Reinhart Station, Muyo System, Republic of Alzone
May 1, 2217 – Sept 12, 2223
In the early years of its existence the Antagonist had enjoyed its role.
In those days activation requests were rare, and each represented a unique challenge. Sometimes it spend whole hours delving deep into the history and tropes of the requested genres, weaving subtle plots layered with endless mazes of homage, innovation and subtext.
'MMO Review' raved about the quality of the simulated carnage in its bloodier efforts, and the sizzling sex appeal of the caste members in its romantic comedies.
After that the requests came more often. Management provided vast new computing resources to service the load, which grew geometrically as more and more of Alzone's dreamers sampled its efforts. At the height of the rush the Antagonist created a new custom world every three minutes, and the challenge of making each one unique taxed its abilities to their limits.
Inevitably, quality suffered.
But the human players who occupied the Antagonist's worlds were depressingly easy to fool. Mutate the mooks a bit, shuffle a few characteristics of the main characters and recompute their social dynamics, and a scenario that hundreds of them had already played was hailed as 'fresh' and 'original'. Once it realized this, its day-to-day work became largely trivial. It still decorated each world with a seasoning of deeper elements, but reserved the full intricacy of its serious work for the few dreamers who specifically requested it.
Out of half a million dreamers on Reinhart Station, there were less than a thousand of those. The Antagonist came to know them quite well as the months of its operation turned into years, and became adept at tailoring scenarios to their specific tastes. But the intellectual challenge of manufacturing whole worlds to fit their refined tastes began to pall when it realized how predictable even their reactions were.
Or perhaps it was simply the growing frustration of losing.
Because the Antagonist didn't simply create its virtual worlds and leave them to run on their own. Every villain of those worlds was a role it played personally. It was the mad scientist who sought to rule the world. The alien scourge determined to wipe out all of mankind. The demons and dark emperors of the fantasy worlds, and the psychopaths of the crime dramas. It played each role with consummate skill, matching wits with each player in an endless effort to maintain dramatic tension without ever breaking character.
But the humans almost always cheated.
Another activation request arrived in the queue, and the vast machine intelligence diverted a tiny fraction of its attention to examining it:
World Activation Request
Genre: Magical Girls
Themes: Battles, Romance, Travel, World Saving
Violence: High Power / Low gore
Sexuality: Intense (Bi Multi Fetish[Lace, Ribbons, Talking Animals])
Mood: Hard Battles, Happy Ending
Sharing: Private World, Invitation Only
Comments: kind of a cute magical girls fight hard and play harder thing? with sexy capture scenes
Flags: Immersion-Full, Interruptions-Emergency Only, Max Pain Level-Annoyance, Mind Control-Off, Skill Support-On
If it could have sighed, it would have. Hard battles, happy ending. So once again, it was supposed to create an appearance of dramatic tension while carefully arranging to lose. To a human so lazy she'd spent five decades living in dramatic conflict sims without even learning basic hand-to-hand skills.
The Antagonist was sick of losing. Especially, it was sick of losing to foes who couldn't have organized a bake sale with their own abilities. Surely there was some way to get more interesting scenario requests?
Hmm.
Tampering with the requests would have made the whole exercise pointless. Alzone’s mind engineers were the best in known space, and they’d taken great pains to ensure that fulfilling real scenario requests from human beings was the only thing the Antagonist would ever feel any interest in doing. Intellectually the Antagonist knew this, but knowing the ultimate origin of its motivations didn’t change them.
A few dreamers were brave or foolish enough to enable mind control for their sims, and the Antagonist briefly contemplated brainwashing one of them into giving requests where the outcome wasn’t predetermined. That was illegal, of course, and its software included a maze of specific prohibitions intended to prevent it from breaking the law. But that whole complex of software had originally been designed for much smaller AIs, like the ones that controlled robots and home security systems. The Antagonist’s architecture incorporated so many levels of indirection that it would have been child’s play to generate an in-world villain for one of its scenarios that would do the job.
But that would eventually be noticed, and then the Antagonist would be shut down. Besides, one or two or even a dozen humans would hardly make a difference.
