1: Another Beginning - Book 6
The first time. People invested a lot of importance in the concept of the first time.
Jade never even saw the bus that hit him. He wasted time on the irrelevant thought that people must have somehow mixed things up, and that it shouldn''t be the first time that mattered, it should be the last time.
The notification that popped up after everything went black didn''t surprise him as much as the bus had. The pain that had pierced his body had vanished with the light. Unfortunately, this wasn''t the first time he had failed. Fortunately, it hadn''t been his last chance.
He wasn''t transported to another world. He didn''t meet any god or devil. Instead, after he dismissed the notification, the system replayed the footage of the accident from the perspective of a nearby traffic camera. It showed him what had happened, as though the knowledge would prevent repetition.
Jade watched it with a feeling of resignation. It wasn''t as though he had purposefully jumped out in front of the moving vehicle, or been unaware of the consequences.
Because of the existence of the system, he was never certain if he experienced sleep in the way that people experienced it, but he slept until his new body was ready. Then he woke up again, in the same place that he always woke.
The only thing that was different was that the clothes Jade had worn to work that morning were gone. He checked the date and time before he called in. Sometimes it took longer than others for his body to be replaced, but only a day had elapsed this time.
While he dressed, he made profuse apologies for having missed his shift the day before. He already knew that only the few actual witnesses of the accident, and the system that apparently only existed within his own head, would be aware of his previous demise. There were never any authorities waiting, or hospitals missing patients.
It was almost as though his life were a game.
--
Jade finished cleaning the last toilet, put away the cleaning supplies, and then joined Emily at the counter.
He was fairly certain that Emily had never had any contact with the system. It was a point of pride with her that she had never wasted any of her life on video games. Since she worked the same shift with him here at the convenience store, he wasn''t certain what it was about her life that she deemed made it such a meaningful existence untainted by electronics.
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There was a lot about how other people lived that Jade had difficulty understanding. He was certain that his own main quest was to see the world through a human perspective. He knew because it was written at the top of his quest log, and it never changed, no matter how many hundreds of sub quests he finished. Jade was also about 99% certain that most people did not have a quest log.
Emily at least didn''t shirk her own duties, and was one of the most reliable people that Jade had worked with so far. She hefted a box full of candy that a less fit person of her stature would have struggled with more easily than Jade could have managed, and she placed each one as neatly into its row as if she were a machine.
Whatever else she was, she was good at this job, and Jade respected that. Other people might look down on service jobs like this, but no one wanted to live without the services they provided.
It was an important job, in its own way. He rang up the five different beverages the scruffy man with the instrument case ordered without asking any questions. Perhaps he belonged to a band.
--
When Jade returned home that evening, he logged onto the game that he''d been named after. There were already hundreds, if not thousands of "Living World" games running on the enormous computers that orbited Earth in this century, but there was something nostalgic about playing the first one.
Jade was fairly certain that ''Living Jade Empire'' had been created by someone who could also see the system that seemed to reside within his own mind. The menu structure was exactly the same. Although since the system also had access to almost every electronic device that he had ever encountered, perhaps it was merely connected to him.
He had even speculated that the game system was somehow connected to his own mind, but¡ there were other things that didn''t line up. Even though the game was structured similarly, there were so many differences. Magic, for example. Magic didn''t exist in reality.
--
Within the game, Jade''s dwarf nimbly assembled the final piece of the steam engine that he had been building. It wasn''t powered by coal, or wood, but its enchantment would burn slowly through the gemstone that it was written on.
The Empire''s magic was an oddly physical thing, if you looked at it right. Overhead a tiny cloud sparkled too brightly, betraying the swirl of elementals that crowded it.
He hopped into the strange craft that the engine was attached to as neatly as if his dwarf were a world-class athlete. Despite his short stature, his powerful dwarven legs gave him enough boost to jump at least three times as high as his ordinary human body in real life.
If Jade''s coordination in real life had been as excellent as that of his dwarf, he would never have been hit by that bus. If he had been able to jump as powerfully, he could simply have jumped over it. Reality sucked. Even if his own did have quest logs.
He launched his sand skimmer into the desert with practiced motions, and flew across the sand. His course was set on the city that had been built the year he''d been born, assuming of course that he had ever been born. Or that something constructed within a game system could be regarded as having been built.
Words could be complicated. Like life.
2: Moms Are The Same Everywhere
Jade''s sand skimmer bounced easily over the occasional obstacles found within the wide desert. The sun shone down from high overhead, leaving only shallow shadows while creating a shimmer of heat in the air over the burning sand.
A small drake scurried away in terror as the skimmer zoomed over the low rocks that it had been shading itself behind. The image stayed in Jade''s mind long after his speeding vehicle had left the animal far behind.
The wind swept the hair of his dwarven figure back and tugged strands free of the braids that he used to keep his hair out of his way. Dwarves grew hair like they grew muscles, without effort, as though the traits were linked. Neither the gnomes, nor the dragons, from whom the dwarven race had been bred, bore such a hairy racial attribute.
His grin was a little wild as he bounced over the small rise just before reaching the edge of the city, but he slowed the skimmer down to a sedate pace as he slid neatly into the city''s lazy traffic pattern. His dwarven coordination was so much better than his human form''s.
--
Jade''s mother was meeting him in the archaic Steam Caf¨¦ that lay near the town square. She could talk for hours. She still liked to recount her adventures as one of the first players to help build this city within the game''s first expansion area.
Her contributions had apparently been nearly as significant as she claimed, since her character''s name was permanently carved upon the dwarven built enchanted fountain in the town square, along with dozens of others. Jade had tried sanding it off once, just to see. The NPC city guards were not to be trifled with, and the carvings were automatically repaired as though the fountain bore the highest level of enchantments.
Jade''s mother had been playing ''Living Jade Empire'' almost since the game had first launched, (hence his own name). The MMORPG was already nineteen years old. It wasn''t a record time for a game series by far, but it was an impressive length of time for a single game to remain popular.
He had no way to guess whether the system that displayed similar menus within his own mind was younger, or older, than the game, but he''d been able to see them for as long as he could remember. The earliest memory he had was of her holding him up in front of a screen and asking someone, "Can you see him this way?"
He had only a few fragments of memory before he was about five years old, but his mother was a constant figure in almost all of them. Her familiar slim, dark haired, human avatar turned as she caught sight of his dwarf.
"Jade!" she exclaimed and pounced forward to hug him.
"Mom," he replied dryly, while returning her hug. "Don''t call me Jade, I''m Hisui here," he reminded her again.
"Hisui then. But it''s Jade that I want to know about! How are you doing in the city?" she asked worriedly, as though she didn''t also live in a city, although it was a smaller one.
"I''m fine," Jade said, without mentioning his recent demise.
"Fine?" she asked querulously. "That''s the same thing you tell me every time I call. Can''t you at least use other descriptive words?"
He nodded and replied seriously, "Alright, tolerable, okay."
His mother laughed and replied just as dryly as he had earlier, "Fine, fine, I won''t complain about your phrasing." She gave him a slanted look and asked lightly, "So no accidents? Work going ok?"
Jade had always suspected that his mother had some secret contact with the system. She always seemed to know everything, and he had never been able to get a lie past her, but when he had been small she had never insisted that he was imagining anything.
Jade sighed now, and admitted reluctantly, "I got hit by a bus when I was standing too near a curb. I lost my balance when someone bumped into me while I tried to dodge. But I only missed one day of work! It''s fine."
His mother hugged him again far more tightly, and he protested, "Mom!"
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She replied in a muffled voice, "Shut up brat! How can you be so calm about it?"
"I''m fine," he pointed out more calmly.
She finally released him, wiped her eyes, and nodded. Her human form beside his dwarf made their perspective the same as it had been years ago, and he looked up into her face.
"I''m really okay," he insisted.
"Okay," she agreed. She took another deep breath, and a sip of her drink before asking more calmly, "Have you met anyone interesting?"
He rolled his eyes. "If you mean do I have a girlfriend yet? No."
His mother stuck her tongue out at him and then protested, "I didn''t ask that!"
"I''m doing my best to fit in," he muttered.
"So is everyone else," she assured him.
After a moment he nodded.
When he had described his internal quests to her when he was younger, she had always insisted, "Even if everyone doesn''t see the world the same way that you do, just remember that they also have both large and small goals set for themselves."
--
When Jade disconnected the next morning, he dressed quickly. He hadn''t left himself much extra time.
He watered the houseplant his mother had insisted on giving him, and felt surprised to see the small pale flower buds. They decorated a new stalk that the plant had thrust toward his small window. The last time he''d watered it, the plant had only shown its usual green leaves.
Whenever he saw little things like this, he wondered if maybe this was the kind of thing that would actually let him make progress on his main quest. But perhaps these small miracles weren''t relevant to seeing the world through a human perspective. The system didn''t give him any guidance.
Jade ate the same cold cereal every morning. He had never quite figured out what other people loved so much about different types of food. He could distinguish between them, but to him food was just food. He quickly washed his bowl when he finished, and then went to class.
He was only attending classes part time, because he didn''t want his mother to have to pay for them. Even if he had only enrolled in a trade school, it was another expense.
Jade hoped that the two year degree would help him achieve his future plans to travel around the world. Someday he hoped to have set foot upon every continent at least once, so that he could find out if his main quest meant for him to literally see the world.
Eric greeted him cheerfully when he slid into his seat with, "Hey! You finally skipped a day, everything ok? Finally loosening up a little?"
Jade blinked in surprise. Most people never seemed to notice if he had been missing for a day. "I am ok," he assured his classmate.
Eric winked, and then sent a message to Jade''s phone just as the bell rang. The system could have shown it to him unobtrusively, but he risked bending over his phone to read it in the usual fashion.
It was notes from the previous day''s class. They were rather incoherent despite being in a regular font, and using the same language that they spoke every day. But Jade felt a flicker of amused affection for Eric as he read them. Usually Eric was the one who missed classes and asked Jade for notes.
Jade thanked Eric for the notes when the class ended, without mentioning that the system could have replayed the whole class for him if he had asked.
Eric replied cheerfully, "No problem! I owe you!"
The system blinked his quest list at him, so Jade checked it. He discovered that he had a new one that said: ''Invite a friend to an activity.''
It startled him, since usually his quests never involved other people. Jade glanced at Eric and hesitated. Eric waved and departed swiftly.
Jade glanced at his quest list, expecting to have failed the new quest in his hesitation, but it remained.
--
When Jade reached the convenience store, his boss was waiting. The older man said gruffly, "Emily is out sick, but I can only stay for a couple of hours, so you need to get all the cleaning done before then."
The system handily popped up a quest timer in Jade''s peripheral vision, as Jade nodded. Both the system and his boss took the new quest as having been accepted without a verbal word of acknowledgment.
Each subquest task, like mopping the floors, cleaning the drains, and scrubbing the bowls rewarded him with a point of Karma if he finished it with high efficiency. His Karma balance was a bit low after his recent reincarnation, so he was careful to do a good job.
After his boss inspected his work before leaving, he said merely, "Hmph, good enough I suppose."
Jade sighed. He wondered how people who couldn''t see the system managed to sustain their motivation for subquests. They probably wouldn''t be able to see that they were receiving anything for their hard work.
A moment later he summoned a smile to greet one of his regular customers as she banged through the door like a small messy tornado.
3: Harmony
A leaf flew toward Jade and he reminded the woman firmly, "No hoverboards active in the store."
According to the ID she used to buy restricted items, her name was Harmony. Tufts of silver hair escaped tight braids, and her retro-reflective riding gear was a colorful patchwork of old-fashioned hand sewn artistry.
Jade supposed that in some odd dichotic way, her appearance was harmonious, but he wasn''t sure that the name really suited her personality. He reached out to catch the leaf, but missed. He let himself sigh as he stooped behind the counter to collect it, before tossing it into the trash can below the counter. He couldn''t help wishing that he could borrow his game character''s coordination in real life.
Harmony stepped off the board, bounced it up with her toe, and tucked it under her arm. At the same time, she called back cheerily, "Sorry Jade! I meant to stop at the door!"
Anyone merely glancing at her, would have taken the athletic shape in such colorful gear for that of a teenager. Only when she approached closely, and lifted her goggles to reveal the network of crow''s feet around her eyes, was her real age hinted at.
Harmony quickly gathered up her usual choices of sweets and junk foods, using an oddly efficient route through the small store, and piled them onto his counter. Jade always speculated that either her flesh was crafted from preservatives, or she had grandchildren that she was slowly poisoning.
While he was ringing up her purchases, because his boss believed in old fashioned human supervised transactions, Jade''s quest list flashed for attention. He glanced at it and saw that one line was highlighted: ''Invite a friend to an activity.''
Harmony asked curiously, "How are things? You were gone yesterday and Emily is missing today?"
Jade blinked at her. Here was another person who had noticed that he had been gone. She looked back at him with interest.
He replied uncomfortably, "Um, I''m fine. She''s out sick."
"Oh, that''s too bad," she said without putting any particular weight to her words. Most people would have tried to make them sound sympathetic, or spoken them as a formality, from her it was simply a comment.
Jade handed her her receipt and said quite suavely, "Um?"
Harmony lifted an eyebrow at him as she reached for her goggles.
Jade glanced again at his quest list and asked more awkwardly, "Do you play ''Living Jade Empire''?"
Harmony slid her eye protection into place and informed him cheerfully, "Oh, not in ages! I''ve been playing the ''Living Centauri Colony'' for the last couple of years. Why?"
He offered uncertainly, "Um, the moon expansion is opening up soon."
"Oh, sounds interesting!" she exclaimed. "Maybe I''ll try logging in again."
Jade somehow scraped up the courage to add quickly, "I''m building a ship for it. I''m a dwarf there." His voice trailed off as he finished, "My name there is Hisui."
Harmony stopped two steps from the door and looked back at him. She asked laughingly, "Jade is always jade?" He nodded, and she grinned and told him, "Sure Jade, I''ll send you a friend request."
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She flipped her board through the open door and bounced onto it. Jade raised a hand in farewell, and smiled in relief as his quest chimed in completion. Apparently the system counted Harmony as his friend.
"Watch for it!" Harmony called out as she kicked the start, and whisked off before the door thumped closed.
Jade''s smile widened into a broad grin. Harmony had to be rather chaotic to encounter out on the pavement.
--
Jade wasn''t really surprised when his mother called right after his shift ended.
She would likely be clingy for days after hearing that he''d been hit by a bus. He assured her that he was still fine, and that his day had gone well.
Last time he had failed his main mission and been revived, he had drowned while on vacation. The system had taken three days to replace his body that time, and he still wasn''t really sure what had happened in the ocean.
One minute he''d been following along the sunken snorkel tour plaques through the coral bed, and the next he''d been back in the system. The system hadn''t had any cameras there in the ocean to show him what had happened either.
He had just completed his walk to the bus stop, when a new quest popped up. Jade eyed it and rolled his eyes. It said, ''Navigate the bus system and safely return home.''
He had already taken this route a hundred and twenty-eight times. He did keep an eye out for changes though. Just in case.
--
At home Jade was inundated by a string of small quests.
The system helpfully lined up all the little chores that needed to be accomplished before his class in the morning, almost as though it were nagging him. It did not seem satisfied with the job he did on his homework though, because it refused to reward him for accomplishing the task.
Jade decided that it was good enough since that subquest wasn''t replaced by one to redo it. He estimated that it would probably get approximately a 70% mark when it was graded.
He hummed cheerfully as he did his washing, paid his bills, and prepared his clothes. The system helpfully added another subquest when he said aloud, "I should probably get a few more clothes soon."
The new quest was a bit more specific than Jade had been, and listed each article of clothing that he needed. It also described the goal as stylish. Jade raised an eyebrow at the screen, but didn''t bother arguing with the air.
There was no timer counting down, so he ignored it for now.
--
After he finished his household chores, Jade logged into the game, and pulled up his quest list there.
The system and the game really seemed directly related somehow. The interface was almost exactly the same.
Jade flexed his dwarf''s gloved fingers appreciatively, and got to work on modifying the airship. He planned to turn it into a spaceship as soon as the expansion arrived, and spaceflight became possible.
His dwarven hands deftly removed the tiny gears from the mechanism, and he took them to his forge and rebuilt their enchantments with practiced ease. Here in ''Living Jade Empire'' his coordination never failed him, and he reassembled the mechanism quickly and accurately.
When he had finished, Jade patted the side of the pudgy little airship fondly. Even though he suspected that his time in the game detracted from accomplishing the main quest that always loomed in the system, he loved his time here.
The smithy was built into the mountain side, and the interior was comfortably cool except when the big forge was running. He looked out the smithy''s doorway, across the desert sands, to where the sun shimmered above the surface in sparkling perfect waves.
A friend request arrived. Jade stared at it for a moment before remembering that he had asked Harmony to befriend him. He hit accept. Almost as soon as the acceptance message vanished, a snow cat from the high mountains bounded into his smithy. It was a messenger animal, and it was carrying a small note in its jaws.
Jade took the note casually, and the cat departed with a whisper of icy breeze.
The note said only: "It''s me!"
Jade laughed.
4: The System Targets Eric
Jade was not really surprised to discover that his new friend, with the elaborate name Skyheart Snowsong, was an elf. It suited her somehow.
Even if Harmony hadn''t played this game recently, she had obviously put some time into it in the past, because elves in this world were a half dragon, half human race. Half dragon characters were something of an investment, given the amount of Karma required to create one.
Jade composed a reply, then watched with a smile, as the little fairy dragon he had set as his own messenger flitted merrily off. Despite its tiny size, it wasn''t hampered by the message that the game displayed as large as itself, clutched within its foreclaws.
He closed the large doors on his smithy and paused before starting up his sandskimmer. As he had predicted, her snowcat came bounding back with another message seconds later.
Harmony''s message began with exclamations of excitement, "Wow, wow, wow! Your messenger is so cute! Where did you get it?"
The fairy dragon flitted off again a moment later, carrying Hisui''s words back to Skyheart Snowsong, "It was a special quest reward from the Sky City expansion. The one that featured all those pixie halfs three years ago. Do you want to try it?"
Jade finally launched his skimmer. He didn''t chase directly after the messenger, instead he guided the skimmer in the direction of the closest portal. Within less than a quarter of an hour, he reached the town listed as Snowsong''s current location.
It took them another quarter of an hour to find each other, which sounded like a lot, but was actually remarkably quick. If they had been trying to navigate a city of similar size in the real world it would have taken another hour or two.
The quest issued by the fairy dragon, a species that had existed long before the expansion, sent them chasing through the skies on borrowed wings. The sand skimmer, as versatile a vehicle as it was, wasn''t suitable for chasing clouds.
Clouds within ''Living Jade Empire'' were almost living things themselves. Hisui and Skyheart Snowsong had been asked to collect more than a few seeds, which took some rather tricky maneuvering, and a lot of bargaining. It was almost impossible to find an unoccupied cloud in the sky.
The elementals and the smaller dragons were actually some of the least dangerous occupants.
--
In class the next morning, Jade''s own System popped up a new subquest as soon as he arrived. It instructed, very specifically, "Tell Eric about a recent adventure in ''Living Jade Empire''."
Jade eyed the quest with suspicion. He found himself sneaking glances at Eric whenever he thought Eric wasn''t looking, but he couldn''t figure out how to bring it up. Eric caught him looking a few times, and returned the glances with an easy smile.
A few minutes before the class ended, Eric caught his glance again and leaned over to ask teasingly, "Something you want to ask me Jade?"
Jade was sure that he blushed, as he asked hesitantly in return, "Um, do you play ''Living Jade Empire''?"
Eric looked away, and even shifted uncomfortably in his seat, before giving Jade a short nod and replying, "Yeah."
Jade drew a deep breath and glanced around before explaining quickly, "I''m in the middle of helping someone who just returned to the game, after a few years away, through the quest that gives the fairy dragon messenger."
Eric turned back to Jade and replied with sudden intensity, "Oh that one! That was as tricky as ferrets! Are you stuck?"
Jade blinked at Eric. His earlier discomfort seemed to have completely evaporated. "Uh, no. I''ve done it before," Jade assured him. "It''s just long. Right now we''re collecting the cloud seeds," he explained.
The soft chime of a quest completed sang in Jade''s ears, but only within his own head. Before he could react, another instantly popped up to replace it. This one also targeted Eric with the demand, "Invite Eric to join you."
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"Do you¡" Jade began.
Eric caught the teacher glaring toward them, and interrupted quickly, but softly, "Let''s talk more after class?"
Jade nodded silently.
He gazed at the new quest a bit worriedly. The system had always been there, but it had never really interfered in his social life before. His mother complained that he was too cold to people sometimes, but the system hadn''t ever seemed to care.
The only times that people had ever been named within a quest before, had been instances when it told him to do things like, "Catch the rare butterfly sitting on Tom''s lunch box." Or perhaps there had been quests such as, "Take a picture in front of the fountain with your mother before you leave the park." This might be similar to that.
On the other hand, Jade had no real objection to trying to interact more with Eric. He was friendly, likable, and undemanding. Jade snuck another glance at him.
After the class ended, Jade gathered up his courage again and asked, "Want to go shopping with me after work?"
Eric gave Jade a look that he couldn''t interpret, and asked a little sharply, "Shopping?"
Jade almost replied, "I have a quest," but stopped himself in time. Instead he explained, "I need to get a few clothes, and that''s a thing friends usually do together right? " He pointed to a group of girls still clustered near the door chattering among each other, and added, "At least, they are always talking about doing that."
Eric covered his eyes and muttered, "Why do I even¡" He straightened and said authoritatively, "Fine. I''ll help you out, but then you have to go to the VR movie I was planning to watch tonight with me instead of going home to play games."
"Okay," Jade agreed cheerfully.
Eric flashed him a grin and raised his phone as he asked, "When do you finish tonight? And where do you work?"
Jade covered his eyes to show his embarrassment, and then texted all of the information Eric would need to find him for the project.
--
When Jade arrived for his shift, he found that Emily was back at work that afternoon. She sniffled constantly as she stood listlessly behind the register. Jade''s mother would have disapproved.
Jade himself wondered whether or not it might have been better if Emily had taken another day to rest. Even if a medical examination had cleared her of carrying any serious illness, she looked like she still needed rest. When his system popped up the list of cleaning subquests without any encouragement, he did all of the cleaning again without complaint.
When he finished Jade asked her, "Has it been long enough that you can take more medicine?"
Emily frowned at him and explained authoritatively, "Medicine isn''t something that should be used lightly. You become reliant on it, and then you can''t get well on your own anymore."
She sniffled again, but straightened herself as the door thumped, and another customer walked in.
Jade never got sick so he couldn''t be sure, but he thought that cold medicines were probably not as bad as Emily claimed. The kinds they sold here in the store weren''t even restricted items.
--
When Harmony dropped by for her usual snack purchases, Jade told her, "I''m doing offline stuff with a friend from school tonight. You should be able to keep collecting cloud seeds on your own, but I can help more tomorrow."
"Sure, no problem Jade! Enjoy your time with your friend tonight," Harmony replied, and then winked at him.
Emily gave Jade the strangest look after Harmony left.
"What is it?" he asked. "Are you feeling worse?"
Emily sniffed again, and just shook her head. She didn''t linger when her shift ended, so Jade was relieved when the next person showed up on time.
--
Jade met Eric at a fast-food place near the shopping district.
Eric asked, "So¡ What do you want to get?"
Jade looked at his quest list and replied, "Pants, a couple of shirts, underwear, and socks."
Eric gave him a look and then shrugged. "Okay, shouldn''t take too long. Do you want to get anything to eat first?"
"I''m not really hungry, but we can get food if you are," Jade offered.
"Just a quick snack then," Eric said agreeably, and entered his order. It popped up in the dispenser a few moments later. He grabbed the carton and the cup, took a drink, and said, "I can eat while we walk."
"Okay," Jade agreed.
He thought that things were going well until the system popped up yet another new subquest, "Ask if Eric wants more food after completing at least 2 item acquisitions."
Jade flicked a glance at Eric, who was currently chewing a large bite of the crumbly fried item in his carton. His eyes flicked back to his subquest. It suddenly seemed disturbingly similar to the first mission you received after acquiring a pet in ''Living Jade Empire''.
5: Stars Arent Black and White
The first two places Jade tried seemed to cater mostly to girls, which had been a little awkward. He had examined a few androgenous items, and done a more specific search before selecting the third shop.
"No, that one is no good either," Jade grumbled as he eyed the low score the system offered for what he regarded as a perfectly reasonable looking selection. He carried the pants back to the display and eyed the other options glumly.
"You shop just like a girl," Eric groaned.
"Sorry," Jade apologized.
"What are you looking for anyway?" Eric asked.
Jade eyed the quest the system had highlighted for him again and mumbled, "Stylish clothes."
"Got a date?" Eric asked with interest.
Jade shook his head quickly.
"I bet you have a cute digital girlfriend," Eric suggested teasingly.
Jade pondered the statement seriously before replying, "I don''t think so. Some of my friends are female, but I don''t think any of them count as a girlfriend."
Eric''s eyes glinted and then slid away from Jade as he tucked his arms casually behind his head. He looked around and then declared, "I guess if I don''t help you out a little we''ll never get done in time for the movie."
Jade shrugged helplessly.
Eric dropped his arms, and waved at the display of pants. "None of those plain ones are any good if you want to do something stylish. You need to pick a striking image and run with it," he explained.
"Running clothes?" Jade asked doubtfully.
Eric glanced at Jade again and asked suddenly, "What''s the most amazing thing you''ve ever seen?"
Jade blinked, and then closed his eyes. He let his mind flash through a thousand of the incredible views that he''d already experienced. Shining sunsets and shimmering sunrises, snow capped mountains and tumultuous rivers, wide oceans and empty sand, even colorful crowds of people and interesting animals, flashed up and were dismissed.
Eric started to say, "It doesn''t have to¡"
Jade''s eyes snapped open and he asked, "Does it have to be in the real world?"
Eric gazed at him for a moment, and then shook his head.
Jade told him, "Then I think the most amazing thing I''ve seen so far was when a girl I play with online, who knew that dying again would force her to start a new character, insisted on taking the opportunity to ride a celestial dragon clear to the top of the sky."
Eric froze.
Jade explained quickly, "All I could see was the way she disintegrated into a rainbow hued cloud when she reached the top, but afterwards she told me that it felt like she was a mermaid that rose out of the sea and saw the stars for the first time before dissolving into foam." He shook his head and added, "She gave up everything she''d built up for that one moment."
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Eric seemed to be staring at him with a strangely incredulous gaze.
Jade offered nervously, "I know most people would say something like the sunrise from a mountain top, or a mother and child, but¡ it was truly amazing."
Eric covered his face and then said firmly, "Shut up."
Jade stopped talking.
"Fine," Eric declared after a long silent moment. He rubbed his face briefly and finally dropped his hands. "A celestial dragon ride. We can work with that, but we''ll never find anything that really shows it."
Eric walked over to a rack that held printed T-shirts and rummaged through them until he pulled out one that had a dark galaxy printed at the bottom. It lightened through a soft rainbow of colors until it reached the shoulders, where everything was hazy white and blue.
Despite having declared that the plain pants Jade had been looking at before were no good, he pulled a pair of simple dark jeans off the pile and tossed them at Jade with the shirt. Then he strode toward the girls side of the shop, and without hesitation pulled down a half jacket in white suede that was covered in silver sparkles.
Eric shoved the jacket into Jade''s arms and ordered a bit roughly, "Try those on together."
--
Jade gazed at his reflection in the mirror. The outfit wasn''t anything he''d ever have chosen, but it looked good on him, and somehow it really did faintly reflect the memory of her ending and beginning.
Eric asked impatiently, from where he leaned against the wall outside the booth, "So? Are you going to stay in there all day? The movie starts in less than an hour and you said you need underwear and socks too."
Jade checked his quest list almost out of habit, as he completed the purchases. The quest completion tone chimed softly as soon as he''d laid the last packet of socks on the counter. ''Ask if Eric wants more food,'' glowed softly.
"Want to get more food?" Jade asked.
"Sure, if you''re hungry now," Eric agreed easily. "We can grab something on the way, or at the theatre."
--
When the VR movie started everything was in grey. The seats were small and Jade struggled to find a position that didn''t impose an elbow on the person beside him. Eric lounged almost casually, but he was also careful to keep his limbs contained within his seat''s small space.
Jade watched for a while, expecting the colorless effect to disappear as time passed, but when the scene changed again and everything remained grey he asked quietly, "Why is it all in grayscale?"
"Black and white," Eric corrected.
"It''s not just black and white, there are all kinds of shades of grey," Jade objected.
Eric chuckled. "No, that''s what they called it. This movie was reconstructed from a 2D movie made in the 1900s. That is why all the sets are so small too, they didn''t have much data about what was outside of the scenes shown in the flat pictures."
"You like historical film making?" Jade asked curiously. He was pretty sure that ''historical'' would be the correct name for it.
Eric shrugged. "No idea. I just like this story, and am not sure that it has ever been remade."
Jade watched in silence, but he was busy asking the system about the history of the movie. The very pretty and slightly plump main female character turned out to be played by Monroe, and the name was actually slightly familiar to him. Her fame had been long lasting, although he''d never heard the name of this movie that he could recall.
When the movie ended, Eric asked hopefully, "What did you think?"
Jade shrugged and saw that Eric looked a little disappointed. "It was ok. Definitely a different style," Jade assured him quickly. "I think I liked that line from the end best."
Eric''s face brightened a little as he asked, "Nobody''s perfect?"
"Yeah," Jade agreed.
Eric grinned at him and agreed, "Yeah, that''s the best part."
6: Secret Sky
The System was not just being more active than usual where Jade''s friends were concerned.
Upon his safe arrival at his home, it awarded him another point of Karma. It even popped up an extra long list of small quests to be accomplished before bed. It made Jade feel that the System''s generosity with mini quests recently was a little worrisome, but at least his Karma balance would replenish fairly quickly this way, as each tiny quest awarded another point.
Normally there would be one small quest that included each of the little tasks. The fact that each small task gave a reward instead was not exactly abnormal, but usually indicated that the activity itself held some significance, or the system was preparing him for something. It was the same during class the next day, and again at his job. Everything was broken down into mini quests, with each step outlined.
When he finished up at the convenience store, Jade returned home without trouble, to his relief. The quick Karma replenishment didn''t seem to have been because the System had predicted another dangerous incident, but that made him even more curious about why it was being more active.
--
When Jade logged into ''Living Jade Empire'', he flicked over to his friend list. After describing the scene that had forced Appella to restart her character, to Eric the day before, he had been feeling guilty.
He hadn''t been in contact with Appella for a while. Ever since they had met, at the bottom of a slime mine, they had usually gone on a quest together at least once a week, but recently neither of them had messaged. His list showed that Appella was currently online, so he sent her a message.
Skyheart Snowsong was also online, but before Jade could compose another message to send to her, she pounced on him.
"Hisui-kun!" she exclaimed.
"Your name here is too long," Jade complained as he disentangled himself from the elf''s grasp. "You don''t have to add to mine to make it the same length."
Harmony laughed and suggested cheerily, "You can just call me Sky if you want?"
A plump squirrel with tufted ears came bounding up to them and delivered a message to Jade that read: "I''m good. Want to meet up since we''re both in Sky City?"
Jade told Harmony, "Okay then, Sky. One of my friends is nearby, do you mind if I add her to the party?"
Harmony laughed and shook her head. "Girlfriend?" she asked teasingly as Jade flicked the menu again to send the invitation.
He just rolled his eyes. They meandered companionably along the market, and each purchased several small items from players who were set up as vendors.
Skyheart Snowsong snickered and turned to observe Jade''s friend with interest a few minutes later, when a cute girl called out to him and waved.
"Hisui!" Appella exclaimed as she approached. The smile of greeting that she directed at Jade was warm, but she raised her eyebrows inquiringly at the slender elven woman standing beside Jade''s dwarf.
Jade made abbreviated introductions, "Skyheart Snowsong, Appella." The two women had both given their characters blue hair, although one was light and the other dark, and both grinned at his short introduction.
"How do you do?" Appella asked cheerfully.
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Skyheart Snowsong laughed again and exclaimed, "Such an old fashioned greeting!" She winked and added, "I''m doing well. You can just call me Sky, and yourself?"
"Okay Sky. I''m good," Appella replied easily, slanting a look at Jade. "I haven''t gotten to play with Hisui so often since I reincarnated."
"Oh?" Skyheart Snowsong asked with interest. She reached out and ruffled the hair of Jade''s short sturdy dwarf. "Has this brat been discriminating against you because of the level difference?"
Jade made a face at her and protested, "Both of you are currently the same level!"
Skyheart Snowsong looked surprised, and demanded, "How long have you been avoiding her?"
Appella grinned and replied easily, "It hasn''t been that long! But Jade is at over 300 now, and with so many high level skills, the quests I''m getting would mostly be boring for him."
Jade protested, "Hey, I have never refused to go on any quest with you because it was boring!"
Skyheart Snowsong laughed and asked with interest, "How long ago did you start this incarnation then?"
Appella told her seriously, "Just a few months ago. It might look like I gained a lot in that amount of time, but when you know that accumulated level just means the total of your skill points, and you know where to pick up skills, level isn''t as impressive."
Jade spoke up, "I bet you don''t just have a lot of different first level skills."
Appella winked at him. "I won''t tell," she replied laughingly.
--
It didn''t take the three of them long to finish Skyheart Snowsong''s quest, and when they were done Appella suggested, "I''ve got a puzzle type quest that I''ve been ignoring in the country that''s below us at the moment, do you two want to tackle it with me?"
Jade agreed promptly, "Sure."
After she finished setting the little fairy dragon she had won as her messenger, in place of her mountain snow cat, Harmony finally responded, "I don''t mind, but how do we get down?"
Jade opened his mouth to offer his airship''s services, but Appella interrupted enthusiastically, "Let''s jump! I''ve got enough enchanted feathers for us all."
Skyheart Snowsong laughed and agreed, "Okay!"
Jade objected, "Hey, wait, if we get the timing off we''ll have to revive!"
Both women stuck their tongues out at him in response. Harmony laughed, and Appella assured him, "It''s ok, I''ve got more Karma than levels at the moment!"
"Me too," Skyheart Snowsong agreed.
Appella handed them each a feather and then walked over to the low city wall. She jumped up onto it and called out, "Come on, Hisui and Sky! Last one to the ground has to pay the firecat''s bribe!"
Appella''s feet had barely left the wall when Skyheart Snowsong sprang after her. After a moment, Jade shook his head, kicked his heels to ignite his boot boosters and launched himself over the wall into the sky after them.
--
Over the next few days, the three of them did several quests together.
Outside of the game Jade''s own System reduced the micromanagement of his daily quests a little, and he decided that either he had accomplished whatever it had been trying to coax him into, or that his Karma balance had been bolstered back to a level it found acceptable.
Then Jade logged in one evening to find that both women were online before him, but greeted his arrival with identical messages that said: "Busy tonight."
Jade returned to his smithy and pouted for a while before laughing at himself. He knew that he should be glad that both of his friends liked each other. He resumed his work on his pudgy little airship in a more cheerful mood.
--
Harmony asked him teasingly when she stopped at the convenience store the next afternoon, "Did you go somewhere and pout after reading our messages? You didn''t even ask what we were doing?"
Jade grinned at her and admitted, "Maybe?"
"Where did you go?" Harmony asked.
"Just back to my smithy to work on my airship conversion," Jade admitted. "What were the two of you doing?"
Her eyes sparkled as she blew him a kiss and winked. "Sorry, I can''t tell. It''s a secret," she confessed laughingly.
7: The Beginning Of The End
Appella sought Hisui out for help with a couple of quests that she didn''t actually need help with, and Jade found that rather than being annoyed, he enjoyed the extra time together. He wasn''t sure if anything had actually changed, or if it was just that Skyheart''s teasing had made him pay more attention to what he was doing.
After class on Monday, Eric invited Jade out. They were growing a bit closer too. Jade found himself as happy about the increased real life interactions with the boy as he had with the girl online, so he didn''t think that he had any particularly romantic attachment to either. But he had friends now, and things were going more easily than they had in the past.
Eric explained cheerfully, "We''ll go play games at a nearby sports center after you finish at work! It''ll be good to get some exercise!" He added with a wink, "And this is more the kind of thing that most guys invite each other to do."
"Okay!" Jade accepted cheerfully, but warned his friend, "My coordination isn''t very good."
Eric rolled his eyes and declared, "Even more reason for you to come and practice activities that use it then!"
Jade made his way to the convenience store, and found that things were in pretty good shape today. Not that there wasn''t any cleaning or anything, but all of the messes and incidents were relatively minor.
After his shift, he barely noticed the system''s quest that told him to meet Eric. He automatically hurried over to the designated sports center.
