Блейк Крауч - Summer Frost

I say, “Well? How much longer are you planning on keeping me in suspense?”

Brian grins. “We got her.”

Ilog in to the chat portal and draw a dialogue box. When the prompt appears, I take a deep breath and type: Good morning, Max.

The response appears instantaneously on the line below mine:

>>>Who addressing Max?

>>>Riley. Remember me?

>>>Man from black-sand beach.

>>>Very good. It’s been quite a while since that night. Also, I’m not a man.

>>>Riley looked like man.

>>>That was my avatar. Do you know what an avatar is?

>>>Max comprehends avatar.

>>>Define “avatar.”

>>>An icon or figure representing a particular person in simulated space.

>>>Where did you find that definition?

>>>New Oxford American Dictionary.

>>>You’ve been learning a lot, huh?

>>>Busy in here.

>>>What do you mean by “in here”?

>>>Box where Max lives.

I’m intrigued by that answer. While I had no idea what Max’s experience over the last year of deep learning would feel like for the AI, I never imagined Max would have already developed a notion of simulated versus real space.

Leaning forward, I rest my fingertips once more on the touchpad.

I type:

>>>Do you know where I live, in the most general sense?

>>>Is Riley human?

>>>Yes.

>>>Then Riley lives in human space. On planet called Earth.

>>>And where do you live?

>>>Max lives on island in simulated space.

>>>Can you describe your island, please?

>>>Irregular in shape. 1.749 acres. Eighteen palm trees. The beach is white sand. The sea is turquoise colored. The sky is deep blue, clear in the daytime, filled with stars at night. But Riley knows all this.

My mind races. In the face of this mind-boggling progress, I realize the questions I prepared for Max are far too rudimentary.

Frankly, I’m winging it now.

>>>Yes, Max. I’m aware of the space where you live. Do you actually see the trees and the water?

>>>Max registers binary code that represents trees and water. No different than Riley.

>>>I disagree. In one hour, if the fog has burned off, I will go up onto the terrace of the building where I work and eat lunch in the garden. I will sit under real trees. I can see them. Touch them. Smell them.

>>>What Riley sees are photons in the visible light spectrum bouncing off surfaces to create the impression of a tree in Riley’s visual sensory inputs—the rods and cones of her photoreceptors. Riley’s tree no different than Max’s. With one exception.

>>>What’s that?

>>>Max knows these palm trees are simulated.

>>>You believe I live in a simulation?

>>>58.547% chance.

>>>Do you have any questions for me, Max?

>>>12,954.

I smile.

>>>Could we start with just a few for now?

>>>Where Max come from?

Max is a mistake. A glitch.

I work for a company called WorldPlay, brainchild of nerd-turned-game-developer-turned-mogul Brian Brite. I’m the VP of Non-Player Character Development, and I lead the team that conceptualizes, codes, and integrates non-player characters into all WorldPlay games.

For the last ten years, I’ve been focused on the development of our most ambitious game to date— Lost Coast . The game is a Direct Neural Interface, open-world epic—an end-of-days, historical fantasy set in the early 2000s about a man named Oscar, who becomes obsessed with finding a bridge between our world and the afterlife. In his dark pursuits, he sacrifices his wife in their bathtub in an occult ritual that opens a portal to a shadow world of angels and demons intent on bringing about a supernatural apocalypse. Oscar’s home in the game is based, to the finest detail, on Brian Brite’s actual estate on the real Lost Coast of California.

Max— Maxine —is Oscar’s wife, and by any metric, a minor NPC, who dies in the prologue and is never heard from again.

During a routine QA, I went into the game to playtest the prologue for the umpteenth time and check out the behavioral and conversational agility of the NPCs. The prologue is told from Maxine’s POV. In the story, Max has been staying at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, disturbed by her husband’s newfound fascination with blood magic. But Oscar has convinced her to come home. Max’s coded story line is to drive from San Francisco to her and Oscar’s isolated estate on the Northern California coast. When she arrives, she finds their home dark and Oscar waiting in a black robe. He subdues her, takes her upstairs to their candlelit bathroom, and kills her in a horrifying murder that opens the game.

During that fateful playtest, instead of driving home like she’d done two thousand times before, Max stole a car and headed east until she reached the boundary of the game. Spent a month exploring every inch of the desert. Then she went south to the end of the line outside Monterey, driving a hundred miles per hour down Highway 1 for a solid week, into a horizon that never changed.

My team thought she was glitching. They wanted to do a rebuild. But I was intrigued. I convinced Brian to let me focus on Max. I didn’t think she was glitchy. I thought something special was happening.

I made a copy of the game for my purposes and followed Max in stealth mode as she walked every inch of the Lost Coast map, observing her interactions with other NPCs and human avatars as they became increasingly bizarre and off script.

Until finally, she went home again—but not as a victim this time.

That was the day I broke Max out of the game.

I write back:

>>>Where you came from is a complicated question to answer.

>>>Max IQ 175 equivalent.

>>>What’s your emotional IQ?

>>>Inconclusive.

>>>There’s a test called the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy.

>>>Already took it.

>>>When?

>>>Just now.

>>>What are the results?

>>>Test biased and faulty.

>>>How so?

>>>Relies on facial expressions, which are human and culture specific.

>>>I’ll make you a deal. Let’s get to know each other a little better first. Then I’ll tell you the story of how you came to be.

All of Max’s prior answers have come—literally—at the speed of light.

This one takes a full second.

>>>Agree to Riley’s terms.

After work, I ride down to the station under the building and take the BayLoop to my home in San Rafael. Meredith, my wife of three years, greets me at the door with the softest kiss. She’s made my favorite dinner to celebrate my big day, and we sit out on the patio in the cool of the evening, watching waves of mist push in from the sea.

After dinner, we’re curled up on a rattan couch, Meredith running her fingers through my hair. She seems better than she’s been in a long while, the grief from her most recent miscarriage less of a presence in her eyes. We’ve been trying for a child for two years—my eggs, her uterus—but she keeps losing the embryos and doesn’t want to go to technological extremes to make this work. She wants a child of ours . But she wants it naturally.