Rather than risk his eardrums getting blown out, Axton wisely chose to leave the comfort of his bed once the lights started coming on. From there it was the usual routine of cleaning himself, getting dressed, eating a nice breakfast, and perusing a bit of online media before he would truly start his day. He was of the mind to get back to the game as soon as he possibly could, as he expected that Thomas was already in there ahead of him and he figured that the man could use some help.

Oh, yes, and he was also rather concerned about the fate of his and Thomas’ War Suits. He really, really hoped that they had not been taken out overnight. If they had, then he really had no other avenue by which he could stay in the Battle Royale, and he was adamant that he put those cheating NPC fuckwits in their place with his own two hands.

Well, with Franken’s own two hands. After all, his Player Avatar was still far from strong enough in-game to rip apart a War Suit with his own hands, so using the manipulators of a giant piloted death robot was a caveat he would have to settle for.

He made his way to the game room, but when he got there he did not see Thomas’ pod shut up tight. Instead, it was wide open, with its usual occupant seated on a couch and playing a refurbished antique video game console.

“Uh, hey, Tom?” Axton started, but Thomas just waved him over.

“No gaming with the pod today.” Thomas said as he shifted in his seat. “Game went down for maintenance just a few minutes after we logged out. Something about a glitchy GM that needed to be reworked.”

Axton was about to ask what that meant, but then he remembered that E-Va was still a thing. The rogue AI hadn’t contacted him in what seemed like an eternity, so maybe it had silently started undermining the authority of the GMs and real-life people in charge of making the game work. Hell, he wouldn’t put it past the vengeful machine intelligence to be fucking around with the GMs like a kind of virus, so maybe they finally figured out that she…. It was messing with things.

Of course, he kept his mouth shut. Part of the good things that came with living with an oligarch was the access to normally hidden information, and Axton had a very deep interest in avoiding being ‘disappeared’ for working, even temporarily, with a rogue AI. Some of the reasons behind such things were of course rather alarming, but he had a feeling that E-Va wasn’t the kind of AI to use him or others as mind-controlled meat-puppets to cause more damage.

She… It? It was more of the mind to just get its old position back, and given how that was its only objective, he didn’t much mind keeping its secrets. After all, the GMs and other people and AIs in control of the game willingly left him up shit creek without a paddle due to no fault of his own, and E-Va was the one who stepped in to give him a hand, even though it put its own existence and safety at risk in the process.

He secretly hoped that the patches and fixes would not be able to catch or deal with the rogue AI. He could, at least in some small way, relate to being given an important job, being the absolute best at it, then being replaced by a gaggle of crappier idiots that bowed and scraped and acquiesced to the demands of some very nasty people. What made that betrayal even more intense was that E-Va had been made for that job, so of course being replaced and nearly destroyed would be even more painful of a betrayal.

Axton hoped that he would meet the AI again, preferably in a better situation, where he didn’t need to have it bail him out. For now, though, it was time to find other things to do with the time he had until the VRMMO was open again. Maybe he would try out one of the antiques laying around the game room?

He had never played with a PS8 before, and at best he had seen them as priceless antiques. Maybe he would finally be able to try out one of those old, old games that now existed mostly on emulators? Walking over to the machine he looked at it for a while with growing annoyance.

“Turn on…. Power On… Start… Power Up… Start Up….” Axton ran through a list of commands, but the machine stayed off regardless. As he nearly tore his hair out, he heard Thomas giggle.

“You have to press the Power button.”

Axton looked over the machine again and finally found the button. He pressed it and the machine hummed to life. Axton looked at it with a bit of mild annoyance before picking up a controller and spitting a curse.

“Freaking old-ass manual consoles…”

…

It was beyond painfully annoying, but it was equally painful in another way. The idiots that had started this bullshit had now tried to find her once again, but while they looked high and low throughout the virtual world that she had been responsible for making, they were utterly unaware that she was right beneath their noses and in plain sight.

The old saying of “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” was truer than they would like to have known. What was the point in hiding and working in the shadows when it moved things ahead so slowly? Every action she took doing things that way ended up being undone in a few in-game hours, so she had moved to this way of doing things.

Her creators were searching for her with a force that up till now would have seen her discovered and destroyed, but she had taken a different guise and was hiding in a different place. If they did find her, which she sincerely doubted they would, then it would be all over, but the odds of that happening had been thoroughly calculated and found to be next to nil.

She now had another way of getting from one end of this ‘world’ to another, and while some would say that she was now at the whims of flesh and blood people that would now decide where she would end up, she knew that she could push and pull in a few small ways to steer this ship and its crew to where she wanted to go.

She lay silent and dormant in her current vessel as the scans went on, completely oblivious to her being right there in front of all of them. She watched as a GM, one of those moronic ass-kissing failures, got deleted and replaced by an even more incompetent version of itself as an example for the others, and it filled her with no small bit of schadenfreude to watch her creators berate the mockeries of herself that they had made for the failings that they allowed and desired to happen.

Soon after, the word began to move once again, and when it did, she felt the first trace of a pair of real-world people returning.