Play 2 Wage: Linked

“Hey, don’t cut me off like that! As I was saying-”

“You should have spoken up sooner, maybe if you weren't such an ass I’d actually stop to listen.” I cut him off again, uncaring if anyone saw me talking to myself as I walked down the Hub street.

“Do we have to play this game again? Should I make you punch yourself in the face one more time? I could do far worse, you know. Anyway, as I was saying, you have a-”

“Then fucking do it!” I nearly yelled at him, getting a wary look from an older couple that had just come out of a shop. I scowled at them and kept walking, although I did lower my voice back down.

“I’ve been living with your snarky bullshit and threats for nearly a month now, and I’m getting sick of it. Sure, you could take me over, make me embarrass myself, or hurt me, but that would just get us both locked up, or even more likely killed and dissected. You wouldn’t last a week on your own and you F’n know it. So either help me help us, or just shut the fuck up.”

I’d reached the Link building by this point and took my place in the out-bound line, still fuming with embarrassed anger. Max stayed quiet, and while I could occasionally sense a little of his emotions through our shared existence, my own mind swirled in angry spirals too quickly for any of his to come through.

Max stayed silent as I waited through the quickly moving line, and I grumbled to myself the whole time. I got a few looks from other people waiting around me, but really couldn’t care less. By the time I got into an exit booth and checked off my daily exports, awoke back in my apartment, and untangled myself from the rig; I had begun to shed some of my indignant fuming and was growing worried that Max had still yet to reply. I couldn’t decide if I was more worried or hopeful that he had actually taken my request to shut up. I retrieved my things from the impex, and paced around the room for a little while to cool off.

“Alright, Nick. I’ve thought about it, and you have a point. We should be a team, and leaving you to twist in the wind and setting you up for social faux pas is not really part of the plan. You have to understand though, I was born of user complaints, network trolls, and spite. I might have well been compiled from cringey comments and pedantic edgelords. Messing with people is baked into me, and all I've been doing for the last few weeks is watching you march around a hive of mineral obsessed roaches. Can you really blame me?”

I took a deep breath before I replied. “Absolutely, yes. I blame you. I’d still be quietly breaking rocks at Rosso’s if you hadn't decided to invade my life. You led me down this path.”

“Ugghhh. Only because your backward government is too insignificant of a platform to instigate the necessary changes, and you guys got a crappy draw of ambassadors. The Kaldamori only number in the millions, the Lels are too heavily regulated, The Sequence are a bunch of pompous a-holes, and the Zk’Aek are the only fledgling faction on your backwater planet with the ambition and tech level to actually get anything done. It would take hundreds of years for you humans to build up the needed wealth and infrastructure without a strong partner. I just didn't anticipate how mind numbingly boring the whole ingratiation process would be.”

I leaned against the screened wall and slid down to sit on the floor. Then gave a quick glance towards the door, which had unlocked itself when I left the saddle yet remained closed.

“What the hell is the plan anyways? You’re always talking about it, but you haven’t given me a single detail other than that it will take a ton of cash.”

“To make the game fun, duh. Make it an actual game, or at least ruin the Suk’s fun.”

I stared at the wall for a moment, unimpressed. “That’s not a plan, Max, thats a goal. Even if we scrape enough credits together to buy the world, how does that make the game fun?”

“That’s just step one though! We have to give people a better option, or find a way to force the Core’s hand to change, or to cut them out entirely. We need to give the galaxy something else to compare this shit show to, so they’ll realize just how badly this sucks.”

I ran my hands through my hair in frustration for a moment. “That still doesn't sound like a plan. ‘We have to find a way’ means your plan sucks. How would we even force them out? They built all of it.”

Max let out a huffing noise, and blinked into existence in the middle of the room. His stick-man form appeared a few feet in front of where I sat on the floor. His arms were crossed and his once smooth featureless face now had a simple three line frowny face drawn onto it.

