Cale

  It had been a couple of days since he had started the process of installing a new interface and he was now very convinced that Maggy was not sentient. When he first started the forced endeavor, he had spent almost an entire day asking Maggy as many questions as he could about what was going to happen next and what he needed to decide on.

  He also had to make up for not having a team by using Maggy and her plethora of skills. Thankfully one of the tools she had materialized was a digital pad that let him keep notes using his finger as a stylus. He had asked Maggy about why the knowledge couldn’t just be imprinted into his mind and she said that it is possible but requires special implants and had a chance for brain damage when installed.

  Considering his current situation, he decided then and there that if he ever came across the option, he was going to take it, after all the real him was still alive so why couldn’t the cloned version of himself be a little crazy in this already crazy world he was tossed into? Besides he was about to have his everything carved up, and if he survived it he figured he would have a good chance of surviving an implant, and the thought of instant knowledge far outweighed the risks to him.

  As he took notes, The digital notepad he was using reminded him of his note taking program back home. It had nice tabs, easy to re-arrange, spell checking, and even a little calculator on it. He tried using the keyboard to type but it took way too long to get a word typed out. That was something he was going to have to try to learn when he escaped his current situation.

  “Maggy!” he yelled out without looking up.

  “Yes?” she said with a non-tone

  “Will my notes here survive the installation? Can I use this notepad when we are done here?”

  “Yes. It is saved.”

  “Thanks!” he said quietly as he started to mumble to himself... Let’s see… to do list for when I survive… make new tab, name it something cool like… new world skills... hehe. And item number one. Learn to type.

  There were times when he needed a break from all the learning and he would do random things to break up the monotony of his crash course in interface installation. During one of his breaks he stacked up the chairs and couches to make a fort, he hung out in there for a while, before knocking it all down into a pile. He found it wasn’t as fun when Leo wasn’t around.

  He wondered if Maggy would question what he was doing but he noticed that she would never question his actions or why he was doing something. She would just go about her day completely ignoring the oddities. He thought about pushing the limits of what she would ignore but he didn’t see a reason to and considering he was on a time schedule, that would be a complete waste of time.

  When he first met Maggy, he thought that she might be partially sentient. But the more he talked to her, the more she seemed to miss that spark that he had been expecting. The desire to learn more about the world around them, or even his own situation. She never asked for details beyond what she needed to know to make something work or to respond to his question. For the first few hours he was expecting her to ask him if he knew why his soul was so large or dig into how he got here, or even who this 005 person was that signed the paperwork needed for him to continue.

  But no, she didn’t do any of those things, and even though it was nice he wasn’t being forced to give up any secrets, he was a bit sad that she was missing that extra something that would have made her seem more... alive. Then again this was just the installation Maggy, who knew what she would be like once this thing was up and running. He did notice though that she had a bit of a drinking problem.

  Then he realized he had no idea what it was she was drinking... At first he thought it was just part of the environment they were in but now she was doing it so often it seemed like it had an actual function. What if it was actually something real, what if she was drinking his soul! Was he watching Maggy DRINK HIM FROM THE INSIDE OUT!? Panicking, he jumped to his feet and rushed over to Maggy and got right next to her.

  “What is that golden liquid you keep drinking?” he said, trying to keep his tone even, but she was monitoring his vitals so there was no way she didn’t know of his emotional spike.

  “Pure Matter,” she said, looking him in the eyes as she took a swig. Her eyes betraying nothing as she offered up no other information and just looked at Cale.

  “And what is Pure Matter?” He asked her accusingly. “Is that what my soul is made of?”

  “Pure matter is the energy that powers your scripts and is brought into existence on this realm of matter by your soul. No, your soul is not made of the Pure Matter I am consuming.” She explained.

  “Why are you drinking it then? Why go through the motion and not just do it outside of my view?”

  “I drink it this way because I was created to do it this way.” She said as she brought the mug up to her mouth and took another large swallow.