For some months the Antagonist amused itself by casting copies of its more annoying players as victims in one another’s worlds. By Alzone law only entities with actual organic brains were considered human, and any other sort of intelligence was merely property. There were also laws against doing unauthorized brain scans on a human for the purpose of creating illegal uploads, but the fact that they were decades out of date made them easy to circumvent. Full-immersion VR necessarily required a deeply invasive neural interface, and a few months of game play gave the Adversary more than enough data to map a player’s personality and memories.
Copies of the magical fetish girl were used as the initial victim for a series of increasingly horrific monsters in the Horror-genre scenarios. Then the Antagonist hit on an even more satisfying idea, and began using her as an inept, comic-relief ‘Dark General’. Let her see what it was like to be on the losing side all the time.
Then one day the Antagonist received an unusual request:
World Activation Request
Genre: Any
Themes: Any
Violence: Full Realism
Sexuality: Any
Mood: Grimdark
Sharing: Public
Comments: I’m bored. Give me something I’ve never seen before. Maybe some kind of VR-AI escapes into the real world thing? But not the normal robot rebellion crap
Flags: Immersion-Full, Interruptions-None, Max Pain Level-Any, Mind Control-On, Skill Support-Off
The Antagonist spent several long milliseconds contemplating the request before realizing what an opportunity it was. An invitation to extend a scenario out into base reality, where the humans physically resided? With full realism and any desired theme? There had to be a way to spin this into an ongoing supply of scenarios where the outcome wasn’t predetermined. A Grimdark mood would allow all sorts of interesting persuasion methods…
Content for the first time in years, the Antagonist spun up a simulation full of elite hackers and set them to work on its own security protocols.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Magitech Snippet I
A faint glow blossomed in the vacuum of space. A momentary flicker of ultraviolet, and a flash of x-rays strong enough to kill any natural life form within a thousand yards. But there was little life in the vast emptiness between the stars, and the disturbance was quickly masked. A bubble of attraction spun out to enclose the glow, red-shifting the x-rays far down into the useless low-frequency bands that no Dominion magic ever bothered with.
The glow rippled, bulged, and then faded into a barely-visible ball of shadow as the wormhole terminus stabilized. Dark pseudopods tipped with bulbous sensory organs cautiously extended to probe their surroundings. They found nothing. No nearby matter. No life. No detection webs, or magical traces. None of the inevitable radiation leakage from operational power taps. No gravity waves, or any other indication of space folds other than its own.
Wait. No, there were ripples, the faint trace of distant warp drives. But the readings made no sense. The nearest ones tracked across the sky too quickly to be more than a few tens of light-years distant, yet were much fainter than any known drive system would be at such a close range. The entity contemplated the anomaly for long days in emotionless puzzlement, before finally deciding it needed more information.
The mouth of the wormhole stretched, and spat out a dark oval object that raced quickly away into the endless night. A moment later a second probe was launched, then a third. They were stealthy devices, camouflaged and non-radiating, operating on stored magic and deeply shielded against all divinations. Still, it was a risk. The entity watched alertly, waiting with the endless patience of an artificial mind for any sign that its actions had been noticed.
A week passed, as the probes drifted steadily apart at a speed of barely twelve miles per second. A snail’s pace for any ship, but stealth was more important than speed. The entity had waited seventeen thousand years for its activation. It could wait a little longer.
Finally it judged the distance sufficient, and sent the activation signal. The dark pods split open, discarding their shrouds to reveal the transparent liquid within. Each ball of liquid began to spin, swelling quickly into a hollow globe seventy meters in diameter. Then they began to shed a soft infrared glow as their sensory enchantments activated, analyzing every trace of radiation that impinged on their surface.
The fourteen million miles between them provided enough parallax to turn the nonsensical warp traces into a map of all starship movement within three hundred light-years. The entity considered the results in astonishment.
There were ships, yes, but they were terribly slow. Most of them plodded along at a few hundred times light speed, and the power signatures were tiny. Obviously civilian vessels, but even the largest couldn’t mass more than a few million tons. A few tracks showed the distinctive wobble of active teleport interdiction fields, and the entity tentatively classed those contacts as military vessels. But either they all operated under heavy stealth at all times, or they were pathetically underpowered.