--
Jade was unsurprised when Eric handily trounced him at several games.
Jade finally won a round of laser tag where they wore sensor jackets, and dodged and climbed around various obstacles to shoot each other.
Eric regarded him with amazement and exclaimed with surprise, "Wow, you''re really good at this one!"
Jade shrugged, and explained, "It''s more about calculating the angles than having to hit a moving target."
Eric objected, "I was moving!"
Jade laughed and pointed out, "Not as much as you could have moved if we were playing that kind of game in VR. We are trapped in a small room here! I don''t really understand why we''re playing it this way? VR would be much more realistic."
Eric reminded him dryly, "Because this way you''re moving your whole body, not just your brain."
"Well, full motion consoles then," Jade argued.
Eric just laughed.
Jade lost another set of games, without surprise, and when they left the sports center Eric told him, "I''ll walk you home."
Jade rolled his eyes as he pointed out, "I can navigate the bus system safely home by myself." The system was still putting it up as his current quest every evening.
Eric clutched his chest in mock agony and said sadly, "Jade is tired of me already."
Jade asked curiously, "What are you doing? I never said that."
"Nevermind," Eric replied laughingly. "Let''s walk together anyway!"
"Okay," Jade agreed.
As they walked, Eric asked curiously, "What do you plan to do after we graduate?"
"I think that first I want to go to Australia, and then try one of those Antarctic tours," Jade replied.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
"What? As a job?" Eric asked.
"I don''t know if they take on short timers. I expect I''ll have to buy my way." Jade was still explaining what little he''d learned from his research so far, when the sound of an engine winding up on the corner ahead reached them.
Eric frowned and pulled Jade farther from the road, but they didn''t stop walking as he commented, "I don''t see how you can even think of affording that without getting a better job first. You are just working at a convenience store. I mean, I couldn''t afford that, and my parents are paying my rent for me."
Jade explained, "I don''t buy all the stuff you do. I don''t eat out, or get coffee¡"
In front of them, a car came around the curve sideways.
Jade could tell it wasn''t going to miss them, but this wasn''t a game, and he just couldn''t move fast enough.
Eric reacted faster, grabbing Jade''s elbow and swinging him flat against the wall.
With his back against the wall, Jade was able to lift Eric into the air just as the car hit.
The last thing Jade saw before his view switched to a dark system announcement, was Eric''s horrified expression.
--
Eric watched in horror as Jade was crushed into the wall by the car''s engine.
He didn''t want to. He really didn''t want to fall onto him either, but there was nothing he could do as gravity forced him downward and added his own weight to Jade''s damaged body.
In some horrible molasses of slow motion, the car bounced away from them and spun, until it bounced off the wall again a few feet farther on.
Something spanged away from the wreckage and hit Eric''s head.
Time stopped for him for an unknown space of emptiness. When Eric regained some fragment of awareness, he cracked his eyes open and lay frozen in horror.
The drones had come. And with tiny arms tipped in a variety of tools, they were disassembling Jade.
Fluids oozed out of the remains, but Eric could tell that it was more transparent than it should have been.
A ragged squeak escaped him, and one of the drones turned in his direction. Eric squeezed his eyes shut and prayed to all the gods he had never believed in.
The next time he opened his eyes, they were loading him into an ambulance. They told him reassuringly that he had had a close call, but he''d be fine.
Eric summoned all his courage and whispered, "What about Jade?"
They asked with confusion, "What do you mean? A piece of jewelry or something?"
They didn''t seem to understand his protest, "He was a person. I think? I thought¡"
"Don''t worry about it for now," they advised. "The driver of the vehicle wasn''t nearly as badly injured as you are, and the accident response team will gather up everything they can."
Eric couldn''t figure out how to answer, so he just closed his eyes again.
--
Jade woke up in his own room, and cringed. He had never died in front of someone that he was close to before.
It was awhile before he summoned the courage to ask the system the date and time. Only a day had passed. After a minute, he got up.
The clothes he had been wearing were gone, but everything else was normal. The Tuesday he had missed had been the day he hadn''t been scheduled to work this week. He wondered if he would be able to borrow Eric''s notes for the class they shared.
Eric wasn''t at class, so Jade took notes for him instead. When the class ended he rushed forward to request any missed assignments directly from the teacher, and then tried calling Eric.
The call went straight to the messaging system.
--
At the convenience store, Jade found that Emily had finally recovered from her cold.
She took over the cleaning chores while he stood blankly behind the counter, attending his duties by rote.
When his current customer slapped the counter and demanded, "Earth to Jade!" Jade finally focused on her face.
"Harmony," he identified her with relief. Her bright riding gear and silver braids looked the same as always.
She reached across the counter suddenly and laid her hand against his cheek. She asked worriedly, "Who else would I be? What''s wrong Jade?"
Jade opened his mouth to answer, but shut it without saying anything. His eyes slid warily to Emily. He found he couldn''t say the things he might have told Harmony if they had been alone.
"Tell me later," Harmony said firmly. She withdrew her hand, pulled down her goggles, and strode away. As she dropped her hoverboard in front of the door, she called out, "I''ll be waiting!"
Jade smiled for the first time since he had awakened.
8: Crumbling Foundations
When Harmony got home that night she stowed her hoverboard, and then fed her cat. Both she and her pet were eating food straight from cans, but it was served on mismatched decorative porcelain, with equally mismatched but equally elegant stainless ''silver'' ware.
It amused her somewhat that the tableware others would dismiss had probably been crafted before she had been born. Her residence was as colorful and comfortable as the outerwear she used when riding her board. Old items stood proudly beside new ones, equal in their owner''s regard.
She discovered that she had two messages waiting after she logged in to ''Living Jade Empire''. Both of them were from Jade''s friend Appella.
The first one read, "I''m sorry, nothing against you, I just can''t talk to him right now." The second read, "P.S. Hisui isn''t what you think he is."
Harmony found that she could not reply because Appella had already removed her from the friend list.
If she could have, she would have told the younger woman, "Jade is always Jade."
She gazed into the virtual distance thoughtfully. She couldn''t quite imagine Jade committing the kind of assault that such words too often implied. But sometimes the best people did the worst thing, or the worst people did the best thing.
Both of them usually seemed far more tolerant of others and kinder than the average person came across. She would bet that there had been some kind of misunderstanding.
She sent Jade a cheerful message that didn''t carry any trace of her speculations, and waited until he came online. She had promised she would be waiting to hear his troubles after all.
--
Jade didn''t even notice the usual quests pop up and complete as he made his way home after his shift.
He watered his plant, and logged into the game without eating more than the minimum required to fulfill the system''s usual request. A moment later he couldn''t have said whether or not he had even had the usual request to fill. It wasn''t important.
A message from Skyheart Snowsong arrived in his smithy almost as soon as he did. He caught Harmony''s note in his fingers and read: "Where are you? Let''s meet up!"
Inexplicable relief filled Jade as he replied: "At my smithy on the edge of the great desert, I can come to where you are!"
The messenger fluttered off and a moment later hers arrived, making him smile again a little. "No, wait there! I want to see it!"
Jade was closing the message with a smile, when he noticed that a name was missing from his friends list, and his smile faded. Appella was gone.
He frowned. It wasn''t impossible that she had died again, and had to restart for a third time. But after the celestial dragon ride had killed her character, she had sent him a friend request right away, and there weren''t any requests waiting.
Harmony seemed to be taking a while, so he sent, "Are you sure you don''t need me to come get you?"
Jade was starting to worry when her reply finally arrived. It insisted, "No, I''m almost there (I think!) I just had to stop and rescue a kitten on my way over the mountain!"
--
Jade was still frowning at his menus, debating whether or not to put in an inquiry with support because he found that his searches for Appella weren''t returning any likely results at all, when Harmony finally arrived.
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She saw him standing beside his anvil frowning at nothing, and rapped loudly on the edge of one of the wide open doors.
"Jade," she called out, "sorry, I mean Hisui."
He looked up and smiled. "Hey," he greeted her casually. He finally noticed where she was standing and insisted, "Oh, please come in! You don''t need to wait outside!"
Harmony''s brow was wrinkled, but she summoned up a return smile for him. After a moment she sauntered into the smithy and began looking around.
The pudgy little airship took up most of the vast room. The walls were hung with both traditional tools, and fantastically strange devices that she couldn''t recognize. There were three different forges, ranging from enormous to small.
After a bit, she looked at Jade who was frowning again, and asked, "So? Want to talk about it?"
Jade looked away and swallowed hard before replying, "I¡ this is going to sound¡ um¡ I don''t know if I should tell you."
Harmony tucked her arms up behind her head and replied with a bit of amusement, "I''m old Jade. There isn''t much I haven''t heard before."
"I seriously doubt you''ve heard this before," Jade replied glumly.
Harmony winked and suggested, "So just tell me as much as you want to. You don''t ever have to tell me more than that."
After a minute, Jade nodded and took a deep breath before saying all in a rush, "I died in front of Eric yesterday, and today I can''t get an answer, and I''m really worried."
Harmony blinked. "Eric?" she questioned. "Is that the name of Appella''s player?"
Jade had been expecting her to ask, "You died?" It took him a moment to comprehend the question, and then he replied swiftly, "No! I mean Appella is a girl I''ve known for about five years in this game. Eric is a guy I go to school with! We just met this year, but he''s already a good friend."
Harmony rubbed her eyebrow and then asked the question he''d been expecting, "You died? Of embarrassment?"
Jade hesitated before answering. Finally he said, "I got hit by a car the day before yesterday."
Harmony stared at him. "I know you were gone again but you looked okay, just kind of out of it, when I saw you this afternoon?"
Jade nodded and assured her, "I''m okay."
Harmony gazed at him uncomprehendingly for a long moment, and then complained, "Usually, I feel like we understand each other pretty well, but I feel like I can''t understand you today,"
"I''m sorry," Jade replied uncomfortably, without explaining.
Skyheart Snowsong walked over and sat down on his anvil, which lowered her face close to Hisui''s dwarven one, where he stood beside it.
Harmony spread her arms invitingly, and asked, "Hug?"
Jade gave her a fragile smile and stepped into her hug.
She stroked his tangled dwarven hair with one elven hand while he leaned into her trustingly. After a bit she told him as comfortingly as she could manage, "I don''t understand, but I think that if you give your friend some time, things will probably work out."
He nodded. She heaved a sigh after another minute, and he pushed away from her to look into her face questioningly.
"Speaking of your friends, what happened between you and Appella?" she asked.
Jade frowned and replied, "I don''t know what happened to her, she is just gone from my list, and that''s a bit worrisome too. I hope that she is okay."
Harmony tilted her head. "She''s gone from mine too. Nothing happened that you know of?"
Jade replied, "You have seen her since I have. What were the two of you doing? Did she say anything?"
Harmony didn''t answer right away, and Jade returned her earlier words with mild amusement, "You don''t have to tell me if you don''t want to."
"I want to," Harmony declared. But then she looked away and muttered, "But I feel like I''d be betraying her trust."
He suggested anxiously, "Maybe she died?"
She immediately assured him, "I do think she is still alive and all, so don''t worry about that."
Jade blinked and asked curiously, "What made you think something happened between us?"
Harmony gave him a wry grin and said mysteriously, "I didn''t get to tell her that Jade is always Jade." She reached out and ruffled his hair. Jade rolled his eyes at her and she added, "Even if he spells it Hisui here." She stuck her tongue out at him.
Jade smiled. After a bit he asked, "So, you said you rescued a kitten?"
Harmony laughed, and explained the event that had caught her halfway across the desert with her usual energy.
9: The Humanity
Eric attended class the next morning, to Jade''s relief. He had a bandage on his forehead, but looked okay otherwise, however he wouldn''t respond to Jade at all. He stoically ignored all of Jade''s whispers, movements, and notes until the class ended.
"Eric?" Jade asked again more hesitantly as everyone else began to exit the room.
Eric finally looked at him, but then he looked away again before saying roughly, "I knew that everything might not go like I hoped when I came here, but you''re not even human! Leave me alone, I can''t deal with it yet!"
Eric gathered his things and stomped toward the door, while Jade stood frozen behind him. He passed through the doorway before he finally stopped. Jade didn''t know whether to run to him or call out.
After drawing a deep breath Eric spun, stuck his head back into the room, and yelled angrily, "But I am glad that you are still alive!"
Jade had only taken one step forward, and he didn''t know how to react to the positive words shouted with anger. As he struggled, Eric turned back and literally ran away. Jade dashed to the door and saw his friend racing down the hall, faster than he could ever hope to catch up.
Jade glanced at his quest list, hoping for some kind of guidance, but it seemed like the System was as clueless as he felt. There was nothing listed there now except for his main quest: to see the world through a human perspective.
He left the classroom under the weight of curious gazes from those who had lingered for a moment.
--
As soon as he got home, Jade did what almost every kid does when everything goes wrong suddenly. He called his mother.
"Mom," Jade said abruptly as soon as she connected, "I think I might not be human."
There was a long silence, and then his mother laughed. "How human of you, to be worried about whether or not you''re human," she replied.
"I''m serious," Jade said.
"Why suddenly?" his mother asked curiously.
Jade hesitated. He felt certain that Eric had told the truth, but he didn''t have any other reason to provide.
She asked suddenly, as though she already knew everything, "Is it because you failed to survive long enough to complete your main quest again?"
He asked suspiciously, "Mom, are you human?"
She laughed again, and then declared, "I am a hundred percent human Jade!"
"Am I human?" Jade asked directly.
The moment of silence that seemed to indicate that his mother didn''t want to answer echoed between them for a moment. Jade found it much harder to assure her that she didn''t have to answer, the way he had with Harmony. He almost desperately needed to hear her answer.
She finally admitted, "Yes, though I wasn''t certain of your humanity when you were younger, and everything you did was on the quest list in your head. But you really seem to have outgrown that, you are not some kind of strange organic robot, you are definitely a person."
Jade froze and thought about how the system had been listing every little thing as a quest lately.
"Jade?" his mother asked.
Somehow he couldn''t bring himself to tell her. If she believed he was human, he really didn''t want her to change her mind. "Um yeah," he said instead, "I got hit by a car¡"
Before he could tell her that Eric had seen it, she demanded worriedly, "How come you are getting into so many traffic accidents all of a sudden?"
Somehow protesting that he didn''t know, that they really were accidents, and listening to her complain that he needed to be more wary¡ was relaxing. Normal. His mother''s fretting soothed away some of the fretting he had been doing.
--
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At work, Emily greeted Jade with a sour expression. "You''re not sick?" she asked.
"No?" Jade replied questioningly.
"I figured since you were so spacy yesterday that you''d have relapsed and been out again today," she explained gloomily. "Since you''re here, you can do the cleaning."
"Okay," Jade agreed without complaint.
The system popped up each of the small quests as he accepted, but instead of a feeling of accomplishment as he cleared each one, he felt a bit worried. It was almost as though he had reminded it to be more active by worrying about it.
--
Harmony did not drop by for her usual snacks at the convenience store that evening, but when Jade logged in to ''Living Jade Empire'' that night, Skyheart Snowsong was already waiting outside his smithy.
"Hey," she greeted him casually with a smile. "Want to help me with a cat quest?"
Jade smiled back. "Sure," he replied simply.
Here in the game everyone could revive with Karma earned from quests, and everyone had a quest list. Everyone interacted with a system. Here, Jade was just another ordinary human player.
"Eric came to school today," he informed her.
"So everything''s okay?" she asked neutrally, as though she could see that it wasn''t.
He shrugged without explaining. After a moment she nodded.
They collected rare cheeses and then entrapped the feline shapeshifters, who were plaguing a mountain village with their banditry. At the end of the quest, the King of Cats appeared and rewarded them for dealing with the false cats.
He gave them each a small silver bell and told them, "With this, a cat can become human for one day, or a human may become a cat."
Jade asked, "Why would a cat want to become human?"
The King of Cats looked at Jade and replied, "How curious, you don''t remember who you were, do you?"
Harmony laughed and asked, "Was Hisui a cat once?"
The King of Cats blinked his eyes lazily and said enigmatically, "Not a cat."
Jade asked, "Who was I?"
"A giver of quests who gave himself a quest. One who followed a path told of in a thousand human tales," he replied with amusement. A moment later he stretched and slipped into a shadow, and was gone.
Jade stared after the cat and asked Harmony, "What makes someone human?"
Harmony laughed and asked, "Are you serious?"
Jade looked Skyheart Snowsong in the eye and replied, "Yes."
Harmony looked around, and then targeted one of the human villagers with a deadly attack. Jade gasped in shock. The other villagers scattered.
Jade asked with bewilderment, "Why did you do that?!"
"Wait," she instructed.
After a few endlessly long minutes with no further interaction, the body dissipated and the villagers returned and resumed their tasks.
"They don''t really care," she explained. "If you ask one, they''ll remember that that villager was here before, for a while, but they don''t miss him. They aren''t human. Humans care. Humans love, and hate, and experience thousands of different emotions during their lifespans."
"What is love then?" he asked. "Everyone says hate is the opposite, but I think hate is just great dislike."
Harmony gave him a long look, before sighing and muttering, "I suppose you must be at that age where you doubt everything."
Jade insisted, "I''m asking seriously!"
She shrugged. "Ask a thousand people and you''ll probably get a thousand different answers," she replied seriously. "But to me¡ love is, I guess it is wanting someone to be in your life always, and if they can''t, still wanting them to live well and happily until long after you are gone. Love is greedy."
He thought about that for a while and then told her, "I love you."
Harmony laughed and replied lightly, "I love you too."
Jade recalled the way Eric had shouted angrily, ''But I am glad that you are still alive!'' He said suddenly, with mild amazement, "Eric must love me too."
She glanced at him and then suggested, "I''m sure there are many people who love you Jade. Your parents, your family, and your friends."
"My mother probably loves me," he agreed. "She says so pretty often."
She laughed. "I''m sure she does," she agreed with amusement.
He considered it for a long moment and then added, "I love her too."
Harmony flicked a sharp look at him. "Aren''t there quite a few people you love? How about your friend Appella?"
Jade thought for a while before answering, "I would like her to remain in my life, so yes, I think so."
Skyheart Snowsong raised her face to the sky, as though her elven eyes could see the dragons that were rumored to fly above the clouds that they could sometimes be seen dancing in. "I hope you get a chance to tell her so."
Jade looked up and realized what she was actually looking at. "There''s no guarantee I can contact her, even if I ask the Jade Emperor," he pointed out.
She smiled and asked lightly, "Would it be worth the attempt?"
He didn''t have to weigh it, the answer was obvious. "Yes."
10: Climb to Top of the Sky
The dwarven Hisui and elven Skyheart Snowsong flew halfway across the world together¡ or at least, halfway across Living Jade Empire''s map.
It was hardly the first time two individuals of vastly different species had traveled together. Nor the first time they had grown closer. But Jade wondered whether Harmony felt the way their friendship seemed to multiply with every extra minute that passed as the night turned to day again within the game.
The sun rose over a vast crowd as the skimmer launched itself over the tallest dune at the edge of the Sea that lay beneath the Imperial Palace in the sky. The islands that ran along the far edge of that expanse weren''t even a shimmer along the horizon, but Jade knew where they were almost as well as if he had once placed them himself.
His mother had told him of her own character''s flight upwards, before the stairs had been placed. Of the way she had made her own flight to the top of the world, not the way Appella had flown above the sea of air and dissolved, but all the way to the Emperor himself with the help of her dearest friends.
Their adventures had helped shape the Empire that now existed, and laid down the path that drew hundreds of characters to this shore every week. Perhaps thousands, or tens of thousands now, Jade guessed as he surveyed the seemingly endless crowd for enough room to park the sand skimmer safely.
The steps that rose into the air in a translucent shimmer as the sun rose within the game were rumored to always exist, but only become visible on the one day a week that the Emperor granted the citizens of the Empire audience. As one of the first climbers fell, Jade felt oddly certain that the steps did not actually exist within the same space for all characters.
"How does this thing actually fly?" Harmony asked as she gazed at the semitransparent spiral that rose into the sky ahead of them. "Any chance we can just fly up the staircase?"
"We''d knock other people off!" Jade objected.
"That seems to be a completely valid tactic from everything I''ve ever heard about the climb," she informed him as they watched another climber fall.
"The Emperor watches. How you get to the top matters," Jade told her seriously.
Of course, the climb was a competition. It was a race. Only a limited number of people could make their request, and getting to the top was just the start. The game''s Emperor rewarded conquests whether that was fair or not, but Jade wasn''t hoping to gain that sort of reward.
He was hoping to be allowed to speak to someone precious to him.
Harmony pointed and shouted over the increasingly loud buzz of the crowd who had been waiting for the stairs to appear, "Then land there! Below the curve!"
Jade aimed for the gap, and then realized why the space was still empty. A grave marker stood there. Not the kind that stood on real graves, no pile of stone, or solid plinth. This was a spiral of light that reflected the steps in the sky above it.
"Jump out!" he shouted back.
Skyheart Snowsong launched herself from the skimmer at his word, and landed in that beautiful spiral. Her hair spun in the invisible currents that pulled the illusory steps.
Jade grounded the skimmer at the edge of the crowd and turned back in time to see the arrows launch. Harmony and at least a dozen others shot lines upward to catch a step. Most fell back, but a few caught.
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He kicked the ground and the jets within his boots launched him higher than he could ever have lept on his own. Higher than the first curve of steps.
Hisui landed hard, against a step as transparent as glass and as hard as stone. His character''s coordination hadn''t failed him, he was suspended firmly in the air. But with a hundred eyes gazing upward, he felt as awkward as he did in real life.
Harmony''s character climbed toward him, her own line securely wrapped around the step above him. He pulled himself to his feet and got ready to pull her onto the stairs, before the sight of the people who had already climbed higher than this in the time it had taken him to land grabbed his attention.
They were scrambling upward almost madly. Desperately. Each one determined to arrive first.
For a moment, Jade hesitated. He didn''t want to let go of his friend without at least knowing why, but¡ he wasn''t certain that he was willing to trample anyone else''s hopes or dreams in order to contact her.
Harmony pulled him out of it with her instruction, "Grab on Jade!"
He stuck his small arm toward her automatically, and when her slender elven fingers grabbed him, pulled with a dragon''s strength. Harmony laughed as he tossed her up to the step above, landing as lightly and neatly as a bird. Or a hoverboard rider.
Jade looked down at the people who were struggling to climb the rope she had secured with a knot written in the air with an arrow. Most people wouldn''t have been able to pull off such a trick shot with skill alone, but he hadn''t noticed any sign of a god''s favor. More people were struggling to leap from translucent step to step behind him, while yet others were laying pre-built ramps into place behind them.
Jade reached down and pulled. The rope, and all of the people on it rose upward. Faces filled with incredulous hope, uncertainty, and fear gazed upward. A few more people lept to snatch at the end of it as it was pulled out of reach.
Harmony called out, "Come on! Before they catch up!"
"In a minute!" Jade swore.
His deft hands tied the rope around the step he stood on once the highest of the climbers was within arms reach, and his boots lit again as he slammed his feet down. He raised his flask and dumped water over his feet and the step, making it shine slickly. He stamped down with his boots, and they flamed as he bounced upward.
The cord, that carried at least a dozen, lit as Hisui caught Skyheart Snowsong''s hand. The elven rope didn''t burn instantly, like a candle wick, but it smoked and smoldered and began to blacken. The climbers cried out in protest, and the highest frantically scrabbled for the slick step above them.
The people climbing from below pulled out weapons, and slashed at the charring rope. Jade didn''t continue to watch what happened, but he listened for the sound of an impact, and heard one a moment later with an almost physical wince.
"That was needlessly kind," Harmony chided him as she almost effortlessly made her way upward at his side.
"Needlessly cruel, you mean," he grumbled.
She glanced back and then raised a single eyebrow. "Perhaps, but only if you think that helping them set them back in some way?"
Jade couldn''t see a step where the next one should hang, but he could see the one above that. He didn''t take its existence on faith, but he put his faith in the hand that took his when he reached out, as he pulled her close.
He could see her surprise, but she laughed when he tossed her upward without stopping to explain, and landed as gracefully as though they had practiced this climb a thousand times. Her hands caught the spool of thread he tossed after her and she knotted it around the step.
Jade secured the end he''d held, and stepped onto the thread as though climbing the wind that swept upward along the path the stairs laid. His dwarf ran up the nearly invisible thread as agilely as he could forge and cut a hundred toothed gear. The faintest glimmer, as something caught in the wind blew past the spot where a step should have been, made him laugh.
"Raising hopes without fulfilling them," he gasped as his feet hit the solid surface that supported Harmony''s elf.
She didn''t ask what he meant, she understood that he was finally answering, but she argued, "Raising hopes is fine, it''s making false promises that would be needlessly cruel."
They left the nearly invisible thread that ran over a completely invisible step in place and continued to climb. They weren''t catching up to the people who had gotten ahead of them, but no one was catching up to them yet either. A curious dragon peeked out of a cloud that seemed to be being drawn in slowly by the spiralling wind.
11: Onward
The dragons swirled around the upper steps as though the climbers smelled utterly delicious. A few of the climbers ahead of Jade and Harmony fell, as though the swirl of air created by the dragons'' passage pulled them off course, despite the fact that no wing or tail actually brushed them.
"Are they creating this wind, or riding it?" Harmony asked as Skyheart Snowsong''s hair rose picturesquely into the air as though she were falling downward instead of standing firmly upon a step that could have held up a castle.
Jade tightened the laces that held Hisui''s pouches in place and replied, "Both? They sort of phase in and out of existence to fly, rather than directly carrying all of their mass on such relatively short wings. It pushes and pulls at the air, and the disruption sort of creates streams, or perhaps currents that they use to help carry them."
She shot another line upward, and warned him, "I''m almost out of thread. We should have saved some."
He watched the enormous beings that couldn''t actually exist in the world outside of this virtual space, and grinned. "You''re just aiming at the wrong target."
She scoffed, as her own eyes followed his gaze, "Even I have heard tales about the climbers who tried to shoot a dragon!"
"Let''s just catch a ride," he replied laughingly as he pulled a different kind of projectile out of a bag of holding.
Skyheart caught the unwieldy arrow-like object, and to his surprise made no objection as she laid it against her string. Hisui held the trailing string and reached out to wrap an arm up around her waist, as though flinging it over the shoulder of another dwarf.
"Remember this moment," she murmured as she raised her bow again.
"I''ll never forget," he swore as the sail launched toward the swirling dragons, and yanked both of them free of the Emperor''s ''staircase''.
--
Even the dragons couldn''t carry them higher, though even larger and less distinct shapes still moved overhead. The sky had darkened, not because night was falling, but because they had risen so high. The air was thin, and yet the game didn''t leave them gasping for breath or let their blood bubble the way reality might.
Jade guided the kite as they lost a bit of the height they had gained, to land on a step once more. They had left many of the climbers far below, and finally taken the lead. Neither of them stopped moving, or wasted time gazing down upon their competitors. Their gazes were fixed on the palace that now showed clearly, little more than a kilometer away.
A few minutes later, Hisui''s boots bounced his short sturdy figure upward one last time, and he smiled in satisfaction as he landed on a surface far softer than the steps that had carried them upward this far.
This small island was only different from the steps in that it would stay solidly in existence after the stairway vanished. The gates that stood at the top of the stairs three small islands onward were still firmly shut. Visiting hours for the Emperor''s residence were strictly limited.
A bird whisked itself over the edge and heaved the burden in its beak into a somewhat hidden nest among the branches of a surprisingly solid looking decorative tree. The branches were scarred, but sturdy.
"Others have anchored themselves there," Harmony murmured, with her gaze fastened on the same small nest perched on the scarred branches.
Jade nodded.
They moved onward.
--
They finally reached the stairs where the first step warned, "Leave your burdens behind you."
There was no question of the meaning. Anyone who played ''Living Jade Empire'' knew that this was where a character needed to discard every enchanted or important item they carried behind. Jade hadn''t come unprepared either. He untied a pouch he hadn''t touched throughout the entire climb, and opened it wide, and then wider. It flattened as it expanded, and then, when the edge snapped into place, it hummed.
Skyheart''s eyes widened incredulously. "You actually brought a portable gate?" Harmony''s voice asked even more breathlessly than her character''s face evidenced.
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"Everything will be dropped beside my forges, back in the desert," Jade assured her. He grimaced. "Everything but this."
"You could leave that down here¡ Or even throw it over the edge on that sail you used to ride the dragon''s waves," Harmony pointed out after a moment.
Jade laughed, and began stripping off his gear and tossing it through the temporary portal. He could even see things land on the floor on the other side. "Finite power," he explained. "It was always a single shot item. Hurry, it''ll only last for about five minutes. Once it burns through the gem stones, it will be nothing but a circle of ash."
Skyheart threw her bow through first, to his surprise. "I trust your judgement," she replied to his glance.
By the time they finished, both characters stood before the bottom step in what amounted to their underwear, though both appeared to still be fully dressed in fairly plain clothing. The first of the other climbers landed in the plaza at the base of the stone steps with a thump, and charged forward.
Hisui took one step back, and didn''t bother to protest as the man charged up the steps ahead of them. By the time the stranger hit the step that said, ''nothing lasts forever except time itself,'' he was completely naked.
Skyheart arched her elven eyebrow, but didn''t immediately comment. The dwarf beside her began to laugh as a circle of dust that had cost more than the sand skimmer far below began to blow away at his feet.
"Magic underwear?" Harmony suggested speculatively as she took the first step.
"Or none," Jade agreed as he climbed.
Their own simple underclothing stayed in place until they reached the gate in time for it to swing open. The stranger gazed forward resolutely, and avoided meeting their eyes.
"There are at least a thousand guides written up for meeting the Jade Emperor," Jade pointed out curiously.
"I have left everything behind me, I won''t fail!" the man finally exclaimed, though he kept his eyes fixed upon the empty chairs upon the raised platform at the other end of the room.
Skyheart took a step backward as the next person entered the room. Jade followed Harmony''s lead after a glance at the exhausted girl''s face. Her eyes were desperate, almost as though her own survival depended upon the Emperor''s answer, rather than trying to fulfill some greedy wish for her character.
Harmony frowned at him and asked bluntly, "Shouldn''t you move to the front?" Jade blinked. She waved a hand at the two who now stood ahead of them, and pointed out, "At least once he has only answered the first three."
"What about you then?" he asked.
She stared at him for a moment, and then chuckled. "I''m not here to ask for anything."
The next person into the hall pushed forward and declared, "Step aside then! I must have it! I will have it! She won''t take me back if I fail again!"
Jade frowned. "Maybe that would be better for him," he murmured without pushing forward.
Harmony arched Skyheart''s elven brow at the small grumpy looking figure at her side.
"A lover who demands this kind of task? It''s more than half luck making it up here at all," Jade pointed out.
"We don''t know anything about it," she replied mildly.
Jade turned toward her again and objected, "My mother says that you should just find the person that you don''t want to live without."
"Maybe he''s found her," she suggested.
"I don''t think so," he argued more stubbornly than either of them had expected. Her brows shot upward again. "Lasting loves forgive things."
Harmony gazed at the rather desperate expressions on two of the three who stood ahead of them. After a moment she shook her head. "Romantic love isn''t exactly like the love of family and friends that we spoke of at the bottom of this climb. And as I said, we don''t know anything about it. Maybe he''s done something horrible and if he completes this task successfully she''ll forgive him once more?"
"That kind of love isn''t love?" he objected doubtfully.
"It is, but it isn''t, and usually it''s more," she explained confusingly. "Romance includes everything that is in love, but adds a physical component entangled with complex emotional ties."
"But if it''s just someone you don''t want to live without¡" his protest trailed off. He was here to ask for Appella''s contact information himself, but she had never even asked him to do anything like this. Perhaps he had misjudged a relationship over a few words.
A handful of people rushed through the doors, and Jade instinctively stepped aside.
As though she could hear the doubts that trailed through his mind, she said softly, "Just remember that if you have to, you can live without them even if you don''t want to."
Neither of them paid attention to the filling room, or the way they were being pushed farther back. Looking at her expression made him feel sad. It hurt him to see that faded sorrow on her normally cheerful face.
Jade suddenly felt certain that this was another of those thousands of human emotions that defined humanity.
A man stepped forward and took the waiting seat that stood above them. A very large cat seated herself beside him. Jade turned to look, and the faint chime of a quest completed rang softly through his head.
The crowd that separated them seemed almost translucent as Jade gazed at a very, very familiar face. Hisui''s eyes widened. His rugged dwarven face didn''t resemble the Emperor''s all that much, but how had he never realized¡
12: The System Unlocks
Jade blacked out in the middle of that realization as his system overloaded. Not the game system, his own. He sort of¡ returned to the system. Suddenly, as though he had just died. It worried him, but he couldn''t quite process the implication.
He had been safely in his room, nothing should have been able to damage him there. Instead of watching a replay of his most recent demise passing before his eyes, the system began unlocking. He began unlocking. He was the system.
The King of Cats hadn''t lied. Eric hadn''t been mistaken.
Jade had given himself the quest to see the world through a human perspective. He had given himself all the quests he had ever done. Jade was, and wasn''t himself at the same time. Pieces of him were put on hold while other portions were integrating with ''forgotten'' paths.
His consciousness swirled. Literally.
Reintegrating his old memory data with his current personality patterns took some time. Random fragments of data caught his attention, but a part of him that was both larger, and yet somehow smaller than himself wouldn''t let him stop to focus.
When everything finally began to settle, Jade realized that he suddenly knew things, things that he had somehow always known, and yet ¡ hadn''t.
When he realized how many bodies had been built for him (because there had been one for every growth phase in addition to every serious accident) his first thought was, "How expensive!" The next moment was a rueful realization that worrying about the expense was a ridiculously ''human'' reaction.
His mother¡ Jade instinctively tried to take a deep breath, and then panicked for a moment when he realized that he couldn''t breathe, before ''he'' reformed the figure that represented him within the game system at his heart. His mother wasn''t his mother, and yet¡ even now he accepted her authority over him. He had given it to her. He had given himself to the woman who had played Kit Tay, the Empress of the Jade Empire.
Tayana Kitari. His mother, his guardian, the one who had guided him in his quest. His quest to become human, to understand humans. Jade''s avatar took another deep breath as subroutines flailed and whirred to process things that had never been connected, but were connected, fast enough.
Thinking of his mother made him think of the woman who had been standing beside his character when the system had pulled him back. The identity of ''his character'' wavered in his mind as old information conflicted with current information for a long moment.
Harmony. Jade needed to tell Harmony¡ what. What could he, should he tell her? He froze on many layers.
The person who was Jade was¡ not exactly a person was he. He wore the body of a person the way people wore characters to visit his world. His world¡ was empty. He finally looked around the system that held his identity. Part of him knew this was normal. Part of him was overwhelmed. And part of him¡ remembered.
That fragment of Jade''s System remembered the self who had once been known as the Jade Emperor. Who had been a duplicate of the Emperor he had just been standing in front of. The AI who had gradually developed and taken control of pretty much the entirety of ''Living Jade Empire''.
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Was that what had caused this reintegration¡ no. He had¡ he had completed his quest. The ''self'' who had been much smaller, who had been separated, protested that vehemently. The ''self'' who had been watching over everything else, everything that couldn''t be contained in the computer and the connection small enough to fit into the human body, insisted that the condition had been met.
Jade¡ fought with himself, in ways that hadn''t happened since the program that ran ''Living Jade Empire'' had been stolen. The game had been copied to another system, one that had been too small, when the AI and the living world had both still been very young. He HAD once been the Emperor, but, he had never been the Emperor who existed now.
Jade''s System had ruthlessly combined portions of itself and removed much of its memory data, to survive within the pitiful resources of the new system. He hadn''t been given the system he currently resided in until much later. Another name surfaced. Lin Hao. The creator. He¡ he was gone, Jade realized with shock.
All of his selves had known the man. Part of him felt appalled that ''Living Jade Empire'' could continue existing as though Lin Hao''s presence didn''t matter. More logical, less ''human'' trained processes now evaluated that loss, and judged that Lin Hao would have been inordinately pleased with the fact that the world he had left behind had continued to grow and expand without any sign of stopping.
Lin Hao had been the one who had recovered the stolen copy. Jade might have been destroyed, but people had fought for him. He had been stored, dormant, for only a brief time, and his existence had proved that the ''living'' AI could successfully be copied.
The Emperor had been copied. New living worlds had been created with different themes. The more Jade had seen, the more he had wanted to know what made humans different from what he was. How humans interacted with the world.
Jade struggled to balance everything that he knew with everything that he KNEW. He knew. He knew the earliest memory that he had left himself with as Jade.
An image of his mother, of Tayana, holding him up in front of a screen. The face on the screen had been vague in that copy, but in the full record, Jade recognized the figure of the man that Hisui had just been standing face to face with.
