Thebuildinglookednormalfrom the outside.
Glass and steel, four stories, the kind of corporate architecture that existed in every business park in every mid-sized city. A logo on the front was the Virtual Vice emblem, silver on dark glass, smaller than Levi expected. A parking lot with six cars in it. A front door that Asher opened with a keycard and a code.
Inside was worse.
Not because it was scary, but because it was empty. The lobby had a reception desk with no one behind it. The lights were on but the light had the quality of light in a building that was running on a timer rather than for people. Hallways stretched in two directions. Doors with frosted glass. The hum of climate control and nothing else.
Levi wasn’t sure what he was expecting to come today, but he had his cane, and Asher had his brace, so he was expecting a lot of walking.
“It’s always been like this, we ran with a skeleton crew,” Asher said. He was walking ahead of Levi, his gait still uneven on the healing leg.
A man in a suit intercepted them on the second floor. Levi didn’t catch the name, he just caught something about paperwork and needing Asher’s signature. The man was nervous. Everyone was nervous around Asher. The man spoke to Asher the way Paul spoke to Asher — carefully, watching the face, managing the proximity.
“I need twenty minutes,” Asher said to Levi. “Feel free to look around, my office is on the third floor. I think Paul is in too. Third door from the elevator.”
“I can wait…”
“Go see Paul. I’ll come find you.”
Asher followed the man down a corridor. Levi watched him go — the uneven gait, the shoulders squared, the posture shifting from Levi’s Asher to CEO Asher in the space of three steps. Two different people. Same body.
He took the elevator to three.
Paul’s office was small and overwhelmed with paper. Stacks on the desk, files on the floor, a whiteboard covered in timelines and names Levi didn’t recognize. Paul was behind the desk, reading something, and he looked up when Levi appeared in the doorway. “Levi. Is Asher —”
“Downstairs. With a lawyer.”
Paul exhaled.
Levi sat in the chair across from Paul’s desk. The chair was uncomfortable, and the office smelled like coffee and paper and the staleness of a room someone had been working in too long. But Levi had questions he wasn’t sure Asher would be willing to answer, and Paul seemed like the kind of person who would accidentally give him the nuclear codes if he had them.
“I have a question,” Levi said.
Paul’s hands went still on the file he was holding.
“How did Asher change the game from inside it?”
Paul looked at him, and he held the look for a long time — long enough that Levi could see him calculating. What to say. How much. Whether Asher would get upset with him for the telling.
“The system was built for him,” Paul said carefully, his eyes darting back and forth as if he were scanning his brain to make sure he was picking the right words. “Originally. Before it was a product, before the distribution model, the system was designed to interface with Asher’s neural patterns specifically. His brain. Nobody else’s. The whole point was to see if the AI could read a single person’s mind deeply enough to generate responsive stimuli.”
“So the AI was trained on Asher’s brain?”That explains why everything was so fucking scary in there, at least.
“The original prototype was just to test if Asher could code the AI by thinking. That was the original test. Not fear, not horror. Just: can this system read a person’s intentions and modify its own architecture in response? Asher would put on the headset and think about changing a variable and the system would change it.”
It’s genius. Or it would be…
“So when he was inside the game,” Levi said. “When he’d been in for months and he couldn’t remember who he was anymore…”
“The system still recognized his neural patterns. It was trained on him. So when Asher started wanting the game to change and those desires were strong enough and sustained enough, the AI followed the oldest pattern it had learned. It restructured itself around what Asher wanted. He didn’t know he was doing it. I don’t think he remembered he could do it. But the system was built to respond to his wanting and the system responded.”
Levi wasn’t sure what to do with that information.
He wanted me to stay bad enough he altered the game, back in the barbershop. And then again on the ship…it’s insane. It is actually insane.
But also kind of —
He didn’t finish the thought. Not yet.