Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Read online

  Temperance nodded. “No. That is the consensus.”

  “Then what are we doing up here?”

  “The information you are about to receive is top secret.” Temperance folded her hands in her lap, her head turned toward me. Traceries of azure light flickered through her eyes as she processed and thought about whatever it was she was going to say. “Ryuko has two divisions: a civilian division, and a contracted military division. The divisions exchange technological innovations, repackaging military applications for civilian use, and vice-versa. Our military division works on a number of systems for the Air Force and the 101st Powered Armor Division, and over the course of the Second Total War, we developed the technologies that turned the tide against the Pacific Alliance… true brain-to-interface hardware, and software capable of managing full-contact, full-immersion connections… and systems that are capable of storing the information transmitted by the brain to a network.”

  I swallowed, grimacing at the dry, itchy discomfort. “You can copy things from people’s minds?”

  “And to people’s minds.” Temperance smiled. “And even more than that: we have been able to replicate consciousness. A copy of a person’s mind can become a self-functioning ‘AI’ within a network. Or a virtual reality scenario. We call this technology GNOSIS, and the supervisory AI system OUROS. With these systems, we have been able to create functioning ‘copies’ of our best drone pilots. So rather than one flying ace, we have ten – all of whom can remotely pilot a machine in formation, while communicating instantly with each other.”

  THAT’S what Steve had been working on? I listened on in rapt silence as Temperance continued.

  “Besides the military applications, we also had a side project: a ‘lite’ version of OUROS and its accompanying systems were being repurposed for the world’s first full-immersion videogame engine,” she said. “Entertainment is still important during war-time, after all. The first game using this engine was scheduled for release early next year. A full sensory immersion VR-RPG, with the working title of ‘Archemi Online’.”

  My chest rattled as I breathed in. Even the strong mix of pain meds and anti-inflammatories I was getting wasn't taking the fluid out of my lungs. And by tomorrow... I really didn't want to think about it. “An MMO?”

  “Archemi is, in every way, a true virtual world.” Temperance’s lips quirked. “It’s not really a MMORPG… it’s orientated toward single-player or small-group play, much like real life. We had hoped to give people a release from all the horror in the world. There were going to be limitations on log-in time and many other failsafes, but after HEX began to spread, President Hashimoto decided to repurpose the Archemi project to something more beneficial. We have now integrated the system with our BigBrain Cloud AI and have established near unlimited storage. The goal was to create a limitless population of human minds, experience, and personalities.”

  Well… shit. “That’s a lot to digest. What does Steve have to do with it?”

  “Your brother was a senior project developer on the civilian OUROS project,” she replied. “All of the people working on these projects were given the opportunity to sign a contract with us that would allow them to participate in innovative research. Essentially, the employee had the option to be uploaded to BigBrain if they ever developed a terminal condition, to see if their consciousness would persist if the body ceased to work. The problem with GNOSIS is that the upload process is still unreliable. OUROS needs at least a thousand uploads before it really learns how to do it flawlessly. We were willing to work that out over the next century with willing volunteers, but…”

  “HEX happened,” I finished.

  “HEX, and the ongoing nuclear threat to Japan and the USA,” Temperance replied. “Everyone has scrambled to finish Archemi and refine the upload process, but we still need that first thousand or so, the vanguard of volunteers. Without them, we can’t make GNOSIS stable enough to reliably upload the unique brain patterns of millions of people as fast as we need to. And that, Hector, is the basis of the agreement we made with your brother and will hopefully make with yourself.”

  I licked my lips and frowned up at the frosty surface of my capsule. “What kind of setting is Archemi?”

  “Open world fantasy with steampunk and ‘dark fantasy’ elements. Archemi is part of a paracosm. Do you know what that means?”

  “Nope.”

  “A paracosm is a complete, self-contained reality which encompasses its own physics, mythos, characters, cultures, and environs beyond a planetary scale. Famous examples of paracosms include Discworld, Middle Earth, the Forgotten Realms and Elder Scrolls. Are you familiar with them?”