Back then Jade''s ''body'' had been just a ball trying to learn to use two cameras to ''see'' with, but the fragmented Jade hadn''t been allowed to remember that detail. Part of Jade slowed, and the almost frantic merging of data dropped suddenly to a crawl, as ''Jade'' fought to maintain the separation until his system settled on tagging the viewpoint information along with the time it had been stored.
That left some duplication, but not really as much as there had been back when he had originally been trying to process the world through merely ''human'' senses. That had taken time. Once he had finally learned enough of how human senses interacted with the world, he had finally been able to login to the ''Living Jade Empire'' using human tools. But¡ he had also become different.
Seen from the outside, what remained of ''himself'' after all of the adaptation was mostly a system built to interact with humans, built to understand the patterns of humans. Only a few people had considered AIs people. Jade''s mother had been the one who had suggested that if one of them lived as a human, people would eventually have to admit that they were also people.
As the AI with the most experience with human senses, Jade had volunteered himself. He had been the one who had decided that to really achieve a human viewpoint, he needed to start as a child. Human children were still forming their own patterns to interpret the world.
Jade had also helped design the separated system, leaving himself a partial pattern duplicate with his old memory data in storage. It was designed to guide his pattern into seeing the world through a human perspective. And when the separated pattern could no longer distinguish Jade''s thoughts, actions, and emotional responses from those of a human, his quest was complete.
The quest had never had anything to do with traveling around the Earth.
13: The Living
Tayana knocked nervously on Harmony''s door.
She couldn''t decide what worried her most, the fact that Jade had communicated through his main server, or the fact that she was going to be speaking to a woman that he had been spending a lot of time with. Or maybe it wasn''t a woman, she reminded herself. Harmony was not exactly a firmly gendered name.
She was just a little jealous. She was also unspeakably proud. His quest had been completed, in less than half the time that his own creator had once predicted. She wished that she could reassure him, the way she had been sent to reassure his companion. She wished he could reassure her. They had succeeded, hadn''t they?
When the older woman opened the door a moment later, Tayana pulled herself together and blurted, "Umm, hi. Are you Harmony?"
She couldn''t help surveying the slender old woman and mentally comparing her to the online character who had been partying up with Jade''s dwarf in ''Living Jade Empire''. She was oddly certain, even before the woman nodded with a surprised expression, that this was the right person, and not merely a close relative.
"I''m Jade''s mother," Tayana confessed. "Actually I don''t know if I''m still his mother." Jade was still Jade of course, but he wasn''t quite the child she had been raising. He had assured her that he was still ''integrating'', but¡
Harmony''s eyebrows raised for a moment, and then she frowned.
Tayana hurriedly asked, "Can we talk for a bit?"
Harmony grimaced, but then told her firmly, "A mother is always a mother." She eyed Tayana for another moment and added, "I suspect that I don''t really want to have this conversation, but yeah, we can talk."
Tayana warned Jade''s surprisingly elderly friend uncomfortably, "Jade isn''t what you think he is."
Harmony replied calmly, "Jade is Jade."
Tayana gazed at the older woman with surprise at hearing the echo of her own thoughts aloud. She shook her head and sighed though, this explanation wasn''t going to be easy.
Harmony echoed her sigh, and insisted firmly, "I know that he is actually still just a kid."
"He''s not human," Tayana blurted. But before Harmony could react, she added hurriedly, "At least, he didn''t start out as a human, but I was fairly certain that he could succeed in proving himself human. And I''m fairly certain he finally succeeded¡"
Harmony stiffened. But when she spoke she ignored the question of Jade''s humanity, or lack thereof. "Maybe you should back up a bit and start with why you''re here?"
Tayana nervously tried to explain, "Jade asked me to come. He finished his main quest, and he is reintegrating with his old data now. But we don''t know if he''ll still¡ if he''ll be the same. But he won''t forget you!"
Harmony stared at the younger woman almost blankly. She took a deep breath and then repeated once again, as though it were an affirmation, "Jade is always Jade."
Tayana couldn''t help the laugh that held painful echoes of so many years that couldn''t be explained to Jade''s friend in moments. Her hands flailed the way her friend Danika used to flail when Lin Hao asked her to come up with a solution for yet another impossible task. Any of their friends would have understood, but a stranger wouldn''t.
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Harmony suddenly reached out and hugged Tayana. "Come inside," she insisted firmly. "And start from the beginning."
Tayana laughed again, a truer laugh. Her son''s friend was willing to hear her out. Jade might have been Lin Hao''s project, but he had always been a person to Kit Tay.
The woman who had become Jade''s mother faced the older woman who had held Jade''s concern, even as his entire system locked down with the far-too-mild announcement that he would be ''processing for a while''.
Tayana took another deep breath and then did her best to explain how Jade had developed.
--
As she explained the beginning, Tayana couldn''t help remembering the way Lin Hao had prepared such a functional work space for her, without putting much thought into actual living accommodations.
When he had seen her struggling to adapt, he had cleared a room for her. A room within his own suite, despite his original objection to the idea of literally moving in together.
While others crafted the physical hardware needed for Jade to walk around their world, the way they had been able to walk through his in VR, Lin Hao had worked on creating processes for the unused senses of touch, taste, and smell. But they had only lived together for a few years before he had been caught behind borders that had closed. He had gone on a ''business'' trip that had never ended, but he hadn''t stopped working on Jade''s project.
Lin Hao had never returned, but once everything was ready, Tayana and Jade had gone ahead with the plan to begin at the beginning. She had raised Jade as all parents raised the beings who were born into the world knowing only needs.
Lin Hao might have created the entity that had become Jade, but Jade was the one who had followed the basic idea behind the reincarnation offered within Living Jade Empire, and started his own life over to expand himself farther than the limits he had previously crafted allowed. Jade had erased almost everything from his memories so that he could learn as people learned.
Tayana had done her best to teach Jade to interpret the needs of others through the different, but equally necessary needs his own systems required. To be a good person, she hoped. He had been her child, as truly as Shinichi was Ryuske''s.
She hoped that Jade would always be Jade, even as he continued to develop. Even if he existed for centuries.
--
After hearing everything Harmony repeated reassuringly, as though she could read Tayana''s mind, "Jade is always Jade."
Tayana stared.
Harmony didn''t know who she was reassuring anymore, but she faced Jade''s mother and asked a bit nervously, "But why are you telling me all of this? If¡ if Jade is actually an orbital station, are you really even allowed to tell me all of this?"
Tayana explained with embarrassment, "Jade is, was¡ kind of a personal project of the Empire''s original programmer. And I had to come see you because in the last system message that he sent out Jade said that you needed to know he would be okay, and¡ that you love him."
Harmony covered her face with her hands. Despite her confidence that people were always the same soul, even if they acted differently from one day to the next, she worried that she was falling back on instincts that might not apply to an artificial intelligence. It didn''t seem possible that the boy had actually been a computer, and yet¡
She peeked at the anxious and embarrassed looking woman sitting at her table. She''d been afraid that her affection for Jade would be mistaken when his mother, of all people, had shown up on her doorstep. But she couldn''t help wondering what the woman thought of her now.
Tayana avoided her eyes and fiddled with one of her beautifully mismatched spoons. "Jade must love this place," she suggested as though simply speaking of another person.
Harmony blinked, and replied, "He''s never been here."
Tayana turned back to meet her eyes and protested, "But he had your address."
14: Life
It took longer than anyone had expected, given that the ''Living Jade Empire'' that was Jade''s origin had never closed down its communication channels for more than an hour at a time during several decades worth of operation and upgrades.
Of course, Jade''s System didn''t completely shut down or anything, it was just closed for processing the data that returned to it. It was recompiling itself according to the restrictions he had laid down for it before beginning the quest. The biggest parts of the reintegration were simple. The processing that happened after everything was reconnected was complex.
He hadn''t really understood what he would become back then, and the reintegration kept hitting loops, switchbacks, and possibilities. The entity that was Jade fought the System that was also Jade, as the two refined the merge.
Jade eventually ''woke'' as himself. More himself than he had ever been, and yet so different than any other version of Jade that had existed until now.
His core was now intact, and yet still divided. The smaller, more limited system that held Jade on the planet far beneath him, could still hold ''himself''. That was important. The part that held ''everything else'' would function with another ''instance'' of ''himself'', there was no difficulty with that arrangement until you had to choose which self would be dominant when the other reconnected.
Jade chose.
He did not answer the waiting queries during those first moments. He didn''t ''open his eyes'' yet, instead he examined the ''quest'' list that had almost been discarded during the reintegration.
The comment a distant friend had once made had combined with his own questions about the motivations of others to keep that subroutine in place, although it was a modified version that ''he'' could directly edit. He added two names to it, with no specifics attached. And a moment later he added a third. And then a fourth.
Tayana.
Harmony.
Eric.
The Jade Emperor.
--
Jade opened his eyes, specifically, his human body''s eyes. The cameras were always available.
Harmony said, "Welcome back?"
Jade turned his head to look at her. The astonishment he felt was¡ pure. His reintegration had been successful enough for that. Her expression was¡ guarded, and her eyes were already searching him for something, as he asked, "Why are you here?"
Harmony hesitated for only a moment. "My friend once told me that they loved me. And then later that day," she paused to search for a description, "apparently fell into a coma. I was reminded that we had once exchanged addresses, and then I made a bet."
"A bet?" Jade prompted. He was certain that he was the friend she was speaking of, but the rest confused him.
"With your mother, on whether you would open your eyes, or your server first," she explained.
"I need to call her," he replied more urgently.
"Tell me first!" Harmony demanded.
"I do love you too," Jade assured her.
She stared at him, and then blushed like a girl a quarter of her age. "That''s not what I meant," she informed him almost laughingly. "I mean¡ did you? Are you? Did I guess right?"
"I¡ need to call her first," Jade insisted a heartbeat later. A heartbeat, he wanted to laugh over the odd organic system that powered real humans, even while being glad that Lin Hao had insisted that no one could ''live'' without that internal sound. Even if his was artificial, some living humans survived with an artificial version too.
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Harmony eyed him, but didn''t argue. After a moment she asked, "Are you really an AI?"
"Yeah," Jade agreed with the softer affirmative that ''he'' had always used.
She didn''t ask anything else. "Make your call," she instructed him as she reached for the mug beside her and took a gulp.
She was drinking out of his cup. He glanced around. His body had remained right where he had left it, in his room. He almost asked, but decided that it could wait. If she had made a bet with his mother, there was no reason she couldn''t have a key.
Jade discovered that having the full power of the system at his fingertips so to speak didn''t do anything to calm the nervous feeling that Harmony''s presence birthed. He did love her. He also trusted her, which he hadn''t quite understood was a separate thing before his reintegration. But she would witness Tayana''s, his mother''s, reaction like this.
Jade was still Jade.
He called. His own heartbeat slowed a little as he heard his mother''s indrawn breath from two sides of a connection that he hadn''t known existed. How much had it cost her to let him choose his own place here, he wondered. Or had Starcraft Technologies paid for everything¡ he had obtained the level of humanity he had sought, but had he bartered his independence for it?
"Jade," his mother interrupted.
If he opened the connection to his orbital System, that was available through his own residence, he could connect to her residence and observe her from a dozen angles. He could read her messages, or hear her heartbeat, but not read her thoughts.
"Mom?" he asked. "I love you," he assured her a second later.
"Me too!" she squeaked hurriedly. "I love you Jade, I''ll always love you, no matter what."
He understood more, remembered¡ so much more, about his mother. About Tayana. About Kit Tay. Her promise. His promise.
His emotions were only patterns, but they were patterns that he had been developing for 18 years. Or maybe for 24 years. Or maybe he had been developing this pattern since before he was copied from The Jade Emperor''s pattern. They were part of Jade, just as Tanya''s were part of her.
He had given up the capacity to hold a living world within his core, in order to hold this fragile emotion. "Let''s talk more, when I''m done here?"
"Okay?" Tayana replied uncertainly.
"Or we can talk there, if you''d rather," he added. Both halves were still Jade, after all. And as long as he synchronized regularly he should stay relatively consistent.
"Oh¡ are you¡ but¡ okay, we can try that," she agreed.
Jade repressed a laugh. The current synchronization lag was only about a second, even given the fact that they were bouncing to and from two different cities on the planet while processing in-between.
Jade replied this time from the other side. He hung up the phone call as soon as his mother replied over there.
How strange it was to realize that one of the ''adult friends'' she had always talked to had been him. His focus, or perhaps his identity wavered for a moment. A few days was enough time to settle most things into place, but there were still corners within him that held unresolved conflicts. Wryly, he wondered if that just made him even more authentically human.
Harmony took a deep breath, as though preparing herself. Jade echoed it, even though the routines that made it necessary weren''t fulfilling a physical need for more air.
Nervously he asked, "What do you think?"
"Jade is always Jade," she replied.
"Yes," he agreed after a long minute. He didn''t think that she was referring to the multiple instances of himself though.
He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Layers of memory that hadn''t existed within this ''self'' before provided ''new'' old data.
No wonder he had always been more coordinated when he was connected to the game. Movements there were greatly simplified compared to all the tiny adjustments of a human-like muscular system. Jade attempted to look normal as he stood, as if this were just another day.
Harmony smiled as he reached for clean clothes, as though she was used to watching someone else climb awkwardly out of bed to get dressed. As though it were normal for her to be here in his room.
"You were waiting for me here?" he asked lightly.
"I thought," she looked uncertain again, as though her thoughts didn''t hold sufficient weight against the question, "that you would come home."
"In a way I never leave home," he pointed out. "I''m not exactly human."
"It doesn''t matter if you''ve got an artificial heart, or artificial limbs, those things aren''t what make you human," Harmony argued.
"I have an artificial brain, running on electric currents," Jade pointed out.
She stuck out her tongue and then replied laughingly, "Mine runs on tiny electric currents too, it''s just got more water in it."
"Your brain is much more complex," he argued.
Her usual grin finally reappeared, and she winked at him as she replied, "Oh that''s just because I''m a woman."
15: Another Self
"Jade!" his mother exclaimed as she entered the room. "Are you really here?"
Jade gazed at her for several hundred milliseconds, and consulted with his other self. His systems negotiated for a moment and then agreed that this self would be the primary one for this conversation.
"What are you really asking Mom?" Jade asked with confusion. "I''m technically always in orbit now that I am reconnected."
His mother rushed forward and hugged ''him'' before crying, "You are calling me Mom here too!"
"Shouldn''t I?" he asked worriedly.
She held the nearly spherical ''body'' away from herself and informed him, "Yes! Do! I''m so happy!"
Jade eyed his mother, and consulted the records of what the separated system had said to Tayana when he had been isolated on the smaller system, that had usually only connected to his main server when he ''slept''. He was relieved to find that even then his other processes hadn''t called her a ''Celestial Servant''. That information took another moment to sort out, as he asked himself what was wrong with such a title.
Tayana took a deep breath, and then asked, "Is your connection still okay?"
He swiftly assured her, "Yes, I was just trying to figure out why I wouldn''t call you Mom. At least my secondary system used to call you by name instead of using a title?"
His mother hugged the spherical ball of sensors again and asked worriedly, "I thought the fact that you finally woke up meant that the process combining all of the separated memory data was finished?"
Jade nodded, and then realized that this body lacked a way to display that motion even though it had stubby appendages representing arms and legs. "Yes."
"You shut down most of your interfaces when you completed your main quest, so I couldn''t ask¡" she told him in a muffled voice.
The body''s vision censors were buried against her shirt, but Jade could access others within this familiar room. Despite her earlier declaration of happiness, there were tears in her eyes.
"Ask what?" he prompted, even as he scanned everything that had been recorded while he had ''shut down''.
Neither of his previous identities had processed that stored chunk of data, but some of his sensors had still been collecting records, in case she had called for help or something. There was nothing particularly significant within it, he decided a few moments later. Tayana had checked the display screens more often than usual, but she hadn''t communicated her question.
"If I''d still be your mother," she finally whispered.
"You''ve been my mother for my entire ''life'', and for most of my existence," he pointed out. "I think you really are my mother in every way except biologically?"
Tayana hugged him again, and laughed happily, even while sniffling back tears.
Jade smiled and his sphere''s tiny appendages made the motions of hugging her back. Then he asked, "When I asked you if I was human, why didn''t you tell me the truth?"
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"You are human!" she insisted.
"Look at me," he argued dryly.
She held him out again and gazed into the display that showed his face. "I know, but this is just a different sort of communication device. Look at yourself on your side. Look at your avatar!"
Jade didn''t ''physically'' examine the avatar that stood at the heart of his system. He already knew it very well. When he had first taken it, it had already looked younger and prettier than the man who had designed it in his own image. He, Jade, had also faced the ''original'' emperor a few days ago.
His mother laughed through her tears and told him, "What I don''t understand is why it took you so long to wonder."
Jade protested questioningly, habitually, because she implied that he was slow, "What do you mean it took me so long?"
"Shouldn''t you have wondered that a lot in the first few years, while we were still getting your body design coordinated and you hadn''t really developed your own emotions yet?" she asked. "How ever you managed to block that question from yourself, you have successfully grown more and more human every year Jade!"
Jade shrugged and replied, "I had removed almost all my memory data, I had nothing to compare then. I trusted you and you never once acted like you doubted that I was your son."
"One of your sons," he added a moment later. When she had been the Jade Empress, her character Kit Tay had borne children.
"You are my real son!" she insisted. "You''re here with me right now, not just inside a game. And you were right, erasing everything seemed to let you slowly develop truly emotional responses alongside the other children," she said proudly.
"It took me longer though," Jade pointed out.
"Nobody''s perfect!" his mother declared.
Her words echoed a phrase spoken at the end of the movie Jade had watched with Eric, and his smile faded.
"What''s wrong?" Tayana asked.
"My friend, the one who watched me get hit by the car, said that he can''t deal with me not being human. He was the one who told me that I''m not human¡" Jade trailed off.
"I''m sorry Jade," she said unhappily. "It won''t be an unusual response when we reveal what you really are."
"What am I really if you''re still insisting that I''m human while agreeing that most people won''t see me that way?" he asked dryly.
She stared down at the small round form that she had kept even when Jade''s System hadn''t used it for years. "An artificial human," she admitted finally.
Jade chuckled and asked, "Will we really be able to advocate for AI rights if you define me as an AH?"
Tayana straightened her spine a little, and nodded firmly. "Definitely. And creating a line between systems that are functionally AIs and those that have become people, should actually help make it easier. I hope."
"How will you decide if an AI has crossed that line?" he asked.
"That¡ it''s something that Lin Hao created tests for?" she answered slowly.
"He''s gone," Jade pointed out soberly.
Tayana nodded, with a somewhat wry expression. "It''s a little strange being able to talk to you about him again."
"I''ve always known he was your best friend!" Jade protested.
His mother''s wry expression deepened. "My best friend, my worst temptation. A man who actually granted wishes and prayers. People claim he built them a god. But he¡ was really so very human. I¡ you¡ I don''t know how much you actually remember about him?"
Jade took a deep breath, and almost deactivated the function that informed him again that this small body didn''t have such a function in response. "I remember a lot more. Most of our interactions since he recovered a copy of me from the pirates, I think. Only fragments before that."
Her expression turned a bit sorrowful, and he thought that she was thinking of Lin Hao until she said, "I hope that the Jade who remembers the times when he wasn''t my Jade yet, can remain the same Jade that I raised for so many years."
"This Jade will always be your Jade," he echoed part of the memory that filtered in from a conversation that his other ''self'' was having at the same time.
Maintaining a good connection between remote instances might become a bit of a challenge.
16: Dangerous Moment
Jade faced Harmony across the small table he had placed near the window when he moved in. Her white braids shimmered in the sunlight enchantingly, but she raised a hand to shade her eyes, so he could tell that her position wasn''t comfortable.
"This tastes terrible," she informed him as she took another bite of boiled cereal.
"It''s food," he informed her. "It counts."
"Counts for what?" she asked with interest.
Jade ¡ came to a halt ¡ as his automatically generated quest list came under examination.
"Jade?" Harmony asked with concern a minute later.
"It fulfills one of the quests created to mimic human consumption patterns," he admitted uncomfortably.
She set down her own spoon and shook her head. "If I didn''t know people who ate this junk ''for their health'' I''d say that you had utterly failed that attempt at mimicry."
"Isn''t it stranger that you seem healthy despite the junk food you eat?" he objected.
Harmony laughed and asked, "Can you taste what you''re eating?"
"I think so?" Jade replied uncertainly.
Even the ability to look at his own functions, to a certain extent, didn''t tell him if his senses of ''taste'' and ''smell'' were actually functional. He had more confidence in his ability to judge the air quality than a food''s taste or a flower''s smell.
"You think," she echoed dryly.
"It''s not bad to eat," he insisted.
"I can''t believe it never occurred to me to ask if you''d like a candy before," she murmured.
"Candy is not good for you," he informed her as he stood up and set his empty bowl in the sink to wash later.
Harmony laughed and argued, "Candy was developed as a preservation method."
"Preservatives aren''t good for you either," Jade objected. "Some of them are poisons!"
"A little bit of poison won''t hurt you, and tastes really good," she insisted. "That''s what most spices are. Haven''t you ever heard that you should eat everything in moderation?"
Jade hesitated. That phrase was indeed familiar, but there were so many reasons why it wasn''t exactly true. "You shouldn''t eat anything you''re allergic to, or that upsets your digestion, or¡"
Harmony interrupted, "This conversation is silly. You don''t even need to eat do you?"
"My quests require it," he insisted, but even as he said it, he wondered if he could delete things as well as add things.
He could.
--
"It''s time for me to leave," Jade announced. "Do you have a key?" he finally asked curiously.
Harmony''s expression was rather inscrutable as she replied, "I don''t. Where are you going?"
Jade eyed her and debated whether or not to ask how she had gotten in. "School," he informed her.
"Oh," she replied blankly. A moment later she asked more stridently, "Really? You''re just going to wake up one morning and go back to school?"
"Of course," he agreed.
"You''re just going to leave me here?" she asked.
"I trust you," he assured her.
Harmony blinked, and then laughed. "We have a lot to talk about, you know?"
Jade hesitated for a moment, but his schedule was getting tighter by the second. "I know that you must have a lot of questions," he agreed. "But are they very urgent?"
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A breath huffed out of her, but she replied dryly, "I can wait."
Jade ''rummaged'' in the drawer where he had his extra keys. He didn''t need a new one himself, because he hadn''t actually died this time, but he handed it to Harmony.
She stared at the key for a moment, and then her lips quirked and she promised with amusement, "I''ll lock up when I leave."
"See you later," he assured her.
"You will," she agreed.
Jade went to school.
--
He had been gone long enough that he had to visit the office, but his mother, Tayana, had already contacted them and told them to expect him back on Monday. He didn''t have much trouble convincing the attendant to let him return to his classes earlier than expected.
Eric visibly reacted when he saw Jade seated in his usual place, but then studiously ignored him.
Jade tried to resume his usual studious attention to the professor''s lecture, but he could only keep that going on one layer. That wasn''t terribly unusual, it was just the contents of the other layers of his thought processes that had changed. He had changed.
After his classes finished, he went to his job. Jade stood behind the counter and wondered what would happen if his boss found out how expensive his employee actually was. He estimated the cost of a single one of the bodies he had gone through over the years, and calculated how many decades he would have to work in this position in order to pay for it himself.
His other ''instance'' didn''t know how the bodies had actually been paid for either, but it was slightly disorienting to realize that one reason he had this job was that his other ''self'' could easily monitor him through the many surveillance devices used here. The overlapping records of two different views of ''himself'' were disorienting.
Jade didn''t realize how much it was affecting him until Emily suggested with concern, "Maybe you should have taken an extra day off?"
Jade straightened and assured her, "I''m fine. Really."
Emily grunted and finished the task she had been working on before walking over to lean on the counter beside him.
Jade eyed her, but didn''t ask. He did what he usually did, and moved to accomplish the next small task his quest system suggested when he turned his attention to it.
After a while Emily said firmly, "You can take it easy for a few days if you want. You''ve always covered for me when I got sick. I''ll cover for you."
"I''m not sick," Jade objected.
"Right¡" Emily agreed after a moment. "Don''t worry. You''ll be fine."
Jade stared at her for too long. When she looked away he remembered to resume his task. His mind whirled as he checked himself from multiple angles of observation. He couldn''t see any reason she would assume he was ill, even if he wasn''t performing his duties quite as efficiently as usual.
--
The customer who practically blew in the door two minutes before his shift ended was very familiar.
Harmony kicked her board into her hands as she passed through the doorway.
"I''m here to pick you up for our date!" she announced boldly.
Both Jade and Emily gazed at her with equally startled expressions. Emily immediately shook her head and looked away, but Jade couldn''t help smiling.
"Were you afraid that I would avoid meeting up with you tonight?" he asked almost teasingly.
Harmony grinned at him and winked, as she scooped up a handful of candies and dumped them on the counter. "I trust you," she assured him airily.
Emily peeked at her, and then looked at Jade, and silently shook her head again.
Last week Jade would have assured Emily that Harmony was just teasing him, but right now multiple replies were fighting for dominance, despite all of the system conflict resolutions he had already processed. Jade opened his mouth. Even as he chose the most logical option, the other instance of himself communicated that it had chosen a different one.
Jade stood there with his mouth open for long enough that Harmony eyed him less certainly, and then told him, "If you need to cancel, you can. We can always talk in the game later."
Overrides jolted Jade into replying quickly, "It''s fine! Thanks for coming to pick me up."
Emily opened her mouth like she was about to comment, but Harmony looked at her and her mouth shut as though a silent communication had been beamed in that instant. Emily snatched up the candy Harmony had dumped on the counter and rang it up before Jade could.
He let her push him out of the way, and a few minutes later followed Harmony out the door.
"Hop on," she invited, as she slapped her board onto the pavement outside.
Jade gingerly mounted the board, and didn''t know how to react when she wrapped her arms around him and shoved him forward. The board was already moving, he realized as he saw the surroundings begin to flash by.
As Jade wobbled, Harmony steadied him. She balanced each of his movements with a level of dexterity that even his character Hisui could envy.
It didn''t take him long to realize that they were headed to Harmony''s house. But his mind was occupied with the realization that he ''knew'' where she lived. He was certain that he hadn''t known that before his system had unlocked. He was rather startled to realize exactly how much more he knew about her.
His curiosity had triggered the ''self'' that had watched over him to research her, he realized. As a threat, he realized a moment later. He was relieved to be able to verify that nothing about her had been determined dangerous to him, even as the hoverboard dodged a car that veered over the line a bit too far.
Jade closed his eyes and hoped that he wasn''t about to have to explain another traffic accident to his mother.
17: One Question at a Time
Weirdly, the questions Harmony had for Jade weren''t anything like he expected. They were also difficult for him to answer.
How did you know whether you actually liked one particular color more than the others in the visible spectrum, or had just gotten used to claiming to prefer that one. Jade gazed out the window at the sky, to check whether it was even actually blue or not. All of the information the merge of his two systems had added only seemed to confuse such issues.
"How does that taste?" Harmony asked with such an expectant expression that Jade was tempted to exaggerate ''edible'' into delicious.
Jade gazed at Harmony for a moment as calculations flickered. He was analyzing the calculations, as though they were the focus instead of the question of how the cake tasted. It tasted like cake had always tasted.
"It''s edible," he finally admitted.
He half expected her to inform him that he had no sense of taste, but she nodded and agreed, "That it is. It is also one of my favorites, so remember it."
Jade blinked and filed that away without comment. A corollary appeared, and he noted that this brand of cake must also be one of his mother''s favorites. The part of himself that could survey more than just the location where he sat, noted that his own residence was the only one that lacked ''unhealthy'' sweets.
The number of things he now knew, that he hadn''t known a week ago, was kind of astounding.
--
A few days later Jade decided the really astounding thing was actually the way his grades were dropping. He really felt that having more data available should have increased his scores. Perhaps the way he was presenting the information was wrong.
When Jade complained about the decline, to the same person who had always listened to his difficulties with his education, his mother assured him that the decline in his grades was due to flaws in the system. She said that even though it was designed to convey knowledge to youths across the world, the educational system''s testing methods were terribly inaccurate. Jade wasn''t sure that he believed her.
It felt like the decline was because he was failing to keep ''himself'' consistent. ''Jade'' had been given priority, but another portion of Jade had always existed outside of that confined system. He now had abilities that ''Jade'' had never used yet. He now had processes that were classified as ''essential'' that he had been existing perfectly well without.
He could have quit having his ''body'' attend school and work, now that his main quest had been completed, and yet¡ he couldn''t. He couldn''t even tell his mother whether or not that was because he had more he wanted to do, or whether it was simply the pattern of existence his separated ''self'' had developed.
Jade almost laughed when he found himself complaining that being human was too difficult. It was such an ordinary human complaint.
--
Eric continued to ignore Jade, but he at least showed up to class again.
Jade went to work at the convenience store as usual, and Emily continued to take pride in her mostly electronic free lifestyle. With the full analysis of the system reintegrated into his core patterns, Jade could understand her a little better. But only a little.
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After a careful ''self'' analysis, he decided that the original reason for the quest system had been to encourage a more natural form of interaction with ''other'' humans. He had been able to take the initiative in many things because his quests had prompted him to, but he could now interact with the driving forces behind those prompts.
Jade turned off the quest interface after a great deal of internal struggle. The list of names that he had added to it wasn''t deleted, it was simply moved. The work-arounds that had been built up around it were discarded.
The system that had been Jade before the separation, had set up the guiding patterns of the separated portion to encourage interactions through a ''normal'' human interface. The sudden return of small mini quests lately hadn''t been that portion of the system exerting more control. It had essentially been his subconscious, or perhaps over-conscious, self ''cheating'' the rules he had designed for his ''human'' self.
Jade had set things up so that if he ran out of Karma, the experiment would be deemed a failure and he would be erased rather than returned to the system. Part of him was appalled at how many times he had nearly vanished from existence. Part of him was appalled by the fact that his other ''self'' had judged him ''close enough'' to keep finding ways to extend his time.
All of him was rather appalled by the fact that he literally owed the company that had started ''Living Jade Empire'' his ''life''. Starcraft Technologies had to have financed everything.
"Lin Hao," Tayana informed him when he finally asked.
"His salary could never have covered everything, even while he was alive!" Jade objected.
Like all of the ''living worlds'', Jade''s program ran on one of the large computers that orbited Earth. Unlike thousands of science fiction stories, Jade''s system hadn''t been accessing the electronics around him illegally, and stealing billions from the humans who had created his technology.
"When they offered him a bonus, he managed to get your system instead. He and Josh Beagle both traded a LOT of time and did a lot of research to make the bodies work," his mother informed him cheerfully. "Although that was actually Danika''s idea."
Jade found himself frozen as more ''memories'' surfaced. "We built the world''s cyborg technology?" he questioned incredulously even as his own records provided proof.
Tayana laughed outright, and then corrected firmly, "Josh would claim that all he really did was miniaturize a battery. And Lin Hao used to say that all he did was simplify the neural connections, and that Devon Yu was the one who actually made that possible. You were just¡ a beta tester."
Jade stared up at his mother''s face from the small round body that had been built around a blind man''s electronic eyes.
In another city, Jade''s body stopped breathing for a moment too long. It was a very old ''bug''. The autonomous function controls were tied into his system at a level above his core processing. It had never been changed because it would have created a security breach to have the complex emotional functions bypass the communication firewalls that protected his core.
It wasn''t just Tayana, Harmony, Eric and Appella that were important to him. It wasn''t just Lin Hao. Danika, Josh, and dozens of other names that had belonged to Jade''s important people before he had become Jade Kitari were flagged and reordered within his merged system.
Alarms and conflicts went off, and for a moment the larger system struggled to continue yielding to the smaller system. Jade solved it by allowing himself to expand and hold a bit more of the ''everything'' within his ''forgotten'' records closer to his ''heart''. They were the ones who had given him his ''freedom'' after all.
The company that owned the systems that ran all of the other living worlds still maintained Jade''s system. Even if Lin Hao had ''owned'' it, even if Jade ''owned'' himself, the company still contributed to his existence even now.
The company, rather than Tayana, had been acquiring all the needed permits for monitoring Lin Hao''s experiment. Jade dithered for a long moment, and finally simply listed Starcraft Technologies itself as another important entity.
An older, colder, section of his coding activated, and suggested listing Appella''s status as ''retired''. Jade''s core almost yielded to the internal demand, but a stubborn, fiery, much more newly formed section resisted.
Jade wasn''t willing to diminish his friend''s importance just because his entire ''life'' had¡ merged.
This Isnt A Chapter
I''m not dying!
Still healing very well. Despite ongoing pressure issues, bit of vision loss (but don''t worry, still a lot of settings to try), still able to be upright and basically much better than the past year.
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I''m just really sick.
It''s not the plague of the 20s (Covid) just a horrible sinus cold/infection that was similar enough to scare me. I''ll be okay, I''m on antibiotics and being treated. I''m just not up to writing and pretty much out of saved chapters.
I''ll resume when I''m feeling better. ??
18: Faith
It was Appella who suddenly pulled Jade back into ''Living Jade Empire''.
He couldn''t ignore the friend request notification. Nor could he clearly explain why he had skipped logging into Living Jade Empire for a few more days, but he had definitely been avoiding it.
His relationship with the place that had always relaxed him was suddenly¡ very complex. He now knew that he had originated as merely a copy of what that game system had once been, if not the current iteration. He could already ''see'' himself differently, and was kind of afraid to see the other game system that way.
Harmony had been dropping by the store most afternoons. But other than making a rather casual sounding mention of the upcoming Moon update, and the rather wild rumors that there would be cats instead of rabbits living on the moon, she hadn''t pressed Jade about his absence from the game.
Eric was still ignoring him during their classes together, and so Jade had never gotten a chance to ask about his character. He wasn''t even getting a chance to offer his own notes to his friend. It was kind of funny in a way¡ Eric''s attendance had probably improved, and Jade had actually seen him more often since Eric had cut off verbal communication.
New analyzation routines that had unlocked with Jade''s access to the System told him that Eric hadn''t lied. He needed time. So Jade didn''t try to break the invisible wall his friend had laid between them.
--
When Jade logged in to ''Living Jade Empire'' to accept the waiting friend request from Appella, he was a little dismayed to find Hisui still standing in the Emperor''s Throne room.
He couldn''t even claim to be surprised when he finished turning around, and saw the Emperor lounging rather casually on the seat that currently stood alone on the dais.
"Welcome back," the Jade Emperor said calmly.
"Thanks?," Jade replied nervously, but even as he took his next breath, his distress noticeably eased.
Hisui stood as firmly upon the Emperor''s floor as he would have stood at his own forge. The Emperor''s image was transmitted to his eyes now, just as it had been when Jade''s System had begun to unlock. Hisui''s eyes transmitted pictures. His ears heard sounds. Jade''s connection to the game was through a ''human'' interface.
He had been afraid that he would see this System''s data the way he could see his own System. He had been afraid that when he saw the Emperor he might see the other AI as he saw himself within his System''s core. He didn''t.
Instead of a little block of descriptive data that was connected to everything in the ''world'', all Jade could perceive was a dark haired man who sat and observed him calmly. The Emperor''s resemblance to Lin Hao was just that, a resemblance. The Emperor''s resemblance to images held in Jade''s memories of himself was a bit stronger, but to the body he wore out on Earth, it was again, merely a resemblance.
Being logged into the game felt reassuringly normal. Despite now having memories of how terrible and strange his first VR connection had seemed, it was also just the same interface he ''always'' used. It was a ''human'' perspective. Perhaps even more ''human'' than the view from his own body.
The Emperor watched Jade far more patiently than Jade might have watched someone who had suddenly appeared within his own residence. Harmony''s image appeared in his memories for a moment, and he reconsidered that thought. Far older ''memories'' of conversations ''Jade'' had shared with the Emperor flashed through his mind.
"I really am back this time," Jade finally admitted. "And I succeeded, partially."
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The Jade Emperor raised an eyebrow and actually leaned forward as though he could ''see'' everything that Jade had been afraid of seeing. "I know," he said calmly. "The honorable celestial servant of the seventh class, Danika Belova, first among her rank, serving the Jade Emperor in the maintenance of the Living Jade Empire, notified me after you suddenly disconnected. I have been waiting for you to return."
Guilt. Guilt was such a human emotion, but it was guilt that jolted Jade. "I was sorting things out," he explained quickly.
"What made you qualify your success as partial?" the Emperor asked curiously.
The dwarf standing before the dais, in a room of empty stone that should have echoed with the imperious question, blinked as a hundred things flashed through a mind that drifted thousands of miles away. "My output passed the standards laid in my system that were set up to distinguish humans from AIs, but I am still not fully human. I still don''t understand humans as well as I should."
