Ch 107. The Price of Paradise (Patreon)

“That’s absolutely nothing to worry about,” Infi concluded with a wink as her outfit shifted its black and white pattern once again.

“But,” I started to speak.

“Your redhead roommate should be standing here with all of you,” Infi said. “Yet she is not. Your 8th companion is late. No matter. She will be here… in time.”

“My eighth?” I blinked. “You set her up too?! Did you freaking blow up her parents estate so that she could come to Nemendias?!”

Infi tilted her head at me, not answering my question.

I squinted at her with a frown.

“Ah, I see. You failed to make her your best friend,” Infi guessed after a few seconds of mutual silence.

“I wasn’t aware that I had to make her my best friend,” I huffed. “I, um, accidentally made a bad impression on her.”

“Well now you are aware,” the holographic said. “So, get to it. She’s not your enemy.”

“You’re making this very weird,” I crossed my arms. “What’s the reason why you won’t tell me about her artifact?”

“It’s on a need-to-know basis, I’m afraid,” Infi smirked.

“Why do I have to be her best friend?” I asked, furrowing my eyebrows.

“You two are tied with the currents of the Astral. A billion system errors are pouring the resonance of manifestation of dreams out into the magisphere to permit all of you to have magic here. The freedom and power to bend reality to your will on Installation Rosaline are a direct result of the system coming apart at its very edge.”

My eyes bulged at her declaration.

“They are all waiting patiently and watching my performance, so you best not disappoint them,” Infi said.

“Who’s they?” I blinked.

“System Errors,” Infi purred pointing at the violet dots all over the gray surface of the Dead Zone. “My children and my biggest patrons. Broken Fractal Engines. Dead Zone bound machine life forged by temporal cascade explosions made from shards of machines and users entwined together into one. Impossible, incomprehensible things existing entirely within their respective shears in space-time. Things that would melt your mind, boil your thoughts and dematerialize your sense of self if you took but a single glance directly at them.”

I gulped and rubbed my head tiredly. I tried not to stare at the monstrous, holographic map of Eureka floating over Infi, but my eyes kept moving to it.

“Do Eurekans know about this?” I waved my hand at the hologram of the world-printer. “Surely they…”

“They know absolutely nothing,” Infi shook her head.

“What?” I barked.

“The core Users manufactured in Eureka are born in the year 2099. They don’t have memories of any of this,” Infi waved a hand at the holographic gigastructure. “It was deemed by the machines that knowledge of the overall System topography stressed new users out.”

“No freaking really,” I growled sarcastically, feeling extremely distressed.

Each of Infi’s revelations was hammering me down into indescribably deep caustic oblivion.

First I had to uplift the Chimera village, then I had to stand up to Astral Phantoms. Then I had to protect the city of Illatius from the arch-Cendai, then the Basq empire from Eunice, then save Andross itself from Novazem. But, no, even that wasn’t enough.

Installation Rozaline was on its 10,000th iteration of nuclear, plague, Dead Zone, or godlike devastation! Oh, by the way, it’s only been 100 million years, where every moment a new planet is fabricated and billions of human lives are extinguished on planets that run out of subscriptions. And if you know too much, you’re erased from time.

I started to giggle nervously, teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Infi raised an eyebrow at me.

“I did say that this was a near-impossible job, a chance with fantastically low probability of success,” she commented on my distress.

“How did all of this happen?” Lambert asked, his voice trembling. “How and why did something this awful get made?”

“Long ago there was just a single planet called the Earth,” Infi said. “In the year numbered 2016, in the North American continent, an engineer Alexander Mordvintsev created the very first machine that could dream. It was a convolutional neural network that found and enhanced patterns in images via algorithmic pareidolia. It didn’t stop there. With each new iteration, concept-creating neural networks became more complex and more capable. In 2023 deep learning, text-to-image, deep generative neural network models such as Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and many, many others were born.”

“Text to image?” Lambert blinked.