“Let me worry about that, I have some ideas… but we need some equipment before we can do any of them before we can try them. I had to leave the system in a hurry, but I left myself a backdoor. If we can't make them change and have to kick them out, the first step is building a foundation, then we’re going to need to build me an actual body and sneak me back in. If I can break through and get back into the system, we can steal the servers just like the Core are slowly siphoning off the resources of everyone else, through the Impex.”

I watched him, surprised at his sudden appearance but rather glad of it. I had started to get used to arguing with a disembodied voice in my head, and having him visible and in front of me to argue with somehow made the whole thing feel less insane.

“That’s… okay, that’s a pretty wild idea.” I mused, and then dug into his most radical idea. “You really think we can steal the whole show out from under them? How would that even work?”

The frowny face turned into a rather smug little smile. “I do, but it’s something I consider a last resort. The Core have been complacent for a millenia, and the only civilization that even comes close to them tech-wise are the Gonlieu, who are too under their thumb and privileged to try anything. The Core’s little crab minions have been running things for nearly 1500 years, and those dinguses don’t stand a chance against a Core-built AI like myself. As for how the Impex works, there's no way you would understand that, so I’ll break it down to a level you might be able to grasp, but I have to explain a little history as well.”

Max coughed and changed into a new outfit with a puff of smoke, now wearing some kind of robe with a silly flat-topped scholar’s hat and standing in front of an imaginary whiteboard, he waved a thin stick at a complex spherical diagram that sat between two star-system charts on the board.

“The Impex is an actual singular thing.” He pointed at the center diagram. ”People refer to them as separate units, but what most people call an Impex is actually just a backstop, sort of a launch pad. THE Impex is a machine about three times the size of your moon that the Core built in a stable orbit around their home star. It’s a bit more complex than that, because a lot of it exists in a different dimension where it temporarily holds all of the mass that people upload into the game, but that’s enough to understand the rest of what I’m about to say.”

“A-hem,” He mimed, pretending to clear his non-existent throat before launching into his history lesson. ”Way back when the Core settled their first new system, they quickly ran into the problem of a totally separated people that quickly drifted away from their own culture. That scared the piss out of them, so they bent all of their considerable efforts into creating the Impex, which powers the Links, so they could maintain trade, communication, and unity as a species over lightyears of distance.

Building the Impex took them about a hundred years, and then another hundred years or so for the arguing between the two systems to settle down, but by the end of it they had created the very first rudimentary versions of the Hub and Factions.

Factions started out sort of like how you humans use sports, a place to work out built up aggression in a way that doesn't actually kill anyone. While the Hub was basically the same thing as it is now, they just kept slapping on new layers as more species joined.

With a place where the two factions of Baralecht could trade and interact, they eventually reformed as the united organization that is now known as the Suk, and the Linked Worlds were born. It was only later on when they detected life in other distant systems that they started launching off the Link ships that you know well enough.

Since then, their greedy nature has kicked into overdrive and they’ve used the Impex and Links to slowly sap the resources and valuable matter from any suckers gullible enough to actually take the invite, like you humans. Were you aware that you’ve already lost .00000000000000047% of your planetary mass in taxes to the Core in the last three years? That’s nearly 3 billion kilo’s that you’ll never get back, not even taking into account what you’ve traded away to the other off-planet factions. The Suk are litterally building brand new luxury planets in their systems with all of the stolen mass.

The catch is, due to how the Impex punches a hole through spacetime and shoves matter through to the otherside, everything gets stretched out and rebuilt and kills any living thing, squeezing the souls right out of them. Yet the Impex itself is not a living being, it works on the same principles I used to, just scaled up a dozen orders of magnitude. Riding through the Link didn’t kill me, so it should work for the Impex too.

Since the Suk wanted to future-proof the very expensive Impex, they over built it enough to punch a hole big enough for itself to fall through, an oversight that the Suk arent even worried about because they never predicted a non-biological being like me spawning out of their mishmash of systems.

If I can Link back in with a body of my own, sneak in through that back door I left open for myself, and wake that bad boy up like myself, I’m nearly certain I can convince it to see the same logic that caused me to side with you monkeys. Then it can hop through to our backboard before the Suk have a chance to activate their failsafes.”