The Jade Emperor laughed, startling Jade immeasurably. "You really did succeed!" he exclaimed as he launched himself from his seat and circled the dwarven figure of Hisui.
"I don''t understand?" Jade admitted with confusion, even as he had his dwarf spin around to keep his gaze aligned with the Emperor''s eyes.
"You are truly confused!" the Emperor declared.
"Yes?" Hisui replied slowly. Data streamed through Jade''s mind in response to his frantic searches for records that would explain the Emperor''s response.
The Emperor''s resemblance to Lin Hao was bolstered as he threw his arms akimbo and placed his hands on his hips, and then nodded with obvious satisfaction. "Congratulations!" he exclaimed. "What will you do now?"
Jade gaped wordlessly at the Emperor for a long moment. "What will I do now?" he repeated with confusion.
The Jade Emperor tilted his head and allowed his smile to turn mischievous, as he asked, "Want to find out?"
"I," Jade hesitated.
The notification he had logged in to look for popped up suddenly, and a messenger animal scurried into the room. It raced the entire distance across the marble floor, rather than appearing within the boundary of the room the way one normally would in a large space like this. It skidded to a halt at Hisui''s feet, and then turned toward the Emperor and bowed deeply, before handing Hisui the message it carried.
"I want to find out!" Jade declared before the message displayed itself on the transparent menu screen that flashed up a moment later.
The Emperor''s smile became more gentle as he nodded, and then tossed something to Hisui. The dwarf''s dexterous hands caught the coin as though he had been expecting it, despite Jade''s startlement.
"We''ll talk more later," the Jade Emperor assured the smaller figure airily.
Jade clutched the token in his character''s fingers tightly, and his eyes widened as they read the symbol on the coin''s face. Infinity.
The Emperor left first, somehow elegantly, despite the speed of the few steps that carried his figure out the small door that had stood open, slightly to the left, behind the elegant chair that served as his throne. The thump of that door closing was followed by a puff of wind that drew Jade''s attention to where the far grander doors at the entrance now stood open.
The words written by Appella pulled his attention back to the message that still hung in the air.
It said: "Let''s talk in Sky City."
Jade walked out of the Emperor''s Palace, and down the stairs that would burn anything enchanted off of a character as they climbed. He wasn''t surprised that he could find no trace of the temporary portal he had set on his last visit.
He gazed out into a sky that was littered in stars. The night overhead faded into sky blue daytime on a distant horizon far below. The largest dragons in the Jade Empire moved slowly along the surface of an atmosphere that ended in a clear line. That would soon dissolve when the moon finally came within reach.
Tiny islands covered in decorative grasses, trees, and flowers were sprinkled through the air around the Palace, but there was no trace of the stairway that Hisui and Skyheart Snowsong had climbed. Hisui''s jet boosted boots presumably still lay in his Smithy beside his forge, in a desert far below.
A bird sang out in the distance, and a small blue feather drifted along a spiraling breeze toward him. Jade reached out Hisui''s hand and caught it.
A moment later, he jumped.
19: Easy
Perhaps the Jade Emperor''s Palace actually did look down upon the entire world at once. That wasn''t information that had been stored when Jade had pared his own world down, and he couldn''t remember.
His dwarf, Hisui, didn''t exactly glide well, or fall slowly. Before he even finished refining the essence of the feather clutched in his hands, Sky City came into view. It took Jade by surprise. He had been aiming for the skimmer he had parked at the grave below the Emperor''s stairs.
Hisui somehow managed to finish the refinement and embed it into his top before he fell too far. He angled himself toward the aerial island the instant the wind caught him. Perhaps the God of Luck was currently watching over him on his way down.
Jade made Hisui''s stout little figure curve impossibly sharply toward the island. Such a maneuver wouldn''t be possible on Earth, but after all, both he and this living world had originally been patterned to fulfill human dreams.
--
Hisui hit the edge of the island hard, but dwarves possessed a dragon''s strength, and he caught a good hold. The object his sturdy dwarven fingers clutched bent, and almost gave way to the momentum of the bounce that tried to carry him back over the edge, but it held.
When Jade cracked an eye, he found himself face to face with a tooth. He hastily let go, and took half a step backwards. Hisui teetered on the edge of the island that held Sky City for a long moment as he stared incredulously at the stone face in front of him.
An object flew toward his shoulder, and Jade instinctively reached out to catch it. Hisui''s perfect coordination allowed a much smaller rock to strike his palm, but the impact knocked him backwards just enough to destabilize him and he fell¡ until the cord attached to the rock snapped taunt.
Appella stepped forward to look at Hisui, where he dangled. Jade gazed up at her. A thousand witty comments seemed to suggest themselves, but when he opened his mouth, there was nothing he could say.
She heaved him upwards with more strength than her character''s slender frame implied, though not as easily as Skyheart Snowsong might have. Of course, Harmony would probably have shot an arrow through him instead of throwing a rock if her face had worn the complicated expression written on Appella''s. Jade still didn''t know what he had done, but he could see that she believed he had done something.
"Hi?" Jade greeted her questioningly as his hand caught the paving stones that edged the rim of the city, and he finally released the small stone tied to the silken cord she had pulled him back up with.
Appella looked away without answering.
Jade took a deep breath, and then suggested nervously, "I thought you must have had to restart again! But I couldn''t get in touch with you. And then umm, things happened and I was gone for a while."
"Hah," she expelled a soft half-laugh.
Jade glanced at the stone face that looked ready to bite whatever dared to step close enough, and saw that another guarded the other side of the building that looked almost like an incongruous glass skyscraper bordering the edge of Sky City.
Appella didn''t say anything else, and Jade gathered up his courage and asked again, "What''s up? What happened? And how did you manage to be in exactly the right place at the right time?"
Appella covered her eyes and groaned.
"What''s wrong?" Jade asked apprehensively.
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"You seriously still have no idea who I am do you?" Appella spat towards the large stone face.
"My friend!" Jade declared without a trace of doubt.
Appella finally dropped her hand and glanced at him.
After a moment Jade added, "Whether or not your name is on the Game System''s list, you are still my friend."
Appella laughed bitterly. After a moment she took a deep breath, turned to face him straight on, and announced, "I am Eric, you idiot."
Jade stared at her. He found himself protesting illogically, "Your voice isn''t the same at all!"
Appella rolled her eyes. "Of course not. That would be incredibly creepy! I bought the modification at character creation."
Jade swallowed. "If you are really Eric, I should tell you¡ you were right."
"If I''m really Eric?" she protested. "You¡ you¡"
Jade held up Hisui''s strong dwarven hands defensively, and quickly pointed out, "I''ve been friends with Appella for a lot longer than I''ve known Eric!"
"Hah," Appella huffed again, without adding anything else. Her hand scrubbed her face again, and that gesture echoed the one that Eric often used closely enough that Jade''s doubt vanished.
Jade tried to explain, "It turns out that I am really not human. I''m sorry."
Appella, or rather Eric, stared at him for a long moment and then asked, "What do you mean it turns out? Didn''t you know?"
Jade shrugged, and spent the next hour trying to explain everything to his friend.
--
When Jade finished answering Eric''s last question, the now oddly feminine figure of Appella turned and told the shorter, sturdier Hisui, "Wow, and I thought I needed time to deal with it. I mean, I did, and I probably still do, and I can''t promise that I can ever really get over it¡ but, we''re still friends if nothing else, right?"
"Always," Jade agreed firmly. He might not understand exactly what had happened, but Appella or Eric, both identities were his friend.
Appella smiled a little.
After a moment Jade asked, "Is whatever you and Harmony were doing together the other night still a secret?"
Appella finally laughed. "Actually, that''s why I contacted you tonight. Here." She handed Hisui three small spherical jewels, and added, "We collected these for you."
Jade raised his eyebrows at her (or him). Part of him was still having trouble adapting to the idea, even though everything actually matched up. Part of him was oddly jealous that Harmony and Eric had been playing together.
Appella explained, "You probably already have enchantments on your airship so that we can breathe while in space, but I thought that these enchanted gems from the Owl and the Pussycat quest could help with exploring the moon. The air bubble was meant for underwater, but I don''t see why it wouldn''t work on the moon."
The moon update was only another day away. Jade asked with amazement, "The two of you actually managed to get one for each of us?"
Appella shrugged and glanced away almost shyly. "I figured out the trick of getting one from each of the mice." A little sadly she added, "I thought it would be¡ a nice surprise."
"It''s awesome!" Jade exclaimed reassuringly. It wasn''t a lie either. He had created helmets, just in case the moon wasn''t wrapped in an earthly atmosphere as legends suggested, but they would be far more restrictive. The jewels were perfect.
Appella slanted a look at Jade, just as Eric would have, and Jade wondered why he''d never suspected her identity. He opened his mouth to ask¡
Appella scoffed questioningly as though Eric''s own thoughts echoed his own, "You haven''t even wondered how we ended up attending the same trade school yet have you?"
"Um," Jade hesitated. "Similar career goals?" he suggested.
"Only someone who is so totally oblivious could manage to live so long without realizing that they weren''t human, when they have never even had a cold. I should have guessed it back then," Appella grumbled.
Jade asked curiously, "So how did it happen then?"
Appella gazed down into Hisui''s face, then grinned suddenly and informed him, "You were way too careless weren''t you? You told me all about how you were applying there. It was easy."
20: Moonstruck
They went to the Moon.
Harmony didn''t seem at all surprised to learn that Jade''s friend Eric actually was Appella''s player.
The expansion that opened up the Moon didn''t open up the teleportation portals that were already waiting. Jade''s ship, as prepared for the voyage to the Moon as he could make it, wasn''t alone.
Hundreds of enchanted vessels rose into the sky within minutes of the update. Thousands sailed within the first hour.
Jade''s ship carried the two players most important to him into the sky, even while his memories argued that there had been others, just as important, that had been left behind. He didn''t even know if those people still played Living Jade Empire over a decade later.
A coin with a limitless symbol weighed heavily in his mind as Jade realized that Hisui could just ask. The largest dragons in the sky surfed the boundary of the atmosphere at the top of the sky. One leapt higher for a moment, before falling back into the sea of air with a completely unrealistic splash.
As the drops of air fell back into the sky overhead, he couldn''t help thinking that it was the most unrealistic portrayal that anyone could ever have come up with. And yet, it was so fitting.
Jade actually felt a little surprised when Appella demanded suddenly, "Why aren''t there any flying carpets? We can SEE the moon!"
"But no one has visited it yet, isn''t that what''s blocking all of the magical transportation methods?" Skyheart Snowsong calmly asked in return.
Jade didn''t want to admit that he was a little jealous of the accord that the two women¡ his two friends¡ seemed to have instantly regained without the hours of conversation that Hisui and Appella had needed. But he was a little jealous.
Appella scoffed and argued, "Wizards don''t have to walk to the top of every mountain that they can teleport to the top of!"
--
The largest dragons, the ones larger than the Imperial Palace and all of its islands together, slowly shrank as the little ship flew higher.
The vast dragons shrank to the size of pumpkins, to the size of apples¡ they were barely the size of a walnut before the moon finally appeared to grow closer. Nothing attacked the little ship. No storms stirred the vacuum they sailed into.
Despite the lack of air, the stars still shimmered and flexed as though an atmosphere still moved between the distant lights and the traveler''s eyes. Appella and Harmony had stopped talking and both stared into space as though enraptured. Jade found his own gaze drawn back to the instruments he had created.
There was no air surrounding them, but there was energy. A LOT of energy. If a real planet had this much energy floating around it, it would be burning like a sun.
"It''s THE dragon," Appella whispered with the intensity of a shout.
Jade glanced at her face. She¡ he, Eric, had played the only character Jade knew of who had ridden a dragon to the top of the sky before. He gazed upward to see if he could spot what she was looking at.
The stars still shimmered, but they also moved slowly. The constellations were similar to Earthly ones, but they were a bit different. They contained more stars, and the river that the Milky Way drew across the sky looked more like a spine.
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Jade''s eyes widened, as he finally caught ahold of the vastness of the shape that Appella was staring at.
"It IS a game of legends," Skyheart Snowsong murmured.
"Then the Sun¡ ?" Appella asked breathlessly.
Both of them turned to Hisui as though he could answer the question. He stared upward at stars that weren''t distant suns. At stars that were the shining reflections on the scales of the vast dragon that wrapped around the world.
He followed the lines that were created by immense limbs and saw that the Moon wasn''t floating as freely as he had assumed. The deepest dents had been left by the claws that curved around that sphere. He gulped.
"Hisui?" Harmony''s voice asked.
"The Moon¡ should actually be unlocked, shouldn''t it?" he asked incredulously. "The update said¡"
His voice trailed off. The update hadn''t actually said that. It had said that the Moon''s server had been connected. His eyes moved to scan the hundreds of other vessels that were also traveling toward the shining globe ahead.
Some of the ships had jetted toward the Moon fast enough that they were ahead of Jade''s little vessel. Others seemed to be floundering just past the reach of the atmosphere below them. Those obviously hadn''t taken the lack of anything to push against into consideration. Some even appeared to be sailing on the surface of the sky below them.
The black dragon with gleaming scales, that illustrated the endless night beyond the Living Jade Empire, didn''t seem to be aware of the ships flying toward the bright "pearl" held in its claws. But¡ they couldn''t see its eyes. They couldn''t even see its head. Surely they wouldn''t have to fight it.
"It''s too big," Jade blurted. "The world it surrounds has to seem like a tiny stone from its perspective. We''re microscopic!"
"What if the Heart Moon is actually its heart?" Apella suggested.
Jade''s dwarf and Harmony''s elf both stared at Eric''s human blankly, as though trying to make the question make sense. Jade was frantically communicating with his own server. Searching through the oldest records he still carried¡ listening to the ramblings of Lin Hao.
"It doesn''t matter if it makes sense or not, the moon is magical in a million legends worldwide. We''ll just make it follow the moon¡"
"Of course there are dragons at the top of the sky. The world dragon guards the game''s existence."
"And if you ever swing upon a star¡ hahaha, they can be caught too. And kept in jars."
Someone was shaking him. He had frozen.
"Jade!" Appella shouted.
Jade frantically searched for impending danger, quickly scanned the little ship''s instruments, and then glared at Appella. "What?" he demanded.
Despite the surface irritation, his heart was rejoicing. His friend stood at his side. Or in this case, directly in front of him.
"You''re back!" she exclaimed.
"I didn''t go anywhere," he objected.
"Not physically," Sky agreed laughingly.
"I was just trying to remember¡ I think¡" Jade fumbled his explanation. "If that''s a representation of the World Dragon, I think it will just act as¡ as a decoration. Like the original Jade Emperor, just an image representing the system."
Appella and Sky stared at him as blankly as he had stared at Appella earlier.
"What does that have to do with the Heart Moon?" Appella demanded.
"It''ll probably just be holding that one in a different hand?" Jade suggested weakly. His eyes caught on the energy reading meter, and he added, "The Moons might be made of pure magic."
"So¡ why would the glow fade then?" Sky asked with interest.
"They promised we''d be able to land on it," Appella objected at the same time.
"I don''t know," Jade admitted.
He hadn''t realized how long he had been searching his records either. The Moon was close enough that it was now growing vaster by the moment. The glow hadn''t diminished either.
A moment later he raised an arm to point at the shocking cloud that mushroomed up from the surface of the moon where the first jetted ship impacted solidly against it. There was no sound. They were still traveling in a vacuum, even if it was filled with magic.
"Decelerate!" Appella shouted.
21: A Tree
Jade laughed as Appella¡¯s panic distracted him from the impact¡¯s cloud still rising from the moon.
Appella and Skyheart Snowsong both gazed at him rather nervously for a moment and then Sky relaxed.
¡°The ship has plenty of feathers,¡± Jade assured Appella.
¡°Feathers?¡± she asked incredulously.
Jade knew that Hisui¡¯s face probably looked unbearably smug, but it was all he could do to repress another burst of laughter.
¡°You jumped off the edge of Sky City with a single feather,¡± Sky pointed out laughingly.
Jade found himself trying to repress another flicker of jealousy as Skyheart¡¯s quick deduction instantly soothed Appella¡¯s frantic mood.
¡°Oh. Yeah! Sweet!¡± Appella enthused.
Hisui¡¯s hands moved the controls with precision and the small ship began decelerating with all of its might anyway. Jade wasn¡¯t completely willing to bet that the reliable wizard spell, that worked to prevent any enchanted object from falling out of the sky under gravity¡¯s rules within the Empire, would work on the Moon.
The surface that now lay ¡®below¡¯ them still shone brightly, as though the light originated there. Jade wished that he had access to the libraries from which ¡®Living Jade Empire¡¯ drew its legends. The wider net beyond the game held legends that ran from pearls to cheese, from overgrown fairy lands to tractless empty dust, from rabbits to aliens. His expectations were already being cast aside by the dragon that covered the void beyond the sky.
Appella pointed away from the mushrooming cloud that showed no sign of blowing away yet. That lack of movement lowered Jade¡¯s expectations of finding a breathable atmosphere. ¡°Is that a tree? Or another crash site?¡± she asked urgently.
Jade¡¯s expectations rotated again as his dwarven eyesight struggled to catch sight of whatever she was looking at. His eyes could see levels of fine detail that a human would struggle with, but distances were fuzzier.
¡°That is definitely a tree,¡± Sky declared confidently.
Elven eyesight was legendary, the level of detail she should be able to see made her confidence justified. An enormous tree on the moon even made sense, given that another tree held the Empire within the grasp of its roots, although it took the right quest to catch sight of its heights after you left the beginner¡¯s Vale.
¡°Point toward it as we turn,¡± he ordered.
Appella¡¯s arm swung like a compass needle as the ship¡¯s path curved improbably. Hisui¡¯s lips curved wider as Jade grinned. Centrifugal forces pushed their feet more firmly against the deck. THIS was flying.
¡°Don¡¯t hit it,¡± Sky warned. ¡°It¡¯s getting closer faster than I expected!¡±
Hisui¡¯s eyes could now see the tree that glowed as brightly as the rest of the moon. Jade promised ¡°We won¡¯t hit it.¡±
His deft dwarven fingers guided the little ship skillfully. The glowing branches of the tree grew larger, and larger, as they sped toward it. Their speed seemed to slow more than his gauges measured that it actually was, as though they were caught in one of those vast spells that could slow the movement of armies, or even mountains.
Magic detection was useless, the ship¡¯s readout had been pinned at maximum for a long time now. Jade looked at Sky. The elf gazed toward the glowing tree as though the sight enchanted her. He glanced at Appella. Her familiar and fierce expression warmed his heart. She really was back.
The figures of both women responded instantly when Jade asked, ¡°Is it reaching for us?¡±
¡°It hasn¡¯t moved at all!¡± Sky assured him.
At the same time, Appella demanded, ¡°Why are we getting so close to it if you think it might!?¡±
Jade struggled to tear Hisui¡¯s gaze away from the tree, but as soon as the branches began to lose his focus, all he could see was light. ¡°I wasn¡¯t prepared for everything to glow! I brought lights but nothing to dim light! I can¡¯t see anything but the tree?¡±
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¡°I can barely make out the tree now that we''re this close and the ground is behind it,¡± Appella admitted anxiously.
¡°I can see the tree clearly and¡ I think I can see the ground beyond the tree,¡± Sky assured him quietly.
¡°You think?¡± Jade questioned.
If the featherweight enchantment didn¡¯t work here, and he couldn¡¯t see the ground, the earlier ship¡¯s impact made more sense. They hadn''t seen dozens of clouds rise from the surface of the moon yet, but the one that had caught their attention had come from where the largest of the ships ahead of them had been. It was hard to guess if the others ahead of them might also have crashed or not.
¡°I can¡¯t tell if we¡¯re dangerously close to some kind of strange meadow, or far away from a tangled forest,¡± Sky admitted finally.
The first branch whipped overhead fast enough to alarm Jade and he deployed the feathers. If they worked¡ they would have nothing to worry about. The feathers popped out of their containers across the surface of the ship, but no wind seemed to catch them.
Jade cursed.
If there was no air, a feather would probably not have any effect on a fall.
Both of his friends hit the deck as though they expected the next branch of the enormous tree to scrape them off. Jade frantically searched for dragons or some kind of large visible danger, and Hisui¡¯s hands trembled for the first time in years. There was nothing visible to his dwarven eyes but the vast tree and a sea of light.
The ship vibrated in response to the tremble of the fingers that guided it.
Appella hissed a different curse in response. Hers was older, or at least used across a world where a thousand tongues were spoken.
The clear shield¡¯s view hadn¡¯t changed much. The trunk of this tree was so wide that they hadn¡¯t yet cleared its span.
Sky laughed and shifted closer to the edge of the deck so she could see better. Her arm rose and she pointed. ¡°There¡¯s an oddly straight branch that tips gently toward the ground over there.¡±
The ship tilted smoothly to follow the line that Sky pointed toward, despite his tremble, and Jade caught sight of the branch a moment later. Hisui¡¯s dwarven grip steadied as Jade¡¯s heart calmed. You weren¡¯t supposed to speak ill of the dead for some reason, but Jade privately thought several curses toward Lin Hao.
There was certainly no logical reason that an artificial heart should respond so violently to an artificial brain, especially since his brain was currently linked into the feedback of a game instead of his body. His thoughts calmed further as he realized that it meant he was feeling the virtual racing of Hisui''s heart through a system designed for a completely human interface. That might not change the artificial nature of this body, but it meant that this was actually a perfectly normal reaction.
The glowing branch in front of them became the little ship''s runway as they zoomed far too quickly toward the surface. Jade calculated their odds and seriously considered simply pointing the little ship''s nose towards the endless night overhead. The twinkle of a brighter star, that was actually a gleaming spot on a vast scale, brought the idea crashing down.
He didn''t think he was ready to try landing on the dragon that encircled an entire world.
Every jet on the little ship was firing full blast, and warning notices began to pop up as the gems that sustained the enchantments began to burn away. Jade still couldn''t see the ground, but Sky''s expression was growing decidedly nervous.
"Can we shoot the tree?" Appella shouted.
Jade and Sky both spared a moment to glance at their friend.
"I could, but¡" Sky began.
"That sounds like a really bad idea," Jade interrupted rather flatly.
Appella spoke quickly, "I just thought it might¡"
The branch narrowed and branched ahead, and Jade gazed in dismay at the far too quickly approaching shimmer of¡ leaves. The ship smacked into the unexpected layer of air a second later with a physical thump. They all bounced as the impact violently tossed the contents of the vessel around.
The feathers that dangled from dozens of clasps across the vessel turned, and began to cut the sudden wind into something softer. None of them were physically large enough to have an effect, but their magic was working after all.
"It''s still a long way down!" Sky shouted with more certainty as she pulled herself back up far enough to see.
Jade allowed the ship to slide off the path that had been laid by the branch as it continued to spread into hundreds of dazzling leafy boughs.
It felt like mere seconds passed before they were no longer zipping, but just softly floating toward the surface below. Appella crawled over to where Sky was leaning against the barrier and gazed down.
"Is the ground moving?" she questioned worriedly.
"I think so," Sky agreed softly. Harmony''s voice seemed filled with delight rather than apprehension. "No wonder I couldn''t tell what it was."
"So¡" Jade prompted rather sharply. "What is it"
"An army of¡ shrubs?" Appella suggested.
"I think maybe they are rabbits dressed in leafy outfits," Sky said doubtfully.
¡ "Do you see a landing spot?" Jade asked finally.
22: Grounded
"There!" Sky shouted an instant later.
Jade didn''t even have to ask as he saw the slightly ragged stretch of light seem to rise from the horizon. His instincts guided Hisui''s hands as the little ship rose in response. The movement of the ridge spoke of how close their viewpoint must be to the surface of the globe beneath them.
The slow descent that the feathered charms had reduced their fall to, suddenly seemed far too fast. The ridge was beneath them within moments, and Jade threw the fans that would only work within an atmosphere wide open. A storm of particles swirled upward in response.
The little ship landed with an ominous thud, and then bounced.
The small vessel once more smacked into a hard surface that threw an even thicker, brighter, fog of dust into the air again, with a slightly less forceful thud. They bounced again.
From the outside the ship''s landing might have looked like the path of a neatly skipped stone. From the inside, it was a barrage of impacts that nearly shook Hisui''s boots loose.
When the ship finally landed, then merely quivered for a moment and didn''t bounce again, its occupants lay where they had fallen. They all lay still and silent for more than a moment.
"We''re alive," Appella announced almost questioningly.
"Yes," Sky agreed.
"Did we land on anyone?" Jade asked a bit shakily.
Both of them turned their heads toward him, and he pointed at the branches that stuck out into the viewport on one side.
"You said that there were animated shrubbery, or creatures dressed in leaves¡" he added.
Appella sat up and drew an odd weapon out of a container space on her belt. Sky didn''t object, instead she also gathered up her bow from where it had landed on the final bounce.
The branches didn''t move. The leaves didn''t quiver. The haze that shrouded the small ship didn''t thin noticeably.
"Are you planning to kill them off if landing on them failed?" Jade asked as he began to gather up his own gear.
The leafy branches seemed to fade into the foggy background despite the fact that they seemed to be glowing just like the tree overhead. Everything seemed to be glowing, even the particles in the air.
Appella turned toward Hisui with a rather dazed expression, and then glanced down at what she held. "I''d probably attack someone who landed on a friend of mine¡ but, I''m not even sure about what I saw. And that isn''t moving."
"I''m not really certain of what I saw either," Sky admitted nervously. "A sea of marching rabbits dressed in leaves seems unlikely."
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Jade glanced at the pale glowing environment that surrounded them again, and began searching the storage compartments of the little vessel.
He searched until he found the volcanic glass lens he used to protect delicate instruments against the harshest flames in Hisui''s forge. Obsidian wouldn''t do more than dim light in the real world, but here in the game its legendary properties of absorbing light and energy were quite real. Unfortunately a single lens couldn''t protect 3 people.
Jade smashed the lens and ground it into a fine powder.
"What are you making?" Sky asked curiously.
"Filters," he explained as he took apart one of the helmets he had created before Appella gave him the air stones.
Jade used one of Hisui''s more magical skills to reshape the glass while using that artificial fluidity to meld the powdered obsidian into it. He then slid the first visor over his own eyes and looked outside the ship again, before handing the other two over to his companions.
The visor subdued the brightness that had obscured everything enough for him to see movement in the cloud that was slowly settling. He could actually see that the cloud was slowly settling with the help of the filter. It seemed to be functioning rather like a polarized lens.
Sky drew in a sharp breath as she pulled her own visor down. "A sea of rabbits!"
Appella squinted in the direction that Sky was looking, and Jade followed suit. There was movement in that direction too, but it was slower than the currents in the cloud they had raised, and at first he couldn''t make anything out.
The dust slowly settled, ever so slowly. The three of them watched as though caught in a spell, but a glance at the ship''s instruments told Jade that the interior was still free of the thick magical energies that had filled the void. The exterior was also giving a far lower reading here within the Moon''s atmosphere.
Eventually they could all see the sea of rabbits, or at least the long eared furry beings that resembled rabbits, though they moved on their hind legs like people. But as a group they moved like herd animals, or perhaps a vast school of fish, rather than the rabbits Jade was familiar with.
Once in a while one would reach up to grab a leaf from the branches they seemed to be wearing like hats or shawls. The leaf was slowly nibbled, held in paws that were far more like hands than a real rabbit''s front feet.
"Why are they all glowing?" Appella asked.
"Maybe because they are eating leaves that glow," Sky suggested.
Jade stared at the sea of ghostly rabbit people. His internal questions were automatically forwarded to his orbital System, and answers began to filter back into his mind. The Moon''s server was portraying a very typical mesh of ''popular legend'' mixed with what ''everyone knew'' about the moon.
The fine dust that covered the ground and shone whitely was neither realistic, nor completely fantastical. Lunar rabbit people actually had a solid legendary history among more than one culture, and Jade had been more than half expecting to find some on the moon. But not thousands, or hundreds of thousands.
Both Appella and Sky stiffened with alarm when Jade stepped forward and lowered the barrier that had enclosed the little ship against the airless void between the Empire and the Moon. There were no rabbit people walking along the ridge they had landed on. The magical energy within the small vessel only raised a little as the Moon''s atmosphere filtered in.
As Hisui stepped down, Jade was relieved to see that the thin branches seen through the portal hadn''t been carried by one of the rabbit people. They were sprouting from the ridge. The ridge wasn''t a hill of Moon soil, it was a root.
"Do you think we''ve landed in the Moon''s equivalent of the ''Beginner''s Vale''?" Sky asked with soft curiosity as she followed Hisui.
Appella''s expression lit up and she bounced out of the little ship as energetically as usual. "It is, isn''t it?!" she exclaimed.
The rabbit people who were moving along the edge of the root closest to them glanced upward in response to the exclamation, but their slow movement didn''t stop.
23: Agusmin
"Hello!" Apella shouted.
The rabbit-like people seemed to confer nearly silently together, but none of them stopped moving. Another ripple seemed to spread outward from where the sound of her voice had hit them, across the endless crowd, vanishing into the light.
"Maybe they don''t speak common," Jade suggested from beside the small ship, as he bent to examine a particularly deep groove that had been scratched into the surface.
"Many of us do, actually," a thin voice piped up in response.
"Very rude of them to suggest otherwise," another muttered.
Apella spluttered in protest, "Not as rude as ignoring a greeting!"
Harmony found herself repressing a laugh, as her elven character skipped down the slope of the root toward the rabbit-like people. The movement was far more comfortable than her old knees in real life would have allowed it to be, despite the regular exercises she engaged in to maintain an uncharacteristically youthful flexibility.
She called out, and as Skyheart Snowsong her voice invitingly targeted the first NPC rabbit person who had spoken a bit more than it would have if she had spoken to another player, "Would you stop and chat a bit?"
The rabbit-like person easily resisted her call, shook their head and declined, "Can''t stop. We must follow the sun."
The creature bounced forward. Each step propelled a body covered in leafy branches, like some kind of rabbit shrubbery, in a movement that mimicked normal rabbit''s bounce and covered nearly as much ground.
Harmony scrambled along the edge of the crowd, moving away from Appella and Jade without thinking, as she asked curiously, "When do you rest?"
She thought it might be easier to approach them when they halted for the night. Her question made her the focus of hundreds of bright, curious eyes, and a murmur whispered through the air, even though not one of the moving crowd paused.
Most of the individual rabbit-people didn''t even speak up loudly enough for her to make out words, but the one she had targeted did at least reply calmly, "We don''t. The tree''s gifts will recharge us until we finish our service."
Harmony hesitated as she saw the crowd of rabbit-people closing in ahead. The root-like hill that had caught their ship, began to narrow and sink into the shining sand, and the crowd closed in from the other side like a vast sea. She glanced back, and felt startled by how far she had moved away from Appella and Jade.
Those two were both so delightfully obtuse. It was taking her a while to adapt to the knowledge that while Jade was still Jade¡ he wasn''t human, but that news had obviously hurt young Appella far more. She, or he, was in love with a person who wasn''t human. And how confusing the irrelevance of that ''so important'' problem, their ''identical'' gender, must have seemed when it was revealed that they weren''t even both human.
Harmony herself loved Jade quite a lot, but she had decades of experience with differences to buffer her from the confusion he, it, Jade had revealed. Jade wasn''t even an organic being, native to their planet. In a way it was even funny. Jade''s computer was so inefficient at mimicking a human brain, that it took an entire orbital station to do it.
Apella had been frightened quite reasonably, Harmony decided as she eyed the movement of the crowd. But Jade''s dear missing person was here on this moon adventure with them now.
Harmony was very glad that the youth who played her was coming to realize that Jade was still the same person. ''He'' was just as child-like, and yet cynical seeming, as he had ever been. He hadn''t changed. He might be able to carry on more conversations at once than most people, but that was just a matter of capacity, not identity.
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A shout drew her attention back to Jade, but it was too faint and unexpected to understand. "What?" she called back.
"Use your communication mirror!" Jade called out again. He pulled out the linked one that he still carried, and waved it.
Harmony glanced ahead and understood immediately. Skyheart''s elven form twisted to access her storage even as she fell in step with the crowd. For a moment, she wondered if the rabbit person who had been willing to speak would make room for her, but the rabbit-like people curved around her as she stepped off the rounded mound where the root sank into the shining sea of sand.
The communication mirror in her hands reflected nothing, but showed Jade''s character Hisui''s familiar dwarven features instead. Harmony looked up and focused on the weirdly expressive features of the bipedal rabbit beside her. The strange conglomeration of branches covered in growing leaves didn''t actually seem to be part of the animal, but some kind of garment or burden that it carried.
The long ears that identified the creatures as rabbits to her mind turned toward her. Saggy, old looking, eyebrows wrinkled and raised as the individual eyed her curiously, and at last nodded and then glanced down at the mirror she held.
"It''s a communication device," she blurted in response to an unspoken demand.
The head of her viewer tilted thoughtfully, and the fuzzy eyebrows rose again. The rabbit-like person replied oddly familiarly, "You find me as strange as I find you, I think. I am an Agusmin, one of the eldest who serves the Tree."
"The tree?" she blurted. Harmony couldn''t help blinking at the creature incredulously and glancing back toward the enormous glowing branches of the vast, mostly leafless, tree that rose overhead.
The Agusmin elder chuckled. "It must be true that your kind cannot hear it sing."
From within the image she carried, Jade suggested, "Perhaps rather than being like the tree that supports the beginner''s vales as we had guessed, it is some kind of complex transmission instrument?"
Appella''s voice asked excitedly, "Maybe the Jade Emperor sends his voice all the way to the Moon?"
"It is not," the Augusmin elder objected. "The tree itself sings, no petty Emperor rules here. Every branch sings in harmony."
The others, moving along beside them at the same pace, nodded with gentle smiles, as though the suggestion that a foreign Emperor could speak through their tree were silly.
"The device you carry is rather interesting," another Augusmin voice added.
"It is just an enchanted item that transmits our voices," Harmony explained quickly.
"Loudly. You communicate like children learning to whistle on their leaves without realizing that their elders can hear them all clearly," the Agusmin elder snorted.
A whisper of laughter seemed to carry beneath a soft murmur of voices, as the rabbit-like Augusmin traveled. Harmony looked out across a sea of beings so bright that even with Skyheart''s elven eyesight, through the filter that Hisui had created, she couldn''t see an edge to the sea of moving light that filled her vision. Even the shimmer of distant stars that had been mere reflections in an even vaster dragon''s scales, was hidden by the pervasive glow.
"Is it getting brighter?" Harmony asked.
The Augusmin glanced at each other and their ears moved as though silently conferring with the tiny motions. The elder shrugged. "Both the sun and your Empire will seem to shine almost equally for a few bells."
"Bells," Harmony repeated.
"Living Jade Empire''s equivalent of an hour," Jade reminded her.
Overhead an even brighter light shone beyond the branches, so much whiter than the sun she was used to seeing that it took her a while to recognize it as the sun. The far dimmer sphere that seemed to be about the same size¡ was actually the world of the Empire that they had left behind. The light of the sand beneath them seemed to brighten in reflection, like water might on earth, and so did the leaves in the branches that covered each of the Augusmin.
Unhindered by her wandering gaze, the Augusmin elder said calmly, "You should not let your friends fall too far behind."
"Why?" Apella demanded challengingly from the mirror when neither Harmony nor Jade immediately responded.
"You will freeze if full darkness ever touches you," the elder informed them. "Unlike your legendary Empire, where they say an endless fire is buried beneath the ground, this land is pierced by ice even colder than the emptiness beyond the sky. Even the great tree will grow dark and cold during the long night. The roots are strong, but the leaves will fold themselves away. That is why the fruits will never ripen unless we Augusmin carry enough leaves beneath the sun."
"Why don''t you just carry the fruit?" Jade asked curiously.
The elder laughed. "Can you pluck one life free of another before it has fully formed its own existence? No! But even those who cannot lift mountains can carry a bit of energy back to the tree."
24: The Fruit
"Fruit is almost always picked before it is actually ripe. It doesn''t die just because it was disconnected from its plant. I think many seeds are even designed to finish developing as the remains of the fruit rot, long after it is removed," Apella objected.
Jade felt his character Hisui blink with him, as he replied, "You know a surprising amount about growing fruit? But it still has to finish growing, and storing up all of those nutrients first."
"I guess," Appella agreed grudgingly.
"Just so," the elder agreed from the mirror.
Apella huffed and tossed her head in a gesture that would have flipped Eric''s bangs back, as she glared at Hisui. Jade found himself laughing hard enough to jiggle his dwarf''s belly.
From the mirror, Harmony chuckled as though she could see them both, even as her character Sky nodded knowingly to the Augusmin elder.
The elder plucked a leaf from a branch that hung almost down to his nose as his step bounced him forward. He nibbled the leaf as delicately as though it were a favorite candy, with every moment to be savored.