  Now, that was a list of names that brought back good memories – the time I spent with my grandparents before they died. Dad’s parents had grown up reading and playing all those games, along with Korean and American MMOs. They only had memories of those MMORPGs – but their collections of single-player games were something they’d shared with me and Steve. My Halbi and Halmon had cared about me in a way dad never had.

  “Yeah. I had... have a thing for old games. My grandad used to play Elder Scrolls.” I had to pause to catch my breath. “Steve volunteered for this? To be uploaded to Archemi?”

  “Yes. Along with many others involved with the project. As I’ve said, Archemi is in early beta. There are bugs and in-game issues we must resolve before we risk giving false hope to the public.”

  And I was lucky enough to be one of the guinea pigs. “What's the catch, ma'am?”

  She sighed. “At present, we cannot upload people who are in advanced stages of illness. However, with every successful upload, the GNOSIS-OUROS system learns and we increase our odds by percentage. Once we have processed another two hundred uploads, the system should be stable enough to attempt the first mass immigration.”

  “Okay. By failure, you mean death, right?”

  Temperance nodded.

  “What are the odds?”

  “For people at your stage of infection, one in eight.”

  I swallowed hard, shuddering. One in eight wasn’t great odds, but that was a… what? 87.5 percent chance to survive? Not bad. I was currently running at 100 percent toward an early mass grave.

  My brow broke out in a sheen of sweat that had nothing to do with the flu. I rubbed some more fog off so I could see Temperance’s face. “What's it like? Archemi? What… options do I have there?”

  To my surprise, Temperance smiled. Maybe they'd re-enabled her empathy features now we were off base. “The world has both original and familiar features common to medieval fantasy and steampunk. The world itself is beautiful. Stunning. The best artists in the world have been laboring on it for more than five years. The game itself is quite open-ended. For the purposes of the refugee program, many of the major threats and challenges players expect will not be present, but there will still be some conflict available for more martial players.”

  Beautiful, huh? I had no idea what kind of life I could expect as a virtual avatar in a virtual paracosm - if you could consider it a life - but it had to be better than this shit. The process might kill me, maybe, but my brother was willing to do it. And he'd included me at the end. No matter what he thought of my chocolate-binging, motorcycle riding worthless ass... he'd wanted to help me. He’d probably been sitting on this for months.

  I closed my eyes, drew as deep a breath as I was able to, and sighed it out with a wheeze that made my chest ache. “Okay. Count me in. For science.”

  Chapter 3

  By the time we reached the facility, I knew I was dying. I was consumed by the horrible, powerless sensation of my body tearing itself apart while an army of millions of viruses replicated explosively through my cells. The pod had been managing me so well that I'd almost forgotten how sick I was for a couple of hours, until I went to sleep... and woke up strangling and panicked, coughing blood as I heaved for air and found only pain.

  The helicopter landed on a helipad that then sunk down into a buildi
ng with a deep underground basement. Or sub-basement. I couldn't tell where we were, exactly - east of the Cascades, that was for sure. My pod was carried out by the men in black, Temperance following behind as we were loaded onto a transport truck. It rumbled off down a dark corridor of rough stone. I lost track then, fading in and out of consciousness.

  When I woke up again, I was sitting upright and everything around me was white - blinding white. The room hummed with voices speaking softly at a distance, and it smelled like clean, new plastic. I was in a chair I could only describe as a throne. It was huge. I felt like Alice in fucking Wonderland.

  The chair was connected to a tower pulsing with blue light. 'Ryuko Industries BigBrain' was emblazoned across the side. It took me a little while longer to realize that I'd been pulled out of my clothes and put into plain white pajamas, and that I was inside of an inflatable bubble that sealed me off from the rest of the room. The people outside of the bubble were all in the same slinky HAZMAT that Temperance wore.