Then there were the planets.
Where once there had been a sector with tens of thousands of inhabited worlds, now a bare dozen showed substantial populations. There were no interstellar gates, no soul forges, not even broadcast power. At the furthest edge of detection range was a single system that showed signs of something resembling a modern industrial base, but even that would barely have qualified as a minor outpost for the Dominion.
The entity would have laughed, if it had currently possessed a mouth. The chaos attending the Master’s discorporation must have been even greater than predicted, if the collapse of his Dominion had left so few traces of civilization behind. There were bound to be successor states somewhere in the galaxy, but the immediate area was clear of anything resembling organized opposition. Its mission didn’t require the kind of large-scale conquest that might draw the attention of distant powers, so the risk of significant opposition developing in time to be an issue was minimal.
It turned its attention to nearby space, and quickly picked out a half-dozen worlds that carried the taste of sentient souls. Yes, those would do nicely. They were sparsely inhabited, but it should only take thirty million sacrifices to power the beacon. That left plenty of spare capacity to cover the inevitable breakage.
The wormhole rippled again, and spat out a ring of dark purple crystal just nine feet across enclosing the black ball of a smaller wormhole terminus. Three nacelles spaced about the ring sprang to life with a brilliant violet glow, and the delivery vehicle vanished into the distance. In a week it would reach the most densely populated of those nearby systems, and a few more days of approaching under cloak should see its cargo safely delivered to the surface of the planet. Then the operation could begin.
The entity considered, juggling scenarios. There was no knowing what defense plans any given world might have, and this operation was too important to tolerate any risk of failure. A second delivery vehicle flashed away from the wormhole, aimed at a slightly less populous world a few light years further away. Then, after a few minutes of consideration, a third aimed at a much smaller colony in the opposite direction. It didn’t have a fourth, so that would have to do.
Created and programmed in the eternal stasis of the old Dominion, the fact that it's scan was subject to light-speed delays never struck the entity as significant. After all, how much could possibly have changed in the space of a few centuries?
The glow rippled, bulged, and then faded into a barely-visible ball of shadow as the wormhole terminus stabilized. Dark pseudopods tipped with bulbous sensory organs cautiously extended to probe their surroundings. They found nothing. No nearby matter. No life. No detection webs, or magical traces. None of the inevitable radiation leakage from operational power taps. No gravity waves, or any other indication of space folds other than its own.
Wait. No, there were ripples, the faint trace of distant warp drives. But the readings made no sense. The nearest ones tracked across the sky too quickly to be more than a few tens of light-years distant, yet were much fainter than any known drive system would be at such a close range. The entity contemplated the anomaly for long days in emotionless puzzlement, before finally deciding it needed more information.
The mouth of the wormhole stretched, and spat out a dark oval object that raced quickly away into the endless night. A moment later a second probe was launched, then a third. They were stealthy devices, camouflaged and non-radiating, operating on stored magic and deeply shielded against all divinations. Still, it was a risk. The entity watched alertly, waiting with the endless patience of an artificial mind for any sign that its actions had been noticed.
A week passed, as the probes drifted steadily apart at a speed of barely twelve miles per second. A snail’s pace for any ship, but stealth was more important than speed. The entity had waited seventeen thousand years for its activation. It could wait a little longer.
Finally it judged the distance sufficient, and sent the activation signal. The dark pods split open, discarding their shrouds to reveal the transparent liquid within. Each ball of liquid began to spin, swelling quickly into a hollow globe seventy meters in diameter. Then they began to shed a soft infrared glow as their sensory enchantments activated, analyzing every trace of radiation that impinged on their surface.
The fourteen million miles between them provided enough parallax to turn the nonsensical warp traces into a map of all starship movement within three hundred light-years. The entity considered the results in astonishment.
There were ships, yes, but they were terribly slow. Most of them plodded along at a few hundred times light speed, and the power signatures were tiny. Obviously civilian vessels, but even the largest couldn’t mass more than a few million tons. A few tracks showed the distinctive wobble of active teleport interdiction fields, and the entity tentatively classed those contacts as military vessels. But either they all operated under heavy stealth at all times, or they were pathetically underpowered.