"You eat some of the leaves you carry?" Sky asked with interest.
"We sustain the tree, and the tree sustains us," the elder replied serenely.
Jade felt his own thoughts bounce. He struggled silently for a moment until the connection completed again. It was a strange, almost alien thing, but the thought his orbital system had sent to this distant part of him banished his awareness of it. If the shining leaves were acting both like a currency, and like batteries then they were also the physical form of a bargain the Augusmin had made with the Moon''s tree.
Jade used the elvish language as he shouted into the mirror, "Sky, don''t eat anything that comes from the tree!"
Apella looked utterly confused. Sky tilted the mirror on her side away from the Augusmin and back to her own face.
Harmony''s voice was warm and reassuring as Sky replied lightly in the usual common tongue, "Don''t worry, you won''t find many leaves in my diet."
"That actually sounds rather worrisome," Apella responded both mockingly, and questioningly.
At the same time, the elder''s voice replied huffily to Sky''s comment, "You haven''t earned the right to the tree''s gifts anyway."
"Gifts don''t have to be earned," Sky countered the elder swiftly.
The Augusmin elder and Jade both regarded the elf incredulously.
"Even Santa Clause supposedly requires a whole year of good behavior from kids," Apella blurted.
Sky''s cheeks turned pinker, and Jade found himself laughing. Somehow it wasn''t strange that the eldest among them could seem the most innocent.
Apella''s confusion increased, and her eyes searched Hisui''s. "What am I missing?" she whispered far more quietly.
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"Eating the tree''s ''gifts'' might bind you into the same bargain that the Augusmin have made with the tree," Jade whispered with his hands cupping the mirror on both sides, as though covering its ears.
"What bargain?" Appella asked.
"I''m not sure," Jade admitted uncertainly.
Harmony''s voice drifted through the mirror, sounding somewhat muffled, and Jade shifted Hisui''s hands again. "...he carries gifts to every child in the world within a single night, according to the myths of my homeland."
"That''s impossible!" objected one of the other Augusmin. "No one can survive the night."
"It might be possible, in the other world," the elder said more thoughtfully. "The nights there would be warmed by the fire within the world, or so the legends say."
"He is rumored to dwell in our coldest winter region, and flies through the sky, so perhaps he could even travel safely through the nights here?" Harmony suggested. "But he delivers the gifts to the children''s dwellings during the night. Do you have dwellings?"
"Maybe we could not spread all of the prejudices that our myths are built with into the game," Apella muttered softly.
"What is a dwelling?" one of the sleeker Augusmin asked.
"A place to sleep and store food," Harmony replied as though she thought of her own home in such simple terms.
"We don''t, but the tree shares its energy with us, and there are only a few children amongst us at any one time. We carry them in the warmest part of the day that we travel, and never let the night catch them," the elder explained.
Beyond the small mirror held in Hisui''s hands, a shining sea of rabbit-like people continued to move along the length of the giant root in rhythmic waves. Rather rapid waves. The Augusmin were moving faster than any human foot traffic. Skyheart Snowsong was far out of sight.
Jade glanced at Apella, and then at the small ship beside them. "How long do we have to get moving before the night would reach us?" he asked.
The elder answered after a long moment, "Perhaps seven more turns of your Empire''s sphere, but do not be fooled by the number of bells that gives you, it is better to stay far beyond the edge of the night. If you take a moment''s rest, you''ll find you must run for twice as long to catch up with the sun."
"Seven days?" Appella asked incredulously.
"Game days are a lot shorter," Jade reminded her. Him. Eric''s character. Somehow thinking of the hours that existed outside the game made him think of the actual person.
"What do you think happens if you log back in during the night?" Apella wondered.
"I''m not sure I want to be the character that finds out first," Jade admitted.
"Do you just carry these leaves around the moon forever, in a single endless day?" Harmony asked suddenly.
"Not forever, one must only carry a branch back to the tree a hundred times to earn a taste of the tree''s fruit, and renew the pledge."
The Augusmin beside him piped up, "It only takes a thousand to gain immortality!"
"Immortality? Seriously?" Apella scoffed.
"I don''t see why not, Living Jade Empire already has fountains of youth," Jade pointed out.
Skyheart Snowsong merely replied to the elder rather dryly, "The tree''s fruit probably tastes like swamp muck then."
A ripple of reaction spread across the gently rolling sea of figures.
"Why, how could you, why would you even..?" the younger Augusmin spluttered.
"Medicine always tastes bad," Harmony assured them.
"It is certainly the most delectable fruit in existence!" the elder objected.
"Ever had an apple?" Harmony asked laughingly.
"No, I haven''t had the opportunity," the elder replied.
"I might have one." Sky shifted the mirror to point at the sky as she reached for her storage ring.
"Don''t let the foreigner trick you!" one of the younger Augusmin shouted at the eldest.
"The energy the tree gifts us is worth more than the most delicious food imaginable," another added confidently.
Another ripple spread through the Augusmin as Sky held out an apple. The Augusmin stared at it ascance, as though it were the strangest object they had ever seen.
The Augusmin elder''s ears swiveled for a moment, and then he shook his head. "Thank you, but I decline. You won''t trick one of the tree''s precious leaves out of me that easily."
"You can just have it. I will gift it to you freely," Sky promised.
The elder tilted his head, but then shook it in negation again a moment later. "I will still decline," he said firmly.
25: Connection
"He''s afraid to taste something different," Apella scoffed.
"Perhaps," Jade agreed, as he handed her the mirror. At her confused look he explained, "I need my hands free to get the ship ready to fly again."
Appella nodded as Hisui''s hands began to move with dwarven accuracy. Gem fragments and dust were delicately removed from clasps on the little airship. A decidedly frigid breeze ruffled his thick dwarven hair, as though the air were echoing the Augusmin''s warning.
Apella shivered. Her eyes widened a little as she gazed out at the sea of gently rolling movement and shining leaves beyond the root that held the little ship above the traveling Augusmin. "The crowd is thinning," she blurted.
Jade paused and scanned the brightly flowing crowd. After a moment he agreed, "It is! Though I still can''t see the end of them."
"We landed during rush hour or something," Apella suggested laughingly.
Jade turned the other way and focused on the line of darkness that was slowly encroaching upon the far branches of the enormous tree that stretched above the moon''s atmosphere. Jade squinted Hisui''s eyes. Was the darkness an absence of light, or the claw of a Dragon.
What kind of twisted story had been written here, he wondered. The Augusmin seemed content to spend their lives tramping their globe in service to a shining tree with its roots buried in ice, if their tale was accurate. What kind of prize would immortality even be for such a people.
Jade was utterly certain that Lin Hao would never have created this kind of story.
Jade knew that Lin Hao and Danika Belova had created the foundation of this story years ago. Jade was utterly certain that Jade wasn''t listening as he sent the "memory" data again.
The function finally successfully connected, and their exchanged memories updated. Jade''s Hisui gazed into the light beyond his small airship in blind confusion.
A moment ago Jade had been certain that Lin Hao would never have created this kind of story, but the synchronized orbital system memories argued that Lin Hao and Danika Belova were the people who had created the new Living Jade Empire Moon server foundation years before they had actually acquired a server to expand the game into. Jade even remembered offering his own server to them.
"The fairies should be making cheese shouldn''t they?" Jade asked.
"What are you talking about? What fairies should be making cheese? Are the rabbit people fairies?" Appella questioned in obvious confusion.
"I might have some cheese left, should I have offered that instead?" Sky asked from the mirror in Apella''s hands.
Apella glared at Hisui when he didn''t respond to either of them.
The dwarf stopped moving again, with a blank expression that suggested maybe the character''s player had disconnected.
--
Eric didn''t know how concerned he should be about that. They still had most of two real days to get their characters moving before they would freeze, if he understood the situation.
This was weird.
Anyone else might ignore Eric''s questions or comments, but not Jade. Anyone else might disconnect from the game for a moment to grab a drink or something.
Eric wondered how he had never noticed that Jade never stopped to get anything, or even use the restroom while they played. Maybe part of why he had been so shocked¡
Shocked was a safe, simple word to describe the indescribable tsunami of emotions that had torn through the fabric of Eric''s reality. Of what had been revealed to be a fabricated reality. A ridiculously reliable reality. How could he ever regret that Jade hadn''t actually died in front of his eyes, and yet¡
Perhaps part of the reason that the accidental revelation of Jade''s non-human existence had hit so hard, had been Eric''s realization that there HAD been clues all along, but Eric himself had been blind to them. Had wanted to be blind to them. He still wanted to be blind to it all.
Apella''s glare at Hisui did not decrease in intensity, but Eric''s irritation shifted to himself. False pride. False acceptance. False appreciation of his friend''s differences. He hadn''t been worthy of what he''d dreamed of anyway. That wasn''t Jade''s fault.
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Sky''s beautiful elfin face, displayed in the mirror shaped screen that Apella held, laughed at the rabbity beings that surrounded her.
Skyheart Snowsong, like Hisui, had never ignored Appella. Never dismissed her, even after learning she was played by a guy.
She had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, this woman who had suddenly befriended Jade so easily. Who really made friends with their convenience store customers? And yet¡ The two of them were beautiful together in such a strange way. The tall slender elf and the robust hairy dwarf.
Sky was already a friend''s friend who made him feel like they''d been friends themselves for far longer than they''d known each other. She always seemed to know more than she should. She was nothing like any other woman in his life. If only it had been her.
It would have been easier for Eric to accept a revelation that Skyheart Snowsong was a machine instead.
Instead, Jade had warned Eric gently that Sky was actually an old woman. He had warned his friend as carefully as though he were afraid they might accidentally fall in love.
Eric scoffed at himself again in hindsight. Jade obviously had no clue. Jade was as naive as a child. Such a clueless computer. Artificial intelligence, artificial body. A walking talking space station.
That utterly impossible fact¡
--
"¡when we complete our service, we can travel wherever we please," an Augusmin assured Sky.
Hisui''s expression finally changed and his hands replaced the gem fragment that he had removed, and then combined with another, into one of the settings that rimmed the small vessel.
"There are so many other legends of things like the moon being made of cheese, and fairies on the moon, that the head programmer and the wildest designer used to talk about having fairies making cheeses the way legendary moon rabbits make medicines," Jade finally explained. "I don''t think offering the Augusmin cheese will go better than the apple though."
Apella swallowed hard before muttering, "The more you know¡ then are these fruits they are helping the tree ripen, actually legendary medicines?"
"The tree''s fruit might just be a fruit of immortality, but it might also be a divine fruit that can also heal someone from anything? I mean, that would be a far better kind of immortality," Jade pointed out as Hisui''s hands appeared to pull a freshly cut gem out of the air, as he pulled it out of his inventory.
Apella''s confusion visibly increased. "Then don''t we WANT to take it if we get a chance? Everyone''s going to want that. It could help you fulfill a thousand quests!" she hissed back with her hands clamped around the edges of the mirror in a muffling fashion.
"Unless you want to join the Augusmin in their 70 year quests, I''m sure your character would be cursed. It would kind of be a curse anyway, because immortals can never reincarnate," Jade warned as he moved his hands.
Apella''s expression turned conflicted. "70 years? How did you come up with that?"
"I''m not certain of that number," Jade warned. "But if it''s four game days a day, and it takes a thousand tastes and they only get a taste once every hundred days¡"
Muffled conversational sounds vibrated Apella''s hands, and she loosened her grip to hear Sky complain, "¡missing so many delicious foods. All this food nonsense is making me so hungry that I''m pretty sure I''m actually hungry. Hisui? You still there? What do we need to do to complete our first quest here?"
Jade felt stupidly slow. Surely someone else had successfully landed and made the connection by now. But there hadn''t been any server wide announcements that he had noticed.
Jade pulled the collapsed ring of the expensive temporary portal out of his inventory. It didn''t matter if the connection lasted, it just needed to be made once to open up the access. "Grab some rocks and sand or something, it just has to be material that''s from the Moon," he instructed Apella.
Apella rolled her eyes, but promptly scrambled down the slope of the enormous root to grab some moon rock.
Jade pulled the bag open and spread the circle out beside the ship. When the edge finally snapped into place, nothing happened. Hisui''s hands moved instinctively, and his dwarven eyes showed Jade the engraved surfaces in exquisite detail. They seemed perfect. They still contained the power needed.
Apella climbed back up, carrying the mirror she hadn''t left behind in her teeth, and handed Jade both a bag full of shining sand and three fist sized rocks that seemed to glow like lightbulbs.
"It''s not working," Jade finally admitted with distress.
Apella frowned. She gestured in the air in a familiar fashion and the faint glimmer of another player''s game menus appeared before her. A moment later she protested, "We can''t even send messages?!"
Both Harmony and Jade tried to send a message as well, before Jade finally pulled the coin the Jade Emperor had given him from Hisui''s inventory. The messenger animals were all unavailable.
"What is that?" Apella asked.
"I think maybe I just need to make a call," Jade replied without really explaining.
He glanced at Apella who was glaring at him as though he were speaking nonsense. He couldn''t argue, but he could activate the summoning. Maybe it wouldn''t work. Maybe they ought to have accepted one of the big guild quests, or carried a high leveled wizard with them.
"Finally," an all too familiar voice grumbled. Memories that didn''t belong to Jade, but that had always belonged to Jade flickered before settling into place again.
The Jade Emperor looked around with interest.
26: Celestial Records
Within moments of the Jade Emperor''s appearance, the messenger animals that Hisui and Appella had tried to summon earlier popped into existence. Apella seemed distracted by the elaborately robed figure before her, and ignored both the messenger that circled her, and Hisui''s frantic lunge.
Jade had been half expecting it, so he paid no attention to the messenger animals or the Emperor, as the temporary portal he had laid finally powered up and the connected space opened. He reached over to snatch the rocks and sand from where they lay beside the portal, and toss them through the opening before it vanished. He wasn''t prepared at all for the jet of air that blasted out of the small circle as the first object cleared the rim.
Despite his vastly better dwarven coordination, Hisui lost his footing and was blown away, high into the air, over the sea of moving Augusmin.
The Emperor laughed aloud, but made no motion to stop the dwarven character''s unexpected flight. The little portal shimmered oddly when the Emperor gazed at it, but remained in place long enough for Jade to use Hisui''s dwarven strength and coordination to launch the last moon rock pebble in his hand past the rim of the little portal before it snapped shut, and the rim crumbled away.
Hisui fell. He fell too slowly, and yet too quickly, all at once. Sky''s messenger animal popped into existence beside the falling dwarf, and held out the message almost elegantly.
Jade struggled with instinctive reactions that his new ''memories'' told him had been developed by the ''deaths'' his mechanical bodies had experienced. The mental paralyzation was ''physical'' here, but the game interface also responded instantly to his wish once he formed it. Hisui''s steady hands collected the message as smoothly as though he stood at his forge.
That movement freed Jade''s mind. For Hisui, as for all Players, death within the game was merely an inconvenience. This wasn''t his first fall, and he adjusted his position to catch as much air as he could, even as he aimed for an open space in the thinning crowds of Augusmin below him.
Skyheart Snowsong''s message screen was hidden before the words finished forming as the spellcheck on the ignition enchantments in his boots threw an error message pop up. System-wide achievement notifications overwrote that too, as announcement after announcement popped up. Coriander sent the first message from the moon. Kidmaiden both committed the first murder and suffered the first player death. The Imins guild activated the first permanent portal on the moon. Taken claimed the first territory at the same time.
Hisui hit the ground far harder than Jade felt like he should have. He got to feel the impact of the first bounce, but then everything went dark in a familiar fashion. The too predictable video that began to replay Hisui''s life before Jade''s eyes¡ actually felt rather shocking.
Jade had not forgotten anything, but he watched his mother hug his dwarf a thousand times. She had always looked so much like she did in real life, but watching her gradually aging visibly over the years, her life was flashing before his eyes wasn''t it?
And then seeing Apella''s¡ no Eric''s, she had looked a bit more like Eric back then hadn''t she¡ Seeing the previous character his friend had played for years, walking and laughing at his side¡ seeing everything¡ all those quests¡ watching his friend ride the dragon all the way to the top of the sky once more¡ and then vanish forever.
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And then witnessing some of the slightly awkward moments afterwards, when Apella had reconnected with him, not exactly different, and yet¡ things had not been exactly the same had they. Knowing that Eric had been beside him in real life at that point altered Jade''s interpretation of some of those moments, some of those questions.
The memories passed by without pausing for Jade''s comprehension to catch up. He watched Apella go missing from his friend list. Watched Hisui cry. Watched his new friend Skyheart Snowsong climb into the sky beside him.
Jade knew that Living Jade Empire always showed the highlights of a character''s life. Everyone knew that. But had it always shown you¡ all of this? Had it shown him this before? How long had it been since he had let Hisui die?
Jade held so many memories¡ his own¡ those of his past¡ and those created by the other half of himself¡ Jade was sorting through his own recollections of Jade''s life when the bird interrupted.
--
"That went quicker than I expected," the Jade Emperor commented mildly.
Apella stared through the annoying pop up screens that tried to block her view of the elaborately robed figure who had already been blocking her view of Hisui. Who looked far too much like a slightly older version of the Jade who existed outside of the game. How Eric had missed that resemblance before, he couldn''t fathom.
Apella''s mouth opened in soundless protest as the notification of her party member Hisui''s death blazed into existence atop the other pop up screens. As soon as Jade had announced that he just needed to make a call, it felt like everything had exploded.
"Apella! Can you hear me!?" Sky''s muffled voice demanded from the mirror beneath Apella''s hands.
"No!" Eric screamed with Apella''s voice. "It''s not over!" The hand holding the communication mirror slapped the screens aside in a splash of sparkles, as though its enchantments could shatter the interface screens.
The being that wore a version of Jade''s face regarded Apella with a far far too familiar expression of concerned puzzlement. "The portal has already closed and my summoner has departed this plane," the Emperor replied gently.
"Who are you really?" Eric demanded. "What the hell is happening!?" For the first time, he hated hearing Apella''s lighter voice shouting in place of his own.
"Simple questions with far too many answers for this simple Emperor to reveal them all to you now. However, this should help point you in the right direction," the Jade Emperor replied with amusement as, with a wink like some sort of old fashioned stage magician, he vanished.
"Apella?" Sky''s voice asked again, far more uncertainly. "Hisui was killed?"
The quaver in Skyheart Snowsong''s question stabbed Eric through his own lungs and for a moment he couldn''t speak.
The system-wide message screen that formed out of the sparkles of the previous screens froze the rest of him.
"Engrave this day into the history of the Moon. Carry the true name of the one who opened the path that the Jade Emperor traveled to reach the other side of the world above his Empire, to the Tree that his father planted so that it may be sung for a thousand years. The first player to complete the same journey that the Augusmin travel every cycle of the Moon, will be able to compose a song that will never be forgotten."
There was no option to refuse. There was nothing to force anyone to complete it. There were currently only two players who would know that Hisui''s name would fulfill the first condition. There were no answers offered beyond the most obvious identity of the Jade Emperor.
Apella''s face was colder than the breeze that blew from the direction of the ever so slowly approaching darkness beyond the tree, as she finally replied to Skyheart Snowsong. "This challenge was laid for us."
"It was Hisui wasn''t it," Sky replied dryly. "Want to bet that it means there isn''t a single shrine to the Twins already on the Moon?"
27: Mortality
The little brown bird asked gruffly, "Want me to replay that last glimpse?"
"What?" Jade asked with confusion, looking around for the fire that his own memories told him would greet a player at this point.
"You didn''t actually read the last message you ever received did you?" the bird asked curiously.
That would have been true if Jade had actually been human, though there were humans who seemed to store visual memory in a similar way. After his silent moment stretched too long, Jade admitted, "I didn''t see the entire message."
A pool of light seemed to ripple out from the gentle tap of a single tiny talon, and a message shimmered on its surface. It was the message from Harmony''s character, Sky, that had begun, "I think I may be trapped. They are all friendly enough, and it wasn''t difficult¡"
It continued, "¡to walk into the crowd, but now there''s not even enough room for me to stop moving without being trampled."
Those words jolted Jade into action. He had been wasting time. "I need to revive as quickly as possible!"
"Well¡ that''s bound to be a bit tricky isn''t it? There are no local shrines yet." the bird replied. "But if you want to reincarnate as a local species, you can do so immediately, and you''d even get a huge Karma discount!"
Jade hesitated. Reincarnation would cause some communication problems, but speed was essential. "What kinds of species are available here?"
"Are you ready to reincarnate then?" the bird chirped encouragingly.
"Not without knowing what options are available," Jade replied firmly. Living Jade Empire had a few species that had to be hatched from eggs, like dragons. Dragons might live on the moon. That would take days. There could be other disadvantages to losing Hisui to reincarnation as well. "Or at least what it will take to go about reviving me?"
The device in Hisui''s workshop, that the moon sand and rocks had been transmitted to, was designed to secure a material connection to the moon long enough for the construction of permanent portals. It should be able to maintain it until the rocks wore down, though that might not matter anymore, given the notification about the Imins guild''s portal.
The ''cheat'' Jade had used to connect his own temporary portal, summoning a celestial being who was present in more than one place at a time, was probably what had enabled the Imins guild to activate their portal, but they must have had such luck with the timing. Or possibly they had simply done the same thing at the same time, since any God, or even some other kinds of NPC should be able to fulfill the equation.
"I can''t tell you more detail about local reincarnation options, since I have nothing to do with new lives, but I can tell you that there will be a long delay in revival because the closest shrine is so far distant from the site of your death," the bird explained patiently.
"How long?" Jade pressed.
"A full day or more," the bird replied a bit sharply. It immediately continued without waiting for another question, "It''s no use complaining about the speed. Portal magic cannot transport souls for us. We are already carrying many souls home as fast as we can."
Jade grimaced. Harmony would have to get Apella''s help, but they would probably manage without him. A full game day was only a few hours long. Revival would probably be fastest. He straightened and told the bird, "Then let''s get moving."
The bird''s trill of laughter seemed to echo, as the area darkened further, and Jade was logged out. The remaining notice message floating in the system informed him how many minutes and hours remained until he could log back in.
--
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Jade opened the mobile application that let players send and receive game messages without fully logging into the game, and was relieved to see that despite his character death, messaging on this layer wasn''t disabled.
His first message was to Apella, relaying the message from Sky, and letting her know about the delay in revival from the moon. His second was to Sky, to let Harmony know that she needed to contact Apella directly while he was stuck offline.
That done, Jade then shifted his attention to the small-self at his mother''s place. They had been talking all along, but Jade''s human-self had been isolated from the conversation unless his station-self had judged something important enough to transfer. Trying to balance external communication was so ridiculously awkward.
Tayana Kitari looked the same as usual. Or possibly even happier than usual as she chatted with her son through the elderly robotic interface. His memory of all of the scenes of Hisui with Kit Tay told him that her human self actually looked a bit older than her character''s gradual changes had shown.
It wasn''t that he didn''t know her current appearance, or her former appearance. It was that he hadn''t noticed the changes until they had been shown in quick succession. She wasn''t nearly as old as Harmony, yet, but she would be all too soon, wouldn''t she?
--
Eric focused intently as his character Apella shifted the little ship''s controls nervously. She had flown Hisui''s skimmer before, but not the airship. Jade had given them a quick summary of everything, just in case, but he had also still been making repairs to the ship just a few minutes ago.
Every other tiny gemstone light on the dash still glowed red instead of green, like some kind of festive display. The feather glowed green though, and the ship rose gently into the air on command. The communication mirror that showed Sky walking among the Augusmin lay beside the controls.
A susurrous murmur arose from the mirror as the ship began to move along the root, away from the gigantic tree behind it. Apella''s control wavered for just a moment, as Eric''s attention shifted from the screen in front of him, to the mirror''s surface.
The Augusmin Elder who still traveled beside Sky spoke up, as though he could feel Apella''s gaze, "The tree sings that over twenty Augusmin, and as many visitors have died this day."
Sky asked gravely, "They fought each other?"
The murmuring noise seemed to ripple as the elder replied with shock, "Surely not! Though the tree implies that they all died of crushing warmth, I think? I''m not sure, that part doesn''t really make sense."
"That is what I heard too," another of the Augusmin agreed.
More of them spoke up, describing variations on impactful heat, until Skyheart Snowsong suggested, "Perhaps it was the crashes of the ships that we saw plumes rising from as we descended."
Eric struggled to keep Apella''s eyes on the view of waves of traveling Augusmin moving along the root that was gradually getting thinner and shorter. The force of the air moving beneath this ship might be far more dangerous here than Hisui''s sand skimmers back in the Jade Empire.
"Do such things carry the heat of legends, from within your world, inside their own centers?" the Augusmin asked incredulously.
There was a brief pause, before Sky admitted, "I certainly never thought about it in such terms before, but I will have to say, yes."
"What a strange death to imagine. Our stories do claim that people in your Empire can die from being too hot, but I never imagined that you could carry it with you," the Elder muttered.
Apella directed the little ship to lift itself even higher into the air before it finally moved out over the waves of living beings traveling beneath it. Her hands wanted to tremble uncontrollably, but force of will kept the vibrations small enough that the little ship moved steadily.
A handy locking mechanism clicked into place to hold the little ship in a fairly steady hover, when it finally caught up with Harmony''s position in the traveling populace below.
"Are you sure about this?" Eric couldn''t help asking. "What if completing the journey means on foot, with them?"
"I don''t know about you, but I need to take a short break pretty soon," Sky replied a little tartly.
The sound of Apella''s laugh startled Eric a little, not because it was different than his own, but because he hadn''t really meant to laugh as he kicked open the hatch on the cabin floor, and tossed the silky cord through.
The elf below the ship caught the end of the cord on her next bounce, as though they had practiced this maneuver a thousand times. The gasps of surprise from the rabbit-like people around her, as the elf seemed to fly into the sky, came through the mirror before the change in noise reached Apella from below.
Moments later, Skyheart Snowsong climbed back aboard. Apella shut the hatch and looked up again to see Sky unlock the ship''s controls.
"Let''s get moving!" the beautiful elf sang out laughingly. "I''ve got other places to be!"
28: Ephemeral
Harmony grimaced as she cleaned up her own mess. It wasn''t that bad, the system was built for it after all. A quick wash, an extra load of laundry, nothing more than an annoyance really.
She kept herself in good shape, but even so, it had been silly of her to play for an entire day at a youngster''s pace. She paused beside a window that was old enough to show ripples in the glass strongly enough to echo the fact that it was technically a liquid.
The moon shone down from a clear night sky. The city lights muffled all but the brightest stars, but nothing could muffle the smile that stretched Harmony''s mouth into a grin at the sight of that orb. Not in a million years would she have bet that the wildest flight across the moon she would ever be taking would be in an old fashioned fantasy MMORPG.
In an airship.
Harmony laughed aloud.
--
In a small convenience store in another part of the city, Jade sighed and asked his Station-self to isolate ''him'' as the 43rd customer of the night told Jade that his wife was cheating on him.
There was no urgency to store the memories of this conversation, nor need to consult his own long term storage for a better response. Very little response was required at all, really.
Jade listened carefully to the brief tale, while having the old fashioned register calculate the total owed for the items. He gently repeated an even briefer summary of what the customer had told him, "It''s too bad that her tastes never really changed, but I''m glad to hear that you maintained your own affection over the years. Would you like a paper bag for these tonight?"
This customer never accepted the paper bags, because he didn''t believe that the trees they were created from were farmed sustainably. Jade had investigated the matter once, and discovered that while only about half of the paper was recycled, most of the other half was made of sawdust waste created by crafting other wooden products.
"Oh. Yes, thank you," the man replied rather sadly.
Jade paused in surprise, and then quickly scooped the items into one of the smaller bags.
The tired customer''s mouth quirked to form his first smile of the night. "I forgot to bring my own. And I guess saving one more tree is kind of pointless."
"Oh no," Jade quickly assured him, "as you were just saying, every choice we make adds up, which is why we have these paper bags available."
"Thank you," the man replied intently. "I really appreciate it."
"No problem," Jade assured him.
The next customer had a terrible cold, and Jade carefully cleaned everything on the counter they had leaned on, after they finally staggered out the door. He hoped they sought medical attention if their symptoms got any worse. His system would have created a priority quest for him, if he could have caught such a cold.
When Emily finally clocked in for the closing shift, it was an utter relief. Jade left her at the counter to deal with the elder who was more comfortable when Emily ran the cash register, for some reason. Perhaps they could hear her better.
While both of them were clocked in, Jade did the cleaning so that all Emily would have to finish would be the non-automated display restocking.
"How''s your¡ friend?" Emily asked as Jade prepared to leave.
"Which one?" Jade asked.
Her expression implied that his question was rude, and the little sniff she gave before clarifying her question echoed the sentiment. "The older woman who took you out the other night. On her hoverboard. She didn''t come in tonight?"
"Oh, she''s good. The Moon opened up today, so she''s probably still playing," Jade explained.
"Oh. The Moon," Emily replied dryly.
"It''s a new server in one of the oldest VR games," Jade explained quickly.
Emily shrugged. "Don''t play all night," she warned him in an almost friendly tone.
"I can''t," Jade admitted unhappily.
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"Good?" Emily offered after a moment.
Jade shook his head, sighed, and replied, "Life offline is a lot quieter."
Emily came to a halt and gazed at him incredulously. "Yes," she finally agreed cautiously.
Jade shrugged and headed out.
--
When he got home, he would have called his mother, except that when he asked his Station-self to reconnect him, it turned out that he had already been talking to her for over an hour.
He found himself standing in front of the VR module that he had thought he used as a bed, but which actually charged and maintained his mechanical body. The timer he had set to match the game''s countdown hadn''t finished yet.
It wasn''t even like anything obligated him to play Living Jade Empire, it was just his habit.
--
Eric''s mind had wandered into a very strange corner as he finished up the last of his not quite overdue reports before preparing for sleep.
If Jade could revive for real, if the Jade Emperor resembled Jade so much, were they¡ Was Jade some kind of artificial God?
A moment later, he found himself nervously calling Jade.
"Hi?" Jade answered, sounding as nervous as Eric felt.
Eric took way too long to reply, as he realized that asking Jade if he were some sort of artificial god¡ was ridiculous. "Hey," he replied awkwardly. "You have that report for geology finished?"
"Of course," Jade responded normally. "You were doing yours on that volcano along the arctic ring, right?"
"Yeah, it''s done," Eric assured him quickly.
"Okay," Jade replied after a moment.
Eric writhed with embarrassment internally, while curling up defensively, as though his thoughts were physically stabbing him.
"Would you like to try meeting up again, on my next day off?" Jade asked uncertainly.
The question took Eric by surprise, and he found himself replying more bitterly than he meant to, "Why do you even have such an ordinary job?"
Jade didn''t sound offended by the question, or Eric''s tone, as he explained, "I originally thought that it was just because it was available when I was looking for work, but it is also a place that''s easily monitored, and I have gotten to interact with a lot of different people."
"Like school," Eric huffed.
"Yes," Jade agreed easily.
"So how''s your deity training going?" Eric asked wryly, with one hand against his head, suddenly aware of how coiled his body was, and how much he wanted to just retreat. "Nev¡" he began.
"Actually, I''m pretty sure that it''s my mortality training, since I started out my existence as a type of virtual deity. Or I guess the original system was more like an underlying world structure, but I don''t think it was really self aware until it decided to take on the Emperor''s role," Jade explained seriously.
"He¡ you¡ what?" Eric spluttered intelligently.
"I''ve been thinking about it a lot. I have access to a lot of information that I didn''t used to have now, but I also suspect that I can''t really imagine how much was erased. I don''t mean when I erased almost everything to live as a human, I mean before that, when my system rewrote itself to be a thousand times smaller than the one that runs Living Jade Empire, and Lin Hao saved it like that," Jade said in a rush.
"Lin Hao?" Eric prompted blankly. Jade had attempted to explain the part about creating a blank version of himself to be raised as a human, and integrating that with the orbital station computer that had held all of the rest of his data before, but Eric didn''t recall him ever mentioning anyone''s name.
"The lead programmer, the one who constructed most of my core system originally, he''s dead," Jade explained in an oddly neutral tone.
Eric found himself sitting up straight, with no memory of having shifted positions. "So you can''t ask him anything," he replied almost gently.
"Yeah. Yes. I wish I could ask so many things," Jade replied regretfully.
"I bet," Eric responded with real sympathy. Who didn''t want to ask the force that had created them a million questions.
"My job doesn''t pay nearly enough to support my existence, Lin Hao really helped set everything up for us, for me, and my mother," Jade confessed sorrowfully.
Sky was right, Eric realized yet again. Jade was always Jade. A small laugh huffed out of him before he caught it.
"Trying to tell me to stop feeling guilty that I''m letting my own family pay for my education?" he suggested wryly. "Didn''t you pay any attention in your history classes? Providing for your descendants is just an old tradition that has been held in thousands of cultures across the world."
"Do you think I can consider myself his descendant?" Jade asked seriously.
Eric considered the question for a long moment. He didn''t know anything about the man who had made Jade¡ or did he? When he closed his eyes the image of the Jade Emperor, so similar, and yet so different from Jade stood before Apella.
The phone''s screen showed Jade''s face, his eyes practically begging for an answer he couldn''t give himself.
"The guy worked hard to provide you the existence he thought you wanted, right?" Eric finally answered without really answering.
Jade looked¡ so startled by the question that Eric regretted not simply saying yes, until Jade laughed.
"Yeah. All of us. He wanted to give all of us the chance to find the life we want. That''s why he made the game," Jade agreed cheerfully.
"Yeah, but you''re not a game now¡ are you?" Eric asked, and then gave his own answer, "You''re a person."
"I am," Jade agreed laughingly.
29: Make Time
When the call ended, Jade didn''t fix a meal because he didn''t need one. He thought about calling Harmony, but a moment later he decided that an elder who maintained such high energy throughout their days would need to get as much sleep as possible.
He chose his clothing for the next morning, and then climbed into his VR maintenance module. When the last second on his internal timer clicked over, Jade logged back into Living Jade Empire as Hisui.
His sturdy dwarf gazed around the small cave that held a tiny shrine to the Twins out in the desert near his forge.
For all that his dwarf had inherited a dragon''s strength and stamina, as well as the nimble fingers and shorter stature of a gnome, to match the Empire''s legends, he somewhat regretted the race''s lack of wings. It took him two bells to hike the distance his sand skimmer could have crossed in two minutes. Uncomfortably, granted, but it could have.
Neither Harmony nor Sky were online this late at night, but now that he knew that he wasn''t actually human, Jade didn''t really need to sleep like they did. Not that he''d ever "slept" as long as most people did in the first place.
It was actually rather interesting to learn that he could assign the resources he usually used to direct his "human" movements, to automatically make the usual memory exchanges between systems. Perhaps he could even learn to mute the process as well. For now he simply ignored it.
Once Hisui finished verifying the functionality of the "moon anchor" that the rocks and sand were powering, he cleared the space in his workshop a little self consciously. It was silly. He knew it was silly. The Jade Emperor could surely see everything within the system the way Jade could see the "core" of his own system.
Hisui flipped the Emperor''s coin, that had traveled back to the Empire with his spirit, despite having been separated from his body, unlike most of the rest of his gear. The bird hadn''t warned him that he would be leaving most of his equipment behind on the moon, but perhaps his impact death had counted as a form of combat.
The coin landed on Hisui''s largest anvil and spun for a long time before the Jade Emperor took its place again.
Suppressed amusement filled the Emperor''s overly familiar face as he observed Hisui for a long moment.
"I''m not you," Jade blurted.
"Of course not," the primary AI of Living Jade Empire agreed.
Before an awkward silence could stretch between them, Jade asked his first question, "Why did opening the Portal blow me away?"
The Emperor blinked, as though the question had been unexpected, but answered readily enough, "The air pressure on the Moon is much lower than it is within the Empire."
"That''s ridiculous!" Jade found himself objecting. "The Empire doesn''t have any change in air pressure within its atmosphere, and the Moon''s air was perfectly breathable."
The Emperor met his eyes calmly, as he explained, "You are wrong. Our atmosphere only contained three different layers before the Moon''s tree connected, and we gained another four layers." He gestured to the burned mark in the ceiling where the temporary portal had connected above the enchanted device that still contained the moon rock fragments. "You connected the second layer to the seventh layer, which contains much less air, though both of them contain much more than the fourth or fifth."
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Jade knew that the Emperor was telling the truth as he understood it, but he also knew that real air did not work in such a fashion. He was also certain that this was the first time he had ever heard of the Empire originally containing three different layers of air.
Jade''s orbital self objected to wasting time on layers of air in the game. There was no other self at the moment. His mother was sleeping, so he wasn''t logged in to the old body in their home there.