  My chest was rattling and I was barely able to sit, but I wasn't in pain any more. More curiously, I had a HUD. The holographic display hovered in front of me, a round blue portal roughly the size of a door. It was monitoring my vitals, all of which were shit. On instinct, I reached back, and touched something metallic behind my head. A cold, rounded surface with a thin edge, floating. Like a halo, but rotating behind my skull instead over it. What in the shit...?

  I jumped as I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, flinching with a soldier's instincts. It was Temperance. She’d changed into a different frogsuit. IT was jet black, a startling contrast to the rest of the room.

  “Good afternoon, Hector,” she said. “And thank you for volunteering. I'll be here to walk you through everything.”

  “Where’s Steve? Where’s my brother?” I gripped the arms of the BigBrain Throne, glancing back and forth between her and the HUD. I was used to them - every game with a headset used a floating menu just like this one, as did a lot of military tech - but I wasn't wearing a headset. That was the weird part.

  “Mister Steven Park has agreed to attempt upload despite his advanced illness and low odds of success. He is in a separate laboratory doing this very same exercise. Are you ready to be walked through what will happen?”

  “Hit me,” I said.

  “You have been fitted with an upgraded Brain-to-Computer interface: a Ryuko PRISM Corona which is capable of utilizing the experimental GNOSIS system. I explained GNOSIS to you earlier,” she said, walking over to stand in front of me. She had a corona of her own, completing her angelic beauty. “Coronae greatly improve GNOSIS outcomes. They are the absolute peak of our technology, Hector – computers comprised entirely of nanorobots engaged in constant exchange.”

  “Right.” I nodded, exhaling heavily on every shallow breath. As far as I was concerned, nanotech was sorcery. I preferred machines you could see.

  “We require you to sign the same waivers and other documents as your brother,” Temperance said. “I will assist you to call them to your heads-up display. You may sign simply by uploading the document, and then thinking of your name when the document has been digested and you are prompted to do so.”

  Nervously, I sat back and rested my hands on my knees to keep them from trembling. I'd never had anything uploaded via BCI before. “Go ahead.”

  My head pulsed, and suddenly, I knew all the details of Ryuko's waivers and liability policies. Just like that.

  “SHIT!” If I’d had any strength left, I’d have leapt out of my chair. Because I didn’t, I sort of flailed around like an angry jellyfish and then slumped back, wheezing with effort. “Dude! Fuck!”

  “Do you hereby agree to remove all liability of damages from Ryuko Virtual Solutions, its corporate affiliates, subsidiaries, and partners?” Temperance asked... Inside my head. She didn't speak out loud. Too weird.

  “Yes…?” I spoke aloud out of habit. That seemed to work, because a word suddenly popped into my head. 'Signature'. I thought of my name in reply, and that was that. Other than a warm sensation behind my eyes, I was no worse for wear after the info-dump.

  Temperance flashed me a sympathetic smile. It reached her brilliant eyes this time – someone had their empathy chip back in. “Alright. When you’re ready, we’ll begin the upload. You will be put into twilight anesthesia for this step, and then full anesthesia to induce a coma. Are you ready to begin?”

  Was I? I couldn't shake the feeling that I was missing something thanks to the virus... that everything was going too fast, that I was setting myself up for something. I felt like I’d only just walked through my family’s front door, and the stench of death was still in my nostrils. I searched back through the waiver, but the information seemed to be getting tangled up with my fear. What was going to happen to my body? I'd always been a physical guy... motorcycles, parkour, martial arts, stuff that engaged the senses. The thought of losing all of that was suddenly terrifying.

  “Hector?”

  I closed my eyes, struggling for a moment. At least I knew what was going to happen with HEX. “Before I say anything... tell me what's going to happen to my body when I die. And my brother's.”

  “When you have successfully uploaded, we will induce your body into a coma and support you for the duration of your natural life. After you have passed, your remains will be cryogenically preserved for research by Ryuko and its affiliated companies. One of our first partnerships involves developing a cure for the H5N1-X virus.”

  Body. Remains. Numbly, I checked through the tangle of information uploaded by the waiver, and sighed. It was there, right in the contract. “Alright. Do it.”

  “Please confirm again: you are ready to begin?”

