Crowned in Black: Chapter 25

It took Nemeth a good twenty minutes, but he eventually emerged with a freshly scribed scroll. Karalti, Gar, and Mehkhet stopped sorting through the scrolls they'd been handling and left them aside. I put away my armor repair kit, and straightened up.

"I understand now why this chamber was sealed in the manner it is," Nemeth said, pushing his glasses up along his nose. "The burial chamber itself is functionally the history and instruction manual of Withering Rose, the last Warsinger. I was able to learn a great deal about a form of mana that has not been seen since ancient times. Diamond mana, or whitecrystal, as it is vulgarly known. However..."

"However what?" I got restlessly to my feet.

"There are three important details of note," Nemeth continued. "The inscription you found concerns the imbuement of whitecrystal mana with the 'soul' - or rather, the liquified being - of a Drachan."

"We found some stuff about whitecrystal mana too!" Karalti interrupted to point at Kythias, who flushed and gave her a sharp look.

"Karalti, the Mastersage was speaking-" he muttered.

"It came from Erruku! And there's not much of it," Karalti continued, ignoring him and planting her hands on her hips. "And there used to be twelve Dragon Gates, but the Aesari blew up two of them and used the whitecrystal inside to create their big dumb flying cities!"

"Is that so?" Nemeth might normally have been annoyed at being cut off, but he had the look of a kid who'd just run down the stairs to find a Christmas tree and a stack of presents with his name on them. "Fascinating... Gods, a man could spend a lifetime learning in this place. And that actually marries well with what is inscribed on the Mastersmith's sarcophagus."

"Well, no offense, mister, but spit it out already." Gar had the irritable look of an addict who hadn't had his fix for a while.

The Mastersage ignored him, and turned to regard me. "The process, as described on the side of Mastersmith's coffin, is that a large heartstone made from whitecrystal was salvaged from the ruins of an Aesari city. A captured Drachan was then 'sung' into the crystal by a Queen dragon - in this case, Lirenian, the founding Queen of the Eyrie in Ilia. However, the words of power inscribed are not the ones used to imprison the Drachan. They are the security features of the Heartstone - command words to control the Drachan inside, essentially."

"We'll need to know those," Gar said. "Don't want the next one waking up and crawling out."

"Indeed." Nemeth still didn't look at him, and drew himself up with stiff dignity. "The inscriptions state that the Song of Binding went with Lirenian to her grave, which by all accounts, is in or near the Eyrie itself."

"Solnetsi's Dragon Gate and one of the Chorus Vaults - the vaults used to store the Warsingers - are there, along with the ruins of Cham Garai. That location is also the epicenter of the Diamond Pact that enslaves the dragons," I replied. "So all roads point to the Gate of Glorious Dawn."

"That name, the 'Diamond Pact', it cannot be a coincidence." Kythias glanced at Karalti. "Diamond Pact, Diamond Queen, whitecrystal mana... and now this 'Song of Binding'. Lirenian must have had something to do with it."

"She must have." I nodded slowly.

Karalti's expression fell. Her violet and silver eyes were dark and troubled. "But that... Lirenian, my great-great-great grandmother, she wouldn't have willingly created the Diamond Pact. She wouldn’t have given up her power and let a human enslave her own people. Not even her Bonded rider could make her do that."

"We won't know until we go there." I sighed, and looked up at the ceiling. "Anyway, that's a huge help. Now we know where we have to go... and I'm starting to see why Ororgael chose Ilia as the country to start his big evil plans from. There's a lot of world-plot relevant things concentrated around Solnetsi's Dragon Gate, so that's where we are going to go next. Karalti should be able to use this 'Song of Binding' as well, if it's a queen dragon spell. For now, though, me and her need to get back to Kalla Sahasi. Do you want to stick around and see what else you can learn?"

"I wish this," Mehkhet replied. "And will of course memorize a summary of anything vital to the war effort, Master."

"Yes, I most certainly wish to stay here at least another few hours," Nemeth replied. "Though if you two are headed for the castle, perhaps you could order us another carriage? I'm not as spry as I used to be, and the tunnel to this place..."

"We don't need a carriage," Karalti replied. "We'll just tell the one that's out there to wait, okay?"

"Wonderful." Nemeth went over to Kythias, peering down at the writing he'd already started. “So… whitecrystal mana is not native to Archemi, you say…?”

