SF Snippet I

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.