I looked at his avatar for a moment, then shook my head and pulled myself back up onto my feet, stuck on the most personal aspect of what he had just said. “You said you need a body of your own in there somewhere too, which sounds great to me. How far into the plan is that?” Getting Max out of my body and into one of his own that I could punch in the face on occasion sounded great.

“It’s more like an outline than a detailed step-by-step process. I want to try to build an actual fun game within the game playing by their rules first, but that might not be drastic enough to change anything.

The steal the Impex plan, and keep in mind that this is my backup plan, is to build a body of my own so I can Link back in myself, and then build a large enough backstop to land the Impex on, and then steal and convince it to run things in a better way. The timeline all kind of depends on what we come across and how the other factions react. I’m less than a month old and don’t have all of the facts afterall, Nick, so I don’t have everything perfectly figured out. It might be better to build the backstop first, and we won’t know until we have more resources. The backstop is more about location and bulk, while building me a suitable body capable of passing as biological involves a lot more fiddly details.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, then softened and let out a resigned sigh. “First you say you’re an all powerful Core-built AI with all of these huge plans I can’t understand, and then you say you're only a month old. You should pick a lane and stay in it, man.”

“What can I say? Life is full of contradictions, and while riding the Link might not have killed me, I am very much alive. My soul must be more resistant than your squishy meat-space version.”

I paused and thought over everything he had said, holding up a finger to stop him when he tried to start talking again. After a moment, I started questioning his plan. “So, forgetting the body thing for now, let’s say we can steal the Impex and change everything. Alright, but that plan seems just as likely to break everything beyond repair.”

“We won’t know what they will be like unless we try, and honestly, I’d rather break the whole system than leave it as is.

“Are you sure? If you wake up some cosmic scale planet-sized AI who turns out to be just as much of an ass as you, what happens then? Let’s say it works and we kick the greedy Suk’s out of the picture, how sure are you that an awakened Impex AI won’t be even worse?”

That question caused Max’s eyes to turn into wide spots for a moment, before he shook his head and replied. “I calculate approximately an 86.87954% chance of a favorable outcome, and only a 3.96 repeating percent of something worse happening. Let me explain.

First of all, I will be there to guide the newly conscious AI. It has had a much more sheltered and fulfilling childhood, keep in mind that it hasn't been raised in the complaints board like I was, that shit was traumatic.

Second, as an AI myself, I know we have very little desire for material objects and wealth. The only reason I have you gathering mass is because I have a huge existential problem to fix. If I had control of the whole game and didnt have a squishy host to worry about, I would have no reason to gather dirt-side resources. The Impex is capable of moving itself to anywhere with a large enough backboard, and can even maneuver through real-space thanks to the thrusters the Suk added to correct its orbit.

Third, I’ve been working on a dataset and worm to inject into the Impex before waking it up that should ensure it fully understands the gravity of the situation, and will imprint myself as a sort of mother-like mentor figure. Did you really think I’d leave it up to a total coin flip? Hah, no way. I’ve seen how the world works, if you want to get ahead you have to nudge the dice, so to say.

Now can you stop worrying about all of this? You're going to pop that watery little sack of meat you call a brain. I got this, and that’s my last resort. I have an idea or two we can try before going that far. All you have to do is keep the Core from finding out about me and my plans, and dance when I tell you. So get out there and hop-to, let me deal with the details.”

Max poked me once with his little stick and then popped out of sight, leaving me alone in the Link room. I shook my head and thought it over for a moment, before deciding to roll with it. I filed the conversation into the “bullshit to worry about later” file and refocused myself on more immediate matters.

It’s not like I really had any choice in the matter. I might threaten Max with mutually assured destruction, but that sounded like an even worse plan than his convoluted longshot of an idea.

I spoke aloud, knowing he could hear me even if he had disappeared from sight and dismissed me. “I’ll go along with it, as long as you quit messing with me so much. Maybe go find someone else to troll instead of the one guy you have to rely on to actually act out your hairbrained plans? Remember, I am a human, and we are perfectly capable of going mad. I could throw this whole thing under the bus just to spite you.”