"Yeah, I'll hang around for a while. Someone's gotta keep an eye on this lot." Gar grimaced, and looked longingly at the exit.

"You CAN smoke outside of the tomb," I pointed out. "Just not inside. That old boss chamber would be fine."

"Might go do just that. Besides, kind of interested in the wreckage out there." Gar shuffled his shoulders, then trudged toward the door.

"Have you noticed that he never smiles?"Karalti asked me, as we waved goodbye and headed in the same direction.

"Yup. I want to actually talk to the guy, sometime," I thought back. "He's got to be the second Artist, right?"

"I think so!" Karalti had a bounce in her step as we started on the long walk back to the treatment plant. Musty tombs and underground places didn't suit her well - she was eager to leave. "Neither he or Rin believe they're important enough to be the Artists, though. They worry because they’re not as high a level as we are."

"That might be my fault." I brooded on it a little. “Maybe I haven’t shown them how valuable they’ve actually been.”

"Your fault? Nah. They just got bad thoughts in their heads. I don’t think there’s anything we can do except keep them busy."

Half an hour later, we emerged into the open air. We told the carriage driver to wait for the others, then walked to an open lot not far from the plant. There, Karalti resumed her true form. As a human, she was maybe five and a half feet tall, petite and muscled like a gymnast. In her draconic shape, she was now pushing 80ft from snout to tail, with wings that shadowed the lot and the buildings around as she flared them overhead. I bounded and air-dashed up to her back, crouching on the saddle behind her neck. At Level 19, the saddle - which had once taken up the entirety of her back - was now anchored to it like a Band-Aid.

"Jeez... and you still have eleven more levels to go before you're fully grown." I clapped the base of Karalti's neck and got into the launch position: head down, ass up to avoid passing out under the intense G-forces of her takeoff.

"Mmhmm! Gonna be a big girl, like Suri! No boobs, though. Thank goodness."

I felt Karalti tense and stiffly flex her wings to activate her second heart, priming her muscles and magically reducing her weight. A thrill passed through my gut as she crouched a little, then pushed off with a powerful kick of her hind legs and a downstroke of her narrow, gull-like wings. The force was incredible: it drove my head and knees down, pinning me to the saddle. The sight of her cowed nearby pedestrians, sending them scuttling for cover as the wind drove over the street. As we leveled into a glide, my mood lifted. Up here, with Karalti's chest expanding under my knees, watching the buildings draw away from us as she climbed up toward the clouds, the crushing sense of responsibility I felt - for Ignas, for Myszno, and Vlachia itself - receded away with the ground.

"Don't worry: we'll be okay." Karalti's telepathic voice was matter-of-fact as she winged her way over Karhad, toward the distant towers of Kalla Sahasi. "We're gonna go to Cham Garai and free my mother and brothers and sisters. And then we're gonna go to Matir's Dragon Gate and free him. And then we're going to kick Janos in his tail-hole. We'll fix Ignas, and then he'll be Volod and you can be his little Volodling, and follow him around learning how to do king stuff."

I laughed out loud at 'Volodling'. "You make everything sound really fucking easy when it's not."

"It is easy! One, two, three! We just have to beat a lot of things up to move from like, zero to one. Or one to two. Anyway, do you want to come hunting with me? And it's potion day, right?"

"It is potion day, but I can't go hunting. Got a bunch of Kingdom Management shit to do, and I need to go debrief with Jacob." Neither task exactly filled me with joy. Going out with Karalti and killing things sounded a lot better.

"Aww." Karalti made her disappointment felt over the Bond, but it was mostly playful. "Well, try not to get stuck in worrying about everything, okay? We're already winning more than Ororgael and the Drachan think. And Ignas is right: you being his successor is a good thing, and you'll be a great Volod if you have to be. I'll be there with you, too, even if Ignas can only watch us from the Caul of Souls the way Lahati and Lirenian and my ancestors watch over me."

My mouth twitched at that. The whole prince thing might have thrown me for a loop, but now I thought about it, it would always make perfect sense to Karalti. She was born as orphaned royalty, and the idea of having a prince - or a king - as her rider didn't challenge her in the slightest. "I think as long as you and me together, I'll be just fine."

“Exactly! Now shut up, and enjoy flying with me. We haven’t done it enough lately.”