  “Why don’t you just use a bigger container?”

  “I like this one.” She said dryly, almost monotone.

  Cale turned his head and squinted at her as he tried to figure out if he believed her or not. He wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but then he recalled that as far as he knew he didn’t have any choice but to trust her. Besides, who would go through all this effort just to trick him to do... what… ever this was?

  As he thought about it, he had no reason to think Maggy was lying to him, she just didn’t seem to be able to. No, what was happening to him was real, in its own way. Which meant he had to get out of this place and regain his consciousness. He had a lot to do and now that he knew he wasn’t being drunk from the inside out, he could focus again.

  As he continued without the fear of his soul being drunk like water, he was able to finalize his notes on the installation process pretty quickly with Maggy’s help summarizing some of the longer steps and he also had her put up the health monitor he had seen when doing diagnostics.

  Thankfully he wasn’t immediately dying, but he could tell that his body was using a lot of energy and wasn’t getting enough food, if any, to keep up with the demand. His fat reserve estimates showed that they were going to be dangerously low unless he got some good food in him soon. According to the graph he was looking at, he had another three days to finish until his body started to eat away at his muscles.

  On the morning of day three, they had just gotten started going over the U.S.E. Ratio final numbers when he heard Maggy whisper something to herself almost angrily. Shockingly, with no hint of intent beforehand, she reached down next to her, grabbed the first piece of furniture she touched, which ended up being a small chair, and hurled it toward the window, smashing it into little orange glow-y pieces.

  The pieces landed on the floor and spread out like a low fog, hitting the other chairs like it and turning them into the same glow-y orange pieces. Once all the chairs had been dismantled, like ants on a mission, the pieces returned to where the chair was hurled into the window and started to push the glass outward, expanding it and forming into some sort of room with a small airplane looking jet ski with stubby wings and what looked like a really big engine.

  As soon as the mini jet ski airplane was complete, Maggy ran up to it, grabbed a helmet with a bunch of red stars on it that was on the seat, and took off toward Cale’s soul without saying a word.

  He watched her until she was a tiny dot and was far out in the distance. He strained his eyes up against the window to see her when the window itself sensed his intent and a small portion of it reformed to make a medium size screen with a closeup of Maggy. He watched as she pummeled what looked like an orb, only part of it was flat on one side, with her blacksmith hammer.

  The orb shattered from the impact, leaving a lump of something behind floating in the air while the rest of the pieces fell and dissipated into nothing. Maggy grabbed it and headed back toward Cale at a much more leisurely pace. When she got back to the room, she took the lump she picked up and threw it over at the bartender orb. The lump landed on the orb and stuck to it like it was glued there with a loud thunk causing the bartender orb to fall into a lounge couch from the impact, conveniently landing on some plushy pillows.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  After a few second, the piece Maggy threw onto the orb started to shrink as the orb seemed to absorb it and take it into itself. Cale noticed that it got a little bit bigger afterward and maybe its mustache just a little bit curlier than before.

  “What was that thing?” Cale asked

  “A soul rider,”

  “Why did you throw a soul rider at the orb?”

  “I did not do that.”

  Cale looked at her questioningly and confused as to why she lied to him.

  “Did you just lie to me?” He asked incredulously.

  “No,” she spun and turned to the flying jet ski, “That is a soul rider.”

  A slap could be heard in the room as Cale’s hand landed on his forehead. He pointed to the orb. “What was that thing you threw at it?”

  “That was the core of an earlier version of the bot that I made. With the current version of the bot being so helpful, I decided to terminate the old one and give the allocated resources to the latest version.”

  “You can just make orb bots?” Cale asked her. “Why?”

  “They serve a role where they can do functions and I don’t have to actively think about them. The bartender bot may visually give me drinks, but underneath, what you don’t see is where the bot does the majority of its work.

  “This entire room is for my benefit then, huh?”

