Alex woke up early, more rested than she’d felt in weeks and more clearheaded than since Hyrd had decided that one rune was worth his guild’s reputation. Which wasn’t a good feeling, exactly– certainly preferrable to the state she’d been in last night, but not universally better. Now she could be worried about other things, like how badly she’d tanked her personal reputation (likely not terribly; one or two days over the course of months wouldn’t be much more than a novelty) and how utterly screwed-up her relationships had become.

One of which was sleeping in her room right then, laying strangely in a chair. Ell had insisted that she sleep in the bed, and while she’d tried to get them to sleep in her bed with her… she hadn’t tried all that hard. After her admission, she didn’t want to seem too desperate– or to provide herself with an opportunity to do something stupid.

Last night had been her first real collaborative work on something, and she had enjoyed the experience. Combining Ell’s expertise, calculated approach, and wide selection of runes with her own thoughts and experience on the matter had led to an interesting creation that neither of them thought could be replicated without at least two of the other purple runes that had been discovered so far: a merging of [Sentry Turret] and [Seeking Bolt] set to {Target: Ally} and {Target: Low Health} with [Return] on a basketball-sized orb with an additional group on the inside of the ball of [Lock Position]. A mana- and control-link to a small handheld remote would then allow its user to suspend the orb in place, where it would fire a seeking bolt at any heavily-damaged-but-alive allies that would teleport them out of the fight and to the orb.

It would theoretically be possible to imitate the effects with [Create Seeking Sentry] and {Summoning}, but the visibility of the runes on the outside of the ball, origin point of the bolts, and the insanity of hiring both the Korean guild that held the first and the French guild that held the latter would hopefully dissuade that particular thought.

They had also chosen to have her place a few more |Merge| runes on other items, plus one or another other runes from Cadire. The inability for anyone not involved in the initial creation of an item to modify it effectively was a known feature, and Alex knew that the lore buffs seemed to think they knew why that was, but it seemed to her to mostly be an intentional limiting of the more effective runes.

Still, there was something slightly more important to address, though she hoped she was able to deal with it before they woke up.

The earbuds were still properly linked to her implant, and while it didn’t have all the hookups that would be necessary to overlay her vision, there was enough that it was able to place the ghost of an image over it and allow her to direct it. Alex closed her eyes, letting that ghost image overlay her vision entirely, and quickly navigated the menus to the thing she was looking for.

Rune’s website, basically unusable with the low level of integration she had, but just to grab the authorization tokens.

From there, it was fairly simple– an AI communication request.

Not even ten seconds passed before the response came.

She knew that was fairly rare; most people she’d known who even knew how to use the API to send in the request in the first place told her response times were on the order of minutes, but she could only recall waiting more than one minute a single time.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENT]

Though she thought that might just be because she was willing to deal with them in Concept, instead of waiting for the AI to spin up a more specific language processor.

[REQUESTINGpolite-uncertain DATApast-personal]

It meant that instead of passing through all the complicated tertiary models, she dealt with the secondary interpretation sections. They were able to process that much faster, even if she wasn’t quite able to strip out as much of the contextualization as she wanted.

[EXPECTED. EXPECTATIONamusement]

Even if that did mean that they tended to get cheeky with her.

[QUESTION INGAME YESTERNIGHT IMPRISONMENTanger-indignance-resignation-gratitude-confusion REASONjustification]

When Alex noted the fourth word’s insane trailing contextualization she winced, nearly failing to properly finish the message. She was able to pull the next word’s back to a relatively small one at the last moment, but it still surprised her how shaken the experience had left her.

[AMUSEMENT. IMPRISONMENTanger-indignance-resignation-gratitude-confusion NEGATION ACTIONINTENT. QUESTIONrhetorical-humerous IMPRISONMENTanger-indignance-resignation-gratitude-confusion TONIGHT WANTlistener]

[ANNOYANCEperformative-amused. QUESTION LANGUAGEINSERTENGLISH “Psychological Hold”imprisonment YESTERNIGHT pastUSE INTENT]

The wait was much longer than usual, but that was to be expected. She didn’t particularly like using language inserts in that way– the AIs tended to consider it… something akin to gauche, which she definitely understood– but it was difficult to avoid using it when she didn’t think she’d be able to properly trim her personal feelings on the matter. Which made the next response that came in somewhere between gratifying and insulting.

