Андреа Хёст - The Starfighter Invitation

[[Out of spoons?]]

Dio had to be monitoring my physical reactions to ask that question, which was a less than comfortable development, although one I should have predicted. I took a moment before answering, and then used directed thought.

" Good to know current Earth idiom survives all the way to The Synergis. "

[[Idiom is just another layer of speaking your language. Your heart rate is returning to a more regular pace. Was it the crowd or the height?]]

" Crowd. I’m fine now I’ve some elbow room ." Recovering, anyway, and glad not to have curled up into a panting ball in front of my guild. Though not very keen on Dio’s interest. I’m slow to open up to therapists, and didn’t want an impromptu one in DS .

Fortunately Dio moved on without further comment. [[Is there a story behind the name Corpse Light ?]]

'' Remnants of a hard-core EverQuest guild called Chaos Corpse. Corpse Light is the part of the guild that burned out on the raid schedule, so they made a casual sister guild. Tornin, Amelia, Far and Die—um, Vasharda—have all been playing together since before MMOs had graphics. Over twenty years. "

I looked back to where Tornin, Amelia and Vasharda formed the centre of an excited babble, and thought about fetching another tray of drinks and being social, but I couldn’t, not quite yet. I’d spent years learning how to self-manage around crowds, and going back in too soon had always been a bad idea.

Besides, a cute little robot was floating past, collecting empty cups, and new arrivals were circulating with food offerings, and so I let myself sit back and enjoy putting self-images together with names I’d only ever associated with voices and character classes. Uncomfortable as this Core Unit concept made me, it was fascinating to see how people thought of themselves—or how they wanted to be—for all there were clear limits to how much we could remake ourselves. Sprocket might have replicated a well-known game character, down to the gravelly voice, but he still spoke like a sixteen year-old who hadn’t figured out what was crass. I had given myself longer legs, but couldn’t change the way I felt about crowds. Tornin could technically walk, but didn’t need to.

"And we’re all going to wake up."

Amelia and Silent had come across to join me on the rocks, and Amelia was either mind-reading, or thinking along the same lines.

"I keep reminding myself of that, too. And also that I’ve only been in here a couple of hours. Does the time-compaction thing bother you as well? It’s the one thing I thought absolutely had to be rubbish, because it just didn’t seem possible."

"We know it’s possible through observation," Silent said, with a shrug. "What we don’t know is the how."

"I care about who," Amelia said, waving a tray-carrying Sprocket over.

"AI or aliens?" I said, with a glance up at the motes of light wafting above our heads. Dio had been keeping quiet, but definitely hadn’t gone away. "I’d say we’ve blown past the Turing Test. And we can’t be talking to people—uh, Bio people—pretending to be Cycogs, because the sheer number of concurrent conversations just isn’t viable."

"The official idea is that we’re talking to ourselves," Silent said. "Just like GDG is a series of prompts, but we fill in the blanks to complete the dream, the game’s Cycogs are simply a series of information feeds, and we’re supposedly constructing a personality and dynamic conversation around them. So they’re neither players nor AIs, but a subconscious part of our mind being fed statistics."

"A subconscious that other people can record?" Amelia said. "Not that I can quite believe in aliens-or-AIs either." She glanced up at the drift of Cycogs, who were notably not contributing to any conversations. "Not that it isn’t possible, I suppose, that an AI developed and decided to make a game about AIs."

"Most common theory is the Starfighter Invitation," Silent said.

Amelia laughed. "Oh, yes. Aliens who watch eighties movies."

"If we follow The Last Starfighter’s pattern, then there’s a space war we need to end before it gets to Earth," I said. "I suppose the game could count as a big warning about what’s going to happen if we don’t step up. They must be recruiting people to Skip rather than shoot, though."

"I’m totally with Driver9," Sprocket said, after finishing passing out sodas.

"Driver9’s been streaming Dream Speed already?" I asked. Driver9 was part of MMO-focused streaming group.

"Hell yeah. Watched it while I was racing home, after word got out DS was unlocked," Sprocket said. "The capture in the game can only be uploaded when you log out, but he’d already posted a couple of hours' worth of play before I finally got to log on—more than I could watch. His big idea is that there really are Cycogs, but they didn’t form on Planet Whatever, centuries in the future. They’ve formed here on Earth, now. DS is their way of brainwashing us."

"Indoctrination?" Amelia said. "Well, I don’t see how to test that. But…Noonan?"

One of the motes of light above us dropped down to drift over her head—a formless blob entirely indistinguishable from Dio. I wondered if they could tell each other apart at a glance—or if they glanced at all.

[[Amelia,]] the light said, doubled voice deeper than Dio’s, and reminding me a little of dour movie butlers.

"Did Cycogs really form recently on Earth, and is Dream Speed a clever indoctrination program?"

Beside me Silent snorted, and muttered: "There’s subtle."

[[That is as reasonable a supposition as any, Amelia,]] Noonan replied, unperturbed.

"Driver9’s Cycog said no ," Sprocket said.

"And that wasn’t quite a yes, was it?" Amelia said. "Thank you, Noonan. Sorry to have interrupted you."

[[It was no bother, Amelia,]] the Cycog said, and rose back to join the other lights above.

I frowned up at them, trying to work out if they were talking to each other in their musical language, or doing anything other than floating. It was hard to even see them against the increasingly clear stars.

"What’s that line in the sky?"

"The moon, apparently," Silent said.

"What?" Cold shock rocked me: a ridiculous reaction given we were on the Drowned Earth .

"Roach—my Cycog—says they think it was hit by a comet," Sprocket said.

"Think?" I asked. "The Cycogs don’t know?"

"Spacefaring humans came back to Earth to find it deserted, and the moon in pieces," Silent said. "Which begs the question of what happened to the people who were here."

"And you have to get to Rank Ten or something to get the reason?" I asked, wryly.

"Probably," Amelia said. "I’ve been running into that roadblock every time I press for details. A way to limit progress on the main quest line. Speaking of which…"

[g] Now that everyone’s sufficiently lubricated, we’ll take a shot at getting some guild business out of the way. I’ll log this and post the discussion to the external guild forums. And will set up internal guild forums as soon as I’ve decided what we need. What we need, or want, from the guild is going to take some sorting out. Before I hand over to Tornin, a reminder about the fund for guild members who haven’t been able to buy a GDG cowl. I know not everyone can chip in, but every pound helps. Okay, now to the business at hand.

[g] We’re facing so much content that we need to decide whether we want this guild to purely be a social link, or to focus on some particular set of quests.

[g] The prestige Challenges and the main quest are where it’s at. But they’re practically all lan-based, and you can only advance in lan every ten hours.