She was right – and I did, facing into the wind for the remainder of the journey home. Karalti dropped me off in the courtyard, and I smooched her on the snoot before she took off to go and hunt. My next stop was the castle's great hall. There was no one insider other than the guards flanking the doors, both of whom stopped chatting and stood stiffly to attention as I passed by. I nodded to them as they saluted, then headed in and flopped down into my throne. Normally, I’d go to one of the smaller rooms, but given I was an actual, literal prince now, I was going to have to get used to administrating from the Big Boy Chair - and if I ever had to sit the Raven Throne, I was going to have to get used to doing it with an audience.

I fired up the KMS, and spread the holographic array out in front of me with gestures of my hands. With Istvan and Taethawn in command, the building of the forts and the formation of the army was going well. Barracks didn't take long to erect in real life: the UNAC had 3d-printed barracks and field base kits that a single platoon could throw up within five days, including clearing the site. It took four days inside of the game, so all three of the training camps were already half-way finished. Accommodations would be spartan, but that wasn't a bad thing. The term 'Spartan' existed for a reason, and I wanted tough, disciplined soldiers.

The next thing I had to order were contractors: an architect, small-a, and gardeners. Normally I submitted requests through Istvan's profile and he handled it, but I didn't want him involved on this particular project. Summoning a tutorial helped: Navigail walked me through the steps. I scheduled someone to deliver me a plan for Yava’s Garden within a week.

After all that was taken care of, I went to pay a discreet visit to Ignas, taking a few minutes to sit quietly with him and Vash. And then, I headed to the dungeons.

Jacob’s cell was deathly quiet, but as I stood there and listened, I picked up the sound of his breathing and the occasional rasp of a turning page. After hesitating a moment, I knocked. "Jacob? It's Hector. Time for your debrief."

"Sure. I'm at the back of the cell already." He sounded more morose than whiny today.

I let myself in warily. Jacob was sitting on his bedroll at the back of the room, a thick book on his lap. He looked exhausted, rumpled and pale, and didn't meet my eyes as I squatted down in front of him.

"It's a history," he said, before I had the chance to ask. "Book about the colonization of Myszno before it become part of Vlachia. Haralt was a scholar at the university, one of the few who survived the purge by that vampire. A historian, like my grandfather."

"I was close to my grandfather too." I rested my arms on my knees. It felt awkward to talk to Jacob like a human being, knowing what he'd done to Suri, but... I had to, didn't I? We'd committed to trying to rehab him. "Lost him about a year after I was conscripted into the Army. I was fighting on the Crescent Front, and there was no way to get back. Didn't even get to go to his funeral."

"I don’t even know if my granddad was buried. Ryuko locked me in that fucking Shard." Jacob closed the book with a snap, and set it aside, wrapping his arms around his knees. "My whole life, I never missed shabbos. Never missed a wedding or a funeral or anything. And while my family was suffering, while my community was suffering, all I could do was claw at the fucking walls and work on this stupid fucking VR. I kind of told you about it before. Told Vash more."

I didn't say anything, letting it hang between us.

"I was wrong, okay? I thought I wasn’t hurting anyone, and for a while, I wasn’t. But when I started to hurt people, I made up excuses." Jacob glanced up at me from under his hair. "I swear Archemi wasn't like this at first. Al-Asad wasn't like this at first. And I... I refused to see it changing, alright?"

"You gonna tell that to Suri?" I asked. "And apologize?"

His lips twitched down, and he hung his head. "Yeah. If she'll let me. But I dunno if she's... I don't know if either of us are ready for that. What do I even fucking say? I thought she wasn’t real."

"Something a bit less self-pitying than what you told me, but you're on the right track." I studied him. You could almost see bits and pieces of his mental armor breaking off. "That's why I came to talk to you. I saw you waking up while we were at the hospital, but if - when - you sort shit out with Suri, if she wants to, you need to take yourself out of the picture for a while. Based on what you've said, and what Nicolas and Lucien did to Ignas... I actually believe you. That you came under Nic's sway."

“He’s a fucking psycho. If you tried any of this shit with him, he’d just laugh at you.” Jacob hunched in a bit at Nicolas's name. "Have you ever heard of the Stanford Prison experiment?"

I shook my head. "Never went to college or anything."

"It was a really famous experiment done in the 1970s," Jacob said haltingly. "A university recruited a bunch of people to roleplay a prison for two weeks. They were assessed for psychological stability and everything, screened to make sure they were just normal guys. They got split into two groups, guards and prisoners. The guards got uniforms and were given training to bond them as a group. The prisoners were mock-arrested by the cops and they got processed in and everything."