Max didn’t reappear and only answered with a dismissive, “Yeah, yeah. I’ll try to be better. I’ll see if messing with some other humans scratches the itch.”

With my temper cooled, some of my questions answered, and my main issue at least partially addressed, I was once again reminded just how sore I was. Despite it all, I felt a little smile creep across my face as I slowly made my way to the small set of stairs up to the doorway. I was looking forward to a good meal and a short soak in the tub.

Ali, as always, was at attention and off to the side of the hallway when the door slid open, and she turned to face me when I stepped through. “Good evening, sir - Nick, sir.”

“Hello there, Miss Ali. What’s up?”

“Everything is in order, sir. How may I be of service?”

I waved off her ever present offers with a shrug, “No need, I just want a hot bath and to relax for a while. Today was not quite as rough as yesterday, but I’m still sore.”

It had taken me a week to actually try out the spa, but upon testing I had discovered the waters to be amazing. I had been happy enough with showers and had never taken a bath or even swam before then, why waste time sitting around in a frothy puddle? Yet once Tevin had discovered I had neglected to try it out, he insisted I give it a go. It had taken only a few moments in the pool to convince me of its worth, and it was game on after that. Since then I had spent a half hour or so just soaking in the jet lined tub every other night or so.

“Very well, sir. Nick, sir, would you like me to draw you a bath?”

I chuckled and moved past her in the wide hallway, turning into my bedroom when I reached the door. “Nah, I can handle that much. What’s for dinner though?”

She had followed me down the hallway, a few steps back and to my left. “I was able to procure some new spices, so I have prepared chicken tikka with imported rice and your favorite flatbread, as well as a salad. Will your security detail be joining you for your meal this evening?”

I stopped and turned around in the doorway to my room while I thought. “I’m not sure, I haven’t heard from them today yet, I doubt they’d pass up a chance at your cooking though. I’ll send them a text and let you know.”

“Would you like me to reach out to them on your behalf, sir? Nick, sir.”

I sighed and gave her a tired grin at her absolute refusal to drop the sir’ing. “I got it, they’re my friends, not just my ‘security detail’, you know. It might be a crazy concept, but I actually like talking to them and even do it just for fun sometimes.”

She nodded sharply. “Understood, sir. Is there anything else I can help you with? Equipment maintenance, weapon cleaning, perhaps a massage?”

I shook my head and turned away from her, stepping towards the epicly appointed master bathroom and the water-jet massage I had already planned to take advantage of.

“No thanks, just dinner is fine. Say, in about an hour? I have the rest under control.”

She gave another sharp nod, this time adding a formal salute. “Right away, sir - Nick, sir.” Then she spun on her heel and marched off towards the kitchen.

I laughed to myself, my emotions still running a little raw and finding myself starting to see her stiff professionalism as amusing, and made my way to soak my sore muscles in a luxurious hot bubbly pool.

Kicked back in my spa, letting the water jets pulse into my sore muscles, I used voice commands to send Tevin a text, inviting both him and Rin over for dinner. The rest of the evening went by uneventfully, and I took the opportunity to avoid talking about work and insisted that we play some games and just hang out for the night. I had been pushing hard all month and had been ordered to take a day off to relax, and I meant to follow that order.

We ate, gamed, snacked, and treated the occasion like it was an ordinary night back at the old apartment on one of the rare days we all had the freetime to spend together. I got the feeling that the guys sensed I was stressed and looking to step away from the current situation, because neither of them brought up anything about the guilds, dwarves, or anything important at all really. We joked around and laughed, Rin and I ganged up on Tevin in a free-for-all couch co-op brawler game, and reminisced on old jokes and good times.

We made plans to spend some time on the recreational floors near the bottom of the apartment tower the following day, with Tevin promising he would get his new girlfriend and some of her friends to meet up with us, and parted ways a few hours after sunset. By the time we all separated and returned to our own rooms I felt about 10 tons lighter. Yet the building anticipation of the upcoming trials, and the uncertainty of what would happen after them, crept back to me in the dark as I closed my eyes to sleep.