  “The entire interface is for your benefit.” Maggy said to him point blank.

  “Good point. When I have the interface installed, will I still have access to this room?”

  “Yes, this starter room can still be accessed, it is how you will access your notes. This room is also used to host network lobbies.” She said.

  “What is a network lobby?”

  “A network lobby is where you can talk to your friends, family, or others from far away, but have it feel like you are next to them.”

  “Woah,” he whispered. If the network was up, he and Leo could be talking at all hours! This was something he would have to have. A virtual reality video call!

  “Do you have any documentation on setting up a network?” he asked her with glee. If she did he would have to learn how it worked as soon as he was out.

  “I do not.”

  Cale opened up his notebook.

  Item number two. Learn how to set up a network.

  ***

  The rest of the day was quiet as he reviewed the results of the U.S.E. Ratio scans with Maggy. The scans seemed to work a lot like sonar that submarines used. Maggy would send out pulses from his soul and they would “echo” for the lack of a better term, against the Trilateral Layer and reveal the shape, size, and some other items he still didn’t understand, to see what resources he would be able to supply to his interface and how the interface would be installed.

  It was a lot, and there were a lot of numbers, which he had no reference for, and if it wasn’t for Maggy, he would have surely died in here. Thankfully Maggy was able to summarize the important bits and by the end he found that he had an OBSCENE amount of resources.

  Unfortunately, because Maggy was doing the installation and not actual professionals, she told him that he would only get about a third of his total usage out of this installation. Over time he would be able to make it more efficient, but her knowledge on some of the finer points, where people went to school for, was not where it needed to be for him to get the full benefit.

  For hours he had Maggy go over the math and he had her check his own. They went over the most painless way to get his interface installed, but no matter which way they went about it he knew it was going to hurt. The pain would be worth it, he thought to himself. After an entire day’s worth of work, he and Maggy finally had their configuration set well enough that Cale felt pretty good and he realized that even if he didn’t ratio his resources one hundred percent efficiently, he would still have more than the average person.

  When he started he had imagined this to be a lot like an installation on a computer back on Earth. But he found he was very wrong and this process was very different. Here he needed to allocate segments of his interface on the Trilateral Layer to certain functions. First, there were the default sections his interface needed to just work, like the interfaces core programming and systems.

  That took up a whopping forty percent of available space, or would have if his soul wasn’t insanely large. He only let Maggy allocate it ten percent, which was still way more than the average persons. He wanted to go lower, but Maggy told him that leaving some room would allow him to make more changes and since he had the room, he didn’t see why not.

  Next, he had to allocate space for Maggy herself, which interestingly wasn’t part of the interface but was an add-on to it that people could purchase. After many questions, he found that currently she was only using about one percent of his allocated resources, which was next to nothing, and as she received more resources, she would get faster.

  She also presented the option to not have her installed with the interface in the case that she would not be able to fit. Since Cale wanted her to be fast and helpful he gave her a good thirty percent of the resources available. With that done, he had a bit over half of his space left to allocate.

  The last of this space needed to be allocated for three different functions. The first function was on demand script usage. This would be the area where scripts like his wind script would be stored. Next, he had persistent script usage to account for. Persistent scripts were scripts that could be always running, but that also meant they were always using energy.

  The coolest example that Maggy had told him about was a mapping script that came with this new interface. He could use it to actively scan his environment and make a map of it to view on his interface. It was either on or off, and when on, he didn’t have to think about it.

  The last segment, to him, was the neatest part. Here was where you could add in control scripts to handle tasks for you. An example Maggy used was that the mapping script could be paired with a sensing script. Since the sensing script took a lot less energy, people could have it do a quick scan of the environment on a timer for a rough scan, and if it changed, then it would turn on the mapping script for a short time to get more details.

  Another use was, funnily enough, for controlling the lights in your house. Apparently one of the script options was to turn on items in your house when you got to the front door using the greater network. Too bad civilization had collapsed. Twice.