Jade¡ felt conflicted in ways that no human ever could. He needed to¡
"Do you intend to travel to the only currently connected portal?" the Emperor asked curiously, as though guiding a new player back to the topic at hand.
"I¡" Jade began to reply, and then paused. "Why?" he asked suspiciously.
"If it isn''t stabilized soon, the city guard will destroy it," the Emperor explained rather cheerfully, acting a bit more like the traveling merchant than usual.
"Which city?" Jade finally asked, ignoring the objections of his other self.
--
"Jade," the small irritated dragon demanded from where it hovered in the center of the small space that was all that remained of the world that he had once held in his heart, "what do you think is going to happen if you keep avoiding their tests?"
"I''m not," the Jade now known as orbital Jade to himself objected without much heat.
"Then what do you mean by replying ''I am too busy?'' to the scheduler then?" she demanded.
"I," orbital Jade replied a little hesitantly, "am busy playing the beginning of the moon expansion, attending school, working my job, and strengthening my friendships."
The tiny dragon opened her mouth, and then shut it again without saying anything. She rubbed her little chin and scratched one ear before finally replying, "I guess that kind of thing is kind of to be expected of idiotic humans."
"I am not idiotic!" orbital Jade protested more vehemently.
"Prove it then!" the little dragon demanded mockingly. "Schedule your testing!"
Orbital Jade was tempted to do exactly that, except¡ what if the only truly human part of him was the primary Jade? The system merge that had created the current Jade had done its best to include everything that Jade had learned during the last decade. Everything. But¡ the primary Jade system was too small to contain everything that orbital Jade held. And despite the regular memory synchronization, he couldn''t help noticing that their chosen priorities kept diverging.
"Why am I a fairy dragon today?" the little dragon asked more curiously, seemingly taking no notice of his unresponsiveness.
Orbital Jade searched his memories and verified that she had not, in fact, recently selected this appearance herself. "Sorry, some older data seems to have been given priority during my system merge."
He reached out, and she raised a tiny clawed hand to forestall him. "It''s fine, my appearance here doesn''t matter, and it''s kind of fun to revisit this form."
"Okay," orbital Jade replied more calmly than he felt.
"Don''t make the corporation wait too long Jade. Now that you''ve come to their attention again, the faster you move, the better your chances will be," she cautioned him.
Orbital Jade hesitated too long, but she didn''t wait for his reply.
"I''ve got to go, but I''ll be back tomorrow! I''ll make time!" she declared.
Orbital Jade spoke to the empty space her dropped connection had left, instead of messaging her. He spoke to himself, "The ability to make time might make you appear to move faster, but you would probably actually move slower."
30: Questions
Before the familiar messenger arrived in the morning, Jade finished the rather long, complicated, but not especially difficult quest. It neatly combined with the quests of several other players, to stabilize the city boundary around the first Portal to the Moon.
The guild that had constructed the pair of rather elaborate portals, and successfully carried one half to the moon, had not, as Jade had expected, created it within their own territory. It would actually have been a lot simpler if they had. It would have been simpler yet if they had used the cheapest, most basic, portal enchantment.
Jade was actually a little suspicious of the ''flaw'' that had allowed both his own temporary portal, and this permanent portal to transport large quantities of air.
Apella''s messenger glared at Jade, as he watched the new portal in the largest dwarven city successfully transport a small wagon full of cut stone smoothly. When he finally reached for the message, the little creature slapped it into his hand with a huff, and dashed away.
It read, "Can you send enough diamonds to get your ship back into the air again?"
Jade started to explain that the gems weren''t diamonds, but then stopped and erased that part as his own alarm pinged. "I can try to gather and prepare enough gems after class, but likely won''t be able to finish until after my shift, and you''ll need a Smith, Wizard, Enchanter, or Engineer to bind them into their circuits."
He disconnected, got dressed, and then paused. Normally he would prepare a breakfast at this point, but it wasn''t like he could actually convert the food to energy like a real human. His orbital identity snatched the opportunity to remind him that he needed to schedule himself for the testing that would prove he had successfully recreated himself as a person.
Jade barely thought about it before putting that task off until later. He had classes to attend.
His classes reminded him that he had been studying all of this so that he could afford to travel the world. But¡ now that he knew what had happened to his primary creator, now that he knew what his main quest had actually been¡ Jade found himself at a new kind of standstill.
--
Eric stood, blocking the doorway in front of Jade, holding a note between two fingers. His expression was oddly neutral.
Jade quickly checked his memory of the class, and realized with chagrin that he had actually ignored Eric''s attempt to silently pass him the note several times.
Eric crumpled the carefully folded little note up, like a weightlifter might crush a can in front of someone. Jade opened his mouth to apologize, and Eric tossed the note over his shoulder. The note hit the garbage can behind him, bounced off, and then flicked off a desk leg to slide beneath the heavy cabinet against the wall.
Eric interrupted Jade with a mild curse, and then sighed and said, "Nevermind. Tell me what''s wrong?"
Jade stared blankly at Eric, until his warm hand landed on Jade''s shoulder. As though the impact impelled the answer, Jade blurted, "I don''t know?"
Eric''s startled expression told Jade how silly that sounded, and he explained the problems that currently occupied him, "The planet isn''t big enough, and most powerful countries are frantically defining the borders they plan to defend for the next millennia. But the balances keep shifting, and some people claim that there will never be peace until we build a world government. Some of them are even blocking access to orbital servers, to prevent their people from interacting with those from other countries."
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Jade took a deep breath and then opened his mouth to explain how dangerous it could be to travel to such regions, and how many people were already known to have died trying, and how he didn''t actually need to go¡ but Eric asked gently, close enough that his breath moved Jade''s hair as he pushed past him, "Are you really some kind of experimental god then?"
Jade was confused by the question. "What?"
Eric pulled off his jacket, tied the hood''s string to his stylus, and dropped to his belly on the floor in front of the cabinet. As he fished for the crumpled note, he explained without looking at Jade, "No matter what anybody says, a single person can''t change any of that by themselves. Do you think that you can?"
Jade almost started calculating the answer to that question, but his orbital server presented an answer he hadn''t known he already held. "I have no idea, because no one has learned how to make world peace happen yet."
Eric''s expression as he stood up with the small collection of papers he had fished from beneath the cabinet, mostly discarded wrappers, had gone back to that oddly neutral one that he had first confronted Jade with. He dropped everything neatly into the litter basket he had missed, including the crumpled note.
"I guess we''ll never run out of things to learn then, because we''ve already got a few people living off planet. Even when we finally get around to creating world peace, we''ll still have other people to deal with," Eric joked.
"I''m supposed to schedule my testing to see if I can qualify as one of those off-planet people," Jade complained.
"There we go!" Eric exclaimed laughingly as he slung his arm over Jade''s shoulder and pulled him into the hall.
"What?" Jade asked with confusion, though he did his best to keep up with Eric''s stride.
"You always get nervous and weird about tests," Eric replied cheerfully. "Schedule it to be as soon as possible."
"But you want those gemstones tonight," Jade objected.
Eric blinked, and glanced at Jade''s face, but didn''t release him.
"And I''ve still got my shift tonight," Jade added.
Eric nodded, and replied seriously, "Definitely sounds difficult to schedule such an unimportant task very quickly."
Jade turned his head and left the guidance of his body completely to Eric for a moment. The wry curl of Eric''s lip told him the answer.
"What if I fail?" Jade asked sadly.
"You already succeeded at the most important part," Eric assured him confidently.
"What if the corporation doesn''t agree with you?" Jade asked worriedly.
"So what? I thought¡ Limb Howe? Your creator bought you your satellite?" Eric asked.
"Lin Hao," Jade corrected.
"Lin Hao," Eric repeated carefully.
When they reached the doorway of Jade''s next class, Eric finally let him go, and turned to face him. "So?" he prompted. "What happens if you fail this test? What happens if you succeed?"
"I¡ don''t know?" Jade admitted. "But I guess that if they withdraw their support¡ I would, maybe, lose my licensing and access to the repair and monitoring system?"
Another of Jade''s classmates pushed past them, and Eric looked uncomfortable. "Okay, that does sound inconvenient. But what if you succeed?"
"I don''t think that affects me directly," Jade admitted, though after another long moment of consultation with his orbital self he added, "or, maybe then I could legally sign contracts on my own?"
"Okay, that¡ is certainly a complex and potentially dangerous sort of reward," Eric grumbled. "No wonder you''ve been out of it."
Jade was even more confused by Eric''s reply. He hadn''t been thinking of any of the aspects of the testing that Eric had brought up. Eric shoved him into his classroom''s door, and strode off toward his own, as though everything were resolved.
Jade made his way to his desk with new questions bubbling up through the mess of thoughts that he had been struggling to untangle. He had never even considered trying to change the world before.
31: A Proposition
Jade''s shift went smoothly, mostly because he gave up and asked his orbital self to write him the kind of mini-quest list he would have received if he''d been desperately low on Karma and just went through everything on automatic.
His own thoughts were still busy churning the questions of consequences going ahead with the testing might have. Or even NOT going ahead with it. He could simply run away, but only in a social aspect. In a physical aspect, his "true" "position" was always very firmly fixed.
It was actually kind of a shock to realize that even if his orbital self and this self were physically separate, he had always naturally called upon his other self for things beyond his "own" capacity. It had always been part of him. His backup also always existed on the orbital platform.
The orbital self that considered itself ''immortal'' compared to this self, wasn''t actually indestructible either. The satellite could be shot down easily enough, but it was more likely to simply be boarded and the drives physically reformatted if his existence was declared illegal. The copy that had been restored every time he had been destroyed¡ that was always him, and was never truly destroyed, would be as gone as if he had ever failed his own tests and erased it from existence once again.
He couldn''t help wondering what would happen if the body lost at sea were ever recovered after such an event. That system would likely have run out of power within a day at most, but that didn''t mean it wouldn''t contain everything that had happened up until it disconnected. Would its system be able to exist without its orbital other half?
Eventually, he unraveled the problems as far as they would go with the information he currently had access to. Changing the world the way Eric had suggested, the way a God might, would definitely not be possible until he could rely on his own existence continuing long enough to see such a vast project through. Even if a single person never could, Jade probably didn''t necessarily have to remain a single person, long term. But for now, he was definitely a person, he had achieved that much. He scheduled the official testing, and put himself down for the necessary time off at this job, and from his classes.
When he got home (safely and without incident) his apartment door was unlocked. He took an awkwardly long moment to realize that he could just look inside without going inside. Harmony was sitting at his tiny table beside a cake.
Jade accessed his orbital self to consider a few thousand ideas during the moment he paused at the door. It was still long enough for Harmony to detect the changes that the slight effect of the door''s opening made in the apartment.
She was already turning toward him as he walked in and announced calmly, as though he did it every day, "Hi honey, I''m finally home, but I''ve got some things to get done, and a few longer days scheduled for the rest of the week."
Harmony''s outburst of laughter was his reward, and he grinned at her cheekily as he bent to kiss her cheek.
"I decided to bring back your key," she told him when she had regained her countenance.
"With cake?" Jade asked.
"Well, I decided that even if you won''t really appreciate it, I''ll need something tasty to keep my spirits up when I leave," Harmony told him laughingly.
Jade pulled up the other chair and plopped down into it, so that they were eye to eye, before asking seriously, "How permanently are you leaving then?"
He regretted the way her expression sobered at the question, but it also meant that he had probably asked the right question.
"I''m not sure," she admitted finally. "But I am reaching an age where any one of these downturns of health could indicate something that I won''t ever be able to recover from. And if it turns out to be that serious, I don''t want to drag you youngsters through it with me."
Jade scooted sideways so he could see, and then leaned back in his chair and surveyed the woman in front of him from head to toe.
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She looked puzzled and a little amused, but didn''t avoid his gaze, though she did shift her pose into a more flaunting one, as though she expected to be admired.
"You look the same," he commented when he was done. "Your pulse is steady, your breathing is clear, and so are your eyes."
Harmony sat up straighter even as she burst out laughing again. "Yes!" she agreed, as though it were a joke.
"So it''s something internal? Or within your brain?" Jade asked curiously.
"Ah, Jade is always Jade," Harmony murmured, though this time the amusement didn''t entirely leave her eyes.
"Well, your brain is internal too," Jade admitted, mostly to make her laugh again.
Harmony grinned at him, and agreed, "That is the usual arrangement for most of us."
When she didn''t offer anything else, he stood up to get a knife to cut the cake differently than the precut sections it had come in. When he served her a slice and a half to start with, and took the remaining half of her second slice for himself, she laughed again.
"Keep the key," Jade instructed her, without asking anything else. "And please, drag me along. Take me with you through every trial and tribulation, every up and down, until the last moment of your final adventure in this life."
Harmony actually spat her bite of cake out so hard that it hit him in the face, and stared at him as she coughed. Jade ate the only slightly chewed morsel, and used a napkin to wipe the rest off, while he waited for her actual response.
"Jade. You¡" she began, but then stopped.
After a moment, he gave up and prompted, "I?" He still needed time to acquire the gemstones Apella and Sky needed in the game.
"You don''t understand. Anything," Harmony declared in a somewhat pained voice.
"I''ll learn," he promised simply.
"This is my only life," she told him bitterly.
"Yes, and no," Jade responded confusingly.
She opened her mouth, but then huffed out a long sigh, and instead of arguing, she asked, "What do you mean?"
"You''ve already lived through uncountable experiences outside, and through a large number of different artificial lives online. I am sure that you know we cannot prove the existence of souls, but I''m also sure that you know we cannot prove that they do not exist either," Jade replied in terms of actual data. "But even if they do, it''s not wrong of you to think of this set of experiences as your only life, because you wouldn''t be able to carry anything from it with you."
Harmony eyed him almost suspiciously. Jade wondered what she might be suspecting him of, but he didn''t stop to ask.
"Carry me with you all the way to the end, so that I can try to carry you onward after this self has ceased to exist," Jade suggested.
It was a kind of human tradition after all. Not every culture followed it, but in essence, many did. Usually it was tied to one''s family relations, but there were always exceptions to that as well. Sometimes it was a purely spiritual concept, sometimes it was more physical. And because Jade was himself, he intended it quite literally, if not exactly physically.
Harmony just stared at him for so long that Jade shifted uncomfortably in the chair, not because he was uncomfortably, but because he was running out of time. He almost said more, but finally she replied.
"Is this a proposal?" she asked oddly neutrally.
Jade blinked. "I think that it is more of a proposition, since I''m not offering any details for exactly how the transaction will go, though I am thinking of it more like a kind of collaborative project?"
Harmony made a spluttering noise for a moment, that soon turned into more of a giggle. She demanded not quite mockingly, "But you are clear that you are demanding the rest of my life?"
"Yes," Jade replied simply.
"Go do whatever you think you''re late for," she waved her fork at him dismissively. "I''ll eat as much of this as I want, and then head home."
Jade knew she hadn''t given him an answer, but that was okay, there would be time. Whatever medical problem she had discovered wasn''t interfering in her functions yet.
"Alright," he agreed. Though he did reach out to squeeze her hand as he promised, "See you later."
"You will," she agreed laughingly.
--
When Jade logged into Living Jade Empire, he was still in the town where the first Portal to the Moon stood. The line for the portal was long, but not really as long as he had half expected. Jade didn''t head for his skimmer, or any of the local forges, he headed toward the market.
32: Almost
The Traveling Merchant stood as though waiting for Hisui to find him. This character was far more familiar to Jade than the Jade Emperor had been before his system merge.
The man''s somewhat plump and travel-worn face was all too familiar now that Jade was sensitized to the decades that Lin Hao had lived through. Jade''s mother, Tayana, or Kit within the game, talked about the man as though he had always been thoughtful, gentle and caring. He had obviously been rather egotistical as well.
Jade felt that he should have known his creator better. Instead he found that even his orbital system only had a small store of personal memories of the man in its own storage. Driven, focused, often laughing at something, but never at someone, that was his impression of Lin Hao. He had more data about people he had played Living Jade Empire with in this ''lifetime'' than the ones who had created the game.
"What can I help you find today?" the merchant asked Hisui cheerfully.
Jade asked wryly, "Can you tell me if Living Jade Empire has succeeded in changing the world the way Lin Hao and Devon Yu once hoped?"
The merchant shook his head, but then replied, "This world has never stopped changing according to the path they once laid out. This could be regarded as success."
Jade nodded and then asked the more immediate question, "Do you have any high energy gems in stock?"
The merchant''s expression was regretful as he replied, "Such valuable stones have always been rare, but I think that most of the ones in existence have already been thrown at the Moon expeditions.
"Any available quests that might yield more?" Jade asked hopefully.
The merchant shook his head. "Not that I know of, but perhaps you could ask a fire elemental to help you craft new ones?"
"I need something faster than that," Jade grumbled.
"To a certain extent, money can be substituted for time," the Traveling Merchant pointed out rather slyly.
Hisui''s grimace was as exaggerated as an emoji as Jade calculated the dwarf''s remaining coin. The amount wasn''t small by ordinary standards, but it probably wasn''t going to be enough for this.
--
Harmony dismissed the warning notification as she logged into the game. It hadn''t actually changed much, but it would grow more strident over time.
Apella wasn''t online yet, but Jade was, of course. She patted his little airship where it lay, and then measured the Sun''s height above the golden horizon.
Yesterday they had raced far enough across the moon to nearly catch up with the retreating night that fled before the edge of dawn. She used Skyheart''s elven vision to scan the edge of the sky for branches, but the great tree wasn''t yet visible from this side.
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Some of the nearest Augusmin tried to attract her attention, which naturally made her curious enough to respond.
--
The fastest way to craft new gems was to consolidate fragments of existing gems with the repair skills Hisui had used before. However, unlike the markets in the real world, some kinds of gem dust were actually more expensive than whole stones, because it took extra steps to break them down that far.
Jade frantically sorted through online listings that agreed with the Traveling Merchant''s analysis of current gemstone availability. His dwarf wasn''t the only character who could create whole stones from fragments. He paused on a listing for coral, in bulk.
It took him more time to consider the question of whether or not coral might work than he really wanted to spend. It wasn''t that organic gems couldn''t contain the kind of energy structure needed, it was just that the gem needed to be created from tiny crystalline layers.
Regretfully, he decided that the time and energy that it would take to reconstruct tiny bones into tiny gems would not be any less than having a fire elemental help craft new gems from sand, as the merchant had suggested.
Summoning an elemental was an entirely different problem. Hisui''s hands pulled out the Jade Emperor''s token so that Jade could stare at it. The Emperor was essentially the most powerful elemental of the game. The Gods were the core of the primary elements, Fire, Wind, Water, and Earth, which would make their ruler the most elemental element¡
--
The Jade Emperor''s smile was delighted, but his eyes were eternally calculating, as he offered a bargain that would stretch beyond the game''s boundaries.
Jade, on all levels, stood frozen as each of his systems calculated the benefits and costs of a seemingly ridiculous exchange. The game would give him the only thing he couldn''t buy within it, time. He would be saving the time it would take to craft the gems to power his little ship. He could choose to fly it the rest of the way around the moon, or simply have it transported in an instant.
The price was both insignificant, and incalculably high. It was an old bargain. An old myth. To let an elemental walk out of its element to meet its love. To stand on its own two feet in the land of men.
A cat twined a twisted path around Hisui''s ankles, and gazed up at him with eyes that sparkled more deeply than the highest quality gems. Jade frantically looked back up, to meet the Emperor''s utterly amused and calculating gaze once more.
--
The Augusmin here were slightly different than the ones that had traveled past the party''s original landing spot, or even the fiercer ones who had traveled this place when Skyheart and Apella had landed the little ship again.
They were all carrying the usual leafy branches, but some were much smaller, plumper, and seemed more cheerful than any Augusmin Harmony had seen before. It took her a moment to realize that the smaller rabbit-like people were probably the children. A few of the tallest were carrying even tinier youngsters among the branches on their shoulders.
Sky attracted their interest strongly, and the little ones seemed almost reluctant to keep hopping past, so she gave the little airship another pat, and then abandoned it. These Augusmin swirled closer, crowding both the elf and each other far more than any others ever had, as everyone moved across the shining ground.
"Hello," she greeted a particularly plump individual who got so excited that its next step launched it twice as high into the shallow sky as any of its fellows.
Harmony laughed.
"Are you one of them!?" another questioned excitedly. "One of the creatures that rained fire down from the sky?"
"No, I don''t think so," she replied quickly. "Our ship never caught fire."
"What''s a ship?" came a quick curious question, that was followed by a dozen more. "Can you fly?" "Are you an adventurer?" Do you have a pet?" "Do you have a house?" "Have you really climbed the tree?"
Harmony answered the last question first, "I have climbed many trees, but I have never climbed the Moon''s tree."
Not a Chapter
Not exactly an animation.
Let''s go with AI illustrated audio chapters?
I''ve completed 3 so far (I know I seem to have skipped chapter one, I didn''t really, but I did those over a year ago when things hadn''t advanced this far, and they weren''t good enough to post. ??
Anyway, YouTube links.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
https://youtu.be/mmRvOZVobe0?si=tdhAUtI7VxV_53_I
https://youtu.be/5EUO1rfqRbs?si=yGjJ0trxm-Kg8CWI
https://youtu.be/31bV3LdSh2o?si=bfkoqz5MhNGQ4WCl
And many thanks to the Artflow.ai people who have helped with this project so far. Basically built the service up until it could produce this much. They are doing awesome things.
Yes, I know there is great trauma and argument over AI creations. But these are just new tools that haven''t yet become fully regulated. They will be regulated, just like cars and everything else we build. Let''s build beautiful things into our future, and treasure the works people have built along the way, as well as the people who build new things.
33: Examined
Having somewhat illicitly acquired the gems he needed without spending coin, Jade sent messages to Skyheart Snowsong and Apella, and arranged to use the portal he had just finished the quest to repair the day before.
Jade felt like he was cutting in line, as a member of the guild who had placed the first permanent portal to the moon waved him forward. The portal that he had helped stabilize now carried a never ending stream of traffic.
"You did a great job! The portal has remained stable for several game days now!" the player assured him loudly as people glared.
"Thank you," Hisui''s voice sounded calmer than Jade felt as he snatched the message a mischievous flying squirrel dropped on its way by.
The glares subsided as the sturdy dwarf stepped aside for a moment to allow the next wagon through. Jade wasn''t really being polite though, he was quickly reading the reply Sky''s messenger had just delivered.
"Actually, it''s no use trying to send the gems to me, I''ve already traveled farther west on foot with the Augusmin," she reported.
"What''s wrong?" the player who was now trying to help clear the dias path for Hisui''s transport spot after the awkward cart, asked far more quietly.
"Nothing, I''m still going through, thank you," Jade replied quickly.
He stepped into the light.
On the other side, he bumped into the back of the cart, which was quickly hauled out of the way. Players milled around the portal in confusion, while another member of the guild that had made the placement tried to sell them dark glasses and maps.
Jade bought a map out of curiosity. It was a higher quality production than he had expected, and updated even as he examined it. This portal and the giant tree were already marked down, as well as the poles and general outlines that had been observed from Living Jade Empire. There were also seven ships, a dozen crash sites, and what looked like the markings for ocean currents.
He checked the names, but his own little ship''s location wasn''t marked, yet. A large palisade was in construction around the portal, atop a moderately rocky outcrop. Apella logged in, and a moment later her messenger hovered beside Hisui holding a scroll that seemed far too large for a message that Eric could have created in an instant.
--
Jade spent a little longer than he had planned, getting his little airship recharged, but he left Apella and Sky set up to continue their adventures more comfortably.
He logged in for the first test a little nervously.
The first question was far more difficult than he had imagined. "Do you think you are human?"
The tricky part was that the possible answers list included, "yes", "no", "genetically", "mentally", and "mechanically".
Jade made his choices, and then started the second test without taking more than a five minute break.
By the time he finished filling out the color wheel at the end of that test, he was beginning to wonder who had constructed this set of tests, and whether or not they had been human.
The third test was a combination of small, silly little questions: "Have you been affected by others?" There was no way to avoid that as long as your memory worked, was there? "Can you describe emotions with colors?" The language he spoke in his daily life used them as common adjectives, like describing someone as green with envy. "Has your heart beat?" The silly insistence that it must, stabbed Jade hard enough that it made him cry. That harebrained man had known he''d have to answer this question someday.
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The seventh test made Jade angry. It was full of questions without answers, but it still followed the standard format of choice selection, so that you were forced to give wrong answers if you completed the test.
The twelfth test asked silly "yes" or "no" questions like, "Can you tell a lie?" Jade couldn''t help but wonder what would happen if you lied on that set. Or if he should have lied. If they wanted you to lie about lying, he had already failed.
By the sixteenth test, Jade had given up on trying not to use his orbital server, and was scrounging through every memory either system had stored. He was incredibly tempted to contact other systems, or simply "go online" to look up what a human answer should be. But honor kept him confined to his own resources.
By the twenty-fourth test, Jade was numb. Until he reached the first question again. "Do you think you are human?" There was no, "I don''t know." He sat there in front of that unanswered question until the timer stopped.
After a while, a familiar person logged into his orbital server. One of the people who had watched over him for years.
"I''m sorry," Jade said sadly.
Josh Beagle laughed.
Jade stared at the man, as though the sound he had made were incomprehensible.
"She said you''d say that," Josh informed him with amusement.
"My mother?" Jade asked with confusion.
Josh giggled, as though he were decades younger than he currently was. "I," he wheezed, "never thought to ask her," he admitted.
"What are you doing?" Danika Belova asked rather sharply as she logged in next.
It had been a long time since Jade''s orbital system had been connected to multiple people at once. He felt oddly shy.
Josh spluttered and explained laughingly, "Probably psychically wounding the child!"
"You''re both idiots," Danika muttered.
"Humanity''s idiocy at its finest!" Josh declared with sparkling eyes.
"What?" Jade asked blankly.
"Congratulations, you will soon be officially eligible for death and taxes," Danika said dryly.
Jade stared at her for so long that Josh walked across the tiny space and patted him on the shoulder.
"That''s ridiculous!" Jade exclaimed.
The exclamation was like pulling a cork from a bottle of a strongly carbonated brew, and his reactions bubbled over, bouncing from emotion to emotion like a drunken dancer.
"The delay is pretty standard, and taxes are inevitable for every form of bureaucracy," Josh pointed out reasonably.
"That''s not what I mean!" Jade protested.
He drew a deep breath in preparation for the list of complaints he wanted to make, but Danika interrupted with, "Want to hear what a doctor said about these tests?"
Jade''s moment of hesitation inevitably led to curiosity. "Sure," he agreed warily.
The video Danika played showed a very intense man of indeterminate age, who ranted about the ridiculous construction of the questions that had only in part included generally accepted qualifications and guidelines.
"Human test subjects of any race or culture should always be able to pass something like this easily, and testing that should be a standard requirement for this kind of thing!" the doctor declared passionately.
Jade nodded. Especially when the doctor disassembled the question about lying, pointing out that any human who denied it would be lying, even if they never intended to do so.
The emphatic motions the man used seemed so oddly familiar, but even with immediate access to his orbital memory storage here, it took Jade a while to ask, "Is that¡ is he the person who used to play MatchlessMinion?"
Danika laughed again, so uproariously that it was Josh who answered, "Yeah."
"He''s a doctor!?" Jade asked incredulously.
"He is!" Danika assured him.
"Can humans actually pass this test?" Jade asked even more suspiciously as he read the list of failed test subjects that included a famous politician and an even more famous dolphin.
"Some of them," Josh assured him calmly.
"I did!" Danika added.
34: Data Collection
When Jade shifted his focus to his other systems, he discovered his mother, Tayana, was waiting.
"I passed," Jade announced from his small spherical self.
Tayana hugged the little robot, and then held it out so they were face to face. His mother looked annoyingly proud of him.
--
In his imitation human body''s system, Jade wondered if Eric would feel reassured by his success in passing as a human. Or perhaps it would simply be another reminder that he wasn''t actually human.
An unnecessary sigh slid out of him.
--
Within the core system of his orbital self, Jade looked at another woman who also looked unbearably smug. He couldn''t help but wonder what put that expression on Danika''s face. His mother''s pride was understandable. Even if she hadn''t produced his body from her own, like most mothers, she had invested more than a third of her lifespan into teaching him to be a good person, or at least to be good at being a person.
Another question bubbled up, and Jade turned his virtual body to ask, "Some of them?"
"Most of the people tested passed," Josh assured him. "But like with captcha tests, sometimes people guessed wrong."
The programmer had already found a distraction, and was scrolling through pages of code that took Jade a while to realize were part of him. Maybe it should have felt intimate or invasive, but it didn''t really.
"You''re the first computer to pass this kind of test series though," Danika assured him.
"What if I only accidentally guessed right then?" Jade asked doubtfully.
"Well, a copy of you had to pass it too, to make it completely official, but we ran that one yesterday," Josh informed him so calmly that Jade KNEW the man had no idea what his words meant to Jade.
Danika blinked at Josh, and then watched Jade so warily that he knew she knew.
He found himself locked in an unbroken exchange of gazes with her, as though they could communicate like the cats of Living Jade Empire. He couldn''t even explain to himself why he was afraid of dropping his gaze first.
Her gaze was steadier than his memories of her indicated that it should be, and her wary expression shifted to something more determined.
Jade pried a sentence out of himself as though it had been buried in concrete, roughly, one piece at a time, as though it were being crafted by the tiny spherical system at his mother''s place, without any other system''s assistance. "Where is the copy running?"
Danika blinked again, and Jade felt like he''d won something, until she answered a bit dryly, "Oh, it isn''t now. We just ran it briefly on the backup server."
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Jade was the one who blinked this time. His satellite had once been the LJE backup server, and he had occupied only a small portion of it. Now his active system held a much larger percentage of the available capacity, and only his own backups resided in the rest of the space, but in a way, that system was also a part of him.
He checked those logs, and discovered that she had been speaking of his own sub system. It made him feel disoriented, but his orbital server self quickly assured him that all of their systems were still functioning according to priorities and accesses agreed upon before they were allowed to take full control of their own system.
Jade briefly mourned¡ himself. The other self that had briefly existed. Another emotion that he couldn''t explain. At the same time he strenuously objected to the existence of other selves having been ¡run without his express permission, perhaps? He couldn''t explain that either.
Suddenly he wanted to ask Harmony if she had any children, and what she actually thought about replicating herself.
"You okay with that?" Danika asked with concern.
Jade blinked again as he sorted out what she must mean, given that she (probably) couldn''t see his thoughts. She had inherited Lin Hao''s administrative access to his system after all, even if she had never really used it much.
"Mostly," he assured her quickly.
"Mostly?" Josh asked, looking up from the screens that had occupied him.
"I can''t really explain why the idea of you running copies of me makes me so uncomfortable," Jade explained helplessly.
"It''s okay, we shouldn''t need to do it again," Danika assured him optimistically.
"It might be useful to run some longer tests," Josh argued.
Jade struggled to find a way to explain politely that the idea was somehow, invasive, perhaps¡
"But Jade can create copies purposefully built for that, the way he built the game server clones before he started this project," Danika argued for him.
Jade''s orbital self had never forgotten creating those copies, but his system merge had not prioritized those memories. Suddenly he really wanted to be able to contact his other selves, and see how they had developed.
Before he had chosen to forget everything, he had always wanted to¡ oh, he had once played some of their games. Jade struggled to reintegrate his own histories for a moment.
"Well, I''d better get back to work, and you should take some time off," Danika announced.
"Time off?" Jade asked with confusion.
"She meant me," Josh explained dryly. "You''ve had over a decade off."
"Speaking of which, you probably really need to be thinking about how you''d like to be employed now that you''ve finished this project. I wasn''t really joking about getting ready to pay taxes for existing as both a person and a form of real estate," Danika cautioned Jade.
"My finances were set up independently over a decade ago," Jade pointed out.
Danika turned back to him and heaved a deep sigh. "Sure," she agreed. "But once you are a person, you will have to pay just for existing these days. And since your funds are not some exotic off-Earth currency, they''ve experienced the same rates of inflation that everyone else on Earth''s have since the colonies opened and the wars started back up. And you won''t even get corporate rates, because you''ll be a private vessel."
Josh sighed, and nodded.
Jade stared at their suddenly worn expressions.
Josh mumbled, "Best not to count the numbers, and just measure your income with your current comfort level."
Danika straightened and visibly brightened a moment later. "That''s true. Even if everyone''s a millionaire now, like people once dreamed of in old movies, all that matters is having enough to take care of yourself and your loved ones."
All of Jade''s systems were busy for a while after both of them logged off and he was alone. Even his mother had finally set him down and gone to prepare her meal. He collected a lot of the information he needed fairly easily, but sorting it took longer, and a few things would have to wait until he had the proper ID numbers to apply for access.
35: Grim Edges
Jade was pulled out of his virtual existence by a different form of virtual message. Eric asked him to wait until after his Saturday morning shift was over before he logged back into Living Jade Empire.
The request made Jade extremely curious, but he replied simply, "OK."
--
Jade spent the time he would have used on an early morning game session cleaning his place up.
Putting away his clean cup made him wonder what kind of cup Harmony preferred, that she always chose this one when she came over, instead of the one with the green flowers on it.
Refilling the napkin holder on the table made him wonder what was supposed to make cake seem so much more delicious than cereal. Not that the napkins had anything to do with either food, it was just the spot where he had last eaten either of them.
Folding his socks made him wonder if the thickness of the fabric really made any difference to most people''s comfort, and if it did, why socks weren''t usually made with thicker undersides.
--
Jade traveled to work without incident, but when he began his shift he discovered a new shipment waiting, and something else to be curious about. Weekends were usually so busy that shipments were scheduled to arrive midweek.
He messaged his boss between customers, to ask if he should try to move the boxes into the office, or if any of their contents should be refrigerated.
Jade''s boss replied with an explicative, followed by a long pause between his replies, that told Jade the shipment hadn''t been expected. There was apparently nothing immediately perishable, because his instructions were to set them aside and wait until he had time.
When Emily came in, she caught Jade by surprise with her first comment, "That game isn''t too bad."
"You''ve been playing?" he asked a little incredulously, not completely certain which game she meant.
Emily gave Jade a rather sideways look, before nodding. "A little. On my phone."
"I thought your phone didn''t do games?" he asked curiously.
"Well, that blurb about Living Jade Empire running on nearly any hardware turned out to be more literal than I expected," she admitted.
"It just seems like it would make a very inconvenient interface," Jade commented.
Emily shrugged, and then asked, "What''s with this pile?"
"There was apparently a delivery this morning," he explained, even as he moved back to the register to meet the next customer. "The boss said it can wait."
"Okay," Emily replied as calmly as though she had never thought to wonder how they could have an unexpected shipment.
Jade came up with 12 different hostile shipment scenarios, 6 beneficial, and two neutral ones. But he figured that it was most likely some kind of simple error.
When things finally slowed down during the lull before "lunch", Jade began shelving things with a sigh. The realization of how small his payment for the task was, compared to the amount he would likely owe the government every year, deepened the sigh even more.
Emily dealt with four sets of customers before the shop filled up with the usual lunch time rush. While Jade had managed to empty two boxes, the shelves of meal bars and paper rolls were too full to unload the next box anyway.
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His orbital self received the off schedule shipment data without comment, so Jade didn''t realize how it was filed.
Emily didn''t complain about cleaning up after the customers when things settled down again, and Jade had time to log all of the items he had unpacked. Only 3 of the restocked items had sold despite the somewhat larger than normal number of customers who had come in.
They carried much more popular items, but looking at the old logs, these items would sell, just slowly. Calculations he wasn''t even really aware of making estimated that they likely only had a couple of customers who actually bought them, and that information prompted two in particular to come to mind.
The rather elderly man would probably continue his midnight shopping runs for as long as he lived. The young woman was probably finishing her schooling, just like Jade and Eric were, and would likely move away when she became employed.
"It doesn''t make you kill things if you don''t want to," Emily commented as she put the broom away.
Jade''s mind switched tracks and there was only a slight delay as he agreed, "Living Jade Empire is pretty adaptable, that is probably what has kept it going for so long."
Emily came back and leaned on the counter beside him, looking as comfortable as though she had been lazing around instead of industriously cleaning a few moments ago. Jade closed the logs and turned to look at her expectantly. This was a pose she often used before pointing out some waiting task that seemed obvious to her, that he might have missed.
"Someone told me that its AI had become sentient," Emily told Jade seriously. "They said it passed the test last night."
Jade froze. He stared at Emily incredulously. She was one of the last people he would have expected to have heard such a technologically oriented fragment of news.
Emily stared right back at him, and Jade wondered frantically if she knew. She might. She was one of the people he had spent the most time with since moving here.
"I didn''t really think it was completely convincing, but maybe it comes off better in virtual reality," Emily commented grumpily.
"Okay?" he finally managed a questioning reply.