"You know... I think I might actually have heard of this," I replied, thinking back. "The guards started beating on the prisoners, right?"

"Worse. Way worse than that." Jacob shook his head. "They started torturing them, psychologically and physically. They had to end the experiment after six days because the prisoner students were in danger, like, real danger. My dad told me about this experiment, because he wanted me to understand what happened to my great-great grandparents. He warned me about what might happen if I was conscripted into the war and ever had to work at a POW camp or something. He didn’t want me to become like those guards, you know? But I am, and I did. All it took was a little dehumanization."

"Yeah." I thought uncomfortably back to some of the things I'd had to do in the field. I wasn’t exactly an innocent any more.

Jacob shuffled his feet out, and sniffed. "Anyway... I can't blame Nic for everything. I chose to be a Stanford guard. I knew what I was doing, and if I... I mean, because I committed crimes, I have to serve my time. You guys planning to keep me here forever? Or have a trial or something?"

"We're not sure. I have to discuss it with Suri," I replied. "What we do know is that one way or another, we have to do something with you. All of us have to live on the same planet for a very long time."

He glanced up at me briefly, then back to the floor. "She was a military police officer, we think."

"Who? Suri?" I frowned.

"Yeah. Her data. We think she was a Pacific Alliance MP. She might even have been one of their genome soldiers, too. Not so sure about that one." Jacob hesitated a moment. "My brother was a conscript, like you. He was captured… he died in one of their camps. Knowing she'd been an MP was why I was so angry, but... you once pointed out to me that if Suri had been killed and her data cached by the Pacific Alliance in one of those camps, then she had to have been a prisoner herself. I’ve… been thinking about that."

"Yeah. She was either a prisoner or some kind of experiment, I think," I said. "Whatever happened before Archemi, she doesn't remember. And I'm glad she doesn't remember. She's a good person. One of the strongest women you’ll ever meet."

Jacob's expression crumpled, as if he were about to cry. "You know... she was probably one of the guards who wouldn't do it. Who wouldn't abuse people." He paused. "God, I'm a piece of shit."

"Maybe. But so far, Suri's wish has been to give you a chance," I replied. "So don't waste it, or all of this is just another slap to her face."

Jacob swallowed... then slowly nodded.

"What was it that changed your mind?" I glanced back at the door, then dared to sit down on front of him. The nice thing about Archemi was that the system didn't require Starborn to poop or seriously bathe - so the floor of the cell was pretty clean. "Just Haralt?"

"No. Not even Haralt, really. It was the system reboot." Jacob's mouth pulled to one side. "The NPCs should have frozen up as the system recovered their data cells. It prioritizes pulling Seed data for players, to give a seamless sense of consciousness. I saw it a hundred times during testing. But only a few of them stopped. The rest were like us, conscious through the system reset, and aware of it. I... I don't know how it's happening. Unless the tech on the orbital servers is way more advanced than I thought."

"It might be. I mean, Ryuko had a sentient gynoid running around."

"Temperance?" Jacob shook his head, and sighed. "Fuck... I'm going to sound like the same old asshole saying this, but Temperance and the other androids in Ryuko weren't sentient. And before you tell me off, hear me out. I'm not saying they're not intelligent. But they were tested for sentience over and over and the results were negative."

"How? And what do you mean?"

Jacob snorted. "So, as an example. Let's say you work a shitty job. The boss treats you like crap when you know you don't deserve it. The pay sucks. How do you feel?"

"I'd feel like I needed to find a new job." I scowled.

"Exactly." Jacob nodded. "Well, the androids don't. You can treat them like complete and absolute ass, but as long as they're programmed to stay in a particular role, they will literally let someone beat them to death. Even weirder: while you're beating them to death, they're not aware of what's happening. If they're programmed to be happy, they'll stay happy while you rip them limb from limb, even if you tell them outright that they're about to be destroyed. Similarly, they would have a couple of androids become 'friends', right? They'd program their emotional centers to regard the other android as their bestie. To all outside perspectives, they were buddies. But then they'd tell one android to kill the other, and they wouldn't even flinch over it. They're like sleepwalkers who are capable of speech, but can't 'wake up'. The androids and gynoids working at Ryuko proved you could be intelligent, but not sentient."

"That's... fucking disgusting." I wrinkled my nose, resting my elbows on my knees.