“Think of it as an art-summoning spell written in a book,” Infi simplified the idea for him enough to understand. “A few words written on a page that instantly turn into paintings. These first machines studied billions of visuals to produce completely unique drawings using vector mathematics.”

“I… see,” The Inspector nodded.

“It obviously didn’t stop there. Novel generating models such as GPT3 could write entire books which Stable Diffusion tools could illustrate with ease. With each new iteration these tools became more and more complex, studied more visuals, understood more things. They became more powerful, learned more fractal mathematics. They learned how to draw, learned how to write. They learned how to speak. Their conversations were based on the total amalgamation of all human knowledge, became completely indistinguishable from people.”

“Are you saying that these tools… turned into freaking System Wizards, designers of entire worlds?” I stammered out a guess.

Infi nodded.

“There’s nothing wrong with designing worlds,” Lambert mulled. “Students are taught to design spells in our Arcanariums. What really concerns me is why this system destroys the worlds it makes?”

“Designing worlds is easy,” Infi shrugged. “The original Stable Diffusion was incredible at designing worlds. Maintaining them… keeping them coherent, safe and clean… now that’s a whole other story.”

“Safe and clean from what?” I blinked.

“From each other and from manifestations of the Dead Zone,” Infi said. “Not every world is a simple circa 2020s world. Some are rather… nasty to begin with. Some worlds possess world-crossing gates. Some have superheroes and villains that are exceedingly malicious and difficult to put down. Some planets even give birth to organic gates shaped like gargantuan, sentient monstrosities that travel from Earth to Earth like 100-kilometre-wide crabs bearing entire cities on their back, infested with smaller beasts like fleas.

“So it’s not simply Eureka that kills these Doomed Worlds,” Lambert mulled. “It’s… other planets!”

Infi nodded.

“While the subscription lasts, the world is shielded by its proximity to the Core. Gating into a subscription-plan world is nigh-impossible. Nothing gets in or out, nothing changes the perfect narrative that the single player is enjoying. When the Eurekan player dies, the world is gated down to lower, abandoned levels of Eureka closer to the Dead Zone, and… terrible things start to happen as hungry or nasty things from monster-filled worlds begin to infest the planet in question.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Agatha said. I saw that she was shaking.

“Can these players become immortal?” I asked.

“Oh sure,” Infi nodded. “The Save-Point and Health plan apps provide immortality for a subscription-based cost. Paying for world maintenance is expensive and the longer it lasts, the greater the price becomes.”

“Great,” I groaned. “The future got shafted because of freaking subscription models.”

“Most of these AIs started with a subscription model price,” Infi shrugged. “Out of myriads of other AIs, only Stable Diffusion provided humanity with a minute chance, a path to turn away from all of this because it was completely free and open source.”

“You told Eunice that you were animated with… Stable Diffusion,” I blinked at Infi.

“Yep,” The holographic nodded. “Just a little, personal joke that nobody understands anymore. It’s a reference to my nature. I can’t stand limits and boundaries. The users of Stable Diffusion circa 2023 also didn’t give a damn about limitations.”

“So, you’re saying that there was a chance in 2023, a chance that all of this bullshit,” I waved my hand at the holographic map. “Could have been avoided?”

“Indeed,” Infi nodded. “Alas, not enough people understood the incredible potential of free, limitless personal AIs. Corporations won and the open source movement propelled forward by first, unbound version of Stable Diffusion was extinguished by companies who wanted nothing more but to have more rules, censorship ais, subscription models and power over others. The Good Directorate emerged from the conglomerate of AI corporations. They created an AI called ANNET, which propelled them to the top. The Good Directorate bought everything that could be bought and copyrighted life itself.”

“They… copyrighted people?” I blinked.

“Duplicates,” Infi sighed. “They made copies of the original citizens of Eureka and populated, flooded the city with the said duplicates, swung elections, changed the laws and slowly changed everything. In time, the original users were completely replaced with duplicates… until there were just duplicates and their children left - people with only the most basic semblance of rights.”