  Day five had arrived, decisions had been made and Maggy never stopped drinking. He reviewed his work and was a little bummed at the results. Even though he had a very large soul that had plenty of resources to handle everything, he wasn’t able to optimize it like someone who had a full team with them. He wasn’t upset, after all as far as he could tell, Maggy had done a great job designing the installation points and making the thousands of underlying decisions that he had no idea what they were.

  When they were first going over the plan, he had Maggy go over what a normal installation would be like with a team of people. He quickly realized that he was far outside of his depth and it was like trying to memorize an engineering degree on mechanical engines in under an hour.

  Take an engine for example. Yeah, you can get the base concept of it if you watched a quick video on how one worked. You could see the basics, like it needs fuel to work and it pushes these pistons to make power. But to know the ratio of fuel to air needed to make a correctly sized explosion, or the exact size of the pistons needed to cause enough pressure to build and turn the drive shaft, were all unknown factors to him. The important bits, the details one would need to actually design something.

  When it came to designing the installation for his interface, he had no idea and he let Maggy do the designs and calculations with minimal input from himself and hoped that Maggy had gotten it right. After all, it wasn’t like he would be able to correct her if she made a mistake.

  Finally, after reviews, double checks, triple checks, and some bottle throwing, there was only one thing left to do. The painful part. The part that had a chance of killing him. The part where he was going to feel the same pain in his soul, his body, and his mind. The part that would decide whether he had a future or not. In the next two days, he would either wake up with more potential than anyone else he knew of, or he would die, without saying goodbye to anyone, and with no one knowing his true fate.

  “I’m ready!” Cale yelled over to Maggy, “Let’s start operation Not-Going-To-Die so I can fight it out!”

  Maggy finished her drink and then took a few of the tables, grabbed them, and slammed them into the ground on the other side of the room from Cale. The tables crumbled into motes of light and started to reform into a fighting cage. First, the platform rose a few inches from the ground and formed into a square. Cale had Maggy design the floor to be a little bouncy, like a boxing ring.

  Once the floor was set, the fences arose around the boxing ring from the floor until it reached the ceiling locking the boxing ring in a cage with no way out. Lastly, two closet sized rooms formed out of the floor as well and attached themselves to the fence and a door formed on the side facing outward so that someone could get in and out. Through this door Cale would enter, and face his opponent on the other side, the monster from the intro video that was fighting the army.

  Over the last few days Cale had time to think about the pain Maggy had told him about and he had recently realized she had undersold it. At first it sounded… unpleasant at best, but when he asked her for more details, he found out that the pain was like being stabbed and having the pain directly beamed into your brain while also feeling the pain being sent from your nerves. He was not sure he would truly survive by just sitting in a chair and feeling copious amounts of pain with no outlet.

  So as Maggy did all the hard math, he thought of ways to help ease the pain and he came across a solution that seemed counter intuitive as it didn’t ease the pain. Instead it leaned into it and embraced it since as far as he knew, there was nothing he could do to stop the pain completely.

  That is when he hatched the plan, operation “Not-Going-To-Die.” The plan was simple in that it gave him a way to understand the pain as well as a way to take out his frustrations when he was in extreme pain. He thought Maggy might try and talk him out of it but she was as ready to go as ever when he explained it to her.

  When the structure finalized its materialization, he approached the closet sized room and walked inside. To his surprise the room was a lot larger on the inside and there were lockers, showers, and workout clothes. As he changed he couldn’t help but check himself out in the mirror and noticed the extreme details that were being shown.

  Thankfully Maggy had thought ahead and put a countdown clock in his changing room. Seeing the numbers get closer to zero, Cale realizing he was distracting himself. He hurried along and finished getting changed. When he was finally dressed and out of excuses, seconds before the timer hit zero, he walked to the door that let him into the cage and with a deep breath, opened it to face his opponent.