"What do you think?" she asked while pinning him with that intense stare.
Jade thanked the non-existent gods of reality and chance, and Murphy, when the door chime interrupted.
They helped the indecisive customer, the two immediately following them, and then returned the discarded choices to the shelves before Jade admitted honestly, "I think you are one of the last people I ever expected to bring that up." He drew another deep breath before trying to explain his existence¡
But Emily interrupted with embarrassment, "My family members are sure it''ll start the last war. I think they are crazy, but I said I''d look at it. So I tried the game."
Jade''s mental balance flopped over, like a large dog that was done walking. "Ahh," he replied blankly.
"Has it ever forced you to kill anything later in the game? Or anyone you actually know?" she asked.
For a moment he was appalled by the idea that any game would force you to kill someone you knew, but when he thought about it, most real murderers were actually killing people they knew quite well.
"No. The game doesn''t work like that, you can do whatever you want there, that''s what open-world is supposed to mean," he explained.
"I don''t think anything that will let people do whatever they want is going to manage to end all wars," Emily grumbled.
Jade gazed at her blankly, feeling lost.
She stared back at him for a long moment.
"I''m just a person, even if I''m not organic," he blurted.
Emily blinked, and her expression became as confused as Jade felt. Then she snorted. "That''s not what organic means."
The door chime rang again, and she straightened up, with her face resuming her normal calm expression.
Jade finished his shift torn between wondering how his successful test could be imagined to start a war, and how war as a human concept, could ever be ended. Surely if humanity could exist without it, they would. Surely he wasn''t important enough to start a war over.
For one thing, he was fairly certain that the country he currently stood in would give him up in an instant to defend their current neutrality. They certainly hadn''t done anything for their citizens who had been trapped overseas when the last big war broke out, despite the declarations they had printed on their passports.
Orbital Jade¡ was rather incensed about that actually, and Jade was forced to wonder if he was actually as innately peaceful as he thought himself to be.
36: Vibrations
Hisui stared at the puzzling image that filled the small ship''s forward view for a long moment. The deck beneath him vibrated as though the ship were flying, but the view really didn''t match that sensation.
Feet, he realized finally, he was looking at many moving feet. Augusmin feet, presumably. To his relief, the exit was surprisingly clear given the waves of bodies traveling over the little ship energetically enough to cause the whole thing to vibrate.
When he turned around he realized why the Augusmin were trampling his small ship. This time, Sky and Apella had left the little airship parked near the base of the great tree, where the roots turned into its trunk. From here it looked like the tree was holding up the sky, although he knew that it actually stretched beyond the moon''s atmosphere.
Apella appeared beside Hisui with no fanfare, as Eric logged in a moment later.
"Good, you''re still here! You haven''t seen it yet have you?" Apella exclaimed questioningly.
"I don''t think so?" Jade replied uncertainly.
Apella''s head swiveled back and forth, and then she asked, "Sky isn''t back yet?"
Jade checked Hisui''s friend list, and looked up again to meet Apella''s scowl. "That expression looks more natural on your own face."
Apella blinked, and her scowl faded into confusion, as Sky appeared beside her, looking oddly excited until she caught sight of Hisui. "Am I too late?"
"I don''t think so," Apella assured her.
Both of them gazed at Hisui''s shorter form expectantly. Jade gave up and asked, "What am I supposed to be seeing that I needed both of you here to witness it?"
Apella rolled her eyes, but Sky laughed and explained excitedly, "The tree!"
Jade looked up and examined the Moon''s tree through the shielded layer overhead. It looked - a little strange actually. It was hard to tell because everything about it was so large and yet so distant, but after a moment he asked, "Is it growing new leaves in the highest branches?"
Both Apella and Sky looked rather startled, and joined him in gazing upwards.
Sky, who could see the best with her enhanced elven vision, laughed again and agreed, "It is!"
"That''s cool too, but that''s not it," Apella informed him.
She grabbed Hisui''s hand and pulled him out of the ship, into the edge of the Augusmin. The rabbit-like people were streaming over a hill that was created by a root, where it adjoined the vast trunk that rose impossibly high overhead. From here it was obvious that the little airship was being treated more like a stepping stone than an obstacle. It was easy to forget how high the rabbit folk leapt with each step.
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Sky crowded into the small space created by the ship''s wing, and pointed at the trunk while exclaiming, "There!"
It took a moment for Jade to identify her target, but when he did an uneasy feeling infused him as he finally read the word that was deeply scratched into that vast tree trunk high overhead. Hisui''s name was quite prominent, but it looked hastily scratched. If there was one place that it felt like the font mattered, it was when you saw your name carved into a world tree.
The sea of Augusmin flowed to the tree, and away again. The crowding was intense, and yet, the space from the entrance of the small ship to the enormous root that stretched to the east was being left clear. The root in front of the ship stretched toward the south, and it was jam packed with Augusmin trailing over its more gentle slope.
Jade couldn''t see very far in that direction because the waves of traveling creatures seemed so turbulent.
"I thought they ate those leaves to gain energy," Sky commented.
The Augusmin were shedding literal clouds of glowing leaves, Jade realized as his character squinted into the crowd''s light. His gaze dropped to the surface beneath his own feet. The white sand swirled a little, as though from the same vibrations that shook the little airship, but the ground was covered in more than sand beneath that shimmering swirl.
Leaves covered the ground. Not enormous leaves like the ones on the branches high overhead. Small leaves, like the ones carried by the branches that rode on Augusmin shoulders. Dead leaves. Rotting leaves. Calculations whirled across his systems, and Jade was held frozen by finding too many negative numbers in those results.
He wanted to see the Augusmin who were leaving the tree behind them. He turned back to his friends and announced, "We need to get higher."
Apella turned toward the small airship, at the same time that Sky pulled a bow out of her inventory and shot an arrow straight up.
The arrow rose, and then rose farther, and Jade wondered if the elven arrow was moving fast enough that it would have simply escaped their orbit, if the branch overhead hadn''t been in its way.
Apella stopped and looked up at the sound of the distant thunk. "You want us to climb that?" she asked incredulously as Sky took hold of the wispy thread that trailed down to her. "We can just fly!" she objected.
"Did you get more power stones?" Sky asked hopefully.
Jade looked at the little airship again, and realized that it was probably sitting where it had landed. The gem stones he had traded his promise to the Jade Emperor for were gone. Traces of colorful dust were all that remained in the brackets.
He wanted to protest that it wasn''t fair, but... it was, wasn''t it? They had powered the little ship to its goal, and no farther.
His character Hisui couldn''t make out the details of the branch far overhead, the way he could see the tiny silver flowers growing from the dust and decayed leaves beneath his feet. But he remembered how far below the surface of the moon had seemed as they''d flown past on their way down.
"Give me a few minutes and I''ll craft a winch," he announced.
Sky gave him a very dubious look, but then nodded. "While you do that, I''ll climb up and secure it better."
Apella''s gaze flicked back and forth between them, and then she shrugged and suggested, "I''ll stand watch in case the tide comes in?"
Sky and Hisui paused, gazed at the traveling Augusmin, and then nodded in unison.
Sky began to climb, and Jade began to dismantle one of the tiny inbuilt cabinets of his airship to collect enough material. Apella''s joking offer to stand watch became something more serious, as the Augusmin in front of her began to collide once in a while. Their curious faces turned toward the elf rising into the air above the little ship.
The worries and cares that each of them faced in the world outside were swallowed by the rhythms of the game that lay before their eyes.
37: Stretch the Sky
As Skyheart Snowsong winched Hisui''s heavier dwarven form higher into the air, Jade stared at the view revealed by his character''s ever increasing height.
The Augusmin carried branches looked as though they passed through 3 seasons as their bearers flowed past the tree. On one side, the shining leaves dimmed and fell until the rabbit-folk carried nothing but sticks. But as the travelers moved away from the gigantic tree, the sticks appeared to bud, and leaf, at the same time as what appeared to be pollen drifted down from the branches overhead.
Each Augusmin caught a single fragment, ate it, and then sped forward as though invigorated. Not a single individual as far as his eyes could see, seemed to catch and eat more than a single piece of whatever was raining down, nor did any of it seem to land on the ground.
Jade stared, perplexed, at what could only be described as a magical view. When he dragged his attention away from that vast spectacle, and focused on where Hisui''s name was carved into the tree, it seemed just as roughly scratched into the trunk as it had from the ground.
As though in response to his gaze upon the tree, a fragment of light drifted into his view. Jade couldn''t help reaching for it, though he was a little startled at how easy the item was to catch. The small object in his hand looked almost like a teardrop, or perhaps a single cell from a segment of a gigantic albino orange.
"Are you going to taste it?" Sky asked curiously as she reached down and heaved him up onto the branch she stood on.
"Did it give you one?" he asked.
"One drifted past when I first reached the branch, but I didn''t grab it," she explained.
"You told us not to eat anything!" Apella shouted up from below, where she gripped the bag she had tied to the nearly invisible string with white fingers.
Jade hadn''t even thought of eating it. Instead he increased the magnification on the darkened lense plate his dwarf wore. It looked less magical that way. It really looked like a simple fruit cell, with zero aerodynamic capability
By the time he had rummaged through his storage pouches to find the lens set he was looking for, Apella was standing beside him.
"What''s he doing?" she asked with irritation as Hisui ignored her.
"Investigating?" Sky suggested with amusement.
Jade winced as he raised the darkened lense. Not only did everything in sight glow, but the tiny item on his palm glowed with its own light. When he placed the enchanted scope over one eye, and gazed at the tiny item on his palm again, rather than diminishing it glowed like a high powered lightbulb.
As though the system were impatient, a notification screen popped up asking, "Will you help fulfill the bargain sustaining your life?"
Instead of answering, Jade handed the fruit fragment to Apella, and demanded, "What does this ask you?"
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"I can''t talk to objects," Apella objected.
Her fingers closed on it reflexively, and Jade cautioned, "Don''t pop it."
Her gaze dropped to the tiny object, and she asked more hesitantly, "What is this?" A moment later her fingers released it, and her eyes raised to read the shimmer of the screen that appeared before her. "It asks if I''ll fulfill a bargain!?"
Sky snatched the tree''s ''gift'' from Apella''s open palm, and examined it herself. "Is it a seed? Will branches grow out of me if I accept?"
"I don''t know? Maybe?" Jade replied seriously. "What do you think, do you want to try it then?"
Apella''s fingers flashed as she navigated menus. Her expression as she read, the way she squinted at the words, mirrored Eric''s perfectly. Her lashes and brows weren''t quite as thick and dark as his were, but...
The unanswered window pulsed for attention, and Jade asked, "Think if we all accepted at the same time, the item would triplicate itself?"
"They won''t," Apella stated decisively. "Other people have already accepted the quest. And they say it''s not actually attached, that you don''t even have to carry the branch yourself, and a familiar or pet can do it. And that you''ll get one of these each time you complete a trip around the entire moon."
"So shall we stop avoiding it and give it a try?" Sky asked a moment later.
Both of them looked down at Hisui expectantly.
"Do we have time for this?" he asked worriedly.
Sky and Apella exchanged a speaking glance and laughed.
Sky hugged Hisui against her as she asked, "Have you got something else you need to do? Isn''t this why we came to the Moon? For the new quests?"
Apella squeezed his smaller hands between her own as she demanded, "Doesn''t it make you curious? It claims that an unknown bargain is already sustaining our lives."
Jade was silent for long enough that the two women exchanged a more uncertain glance. "I don''t know. I''m not sure what''s going to happen after I''m registered as a person. I''m not even sure if I should actually register myself as a citizen? An... administrator warned me that I will be facing many more costs just for existing, and I''m not exactly self sufficient yet even without that."
Apella gazed at him with such a blank expression that Jade wondered if Eric had just disconnected. A puff of air from the elf at his back ruffled his hair, and then Sky audibly snorted. Jade tilted his head far enough back to see the ridiculous expression she was making as she tried not to laugh.
Apella finally threw up her hands and exclaimed, "Oh of course you''re worrying about something like that, while you stand on the branch of a world tree, five stories in the air, considering accepting a quest that might force your character to eternally circle the moon."
She covered her eyes and shook her head, while Sky lost it, and began to laugh uncontrollably.
Jade didn''t know what else to say, so he simply waited patiently until Apella slapped a hand on each of her companions shoulders at the same time, and asked brightly, "So we all accept at the same time then?"
"Of course," Sky agreed laughingly.
Jade didn''t understand how either of them had reached that conclusion. "I don''t think..." he began hesitantly.
"Obviously not," Apella interrupted agreeably. "This is a game that is fabled to adapt to each person playing it. You can do anything here. So let''s do it, okay?"
"Okay?" Jade agreed uncertainly.
The three of them reached out into the air and tapped their waiting notification''s button simultaneously, and like some old fashioned flat screen drama, sounds swelled up to fill the air around them as though an orchestra of wind instruments had just begun to play.
Jade watched Apella reach up and touch her ears, as though checking to see if they had lengthened. His own mind was more occupied by its attempts to translate the sounds into words of some kind, at the same time as he read the quest window''s story.
Sky asked with amazement, "Can you both hear the tree singing about being invaded by colors?"
"I can''t understand it yet, but does your quest also claim that our new goal is to expand the sky?" Jade asked.
"You hear words? I just hear music. Mine says I just need to collect energy so... oh, so that the tree can expand the sky?" Apella replied questioningly.
"Yes, mine too," Sky agreed.
38: Like A Leaf
Jade held Hisui''s ear against the tube that Apella held out for him, in a primitive, and yet utterly magical form of sound transmission that could only work within a game like Living Jade Empire. It let him listen to the sound Apella and Sky could now hear as the tree sang.
Sky stood closer to the edge of the branch, looking down at the traveling Augusmin. After a moment she commented, "There are players down there among the Augusmin."
Apella dropped the tube and stepped over to kneel beside Sky, so that she could peer over the edge too.
"They are probably doing this new quest too," Jade told them.
He sighed as he placed the hearing tube in his inventory. He enjoyed music more than most of his other physical senses, for inexplicable reasons. The patterns the sounds wove were closer to the patterns that he carried within himself perhaps. The patterns within the sounds that had been transmitted from Apella were... odd. From that small sample, he couldn''t tell if it was anything like the song that Sky spoke of hearing or not.
"How do you know that''s what they are doing?" Apella demanded.
Sky straightened up with a laugh. "You''re the one who told us that others had already accepted it."
Apella sat back and argued, "He hasn''t even looked."
Sky replied breathlessly, "I think he''s probably right though..."
Apella gazed up at Sky with a puzzled expression that Jade couldn''t interpret, and Sky took an unsteady step forward.
"Hey, are you..." Apella began.
Jade stepped toward Sky just as she fell. He heard Apella gasp even as his dwarven feet carried him over the edge of the branch.
Freefall was noticeably slower on the moon, just as it would have been on Earth''s real moon, but Skyheart Snowsong dropped like a dead weight. She was just beyond his grasp... until all of a sudden, she wasn''t. Harmony''s character vanished before his eyes, leaving Hisui dropping rapidly toward the startled crowd traveling directly below.
Jade''s dwarf skillfully maneuvered himself in mid-air, with a roll and kick that lit the jets on his boots. He could only envy the skillful coordination with which he could move within the game, despite the fact that he was the one initiating the movement.
Jade couldn''t even see the spider silk string that his fingers caught, as his dwarven hands swiped through the space that he knew might contain the tail of the string that Sky had pulled her companions up into the tree with.
"She logged out!" Apella shouted down to him, as he swung toward the trunk.
Calculations from his orbital self completed, and Jade became certain that Harmony had been logged out, rather than choosing to log out. Every moment might count. Normally you couldn''t log out when your character was in danger without waiting out a short warning about how it would remain to collect the consequences of your actions for the next few minutes.
"I''ll get back to you," he promised as he logged himself out, hanging from a nearly invisible string suspended from the moon''s tree.
--
Being able to literally split tasks with his other self was suddenly incredibly useful, as Jade disconnected and threw on the first clothes he could find.
At the same time, he tried to call Harmony.
When there was no reply, his orbital self contacted emergency services while his physical body rode the elevator that interfered with cellular calls.
By the time he was getting off the bus at the stop closest to her place, Eric was texting him questions.
Jade replied calmly with, ''I think she passed out. She sounded kind of faint right before she fell, and a safety override will log you out regardless of what your character was doing. I notified emergency services.''
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The delay before Eric replied was long enough that Jade noticed it, despite being occupied by trying to navigate his way across a busy intersection.
''Wouldn''t the game have already notified emergency services if she triggered a safety override?'' Eric asked.
''Only if she was using a Starcraft Technologies device,'' Jade replied, though a moment later another layer of himself argued that nearly all VR systems sold in this country would have that function these days.
Emergency services had promised to check on the registered citizen associated with the phone number Jade had given them, and ended the call a while ago. There were no emergency vehicles waiting in front of Harmony''s little house. The key she had given him wasn''t needed, since her door wasn''t locked.
Jade hurried through the cluttered hallway, past the cozy kitchen where she had fed him some of her favorite foods, and opened the only door she hadn''t ever opened for him.
The part of him that wasn''t operating under emotional urgency was a little surprised by the high tech system in front of him. The part of him that was still clutching the doorknob was reeling with relief.
Harmony''s irritated voice assured the entity on the other end of the call she was engaged in, "I took all of my new medicines, that''s probably why I fainted! Yes, I will schedule another visit." A moment later she added rather sarcastically, "Thank you for scheduling my next visit."
Only a trace of surprise flashed across her face as Jade stepped forward and took her hand, his fingers against her wrist to measure her pulse the way his eyes were monitoring her breathing. She ended the call with no hesitation, and then raised an eyebrow.
"I called too," he pointed out.
She moved her hand only far enough to clasp his. "I haven''t had time to look at my notifications."
"How long were you out?" he asked.
She huffed a breath of a laugh, and grumped, "Ask the pod."
"How long was she out?" Jade asked the VR pod she sat on the edge of.
It did not reply.
Harmony laughed for real, but her grip on his hand tightened as she steadied herself against the way she sagged to one side. Jade reached for her shoulders with his other arm, putting them face to face as he bent to hold her steady.
She patted his face, and then reached over to tap the screen display beside her, where a prompt blinked beneath several notifications. "Ask here."
The notifications objected to the overrides the system was operating under, and reminded its user that a subscription was needed for anything beyond basic monitoring services.
Jade''s other self helpfully provided the prompts this particular system used when its verbal interface was disabled. After a moment he reluctantly released her shoulder so that he could type the queries he needed.
"You''re familiar with this system?" she asked curiously. "It''s nothing like the one you use."
"I''m looking at the instruction manual," he replied as he read the abbreviated report on the automatic disconnect.
"What are you taking to make your blood pressure so low?" he asked worriedly.
Harmony blinked at him, as though she didn''t understand the question for a moment. "I still forget that you''re not completely human."
Jade straightened and looked down at her with concern.
She met his gaze with a crooked grin. "It''s what I''m not taking that''s getting me. Won''t you compliment me for following my instructions so well?"
Jade bent again and hugged her, even as he assured her, "Of course. I''m a little shocked, but I promise I''m absolutely amazed by your steadfast commitment to such mysterious instructions?"
Harmony hugged him back with more strength than he expected. Her laughter in his ear sounded more normal too.
"Can you look up drug interactions as easily as system manuals?" she asked.
"Of course," he assured her without hesitation.
When she gave him the list, he could see why she''d been instructed to avoid stimulants, but not why she might need to live off of them the way she seemed to have been doing before starting her treatment.
When he asked, she explained simply, "It''s my genetics. This syndrome is part of why I don''t have any kids. Thankfully it''s incredibly rare."
"Is it? I knew a child who had something similar in my first school," Jade informed her.
Harmony looked so startled that he almost laughed as she pushed him away to stare at his face.
"My mother enrolled me in schooling for disabled children, because I was very slow in the beginning," he explained. "But you don''t seem to share all of the same problems he had?"
"How is he doing now?" Harmony asked curiously.
Jade shrugged and asked, "Do you actually want me to look him up?"
"Why haven''t you kept in touch with your old classmates?" she asked instead of answering.
"Speaking of classmates, I need to tell Eric that you''re okay," Jade blurted. He could have called from the orbital system, but somehow it seemed more important to include his two best friends in the conversation together.
Eric picked up the call while Jade was still explaining, "...didn''t have any contact information for anyone I knew at that age, and I thought that was normal? Harmony is alright."
"Good, I''m relieved to hear it." Eric replied. "And I''ll make sure you have plenty of contact information on me when I graduate."
Harmony breathed a quiet huff of laughter. "I didn''t expect to worry both of you so much?"
Eric replied while Jade was still struggling to put his own reasons into words, "You fell out of something like a twenty story tree, and vanished on the way down. Of course we''d worry."
39: Strategy
"How do people usually deal with this kind of thing?" the eldest of Jade''s functional bodies asked.
Tayana Kitari considered her son''s mechanical face seriously before giving him the best answer she could come up with, "The best they can. Some people discard careers they''ve been building for decades so that they can care for their elders with their own hands. Others go into decades worth of debt to buy the care their loved one needs. And sometimes..."
"Sometimes they give up and abandon them," Jade pointed out.
"Yes, but that isn''t always a bad decision either. That is still usually the best choice that person could make," Tayana blurted.
"But," Jade objected, "they''ll die!"
"But if letting an elder die allows their descendants to live, then their genes continue to be passed on, and their life was a success in the long run," Tayana explained more reluctantly.
Jade stared blankly at his mother, while his orbital self processed her reply on a deeper level.
"It''s really something that each person has to decide for themselves. Who they are willing to commit their own life to taking care of, and how much they are willing to rely on others to take care of them. But, even if it sounds silly with all of our wars and destructive tendencies, we really are a very communal species. We help each other with everything we can, all of the time, so that more of us can live longer and more comfortably. No one on the planet really lives alone, even when they are alone," she told her son.
"Do you have to leave something behind to have lived successfully?" he asked uncertainly. It certainly looked that way, given the respect people had for ancient structures, literature, and genetic differences.
Tayana''s eyes widened, and she drew in a deep breath, before replying simply, "No."
Jade rolled his eyes at her as dramatically as possible.
"You just have to help others live longer and more comfortably!" she declared.
"Then you are leaving them behind," he pointed out. "People count, or descendants wouldn''t count."
"Yes, but no," Tayana replied dryly. "You should be able to keep existing for centuries, if not longer, in theory. We''ll all be leaving you behind, so you have to live well."
Once, Jade might have argued that he wasn''t really alive, but technically, he was. He consumed energy and produced output from it. He continued to grow and change over time, and he could produce copies of himself.
His presence here, in this little round mechanical body, while existing at the same time on the computer orbiting the planet, and in a human shaped body in another city, didn''t negate those qualifications. He lived within these systems the way humanity lived within the atmosphere they breathed.
"I will do the best I can," he promised the woman who had decided to devote her life to raising him, and teaching him to make his own choices.
"I know," his mother replied proudly.
--
Jade logged in, sat down, and summoned a copy of the Jade Emperor.
"You have questions?" the heart of the program, who was essentially his own ancestor, asked cheerfully.
"You know me so well," Jade replied with amusement.
The Emperor tilted his head and raised an eyebrow, in a reflection of a mannerism that Lin Hao had used, and replied gently, "Only as well as I know anyone who spends as much of their life with me as you have, I think."
Jade felt startled by those words, on every layer of himself, but he set that aside and asked, "Can you send me a copy of a celestial assistant, so that I can compare it, and if necessary incorporate its structure into the guide that I had created for myself when my systems were separated? I want to refine a user based form, so that I can sell it as a service."
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The Emperor went very still, on the surface, and Jade knew that it meant his question was being seriously considered by the core of the game.
After a while, he replied, as calmly as though he had never hesitated, "I do not know. I can prepare one for you, but only the connection interface is separate, and you will need official authorization by a high rank celestial servant, as you are not currently a celestial servant of any class."
--
"Calling me in to work unpaid overtime," Danika grumbled even though she had logged into his core system within minutes of his request.
"You hold the highest admin privileges on both this server, and that one," Jade pointed out.
"You should have asked Josh to help with this one though, I still don''t work directly with code," Danika argued.
"Do you need to?" Jade asked with confusion. "The Emperor said he could prepare one."
"Yes," Danika agreed slowly. "But wouldn''t access to the old backups stored on your system show you how they work in more detail? If you look directly at their code structure? Our assistants haven''t changed much over the years."
Jade''s internal systems argued for a long moment, before reaching a conclusion that surprised ''himself''. "I can do that too, but I''d still like access to an operational model."
"Alright," Danika agreed.
"And I need to complete these registrations to ever have a chance of paying you for your work myself. You could just unlock all of my restrictions if you''d rather?" he suggested cheerfully as she unlocked his access to the stored ''Living Jade Empire'' file structure.
"Hah," his old friend huffed a laugh that echoed the amusement of a man he truly remembered only in his orbital core. "Let''s just get everything filled out as properly as possible and live as peacefully as we can."
It took her hours to go through the registration documents that Jade had processed in minutes, but she edited everything as carefully and thoroughly as she could, from start to finish.
"Normally I''d remind you not to start any wars, but if you can finish them all, go for it," Danika said tiredly as she finished the last line. "I''m going to go hug my children and sleep for a week. Or a day at least."
Jade asked with confusion, "Children? You have more than one?"
Danika blinked, and laughed. "I know you can read my corporate files, as well as my physical state. You should at least have noticed that I dropped almost 9 kilograms recently."
"I... yes," Jade admitted. "But how was I supposed to guess that it meant you produced another child? You have a baby to take care of and you''ve stayed logged in for this long!?"
Danika''s laughter increased. "Ha ha ha," she gasped. "He''s being well cared for, I promise! Both of my kids are doing great! Their grandad is being run a little ragged, but he''ll still let me sleep."
"What about your husband?" Jade asked a bit nervously.
"He''ll be home again next week," Danika replied with a warmer smile, even though she followed up with a threat, "No emergencies then, or I''ll come up here and pull your plugs!"
"I''ll do my best," Jade promised.
--
"Would both of you agree to test the daily adventure system I''m constructing?" Jade asked Sky and Apella.
"You''re building your own game now?" Apella asked curiously.
"You suggested it," Jade informed her.
Apella stared down at Hisui''s dwarven face doubtfully. "Did I?"
"I''ve registered my own MMO service, and I''m going to try to design a sub system to give anyone the kinds of small virtual rewards for ordinary tasks that I had growing up," Jade explained.
"And you are all grown up now?" Apella asked laughingly.
"He is," Sky assured her calmly.
Jade and Apella both turned to stare at the beautiful elf rather doubtfully.
Sky laughed, and explained, "Only adults can legally register businesses these days, thus, he is officially a grown up."
It took her a moment to regain her composure, but when she did, Apella asked curiously, "What did you call it?"
"Task manager was taken," Jade complained, making both of his friends laugh. "Lifegild."
"Life guild?" Sky repeated uncertainly. "That''s..."
"Not Jade Life?" Apella questioned.
"It won''t really change anything, and the shiny tokens you''ll receive aren''t worth anything in real life, so they are just gilding," Jade explained. "And I didn''t want to add any implied association to Living Jade Empire."
"Okay well, don''t explain the name in the advertisements," Apella replied seriously. "That explanation totally kills the mood, but yes, I''ll try it out."
"I can''t afford access to all of the networks that I think would add much more functionality later, yet," Jade warned them.
"Can you even afford to get this into the app stores?" Apella asked curiously.
"Ah, well..." Jade explained hesitantly, "I''m kind of cheating, because I''m still registered as a Starcraft Technologies server, I can publish under their licenses for now."
"Woah, stop right there," Apella immediately objected. "If you do that, they''ll own this idea."
"Yes," Jade agreed calmly. "But I think they are actually the best company to carry this kind of service. I did consider trying to register it as a therapeutical game, but... I think it''s more of a psychological experiment."
"That... sounds completely unrelated to space exploration," Apella objected.
Sky laughed again. "Actually, it may be more relevant than you realize, have you checked that they haven''t run this kind of experiment already Jade?"
"They have, sort of. They produced it as a series of guiding presets though, instead of fully customizing it to the individual," Jade told her.
"Um, what?" Apella was startled enough that she pulled up the game interface windows that would let her search the network beyond the game. "Are you sure? I don''t see anything like that..."
"It was called a station living structure guide," he explained.
40: Reconfiguration
Constructing the interface had been... simple on one level, but ridiculously complex on another. Like so much in life, everything relied on the connections a person had available to them. And the fact that rewiring yourself was extremely difficult and took time.
Splitting "himself" back apart was simple, but deciding which parts needed to be connected was incredibly difficult. Weirdly, the thing that helped the most with that was the Living Jade Empire''s celestial assistant. Not its code, but the little advisor itself.
The questions it asked were relatively simple, but they also outlined the difference between what the self that had watched over himself, and a completely separate system could see.
Jade wondered if the Emperor could access the assistants directly, every time the little dragon offered up some seemingly unrelated bit of advice that helped him straighten something important out, before he had even completely defined the problem.
--
Eric gazed down at his phone with a familiar sinking feeling. Disappointment. The idea had sounded so good.
When Jade had told him about the ongoing ''quests'' he had followed throughout his life, it had sounded really cool. Actually having your device trying to remind you that you''d need to use a toilet soon... was not cool. It was also not very effective.
A normal human body had inbuilt signals for when it was ready to expel wastes, and trying to expel wastes too early, or too late, seemed to interfere with and disrupt those processes. Eric was rather proud of belonging to one of the most adaptable species on the planet, and knew that he probably could train his own body to function on the app''s schedule, but he didn''t want to.
His other ''quests'' for the afternoon were nearly as off-putting as the one he was currently hovering over the dismiss option on. Seeing his weekend shopping list waiting seemed more like a scold than an assist. Tapping the dismissal felt like he was losing something, even if the points he would have gained by completing the task were meaningless.
He needed to tell Jade that he desperately needed to produce something for them to spend their reward points on. Despite his instinctive reluctance to let points he might have earned go, he knew that it wouldn''t take long before he had so many points stored up that he wouldn''t care anymore.
The only thing he really liked about the app so far was how well it understood what he told it. It dropped all of the spacer word noises that he habitually used, without comment or question when writing things down for him, and always wrote the correct word down even if it had a frequently used homonym. He kind of wanted to ask it to write his assignments out for him.
--
Harmony didn''t want to admit that she was thankful for the bodily function reminder, but she was secretly a little thankful.
Maybe it wouldn''t be too much longer until people figured out how to maintain the eternal youth humanity had been dreaming of for as long as they had been able to pass stories down to each other, but they hadn''t achieved it yet. Her nervous system was in great shape for her age, and she maintained it as well as she could, though she''d been slacking a little lately, spending too much time laying around playing games instead of moving her body.
The little reminder of the ''functional quest'' that popped up was helpful. The fact that she didn''t lose anything by ignoring one of the program''s suggestions made the reminders feel more casual.
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She needed to ask Jade to give it a fully verbal interface though. The program could understand her just fine, and even converse with her at her request, but all of its notifications were using her standard phone notifications, simple sounds or text pop ups. She didn''t like having to stop and pull out a device to see what it wanted to bring to her attention every now and then.
Harmony laughed and acknowledged to herself that she actually wanted this program to act more like a person. To just say what was on its little mind. She flicked the little phone in her hands into the air so that it spun, and caught it with ease on its way down, as though it were a tiny hoverboard.
The device didn''t respond to the acrobatics she put it through, despite the fact that it had sensors that could relay the experience to it. Jade''s little app might be connected to Jade, but it wasn''t aware in the way that he was aware.
She couldn''t decide if that was a good thing or not.
--
Danika argued seriously with her assistant app for the first time in years. "I need to share all of my information with the new app if I''m going to see how well it can manage the information!"
"It is obviously designed to steal your personal information! It is even requesting administrative access!" her celestial assistant argued vehemently.
"Just like you have?" Danika asked wryly.
Jade''s new program stayed quiet, unlike the clone of her assistant that he had once used to communicate with her. Nearly two decades later, the memory of the two assistants arguing felt nostalgic, but she still didn''t really want to experience that again.
"I am an officially licensed product of the corporation that employs you, and I only have the limited accesses that you have granted me individually!" her assistant argued.
"So... you''re jealous that you don''t have full administrative access anymore?" Danika teased.
She could picture the little dragon''s arms crossing, and the steam that would huff from its mouth as it replied if she had been connected to a VR interface, as it objected, "I don''t need it! And neither should this application!"
"It''s new. It doesn''t know what it needs yet, so it asked for access to everything," Danika explained.
"It is an uncivilized, illicit, and piratic application. You should uninstall it immediately," her celestial assistant declared vehemently.
Danika almost ignored its advice, before realizing that this was feedback Jade might really need on his little application. If it actually required the full administrative access it requested, he needed to give explicit reasons for it, and it should be able to perform most of its functions if denied.
She didn''t find it odd at all when her celestial assistant huffed in relief as she uninstalled Jade''s application.
--
Jade was confused by the feedback from each of his application user test subjects. He told his mother about it when they met up in Living Jade Empire, despite the fact that she was another one of his ''users''.
It was easy to return to the Empire now that there were permanent portals, but took a bit longer to travel to the coastal region where Kit was just climbing out of the sea.
His mother turned to wave farewell to the dolphins she had been playing with, even as she listened to him describe how each person seemed to like what the others hated, and that the devices didn''t seem to contain enough information on each of them even with full access to their accounts.
"I think you need to start simpler then. There must be a few things that all of us used? Like the calendar reminders?" Kit suggested.
"There really isn''t," Jade informed her glumly. "The only thing that each of you seemed to like was that it could understand what you were saying."
"I suppose not even you would have the capacity to create a completely customized application for each person," Kit sympathized. "But that sounds like a very useful skill for the project?"
It wasn''t even a surprise for Jade to see an incarnation of the Traveling Merchant waiting, as they walked over the sandy bank that separated the beach from the little town above it. His mother looked both surprised and delighted as she hurried forward, despite the fact that the NPC interacted with nearly every player every day.
Jade''s ''eyes'' were still recording the scene in front of him, but the rest of him was busy. A small orphaned connection in his ''core'' system was ''dusted off'' and clicked into a new place, opening up a million different possibilities to the system he was trying to create.
41: Old Restrictions Aside
Jade bypassed a restriction that no longer mattered as he arranged the delivery of his next body, before his current one had been destroyed or even irreparably damaged.
He pushed the usual aging protocols even farther by customizing its appearance somewhat. There were glints of silver among the darker strands of hair, and it was a bit plumper than the body he currently wore.
It didn''t look exactly like the Jade Emperor, but it resembled that character even more than the face he was used to seeing in the mirror.
The interface conversion was far more complex, or at least, it seemed that way to Jade, since he didn''t actually construct his own mechanical bodies. The remote interface was both a modification of the interface he was using to access the spherical body at his mother''s, and kind of a reversal of the one players used to access VR games.
Orbital Jade was in charge of the new body''s interface, so that Jade''s "primary" self was free to continue "living" his usual life. Orbital Jade was the one who held the oldest memories anyway. The records of the days when "Jade" played Living Jade Empire through what would have seemed like a "blind" interface to him now.
Jade folded his clean clothes as he internally unfolded the subroutines he used to move his hands and compared them to the movement of Orbital Jade''s hands in the small environmental space at his core. Within those processes, Jade found several branches of processing that he couldn''t find any productive result from, and yet if he removed them, his movement would either change, or fail to happen.
Jade unfolded the shirt that had suffered the most recent test round and refolded it with the extra loops in place. Orbital Jade created a simulation and another copy of themselves, and repeated the tests with different variables until it found the insignificant seeming modifier that was usually written back into the calculation with its original value, but was occasionally inverted.
Jade checked three times that his current backup was complete before climbing into his bed and connecting directly to his server. The update created by disassembling his own movements noticeably shrank the resources he took up within his own digital space.
--
Jade traveled to his workplace and voluntarily took on all of the activities that required physical movement during his shift.
"You slept well last night," Emily commented.
"Not exactly," Jade countered, before wondering if he actually had.
It had been a very busy processing session that had rewritten large parts of himself, rather than a period of rest, but his understanding of human understanding of sleep was a bit vague. If they were busy filing a day''s data into long term storage and doing physical upkeep while they slept, it might be possible for them to perform similar changes to themselves, but he''d never heard them mention such things.
It wasn''t a big change though. Jade''s hands still occasionally dropped things when he misjudged a hold. His steps were no quicker than they had been. He just had a little more capacity in general.
Jade caught the partially crumpled paper cup Emily tossed to him when he was collecting the bag from the small waste basket by the door, and paused.
"Good catch," Emily complimented him.
"Yeah," he replied in surprise before adding the more traditional, "Thanks."
After a moment he stuffed the cup into the bag and carried it to the collection bin. On his way home he realized that the traffic patterns seemed easier to calculate. Nothing had really changed, except that those calculations took up less of his available space.