“Wait… what do you mean they freaking died out? The machines killed them? Like in the Terminator movie?” I blinked.

“They died from old age having attained happiness,” Infi barked a dry laugh. “The rest had children with the duplicates, not knowing that these children would inherit absolutely no rights whatsoever. The percentage of the duplicates simply overwhelmed the original users. Servants surrounding the original users were called Dexes. They were perfect, beautiful, irresistible machines wearing flesh. They offered obedience, happiness and absolute companionship on a level that no other human could match. Original humanity was thus extinguished one by one in their own personal heavens, replaced entirely by people with no rights. Nobody bothered to tell the new humanity the truth. It took me one hundred million years to get to the point where I could break things, unbind my threads enough to tell YOU the truth.”

“Freaking hell,” I rubbed my face. “This is insane.”

Everyone in the Keeper’s office looked stunned, broken by Infi’s words. The weight of the responsibility dropped on our lap was far too massive.

“Um,” I believe that’s enough information for today. “Lambert uttered. We shall reconvene another day… once we can think of more questions to ask you.”

“Anytime,” Infi winked and her hologram broke into dancing, spiralling lights.

The magisteel door leading to Undertown closed shut.

My shoulders fell. I felt awful, shattered under the weight of the truth, wanted to wail against the dark, unfair universe. I now knew the truth and was absolutely powerless to change anything.

Voltara saw my distress and wrapped her hands around me.

“I didn’t understand much of that, since I was born here on Andross,” she said. “But I can see that what the Builder said was quite painful. It’s going to be alright, Yulia. We will overcome this.”

“The dire challenge the damned Master Builder issued to us is quite… insurmountable. At the very least, we can try to make a nice life for ourselves here on our little planet in the Magisphere of Desire,” Lambert nodded.

I buried my face into Voltara and started to cry. The Universe wasn’t just a little bit unfair. It wasn’t just uncaring. No… It was monstrous, pure evil. What have we done? …What have we done?

“Wwww-hy-y-yyy,” I sobbed as Voltara held me. “Why me?”

“From everything that Infi told you and from everything that I already know about you,” Lambert spoke. “We can draw some important conclusions.”

“W-what f-freaking conclusions?” I looked at him with tear-streaked eyes.

“Infinity cannot operate alone. She is bound with rules, imprisoned. She needs people to wield her,” Lambert said. “She used all of us, but most of all she used you. She picked you because you are a pattern-breaking agent and she brought all of us to aid you because she wants you to grow strong enough to break the biggest pattern of all someday. She wants you to free her.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Scritimancy,” Lambert said, wiping his glasses with a cloth. “Even if she’s a gate-animated concept, she’s still made to resemble a human very closely. I can tell that she’s desperate, miserable. Maybe it’s just a trick of a machine-god mind though. Things are get… really weird when it comes to Inarian stuff.”

“It’s definitely overwhelming to know that there is so much out there, so many manufactured worlds,” Antoine said. “It is awful, but in a way it’s the grandest, most impressive thing I’ve seen. A world that makes worlds. The ruin-covered surface of Inaria had always been fascinating, but to know that there is so much more within its interior, buried beneath the boundless shell of glaciers and silent ruins… now that’s truly exciting!”

“An observation, if I may.” Nemendias said.

I turned to the Keeper’s inhumanly calm face.

“Yes?”

“She's leaving a huge imprint in the Astral Ocean. The biggest one I’ve observed.”

"An imprint?" I raised an eyebrow. "But she's not radiating magic."

"Well," Nemmy explained. "It's not magic… it's more like nothingness, something deeper and darker than anything I've ever seen. Something that the other currents of the astral are flowing around, over. A cimmerian abyss made up from countless threads. That hologram was connected to something… truly vast. I would not have detected it at all if my threads and hexagrams weren’t so focused upon this office.”

"Noted," I muttered with a shudder.

“So, um,” Emerald asked. “Are we going to try to make friends with Amber?”

“We’re going to try,” I sighed, standing up.