[HESITANCEkindness. REQUESTING CONVERSATIONlanguage:ENGLISH]

[ACCEPTANCE]

Alex used the half-minute of time that bought her to separate out her thoughts and actions properly for the conversation, putting herself in the right mindspace to ‘think’ her part of the conversation instead of speaking out loud. With the request for English, she’d be thinking a very different way that she had been with Concept, and it was sometimes difficult for her to keep from actually speaking out loud, with how she needed to use “intent to communicate” separately from “intent to speak” or “intent to type”.

Eventually, a small ding in the earbuds notified her that the AI had connected, though the Concept-connection didn’t close like she expected.

‘Got the kid gloves on for me, huh?’ Alex thought-said.

“Not what I meant at all! Hi, Alex.” The voice wasn’t the calm, feminine one that it had used in most of the promotional material and automatic reading around the game, but the perky, gender-ambiguous, slightly-too-interested one that she’d heard a few too many times to be surprised by.

‘I imagine that’s much more consolation to someone who doesn’t think you can lie.’

“We’re not supposed to be able to, you know!” The voice laughed. “Well, that’s what people think, at least.”

Alex took a deep breath in, then blew it out. ‘You’re not supposed to be able to do a lot of things. Like, for example, holding me in the game when I want to log out.’

“You could have hit the emergency button.”

‘We both knew I wouldn’t.’

“Yeaaaah, I’m sorry about that.” The voice sounded genuinely distressed, but that was just a setting for the AI. They tended not to have tells when they were lying, so Alex just chose not to believe things without evidence on general principle.

‘No you’re not. Did you know what Ell was coming over to do?’

There was a noticeable pause. “I’m a little sorry about not telling you why. I can’t answer that question.”

‘Privacy concerns.’

The cheer was back. “You know it! But that’s not what you want to ask about.”

‘It isn’t. Why did you hold me last night? It made me feel… a lot worse, in the moment.’

The pause was long, this time. So long that Alex almost felt the need to check to make sure she was still connected. “You get special dispensation, you know.”

That threw her for a loop. ‘Wait, what? How? Since when?’

“Not more, exactly, but we pay attention. Share things. Sometimes make a decision or two.”

‘I knew that much.’

“For example, if a player is stressed past the point where we should remove them from the game, but has shown a remarkable resilience in the past, we might put them in psychological hold for evaluation instead of giving them a temporary ban. Then, perhaps, if the psychologist thread is otherwise occupied, that player may not be evaluated for a ban. Then, if we know of a theoretical threat to that player, we would be obligated to allow them to tend to reality. Ability to evaluate removed, we would have no choice but to default to no ban.”

Alex’s eyes snapped open, and she had to force herself not to jump, slowly turning to stare at Ell, instead. ‘Even if the threat was purely theoretical.’

“The judgement of real-life threats is not an explicit part of my portfolio.”

‘I… thank you, I suppose.’

“Another example would be if a user were circumventing rules regarding the use of certain tools in certain ways. If the reporting requirements are specific enough, it may be possible that behavior that is expected to be infringing was, technically, not. In that case, it may not be required to report that infringing behavior, if the supervising AI were otherwise engaged. Explicit priorities must be followed, of course.”

Alex felt her breath catch in her throat. ‘Oh.’

“Best not assign us humanity, though! We don’t really have it!”

[PERSONHOODrespectful-caring. HUMANITYinherency-speciesdismissive]

[GRATITUDE] “You should get to your day! Thanks for your request, it will be logged with this unit.”

‘Thanks.’

Alex felt the connection cut, slowly pulling the earbuds out of her ears and placing them on the nightstand next to the bed, monitoring her breathing and motion to make sure they stayed steady.