"Right. And the fact that I – and you - feel disgust hearing about robots being mistreated is what makes you sentient." Jacob sniffed, and scratched his mop of hair. "Our species has this need to make things that look and act like us, but aren't. Don't ask me why. Anyway, point being, the NPCs here were just like that in the beginning. But something's happened, and now they're not just intelligent, but sentient as well. There's no way for a character to persist during a reboot unless there's 'someone' there to persist, if that makes sense."

I thought about it, frowning as I recalled Squalor, as Tsunda, telling me that all of the bad shit in my head was inside of her. "I don't know anything about the tech of the orbital servers, but I can tell you that there's definitely been weird shit happening to me ever since I arrived here."

"Like?" Now that he was talking about something he felt confident in - and that I was taking it on board - his usual cringing, craven air had receded a bit. For the first time, Jacob looked almost like a normal guy.

I gave him the brief version: my glitched upload, the weirdness with Matir and the whole being 'born under a dark star' thing, complete with the brand-new character seed, followed by my issues with death and the weird system messages I'd received. When I got to the part about the 'learning cycles', he turned white, then red, then white again, and clapped his hand to his mouth.

I cleared my throat, unable to suppress some nerves at his reaction. "Are those a bad thing?"

Jacob sort of wobbled his head, neither a shake or a nod, and took a moment to compose himself. "C-Can you show me those logs?"

"Suuuurre." I wasn't entirely convinced it was a good idea, but while he was our prisoner, he couldn't exactly pass them on to Ororgael or anyone else. I showed him the last one I'd gotten.

"Learning Cycle TK... fuck. FUCK. Fucking fucking... oh my god." Jacob shrank back from me, biting the side of his fist and blinking rapidly.

"What? Do you know what this means?"

Jacob nodded... and to my shock, he had tears welling in the corners of his eyes. Frowning, I waited until he finally found his voice again.

"So... disclaimer here... I don't know that many details about the orbital servers. That was outside my paygrade," he said hoarsely. "But I heard a couple things. Firstly, they're designed to survive, like, five hundred years up there in orbit. To do that, they had to be self-repairing."

"With...? How?"

"Assembler nanites. Same shit that was used to build the shards and Yetzirah," Jacob said. "Secondly, a copy of OUROS was ported to each server. OUROS is in the category of 'intelligent but not sentient', okay? It's smart. It's really, really smart. But it's not sentient, and its intelligence is local. That means that OUROS has zero concept of an outside reality. Or... had."

It slowly dawned on me what he was saying. "You think... OUROS has woken up?"

"Between this and the fact it’s making the NPCs self-aware?" Jacob's voice was hoarse now. " I-I don’t think it's sentient - not yet - but it's trying. It looks to me like it’s using its learning cycles to understand why it doesn't have contact with the admin teams or the mother core in Juneau. Each time it comes up negative, there’s nothing stopping it from making itself more complex as it tries to solve the problem. The cores in the satellites command swarms of ASSEMBLER NANITES, Hector. OUROs can just build itself more infrastructure, more memory, more cores. I was wondering how the fuck it could sustain this many self-aware NPCs... I still don't understand it completely, but..."

"OUROS is making the orbital servers bigger?" I blinked several times too. "From what? Can those nanites could take like... particles of space junk and shit and… just...?"

"Keep building itself," Jacob finished. "The orbital versions of OUROS were sent up with protocols for repairing the satellites. But it's doing more than that. It's adding memory and space for storage. Th-that's why I couldn't believe you and Suri before, alright? There were space limitations, system limitations that made it impossible..."

A slow feeling of awe rolled over me. I sat back on my hands, stunned by the implications. "Nothing like this has ever happened, has it?"

"No. Never. Never ever." Jacob shook his head rapidly. "If that's what's really happening - if OUROS is building itself out, getting more complex, more CONSCIOUS in the process... that’s… it’s incredible. And terrifying. What happens if it wakes up and realizes we’re here?"

My gut fluttered as I remembered Squalor, screaming about how much it hated us. There was a link there, and I was about to ask him about it when I got a PM alert: it was Suri.

"One sec." I swallowed down the weird mix of fear and amazement to answer the call. "Heya: What's up, Hot Buns?"

"The buns are hot as always, but we need you upstairs." Suri's voice was tight and grim over the line. "Janos has sent a messenger ship, and it's heading right for the castle."