  My heart hurt, spasming painfully in my chest. It was inflamed already, but now it was rattling along at high speed. At this rate, I was going to have a heart attack before I, or my virtual clone, reached Archemi.

  “Yes. I’m ready.” I replied firmly.

  The white suits outside of our bubble flew into motion, working at virtual terminals and doing things that made the blue-glowing tower thrum and surge to life. All the scientists had coronas too.

  Temperance crouched in front of me, visible through the glowing blue HUD. Her expression was one of calm compassion, but no breath fogged the inside of her helmet. “Look at me, Mister Park, and watch my lips. I'm going to count down from ten, and when I reach one, you will be sent on your way.”

  I licked the sweat off my lip, and tried to compose myself. The Norse had this old myth about warriors being carried off the battlefield by beautiful Valkyries. I was a warrior, and my Valkyrie was Temperance: six feet in heels, long legs, porcelain pale skin. She had a full mouth… it looked surprisingly soft.

  “Ten.” Her lips framed the word like a blessing.

  Beautiful as she was, I closed my eyes. This was the best thing I could do for myself and everyone else. My family was gone. My parents were dead, my brother, too... maybe.

  “Nine.”

  At least one of my family could live on. Me or Steve, maybe both of us. I was sure that I wasn't going to be that one of guys that died doing this. I wasn’t going to be afraid.

  “Eight.”

  … But I wasn't ready. A whine built in my ears, and my stomach tensed horribly, a sensation I'd only felt once before: the gut twist of terror when I’d first been set out to the front lines. The IV was pushing something warm into the vein in my elbow now, and it was spreading through me in a wave, turning my limbs to jelly. Was I dying? Distantly, I realized that I couldn't move any more.

  “Seven.”

  I was bracing for six, but it never came. The reddish darkness of my eyelids inverted into roaring white. I was pulled up toward something with crushing speed. My heartbeat was there one moment, and then it was gone. A roar built in my ears, thunderous and terrifying.

  This is what I imagined being the passenger in a plane crash felt like. For all I knew, I was clutching the arms of my chair and pus
hing back into it while the corona and GNOSIS did their work, ripping a duplicate of my brain like a bootlegged movie. I might have been in pain - there was no way to tell. Same with time. As it ticked on without even a heartbeat to count by, I was more and more convinced that something had gone wrong, that I hadn't made it. I was about to die or… was I already dead? What if this was it? Maybe the end was just this. Nothing.

  Then the white turned to green, and the howling pressure stopped and rushed away. My consciousness spread out like a web through my nerves. I could feel again, though I couldn't see any limbs. There was nothing but a green field when I tried to look down and around.

  “Hey... can any of you hear me out there?” There was no sound when I spoke, which was bizarre, because I felt the words come out. My throat worked, my lungs drew air, but there was no body I could see. I'd just made up my mind to start screaming until someone paid attention to their monitor when the blank environment turned black, and then opened up onto the biggest battlefield I'd ever seen.

  Chaos. That was the only way to describe it. The stench, the screams, the whine of magical bolts impacting against shields and barriers that flashed and crackled when struck, the roar of warriors surging in formation against one another. My breathing sped, mostly out of surprise that I could feel the wind, smell the reek of medieval warfare, and I still didn't have a body. But I sure as hell had ears, because when a huge black dragon tore through the sky over my 'head', bugling a harsh, hateful cry, I flinched down out of pure reflex.

  The thing was the size of an airliner, with a blunt, T-Rex-like head, long horns, and hard black scales covered in spines. I gaped after it as a V-formation of armored dragoons followed on its tail, ruffling my skin with the wind as their griffin-like mounts screeched above and around me. The dragoons split as the dragon wheeled and backwinged in mid-air, barking gouts of blue fire as they surrounded it. One of the fireballs caught a dragoon full on, incinerating mount and rider. My nose seared with the smell of ozone and cooked flesh as the convulsing, charred beast began a lazy death spiral toward the ground, the skeletonized rider still tied into their saddle.