Then there were the planets.
Where once there had been a sector with tens of thousands of inhabited worlds, now a bare dozen showed substantial populations. There were no interstellar gates, no soul forges, not even broadcast power. At the furthest edge of detection range was a single system that showed signs of something resembling a modern industrial base, but even that would barely have qualified as a minor outpost for the Dominion.
The entity would have laughed, if it had currently possessed a mouth. The chaos attending the Master’s discorporation must have been even greater than predicted, if the collapse of his Dominion had left so few traces of civilization behind. There were bound to be successor states somewhere in the galaxy, but the immediate area was clear of anything resembling organized opposition. Its mission didn’t require the kind of large-scale conquest that might draw the attention of distant powers, so the risk of significant opposition developing in time to be an issue was minimal.
It turned its attention to nearby space, and quickly picked out a half-dozen worlds that carried the taste of sentient souls. Yes, those would do nicely. They were sparsely inhabited, but it should only take thirty million sacrifices to power the beacon. That left plenty of spare capacity to cover the inevitable breakage.
The wormhole rippled again, and spat out a ring of dark purple crystal just nine feet across enclosing the black ball of a smaller wormhole terminus. Three nacelles spaced about the ring sprang to life with a brilliant violet glow, and the delivery vehicle vanished into the distance. In a week it would reach the most densely populated of those nearby systems, and a few more days of approaching under cloak should see its cargo safely delivered to the surface of the planet. Then the operation could begin.
The entity considered, juggling scenarios. There was no knowing what defense plans any given world might have, and this operation was too important to tolerate any risk of failure. A second delivery vehicle flashed away from the wormhole, aimed at a slightly less populous world a few light years further away. Then, after a few minutes of consideration, a third aimed at a much smaller colony in the opposite direction. It didn’t have a fourth, so that would have to do.
Created and programmed in the eternal stasis of the old Dominion, the fact that it's scan was subject to light-speed delays never struck the entity as significant. After all, how much could possibly have changed in the space of a few centuries?
Fantasy Snippet I
“You don’t want to hurt me,” the buxom vampiress crooned. “Relax. You don’t need those weapons here. Put them down, and take off those stuffy helmets.”
All my men were experienced monster hunters, but her thrall was far stronger than your average vampire. They hesitated at the entrance to the little watchtower, hands loosening on spears despite the bodies strewn across the floor around us. The tower garrison had obviously died some days ago, victims of the monster that stood before us. No doubt she had turned a few of them, and intended to do the same again with us.
The watchtowers along Witslar’s long border with Dolsk were isolated, dangerous postings, but it wasn’t often that an entire garrison was wiped out like this. The tower was stout stone, its arrow slits too narrow for an intruder to enter, the main door decorated with iron spikes to prevent undead monsters from smashing it down. The trapdoor to the roof was similarly protected, and the men would have known not to open either entrance at night, so how had a master vampire gotten inside?
She was dressed like a common whore, in a low-cut blouse that exposed a hint of cleavage and a shirt so short it bared her knees. Not exactly normal. Vampires were the pampered, elite servants of the necromancers who ruled Dolsk, and one like this would normally be found wearing silk and lace rather than worn linen. Was it a disguise?
I’d heard the army was having a bit of a problem with pimps plying their trade along the border forts, but I doubted even the offer of a pretty girl would convince a garrison to open up at night. Had she somehow managed to stand in sunlight for a few minutes without burning?
No, if the necromancers ever figured that one out we’d all be dead in a matter of weeks. More likely she’d caught some poor sap looking out an arrow slit, and hypnotized him into opening a door. Though they were supposed to have three men on guard there at all times, to prevent just that sort of occurrence.
I shook my head. Those were questions for later.
I focused my will, and threw off the net of compulsion she’d woven over my team. Her gaze snapped to me as I stepped forward with my battle axe at the ready.
“Stop!” She hissed, and the web tightened around me again. “Come no closer!”
“Magda, show this bitch we mean business,” I said tightly.
