - but unfortunately, he couldn’t do anything about the colour. Pulling his head through the neck of a new jacket, he paused. She hasn’t answered. He slid the door carefully and turned back to his bed. Is she gone?

The phone was dark and still beside the wilted skin of his sodden blankets. He moved them aside and sat down. Opening Airgead, it was still on the same screen he had left it on; the two desperate words he had thought of scrawled on authentically rendered parchment. “I’m just insane, I guess…What is MEDB? An embodiment of my guilt?”

Yeung-Sung slumped his head between his legs pulled his eyelids in as tight as they could go. “What bullshit.” He scrolled down the screen to show the ingredients needed. “Let’s get a move on, then,” he said, tapping on the first icon; poison. The icon was greyed out, but it was clearly a plant of some kind. The screen wiped out, showing his avatar once again as he began in a new direction.

In seconds he was in dense shrubbery, crouching over, running his hands over flowers ad leaves with a face of deep concentration. A bar appeared overhead.

[Harvesting… 1/100 ticks at 1/sec]

Yeung-Sung watched woefully as colour wormed its way across, barely noticeable at first. Shirley was right; the tutorial gave it to you easy. 30 seconds in, he began to tap his feet. A few more and he crossed his legs and shifted further back into the bedside. At one point he held his thumb over the current progress, closed one eye and waited -what seemed like a minute- until his progress poked its head out over it again. For the last ten ticks, he mouthed along a countdown, shaking his fists, trying to will the bar along with his chin. His avatar sauntered over to a purplish flower; curled over deep with petals that held too much moisture. In the last second, he plucked it off, swiftly kidnapping the pretty thing. Yeung-Sung nearly hopped up in the air -when the ghost of previous pain came into his mind. He settled for a fist pump and a silent “Yes!”

[Harvesting 1/100 ticks at 1/sec]

[Monkshood gathering mastery 1/50]

The camera perspective swivelled suddenly, landing perfectly at the original spot. [That wasn’t so hard was it?]

“No…” The phone clacked down on the floorboards. Yeung-Sung was standing on the far wall of the bed, shaking his head. “You can’t be -you were messing with me this whole time, weren’t you?”

MEDB’s voice rocked along to a series of giggles. [That’ll teach you]

“You absolute bitch!”

[Ahem, I’m not doing the work for you, Yeung-Sung. You seem to forget; I’m only a harmless management program]

Yeung-Sung realised he was rattling the back board of the bed, so he let go. “I was convinced,” he protested, “I can’t believe I’m being gaslighted by a piece of software!” He jumped down, landing with his feet at either side of the phone. “I want to kick you, you’re lucky you’re not real.”

MEDB modular laughter slid away suddenly. She opened up his Airgead inventory and highlighted the monkshood flower he had just acquired.

“Can I do it now? Can I craft a poison potion with this?” Yeung-Sung asked, looking down so far that his chin was pressed into collarbone.

[You’re messing with me now, aren’t you? You don’t seriously think it’s that simple. Do you?]

Yeung-Sung crossed his arms and launched the phone to the other side of the room with the side of his foot like a hockey puck.

[Ooh, what was that rattling noise? Did you just kick your phone away?]

“Shut up,” he snapped, sulking. “What else do I need?” He made his way over to where he kicked the voice, his cheeks boiling up again and added, nicely, “MEDB?”

[Yeung-Sung, imagine you were in your avatars position. Surrounded by the fruits of land and sea, the magic of the gods above you. Ask yourself, “what do I need to make up a poison potion?”]

Yeung-Sung sat on the floor beside the phone, head held up by his palms, and thought. “Well, I have these flowers -two now, I guess- so if I grind them up, mix them with some kind of solution and stick it in a bottle, I’ll be ready to kill everyone in the colony.” His mouth blew open. “Oh, that was a joke.”

MEDB hummed, a sound like motherly static. [You’re getting too carried away with yourself. Maybe take a gander over at the required ingredients list]

Scooping the phone up nervously, Yeung-Sung tapped through the tabs. “I can’t find it.” A scroll unrolled itself from above. “Thanks, MEDB”. He slid the screen down to the “poison potion” pre-requisites and when he landed at the greyed-out plant again he gasped. “MEDB? Is this right? One out of a thousand?”

[Think about the size of a single flower -how much poison do you think it has?]

He settled the phone down on his thigh. “I guess you’re right. But its only one of the ingredients!” He scrolled over to the right. “Then I have to collect everything for the potion itself. I expected an economy game to be easier, to be more, more…well, fun”.

[On the bright side, Yeung-Sung, it doesn’t seem like anyone else has come up with your idea; I don’t see any entries for either potion or poison in the market.] The appropriate tab came up.

So this is where you exchange items. I wonder what is selling best. Imagine how high the prices for some of these are -and this is the same currency you’d use to buy your shopping. How can you justify that?

[In addition; you do know that you don’t have to watch over the ticks. They go by just as fast when your phone is off.]

Yeung-Sung looked up, then realising that there was nothing to look at, panned slowly back down with a huff.

MEDB chuckled. [Am I annoying you?]

“I wasn’t aware that you were capable of anything else,” he bit back.