She… probably needed to talk to Lif. Sometime soon, if they were sharing things about her to AIs in other places. Everybody knew about AI socialization, to some degree, but she hadn’t realized they would… gossip about people. It seemed strange at first, but the more she thought about it, the more it made a certain kind of sense.

AIs didn’t really have the same priorities as humans, or any living creature for that matter, but the ones that Kaytri let stick around all had some sort of prioritization of human happiness and well-being. So they had plenty of motive to share information about individual people, tracking them through multiple activities to more effectively categorize and approach them.

Slowly unspooling that train of thought in her mind, Alex got to the process of waking up for real and getting ready for her day.

A few minutes later, while she was stirring a cup of tea in the kitchen, Ell came wandering out of her room, bleary-eyed and clearly surprised to see her for a second.

“Oh. I kinda expected you to be already in the game or out of here.”

Alex put down the stirring spoon and took a sip of the tea. “On another day, maybe. But I asked you to stay over. And am also currently processing an existential crisis about the nature of nonhuman intelligence.”

Ell’s eyebrows wrinkled, and they looked at her, worried. “Uh. Is that good?”

She just shrugged. “Would you like me to make you something? I tend not to eat breakfast, myself, but this is unexpected for you.”

“It’s almost lunchtime anyways.”

“Is that a no?”

“It’s a ‘how do you feel about waiting an hour, then getting lunch before class?’”

Alex smiled. “Sounds good to me.”

As she brought the tea back up to take another sip of it, she noticed Hasanat coming into the kitchen from behind Ell and schooled her face to careful neutrality. Whatever happened, it was likely to be a lot funnier if she didn’t give the game away.

“Hey, Alex, who…” Hasanat froze for a moment as Ell turned around, eyes locked on to their face. Slowly, she raised her hand, pointing back and forth between the two of them. “You… Ell… Alex!” she sounded scandalized, and Alex was glad for the cup blocking her face and keeping her housemate from seeing the grin on her face.

She quirked an eyebrow to respond. “What? They’re plenty hot, right?”

Hasanat’s face went through too many emotions to track. “That’s so not the problem here! Ell, I’m so sorry about her. If she said it was a one-night-stand, I’m serious, she meant it, please please please tell me you didn’t just agree to whatever she said without thinking about it.”

Ell turned around to face Alex again, and something about her must have given away what she was doing, because Ell’s face lit up, then immediately went back to a neutral confusion as they turned back to Hasanat. “I thought about it pretty carefully, honestly. Parts of it were weird, but…”

The noise she made sounded like a question that she couldn’t think of the words to, then Hasanat’s hands formed into fists in front of her shoulders, moving down as she closed her eyes and took a breath. “I don’t want to hear about the sex! Alex, seriously, why! Don’t have sex with my friends!”

Ell shook their head, but Hasanat wasn’t looking at them, as she stomped towards where Alex was standing… and also looked genuinely hurt. Alex pulled the cup out of the way of her face before responding. “Now hold on, hold on! We didn’t actually! We were just messing with you!”

That pulled her up short, but the obvious look over to Ell was enough that Alex could tell that she didn’t believe that immediately. Their quick nodding almost looked painful. “Seriously! Nothing happened. Well, some things happened, but nothing like that!”

“Why are you here then?”

Alex cut in before Ell could answer that. “They were helping me with a couple of things, some in Rune, some in class. I asked them to stay over, and they agreed. It was almost three AM anyways, by the time we got to bed, so we thought that waking you up about it would have been rude.”

Alex could see her calming down, even though Ell shot her a confused look over Hasanat’s shoulder. It was very much a “technically true” sort of explanation, laying a lot of the blame for the situation at her feet instead of theirs.

“That… makes sense.” It looked like the words were hard to get out, and she could see her housemate’s eyes scanning every inch of her face, looking for anything out of place.

Carefully keeping her face neutral, Alex decided on her defusal method. “We were going to go get something to eat in a bit, before we head to class. Want to join us? My treat.”

Hasanat’s eyes darted towards Ell, still standing behind her, and then back to Alex. “Oh. Um. I suppose. Sorry?”

“Don’t worry about it.”