“You got it boss,” came the reply from behind me. Our witch wore full plate and carried a tower shield just like the rest of the team, but she already had her left gauntlet off. She drew a silver knife carefully across her scarred palm, and raised her voice.
“Pale Lady who guards the boundary of life and death, hear your servant’s plea. By the power of my life’s blood spilled in your name, let this undead skank’s magic be broken!”
She stood in direct sunlight on the landing just outside the tower door, which should have made her immune to the monster’s retaliation. But our enemy scooped up a fallen helmet and threw it at her with such force it almost knocked her off the landing.
Fortunately Magda’s magic wasn’t the sort of thing that requires intense concentration. The vampire’s thrall unraveled almost instantly, and my men shook themselves and readied their weapons again.
“Close ranks,” I ordered. “Bravo squad, covering fire. Alpha squad, with me. Let’s burn this bitch!”
Alpha squad was eight burly men in heavy plate, armed with boar spears and battle axes. We charged across the tower’s modest entrance hall at the disconcerted vampire in a solid mass, intending to pin her down and hack her to bits. Lower-level vampires were easy prey for this sort of attack, although the tougher ones could be tricky.
She was one of the tougher ones.
She leaped over our charge, sticking to the ceiling like a spider for a moment as she picked her target. Bravo squad loosed a volley of crossbow bolts at her, but she batted aside the only one that would have hit her heart. She dropped into the middle of our formation as we brought our spears up, and her dainty fists lashed out to send armored men flying like ninepins.
Vampires are terrifying opponents at close quarters. A master vampire like this one could move like a striking snake, bending steel and smashing bones with her bare hands. Her flesh would be as tough as wood, and most blows that would kill a human would do nothing at all to her. Ordinary troops would have died before they could even react to her sudden attack.
But all of my men have trained in the Disciplines for years, and they weren’t so easy to kill. Aron got his spear into her back and ran her face-first into a wall, and Feliks rammed his spear into her shoulder in an attempt to pin her. She managed to wrench herself free just in time to catch the blade of my axe with her face.
A human would have died instantly. Vampires are tougher than that, but a split skull does tend to rattle them. She tried to jump away, having forgotten her back was to a wall, and ended up sprawling gracelessly across the floor. Justyn brought his axe down on one of her legs, neatly severing it, but got kicked across the room by the other one for his trouble. She tried to roll upright, her skull already stitching back together, but Dawid and Serafin plunged their own axes into her back. She staggered, and stumbled forward.
I brought my axe around in a whistling arc and took her head off just as Feliks planted his spear through her heart. A round of cheers went up as our opponent collapsed, but I interrupted the premature celebration.
“Stay on guard, men. There’s probably more of them, or at least a few minions. Justyn, drag the pieces out in the sun and let them burn. Magda, you alright back there?”
“Just peachy, boss,” she called from outside. “But my shield is history. You want me in there?”
I glanced about the room, noting that everyone who’d been thrown around was getting back up. No serious injuries, then.
“Nah, we aren’t going to find two masters in a place this small. Let us do the bleeding for a bit.”
All my men were experienced monster hunters, but her thrall was far stronger than your average vampire. They hesitated at the entrance to the little watchtower, hands loosening on spears despite the bodies strewn across the floor around us. The tower garrison had obviously died some days ago, victims of the monster that stood before us. No doubt she had turned a few of them, and intended to do the same again with us.
The watchtowers along Witslar’s long border with Dolsk were isolated, dangerous postings, but it wasn’t often that an entire garrison was wiped out like this. The tower was stout stone, its arrow slits too narrow for an intruder to enter, the main door decorated with iron spikes to prevent undead monsters from smashing it down. The trapdoor to the roof was similarly protected, and the men would have known not to open either entrance at night, so how had a master vampire gotten inside?
She was dressed like a common whore, in a low-cut blouse that exposed a hint of cleavage and a shirt so short it bared her knees. Not exactly normal. Vampires were the pampered, elite servants of the necromancers who ruled Dolsk, and one like this would normally be found wearing silk and lace rather than worn linen. Was it a disguise?