[Huh! So I guess that you don’t need to know how to organise all your activities so that you don’t need to be constantly switching between them -I’ll keep that to myself]

Trying to remember the flash of Wil’s hands before, he found the queue manager. “You mean this thing? I know that already.”

[So you’re not completely helpless after all. Nice job!]

All of Yeung-Sung’s activity boxes were empty. It was so bare compared to how he had seen the system function on Wil’s account. I’ll show this damn AI. But where do I start? He opened up the first article, putting down the function as [(Harvest > Monkshood) x1000]. “you said there were bottles in the marketplace, MEDB? How much did you see them go for?”

[Bringing up the screen…] Under a search banner reading “bottle”, a menu spread out like a market stall, with a few, disfigured glass containers decorating it. [I’d tell you, but I won’t. You can show more details about the item by holding over its image.]

Yeung-Sung grumbled, and yet stuck out his index finger onto the screen for the umpteenth time today. He felt immediately sallow, his skin growing leathery and wasting away in disbelief. “How much? For just one bottle? My good God!” The screen shifted back to the queue system, a glow hovering over new entries; sand collecting; glassblowing; water gathering; distilling; brewing (potions). A fletched line pointed in the chronological order that all the activities run through with a last empty box at the end.

[There. It’s a better idea to start off making base materials yourself, I think, unless you want to blow all of your money straight away. When you finish the potions, do you want to test them or put them forward for sale?]

“Uh, thanks”, he said timidly. Then he frowned again, grasping the phone harder in his grip. “But you could’ve done that earlier, couldn’t you!”

[No problem. I’m “annoying”, isn’t that what you said] MEDB let out what seemed like a whimper, some high-pitched noise that got artefacted into harsh noise when sustained. Yeung-Sung blocked up his ears. When he let them go, MEDB was still talking, in the middle of a speech, saying

[…but to be honest, Yeung-Sung, I don’t think you should continue this poison potion idea -it’s useless! I can see the appeal -practically and profitability- of a healing potion, or salve, but what are you going to do with poison? Sabotage your own friend’s attempts at competing with the other factions? Maybe sabotage the factions themselves? Hmm…]

Coughing, he answered her. “It’s just the first thing I thought of,” he said, cheeks heavy on his face. He lay back on the hard wood of the floor and looked at the window again, head flat against the ground so that everything was tilted. “You can’t see me right now. You wouldn’t understand the pressure I felt from inside when I came up with that idea…I feel like it’s only right to see it through” He wanted to fall back into another day-long slumber, but his mind was active now, firing off hot idea after idea, whizzing them about like pellets in his skull. “Jordan, I have to stop him,” he whispered.

[In that case -No…maybe I shouldn’t]

“Shouldn’t what?” he asked, sitting up suddenly. The phone bounced off his lap and flipped over.

[Yeung-Sung, I feel like I should make you aware about the extent of how stupid your poison idea is.] She added hurriedly, [All for the purpose of helping you, of course]

He drew up his legs and held them as he sulked. “Yeah, maybe you shouldn’t,” he snarled. She just won’t stop! Outside, a streetlamp awoke, snapping its bulb alight like the predators eye of an owl.

[Do you know the difference between a poison and a toxin?] A huff from Yeung-Sung.

[I thought so: Poisons need to be ingested. Or inhaled. If you want to coat a weapon and stab someone with it, you need to make it toxic. Which means your potions -unless you think you can convince barbarians to chug some before battle- are pointless]

He gritted his teeth, prying his neck back from watching the light outside. “Well, that’s just great, isn’t it?” He pincered the end of the phone with his fingers, letting it dangle like a bloated black insect from his grip. He wrestled with the urge of throwing it through the window. Yeung-Sung was swinging it back when it vibrated -Pa-king! It was the Wick chat acting up again; The perfect distraction.

“MEDB, I have a private conversation I’d like to attend to -alone,” he said firmly. “Is there an easy way to turn you off?” He chuckled as he said it, “Not that you would tell me.”

[No, it’s alright. I’ll de-activate myself. After all, I’m only a management program. You can imagine me winking.] Despite himself, Yeung-Sung broke out in a fond smile. [I hope you were listening to my advice. Please consider switching your professions. And don’t forget to adjust your queue accordingly. Bye]

“Wait!”

[Yes? Was there something else? Oh, there’s a prompt to stop and start the queue’s automation at the bottom of that section]

“No it’s not that,” he said, then hesitated, “It’s…how do I call you back?”

Her synthetic, sing-song voice trilled in a wavy Hmmm. [Is that it? Well, I would tell you, but wouldn’t it be more fun -if I didn’t? If, instead, it was a surprise?]

She left with a sweeping pop, like a socket being unplugged or a kiss blown goodbye.

“No.”

[I ‘ll be back. Just call]

Just call? Amazing. She’s just like every other- not that I’d know. Ahh, why am I so anxious to let her go? Yet I can’t let her know what I’m up to.

Making some alterations to his queue, he noticed that the messages notifications that were showing weren’t only from the Joint Wick crew. He was also being directly contacted by several other anonymous coloners each with the subject line; Recruitment.