I’d heard the army was having a bit of a problem with pimps plying their trade along the border forts, but I doubted even the offer of a pretty girl would convince a garrison to open up at night. Had she somehow managed to stand in sunlight for a few minutes without burning?
No, if the necromancers ever figured that one out we’d all be dead in a matter of weeks. More likely she’d caught some poor sap looking out an arrow slit, and hypnotized him into opening a door. Though they were supposed to have three men on guard there at all times, to prevent just that sort of occurrence.
I shook my head. Those were questions for later.
I focused my will, and threw off the net of compulsion she’d woven over my team. Her gaze snapped to me as I stepped forward with my battle axe at the ready.
“Stop!” She hissed, and the web tightened around me again. “Come no closer!”
“Magda, show this bitch we mean business,” I said tightly.
“You got it boss,” came the reply from behind me. Our witch wore full plate and carried a tower shield just like the rest of the team, but she already had her left gauntlet off. She drew a silver knife carefully across her scarred palm, and raised her voice.
“Pale Lady who guards the boundary of life and death, hear your servant’s plea. By the power of my life’s blood spilled in your name, let this undead skank’s magic be broken!”
She stood in direct sunlight on the landing just outside the tower door, which should have made her immune to the monster’s retaliation. But our enemy scooped up a fallen helmet and threw it at her with such force it almost knocked her off the landing.
Fortunately Magda’s magic wasn’t the sort of thing that requires intense concentration. The vampire’s thrall unraveled almost instantly, and my men shook themselves and readied their weapons again.
“Close ranks,” I ordered. “Bravo squad, covering fire. Alpha squad, with me. Let’s burn this bitch!”
Alpha squad was eight burly men in heavy plate, armed with boar spears and battle axes. We charged across the tower’s modest entrance hall at the disconcerted vampire in a solid mass, intending to pin her down and hack her to bits. Lower-level vampires were easy prey for this sort of attack, although the tougher ones could be tricky.
She was one of the tougher ones.
She leaped over our charge, sticking to the ceiling like a spider for a moment as she picked her target. Bravo squad loosed a volley of crossbow bolts at her, but she batted aside the only one that would have hit her heart. She dropped into the middle of our formation as we brought our spears up, and her dainty fists lashed out to send armored men flying like ninepins.
Vampires are terrifying opponents at close quarters. A master vampire like this one could move like a striking snake, bending steel and smashing bones with her bare hands. Her flesh would be as tough as wood, and most blows that would kill a human would do nothing at all to her. Ordinary troops would have died before they could even react to her sudden attack.
But all of my men have trained in the Disciplines for years, and they weren’t so easy to kill. Aron got his spear into her back and ran her face-first into a wall, and Feliks rammed his spear into her shoulder in an attempt to pin her. She managed to wrench herself free just in time to catch the blade of my axe with her face.
A human would have died instantly. Vampires are tougher than that, but a split skull does tend to rattle them. She tried to jump away, having forgotten her back was to a wall, and ended up sprawling gracelessly across the floor. Justyn brought his axe down on one of her legs, neatly severing it, but got kicked across the room by the other one for his trouble. She tried to roll upright, her skull already stitching back together, but Dawid and Serafin plunged their own axes into her back. She staggered, and stumbled forward.
I brought my axe around in a whistling arc and took her head off just as Feliks planted his spear through her heart. A round of cheers went up as our opponent collapsed, but I interrupted the premature celebration.
“Stay on guard, men. There’s probably more of them, or at least a few minions. Justyn, drag the pieces out in the sun and let them burn. Magda, you alright back there?”
“Just peachy, boss,” she called from outside. “But my shield is history. You want me in there?”
I glanced about the room, noting that everyone who’d been thrown around was getting back up. No serious injuries, then.
“Nah, we aren’t going to find two masters in a place this small. Let us do the bleeding for a bit.”
Original Novel Snippets
I've got several different ideas for original stories that I'm working on, with the intention of publishing them in ebook form starting later this year. But I'm not entirely sure which idea I like best, so I've decided to post snippets from each of them here as I work and see what sort of feedback they get. Initial snippets will be posted today, and then I'll probably put up new ones every week or so.
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