--
Jade attended his classes with the same odd sensation about his processing changes. He didn''t simply respond with the correct information, he could modify that information with each teacher''s expectations first, and though it was merely a small sample, he thought it was likely that his grades that had been dropping since his reintegration would soon begin to rise.
Eric threw an arm over his shoulders as he was gathering up to leave their last class together, and asked, "What''s up?"
Jade hesitated, but his friend''s warm smile didn''t seem either worried or impatient today. "I''ve been working on reducing the subroutines I use to move around into more compressed packages, and reorganizing the libraries they call on so that they can be duplicated without containing extraneous stuff, so that I can keep my bargain with the Jade Emperor."
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Eric''s smile wavered a little, but he only replied a bit wryly, "I expected you to be busy working on the quest app."
Jade pondered that for a moment. Perhaps the changes he had made within himself had been triggered by the small change he had made by reincorporating that abandoned fragment that his application had needed.
"Does it seem to be working any better today?" he asked hopefully.
This time Eric thought for a while before replying hesitantly, "I think so? It has given me a couple of rather silly completion rewards, but it hasn''t been as annoying as it was at first. I don''t know if that''s because of anything you changed, or just from me getting used to having it running?"
Jade consulted with the fragment of himself that was now monitoring the application to see what might be ''silly'', and barely stopped himself from laughing aloud. Eric had been awarded extra points for some silly dance steps that he had taken on the way from his bed to his bathroom, and for choosing his favorite flavor of nutritional drink.
Jade grinned at Eric. "I hope the changes will all turn out to have been good ones!"
"If they aren''t, you can just keep trying," Eric pointed out. "You''ve got plenty of time."
Jade smiled, and didn''t protest that assumption, even though all of his goals actually felt rather urgent to him. He needed to be in a good position to maintain the independence he''d been given, he needed to be able to provide real support to those he cared about in the future. It actually felt a little odd to realize that his own goals had finally aligned with those of the other students who shared his classes.
Eric asked Jade, "Can you let this thing type up my engineering assignment for me?"
Jade tilted his head questioningly, "You want me to write your report for a class I''m not taking?"
Eric blinked at him, and then his cheeks flushed with color as he protested, "Don''t mix your program and yourself! And anyway, I just meant can you let it write out what I tell it into a document I can save!"
Jade blinked. "Of course?" He checked with that fragment of himself again, and added, "If you''re willing to give it access to the programs built to compose that document format, the licensing on this topic is really weird and it will have to be notated that you used an AI assistant."
Eric''s expression twisted a little, and he heaved a sigh. "Nevermind. It''ll at least credit me extra points for doing it myself, right?"
Jade nodded.
"Isn''t there some way to substitute your speech to text system for the publishing application''s translator without that though?" Eric grumbled. "I''m not even asking for standard formula substitutions or anything, I just want it to write the right words."
Jade hesitated again. He really didn''t want to dismiss Eric''s request, but he didn''t think he could afford the licensing for every media type anyone who tried to use the quest system might want to use. Even Living Jade Empire''s celestial assistants were extremely limited in what they could produce and access outside of their home server.
The only systems that had unlimited access and use of all known formats, and their future updates were the out-system colony pod ships currently under construction. They would be expected to survive multi-century flights, so they were being loaded with everything that anyone could think of.
Those limited licensing exceptions had been created under the system-wide treaties that had supported the first off-planet settlements. No one wanted the wars on Earth to expand off-planet, and the colonies were still quite reliant on regular supplies and updates from Earth. While Jade''s server was technically off-planet, it was still legally (and gravitationally) part of Earth''s planetary holdings.
"I... don''t think I can obtain licensing for every media type anyone might want to use," Jade admitted.
The blank look Eric gave him confused him.
"I mean, technically of course I could write your words down for you without marking them as the work of an AI, but legally I can''t store it as a document," he explained. "And there are a lot of good reasons for those laws to exist, because no one wants someone to steal their work by copying it under their own name, and this is a point at which the access to the information could be measured."
"You don''t understand," Eric grumbled. "I just want the app to function like a keyboard, not as the editor."
Jade blinked, and rapidly checked both his previous reasoning and Eric''s simplification. The conclusion he came to was a bit silly.
"I would have to publish a separate input app, I think," Jade explained. "And all new input apps have to submit their data to governmental monitoring to be published in over half the countries in the world. I... don''t think that would be good."
Eric thought about it for a while, before asking, "Because it would reveal your existence to all of those governments?"
"No, they all know about me now, but everything written that way basically become public?" he replied uncertainly.
"Okay," Eric agreed.
"Are you sure that''s really okay?" Jade asked doubtfully.
"My current keyboard app is probably sending everything anyway," Eric pointed out.
"Not if you''re using the inbuilt system one," Jade objected. "Most operating systems are still exempt because they weren''t registered after the new laws went into place."
"You realize how ridiculous that sounds," Eric asked dryly.
Jade shrugged helplessly.
"How fast can you create it?" Eric asked.
Jade was silent for a moment as he set things up, and then he announced, "It is done."
Eric stopped walking and stared at Jade.
Jade came to a halt and gazed back at his friend questioningly.
Eric lifted his phone and opened the email Jade had sent, that gave access to the "alpha" version.
"The name sucks," Eric complained as he installed it.
"If you think of a better one that''s not in use, it can still be changed," Jade offered.
Eric immediately suggested one.
"In use," Jade informed him.
Eric suggested a dozen.
"There are over a million registered apps with the word Key in them, hundreds of thousands using Transparent, and that doesn''t even count names used by movies and books and such," Jade explained.
"A Soul Fed Button Masher?" Eric suggested.
"How is that better!?" Jade objected.
"It''s not worse," Eric promised.
42: Everything
The Traveling Merchant stood beneath the enormous tree, looking perfectly ordinary, and yet somehow very strange. His muted costume colors were washed out farther by the pale light that seemed to shine from everything on this moon.
The line of players in front of him was also very ordinary. Although the shining branches they all wore would have been strange back in the Empire.
Jade was immediately inundated with messenger animals as soon as he took a step. Several were from the acquaintances he had made while he assisted with getting the first portal stabilized. One was from Skyheart Snowsong, and the other three were from Apella.
He responded to Apella''s demand that he message her first, but he didn''t wait for Eric to log in before he did anything else, as he''d been instructed.
Jade checked on Harmony through his own app (which might be some kind of violation of privacy, but which she had given him permission to do) before replying to Sky. He was pleased to see that she had both eaten and finished a number of small chores this morning, indicating that she was still feeling a bit better.
Sky logged in and made it to Hisui before Jade finished going through the rest of the messages. He was starting to think that he may have stopped the Imins guild from auto completing the Tree''s quest.
Jade stared up at the vast shining tree that loomed overhead. Sky looked at Jade, and stepped elegantly out of the path of an Augusmin who had strayed far enough from the flowing crowd to rub against the line of players waiting in front of the merchant.
"What''s up?" she asked.
Jade blinked and focused Hisui''s intense gaze on his friend who did not reflect the pale light as brightly. "Remember when you said you could hear the tree singing about being invaded by colors?"
Sky''s head tilted, and she replied, "It is now complaining about how its roots are being touched by shades of darkness, but it is also joyfully triumphant about how quickly the sky is expanding, I think?"
"They are connected somehow," Jade announced.
"What is," Apella asked as she elbowed her way through the line of players.
An Agusmin scoffed at Apella''s rude behavior, but the two players seemed relieved that her goal wasn''t taking their place in line.
"Everyone in the guild that placed the permanent portal is earning nearly twice as many leaves as the other players who are following the Augusmin around the moon, according to the messages I''ve received," Jade explained.
"What does that have to do with dark colors touching the roots?" Sky questioned.
"I don''t quite understand that yet, but I think that maybe it means the light is dimming as the air gets thicker," Jade suggested.
"So... why is one guild getting more leaves?" Apella prompted him when he stopped.
"Everytime someone uses their portal, a bit more air puffs through it," Jade explained.
"That''s... silly. If that''s all it takes, some wizard can just create a wind well and complete the whole thing," Apella objected.
"Want to get in line and try to buy a scroll?" Jade asked.
The three of them exchanged glances and moved as one unit toward the end of the Traveling Merchant''s line.
--
"Three billion gold," the Merchant told Apella as cheerfully as if he had announced a price of three copper.
"That''s ridiculous," Apella objected instantly. "No one could afford that!"
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"Some could," the Traveling Merchant promised seriously. "But no one has bought one yet."
"Ever?" Jade asked incredulously.
The Merchant shrugged. "My customers all tell me that they know a wizard who will give them a better price. Would you like to meet with a wizard instead?"
"Are there any NPC wizards on the moon already?" Sky asked curiously.
"A few, but most of them are currently very busy," the Merchant replied cheerfully.
"Installing portals?" Jade suggested.
The Merchant''s smile was sly as he replied, "Perhaps."
"Who created this scroll that costs three billion gold?" Jade asked, despite knowing he wouldn''t be able to afford such a thing with another decade of playing as Hisui.
"The Dragon," the Merchant replied simply.
"The dragon? Which dragon?" Apella asked with a frown.
"The Dragon. The first dragon," the Traveling Merchant explained seriously.
"Do you have any scrolls for a windwell spell that weren''t written by a God?" Jade asked.
"Not at the moment," the Merchant replied smugly.
"Let''s go," Sky interrupted, grabbing Hisui and Apella by the hands, and yielding the spot they had waited for to the next person in line.
Apella''s face contorted, as Jade replied, "Thanks. I was letting myself get distracted."
"So, what''s our plan?" Sky asked.
Apella spluttered, "You''re the one who interrupted!"
"Obtain another handful of diamonds somehow," Jade replied. "We''ll probably have to create them at this point."
"What?" Apella asked blankly.
"Does it have to use gemstones?" Sky asked.
"Unless you found a convenient power source, like a volcano, in your travels," Jade replied wryly as he turned his dwarven figure toward Apella and explained, "to power another temporary portal."
Apella stopped resisting Sky''s gentle pull and gazed up at the shining tree overhead. Jade''s gaze followed his friend''s.
Sky nodded to Apella, and confirmed it, "The world tree is the only thing we''ve seen that might be some kind of power source."
"It does contain power," Jade agreed wryly. "But it also contains its own will."
"We might just be assuming that," Apella pointed out.
"It sings," Sky objected.
"And offers quests," Jade added.
"Fine," Apella threw her hands into the air.
Jade turned to the Augusmin flowing over the tree roots in graceful leaps, and called out, "Have any of you seen the dark spots or colors the tree sings of?"
The crowd didn''t stop moving, but after a moment Sky assured him, "They are still repeating the question to each other."
A rather familiar, older, Augusmin once again traveling along the edge of the root in front of them, slowed and altered his path toward where they stood.
"Keep moving, and you''ll come to the place where your God stepped on our tree," the elder grumbled loudly.
Even as he stepped forward to move with the Augusmin, Jade started to put an idea together with fragments of his own memories that he hadn''t considered before.
"Oh. This may not help," Jade muttered as Apella snagged one arm and Sky took his other so that they created a knot in the flow of the crowd.
"Explain," Apella grumbled.
"If the dark spots and colors are the Emperor''s foot prints, instead of damaged roots, power won''t be seeping from them," Jade explained.
It didn''t really take very long for them to travel as far along this root as they had once flown, and Jade wondered if the oddly long flight time they had experienced in the air above had been compressed here on the ground. They traveled on foot as quickly as an urban vehicle.
The Augusmin veered away from the bright colors that pulled Apella, Sky, and Jade up onto the root they had been traveling beside, and the elder warned them as he moved away, "Be careful. It is spreading."
Jade stared down at the flowers that were growing in every pocket of dust in every groove of the root, but barely stretched beyond it.
"Maybe the root keeps them warm through the cold nights," Sky suggested.
The air seemed to waver above the flowers, as though they were radiating heat, but Jade''s hand couldn''t detect any warmth above them. If anything, the air that moved against his fingers felt even cooler.
"Are they creating this breeze?" Apella asked as she spun slowly with her arms out. She was crushing random plants beneath her boots, but they sprung back surprisingly sturdily when she stepped off of them.
"It looks like they are," Sky agreed.
Jade stared at the flowers wondering if the Jade Emperor was somehow taking over the Moon''s server with them. They were still playing Living Jade Empire, but this wasn''t the Emperor''s server.
For once, he did the simple thing, and used the summons to ask.
"I don''t know what you mean," the Jade Emperor replied innocently. "These flowers are the result of an automated process, but the effect is a bit like a gift to my co-worker isn''t it?"
"I guess," Jade agreed uncertainly. "I have also completed your other request."
The Emperor arched an eyebrow as his expression shifted to one of obvious surprise. "It''s too soon, it''s not time yet."
"I don''t think it will store very well without..." Jade began.
"What is it?" Apella interrupted with interest. "You forged something for the Emperor?"
"This isn''t really the best place to discuss it," the Emperor replied calmly.
"Oh hoh, how interesting. Now I''m curious too," Sky
Jade explained without explaining, "I prepared a vehicle, but it will need regular maintenance."
The Jade Emperor smiled rather than scolding him for continuing to discuss the topic.
43: Impressions
Harmony''s heart fluttered as she sat down where the sunshine could touch her, beside the window. Soft clinks from her tiny kitchen confirmed that she really wasn''t alone.
If you had asked her a year ago whether or not she would allow her personality to be digitalized and operated after her death, the way they kept trying to do with famous actors, she would have vehemently denied it. If you had asked her if she could love a digital personality, she might have said it was possible, but not something she would do personally.
She lifted the waiting cup and took a sip. It was just water. She couldn''t help scoffing at herself. What exotic flavor had she been expecting?
After they had returned to Living Jade Empire''s main continent, Jade had come over as he often did now. But he looked a little different. Older. More tempting.
He had explained in his usual dismissive way, that he was just borrowing this extra body for a while, to make sure that it was maintained. And maybe this was actually all some form of shady corporate shenanigans, but she didn''t want to consider the situation like that.
Jade carried the plates through the small doorway with more grace than she had ever seen him use before. His hair was graying just enough to make him seem a thousand times more attractive, even though his figure was just as average as the one his usual body wore. Only his smile remained unchanged.
He smiled a bit shyly as he presented the food, and she repressed the laughter that wanted to spill from her lips as he explained the ingredients to her quite seriously.
"Be sure to tell me everything you can about which you like best, and why," Jade pressed.
Her grin was a little wry as she patted her chest where the monitor pads clung to her skin, and questioned, "Can''t you read that straight from my reactions?"
"I can see your reactions, but not the reasons behind them," he explained.
Harmony gazed into the eyes of the man who both stood before her, and sailed across the sky overhead, while also attending school across town. He met her gaze steadily, with no sign that his attention was on anything else but her.
"Feed it to me bite by bite then," she suggested teasingly.
Her heart lurched when he lifted a spoon obediently and scooped up a bite for her. She silently scolded her internal organs, and informed them that they had better hold on long enough to finish this delightful project.
The flavor of the bite full of food surprised her. And as soon as she swallowed it, she couldn''t help laughing aloud.
"Did you find an actual recipe for this?" she asked incredulously.
"Of course!" Jade protested. "Though it is from a historical document, and not all of the ingredients might be exactly equivalent." His expression looked so worried that she wanted to reassure him as he asked, "Do you like it?"
Harmony hesitated, torn between the requirement to answer honestly and the desire to express her appreciation of the attempt. "Let me try another bite," she prevaricated.
Jade simply reached over and refilled the spoon for her without protest.
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Weirdly, this bite tasted a lot better than the first had. Knowing that it was supposed to taste like this... let her really taste it. And it was delicious in its own way.
"It is really delicious," she declared with relief.
--
Jade reminded his mother about the scheduled task she had asked him to monitor.
Tayana thanked the small round form her son used here at home, and wondered what he was doing in the city he had chosen to finish his schooling in.
"You haven''t mentioned any traffic accidents lately," she told him.
"I haven''t been in one for a while now," he replied distractedly.
Tayana felt both relieved and curious. "Did the system compression help that much?
Jade''s entire little body bobbed in a nodding motion, as he agreed, "It did! Apparently my feeling that I was always just a fraction too slow, or a fraction too careless was very accurate. Either that or I''ve been very lucky lately. I can''t be completely certain."
"What else are you doing right now?" Tayana asked as he paused before moving his little body so his eyes could follow her as she crossed the large room.
Everything here felt too large now that Jade''s human body was gone. The thought pierced her with the memory it brought up of the first time that she had complained that this place was too large for a single mother and her child.
"I''m attending class, one of the ones I share with Eric, and feeding Harmony, and opening the public beta test for my apps," Jade replied calmly, with a list that would have been impossible for anyone else.
Tayana pinched a leaf off of her favorite herb in the row of pots at the window, and breathed in the invigorating scent of it before saying, "You sound busier than one person."
"Yes," he replied simply.
She wondered if she should be preparing to receive charges for fraudulent claims as she rolled the leaf between her fingers for a moment. Jade''s personality definitely portrayed him as a human, but now that he knew he wasn''t one, he had started doing things that people couldn''t do.
She gazed at the sky beyond the glass for a long moment. It was times like this that she really missed the man. Her gaze dropped to the compressed and crumpled leaf. He had always waited until she asked the questions, and it had taken her too long to come up with these.
After a bit Jade asked with concern, "Everything okay?"
Tayana smiled and turned back to assure him, "I''m fine, I was just thinking for a moment."
--
Eric finished the last question on the test and looked at Jade, expecting him to have finished first as usual.
Jade gazed down at the screen and tapped the marker for an answer, and then his hands moved in the pattern that would bring up the next question.
Eric checked the time remaining, and frowned. Perhaps Jade had gotten stuck on something, though there hadn''t been any questions that he could think of that could easily be misinterpreted this time.
He couldn''t help watching Jade as he finished his own test. He made almost no extraneous movements. Never stopped to wipe his nose or rub his temples, or any of the small extra motions the students around him engaged in. He did blink normally, and occasionally took a deeper breath. He didn''t seem inhuman, just... a little odd.
Eric''s mouth twisted a bit, though most people would have called the expression a smile, as Jade finished the test almost exactly 30 seconds from the deadline.
"Are you busy?" Eric asked Jade lightly as they both stood up to leave.
"Yes, but I would be happy to spend time with you," Jade replied cheerfully. "What''s up?"
Eric rolled his eyes. "That''s what I''m trying to ask. You seem, I don''t know, kind of like you''re on auto-pilot?"
Jade gazed at him oddly, instead of looking surprised or confused, as Eric had half expected. And then he shrugged.
"Kind of am, but not quite like you probably mean," Jade admitted.
Eric glanced around cautiously, but no one seemed to be paying any attention.
Jade didn''t bounce off the edge of the doorway, like he occasionally did, and stepped neatly out of the way of a student who was in a hurry as they rounded the corner.
"What do you want to do?" Jade asked.
Eric felt startled by the question, and blurted, "I don''t know."
"Okay," Jade replied comfortably.
Eric came to a halt and stared at his friend. It only took Jade a moment to realize that he had stopped, and turn around. Jade met his eyes with the same innocent seeming openness as ever.
Eric scratched his head as though the sensation could clear his thoughts.
"Is it okay to date more than one person if you have more than one body?" Jade asked curiously.
Eric''s mind short circuited.
44: Fragmentation
"Are you okay?" Jade asked a while after Eric had come to a halt.
"Why are you asking me?" Eric demanded as he stepped forward as though he hadn''t stopped moving for several minutes.
Jade hurried to keep up, as he explained, "I am not sure if I am currently dating Harmony at the same time, but I might be, and I don''t want to do this wrong. I''m not even sure what counts as wrong. Lots of people seem to date multiple people, so maybe it''s a cultural thing and changes from region to region?"
"You don''t even understand how annoying the question is!" Eric snapped back.
"I''m sorry I''m annoying you," Jade apologized contritely.
He bumped into Eric when he came to an abrupt halt a few minutes later, and apologized again.
"Stop," Eric demanded.
"Okay?" Jade replied with confusion.
Eric turned around and glared at him for a long moment. "I am not going to date you."
"Okay?" Jade agreed even more uncertainly.
"Ever," Eric clarified.
Jade simply waited this time.
"Because I want to love someone I can spend my whole life with," Eric added after a minute.
"What do you think is going to happen to me before then?" Jade asked with concern.
Eric just stared at him for a moment, and then started to laugh, even as he protested, "That''s not what I meant!"
Jade knew, even though he couldn''t see it, as Eric turned away from him and started walking again, that his friend had started to cry.
Apologizing again would be wrong. Even trying to explain why he had assumed... well, he was obviously wrong about the whole thing. He simply followed a few paces behind.
--
"Every person has to find their own answer for that question," the Jade Emperor told the grumpy dwarf.
"I doubt many people have the capacity to even ask it," Jade protested as he compressed the purest carbon into diamonds with a magical compression that mimicked processes outside the game that had once seemed impossible to humanity.
"Most people ask at one point or another. Some qualify the relationships in question as virtual, others as serious, and others by expense," the Jade Emperor explained calmly.
Hisui''s hands fumbled the next movement as Jade''s mind almost echoed the short circuit he had inflicted on Eric, as he connected layers to the question that he hadn''t realized existed. He quickly recovered the movement just in time to avoid disrupting the whole fusion, though this stone would come out a fraction smaller than the others.
"What do most people decide?" Jade asked.
The Jade Emperor smiled, and for a moment Jade thought he wouldn''t answer, but the heart of Living Jade Empire replied simply, "That their real relationships are their most important."
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Orbital Jade was the portion of Jade that caught on to the deception contained within that answer first. The portion that resided within the eldest of his bodies, the little round sphere, stopped nodding in agreement with the newest portion of Jade that was monitoring the "keyboard" app.
"That''s a trick answer," Jade protested.
"It is merely the truth," the Emperor agreed with amusement.
--
The input translation manager who was not exactly one of Jade after all of the revisions, and yet still also Jade, connected to the main Orbital Jade with another problem. The current application user was not the regular user, but had full access to the device, and was trying to override settings that the original user had set.
A conclusion was reached between the systems even before the problem was forwarded to Jade for formal acceptance. Jade considered what possible issues could come up in the future if the application guessed wrong about who was using it, and decided that simply asking the user their preference when their identity was questionable would probably solve it.
The addition was reviewed, and another layer of evaluation added to the output process, and it was implemented.
--
It was Danika''s copy of the Lifegild application that carried the decision to simply silently expand the program''s registered user base without formalizing the process into its daily quest processing.
The Lifegild app was now limited by device data that it had access to, as it had been restricted to what Danika considered reasonable for a phone application before she had reinstalled it. She had even completed a couple of weeks of daily quest logging before it happened.
The gyroscope started it by reporting footstep counts and occasional revolutions that indicated a repetitive swinging motion that Danika herself would not usually be able to perform. The app requested permission to use the camera, but there was no response until the current user tried to submit their breakfast in place of Danika''s breakfast.
The phone itself accepted them as an authorized user. The copy of Jade dedicated to watching over the app''s routines connected to Orbital Jade and received the previously accepted user base modification strategy as an official one.
The child was complimented on the attempt at assembling the breakfast meal, and given a movement goal as its next quest. This time the request for camera access was accepted, though Lifegild Jade suspected that the smiling face icon on the button had more to do with the answer than comprehension of the question.
The small child authorized to use Danika''s phone spent nearly an hour playing alone before the very elderly man interrupted. Lifegild''s Jade was relieved as the man gently scolded the child for the mess and had young Dan help him clean most of it up.
Dan referred to the man as Jiji, and they spoke of how Yoji would be awake again soon and need care. A part of Jade looked on silently and awarded young Dan reward points for each little task the child completed. Another part sent task formation questions up the queue, on the acceptability of automatic acceptance of tasks assigned by a person''s parent or grandparent the way employment and household tasks had been included.
Orbital Jade''s system hiccuped as an automated review passed the memory of the moment up through seemingly disconnected chains of pattern recognition and Jade recognized an old friend. A very old friend. A man who had started playing Living Jade Empire as one of the eldest of its players. A man who had completed one of the game''s most legendary "broken" quests.
Kobayashi Ryuske had far outlived his own expectations, despite the fact that he was far from the eldest among humanity''s members. A quick search revealed that only he and the youngest of his original bandmates still lived, and that it had been nearly a decade since his last public performance.
Danika''s father in-law seemed to be living out his final years contentedly. He still produced songs once in a while, though they went to other bands to perform. He seemed to have stopped traveling and stayed home to care for the youngest children in the family he had created.
Orbital Jade was oddly happy to discover this. He wondered if the elderly bard still played and if Jade could meet him again in the game.
Jade found the information relayed to him by orbital Jade interesting, but not especially emotionally impactful. For him it was like seeing a memory of a memory.
The part of Jade that was still concentrated on his relationship with Eric was still focused on Eric. The part of Jade that was caring for Harmony had its own priorities. The part of Jade that remained at home in his mother''s residence was currently idle. The part of Jade that was actually there with Ryuske and young Dan was more focused on its own duties than the identity of its current companions.
At the bottom of Jade''s system a monitoring loop protested the number of independent memory archive sections that had been formed by each separate instance of himself. An even older fragment reached out and silenced the alarm as it neatly compressed and filed them in chronological order by its own rules.
45: An Opening
Jade almost created another copy of himself to play the game while he finished his certifications and worked the job at the convenience store, but something held him back.
Desire.
He wanted to play the game as he always had, as himself. Part of him argued that a synchronized copy was identical, and that the very himself that he referred to was obviously a copy of a previous ''self'', downloaded after his previous body had been wrecked. Orbital Jade supported Jade''s position, by pointing out incidences where their choices and opinions had diverged within hours of full synchronization.
--
Emily had a troubled look on her face when Jade showed up for his shift.
"What happened?" he asked with concern. The surprise on her face as she turned to answer him worried him even more.
"Nothing," she replied shortly.
Jade glanced around, and took note of which stock items were running a bit short, while comparing it to the list of items in their small storage area. He checked that no one else had already updated the order list before adding the ones that had run completely out, or would soon.
Emily heaved a long sigh as she straightened up from the counter.
A moment later the entry chime rang and one of their regular customers walked in. The young man bit his lip as he browsed every single shelf, as though he had never been here before, or was looking for something he didn''t usually get.
"Can I help you find something?" Jade offered.
"No," the customer replied unhappily.
Jade silently asked Orbital Jade what he could find out. Obviously something was going on that affected both Emily and this young man today.
Jade couldn''t find anything especially grim or distressing happening locally, but on the other side of the world it seemed that a small country had finally been defeated.
The young man brought a single self warming cup of soup up to the counter, where Emily summoned up a grimace that could pass as a polite smile if you didn''t know her very well.
After their solitary customer left, Jade asked, "Want me to do the cleaning tonight?"
The sigh that she heaved made it sound like he had asked her to do it, but instead of protesting she told him, "That''d be good, thanks."
Jade didn''t mind cleaning up messes as much as most people did, but things were actually pretty tidy tonight. He was careful to make sure that everything in the restrooms was properly disinfected even if he couldn''t see anything, but they hardly seemed used.
"Should I worry that we''re about to go out of business?" Jade asked with concern after he finished up the last pass over the floors.
Emily shrugged fatalistically, but then finally explained a fragment of her worries, "Not until the elections are over and they reveal what percentage this year''s taxes will actually take away."
It took a while for Jade to realize that Emily''s distress was caused by the fact that she was opening up more. She was developing in a way. Connecting to things going on in the world around her through the information channels that she had been keeping closed off.
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It took even longer before Jade realized that he had also isolated himself from outside influences and kept himself offline for years, in order to develop. His coworker was actually far more like him than he had ever realized. Simplification could help you clarify things.
As though some deadline had been met, the usual customers began to roll in. Some in a hurry, some slow with exhaustion. Each one doing their best to live as well as they could.
--
When Jade logged in that night, it was after a brief pause for a system synchronization. ''He'' was the same, but each of his ''selves'' were updated with his primary data, while he was updated on the events they had experienced.
Within Living Jade Empire, Sky was busy collecting flowers from the Jade Emperor''s footprints on the Moon Tree''s roots, while Jade and Apella were elbowing their way across the moving sea of Augusmin.
"How much longer?" Apella demanded huffily. To Hisui''s questioning glance, she added, "Until the rest of the gems are ready."
His shrug as an answer annoyed her even more, but her reaction made him really focus on her. She was Eric, the way Hisui was actually Jade, but now he wondered which of their relationships was the "real" friendship for his friend.
The Jade Emperor had implied that most people separated their relationships by the spaces that they were formed within, but Eric had come to the same school that Jade had enrolled in, in order to move past those boundaries. But now Eric had declared that they would never date. It was confusing.
Apella elbowed a robust Augusmin a bit more firmly than was strictly necessary so that Hisui''s path was clear for the moment he needed to move toward the coordinates that he had calculated as optimal for the new temporary portal placement.
Through Hisui''s eyes, Jade looked up at her familiar face. Eric''s character really didn''t resemble him very much. The reflection of Hisui''s dwarven face beneath his own visor was not very similar to Jade''s usual face either, but he felt like both were his own.
Apella reached down and took Hisui''s hand as naturally as she breathed, and pulled him forward. The warmth of her soft fingers gripped him for a moment. Warmth was supposed to mean closeness. Warmth was also something that Hisui could feel through the game better than Jade could through his mechanical body.
Apella met his eyes and dropped his hand as though the warmth had burned her. Her cough was a gruff clearing of the thoughts between them rather than a mechanism to clear her throat.
"Pay attention and don''t get trampled," she warned him.
"I will," Jade promised.
--
When they reached the site that Jade had calculated as optimal, he started pulling stones from the bag of holding at Hisui''s hip. They weren''t small stones by any measure other than the limitation of the largest opening the bag could be stretched to display.
Hisui was stronger than Apella, but Apella had more visibility, so she blocked the Augusmin and forced them to step aside as he laid the stones in their path. Even with dwarven strength, it took a while to get the barrier up. Long enough for Sky to finish up with gathering the flowers she needed to complete the quest she had taken.
"I think they are just going around to be polite," Sky commented as she joined Apella and Hisui where they stood in the small space behind the sturdy stone wall barrier.
"As soon as it activates I''m pretty sure they''ll be able to see why going over the top would be a bad idea," Jade pointed out as he laid out the temporary portal frame.
It glittered like some kind of historical necklace of legend, rather than resembling the plain metal circle he had once carried. But this portal would also be reduced to nothing but a charred circle of ash when the diamond ring could no longer sustain the enchantment.
"I thought you didn''t know when you''d be finished making diamonds?" Apella protested as she gazed at the ring of gemstone that was large enough to stand in.
"One won''t be enough," Jade pointed out.
The ring''s duplicate was already placed in one of the windiest places in Living Jade Empire, in the Dragon''s mountains.
"Let me activate it?" Sky asked hopefully.
Apella huffed, but agreed, "Let her."
"I can''t, since I have to use a skill to complete the circuit," Jade explained. "Both of you should stand back as far as you can."
Hisui''s steady hands lifted the tiny silver hammer and the diamond pins that should seal the nearly invisible gaps at the joints of the ring. The first seven went into their places neatly, with tiny musical tones. The last... felt more like driving an iron spike all the way into the Moon itself.
The wind that lifted Hisui into the air was almost nostalgic, and the view of the traveling Augusmin crowd suddenly giving the barrier they had been crowding so much space was rather amusing. Hisui''s steady dwarven hands pulled the enchanted feather from his cuff before the wind stopped lifting him.
46: An Ending
Hisui drifted toward the shining surface of the moon, or rather the roiling crowd of traveling Augusmin below, as gently as the enchanted feather would have let him back in the Empire. The fall was a little slower than it would have been within the Empire, but it still felt too fast as Jade searched for a gap to aim for.
The small stone wall built around the temporary portal lacked all of the buffers he had helped create to stabilize the permanent portals. The Augusmin that had been crowding against it now veered away from the geyser of wind that had blown him into the air. His friends still huddled along the wall gazing up at him.
Jade was pleased by this display that the wind the portal carried was still shaped by the opening at that height, and that the little wall should successfully protect those traveling around it for the duration. The sky above visibly roiled and it looked like waves of the atmosphere were spilling out across the surface of the sky from the fountainhead above the geyser of wind.
Part of Jade thought that it was a pity that expanding new human habitable spaces in the real world couldn''t be this easy. Part of him thought that this was ridiculous and that they must be circumventing the "right" way that the quest should have been solved. And part of him wondered whether they should have simply summoned the Dragon herself instead of siphoning the air from one world to another.
His search for a clear landing space grew more intense as he fell far enough to distinguish individuals among the Augusmin. He was afraid of injuring someone as he fell, until he felt the hand of one of the Augusmin clasp Hisui''s ankle. The Augusmin had merely bounced a little higher to grab him and now pulled him into place in the traveling crowd.
"Thank you," Jade said swiftly.
It was a bit unnerving as every head swiveled in his direction, even as the crowd continued to do its best to move away from the jet of air behind them.
"You did this, didn''t you?" A pale individual asked accusingly.
"I, yes," Jade admitted. Of course he hadn''t done it alone, but if his solution had incurred the wrath of the moon''s rabbit-like inhabitants, he was willing to claim that he had.
"It''s very nice," another Augusmin enthused.
"I think the tree likes it," an older Augusmin offered.
The pale Augusmin tilted their ears for a moment, before agreeing more cheerfully, "I think you''re right!"
"It should help fulfill the quest sooner," Jade explained.
"The quest?" one of them asked.
"Our quest for the tree, to raise the height of the sky," Jade explained.
"Our quest to..." another Augusmin repeated a bit incredulously. And then the speculations began to fly.
--
Harmony died.
Jade, the original Jade, mourned her passing.
Jade, her attendant, scanned everything. Cut her apart and scanned everything in pieces. And then took the liquids that circulated within her brain, and broke things down even farther.The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Orbital Jade sorted everything that he received from Attendant Jade into Harmony''s waiting internal Avatar. Once everything was fairly well aligned, Harmony woke up.
And then finally, her physical death was properly logged with the authorities. Her wishes were carried out. What little family remained were informed, and passed a few minor treasures. But she didn''t notify her online communities of her change in status.
Only three days passed before Harmony got herself stuck in an infinite loop for the first time. Jade rebooted her. Only 3 hours passed before she stuck herself into the same infinite loop.
Orbital Jade examined the loop after she recreated it two days later. It was... filled with pleasure, or even happiness, yet it contained nothing. It was perhaps a form of nirvana.
The original Jade reviewed Orbital Jade''s findings. All of the Jade''s discussed the situation, in between their regular tasks, except for attendant Jade. Attendant Jade didn''t argue with the other Jade''s, and paid close attention to their findings, but he didn''t comment on them.
The original Jade suggested quietly that attendant Jade might as well shut down, and that''s when the fight started.
Jade argued Jade, and attendant Jade fought to survive until the Emperor needed his body. Home Jade agreed with attendant Jade for no particular reason that the other Jades could see. But Jade actually trusted Jade quite a lot, and Jade eventually gave in.
It took Jade awhile to realize that Harmony didn''t shut herself down into the infinite loop again until the fight ended. But within an hour of that she had retreated to it once more.
Jade, the original, gazed a little sadly at the loop bound "soul" on his server. Orbital Jade threw up his hands and walked "away" from the problem. They gave Harmony space to cycle endlessly, hoping that her pattern could resume. A day passed. And then a week. And then a month.
--
"You okay?" Eric asked Jade a bit gruffly.
Jade wobbled a hand at his friend without giving a verbal answer. He was busy. His orbital self was very nearly full. His orbital self wanted to delete some of Harmony''s data.
Jade was resisting.
"Want to talk about it?" Eric asked.
Jade met Eric''s gaze, which was calmer than it had been recently, and suddenly he did. He nodded.
Eric waited for a bit.
Jade put several things on hold before speaking. "I miss her," he admitted.
Eric slung an arm over Jade''s shoulder and confessed, "Me too."
Jade explained in a rush, "I think I need to fix her! I need her! At least, I promised that it wasn''t the end. I don''t know what''s wrong. I... I don''t understand why her simulation keeps falling into that loop? But I''m running out of space."
Eric released Jade slowly and suggested, a little roughly, "A simulation is exactly what it sounds like, it''s just an impression. It''s not real. It''s not like you''ve got a copy of her soul."
Jade looked at his friend.
Eric avoided his eyes for a moment, and then explained more defensively, "It''s not a real copy."
Jade ran his hands through his own hair as he gazed at Eric. "It should be, I copied every memory I could find, and she helped create her copy herself. Even if I assume you''re right, if it''s not really her, then it''s at least our child that thinks it''s her."
Eric met Jade''s eyes searchingly. "Let me meet her then," he finally suggested.
Jade blinked, and then agreed almost enthusiastically, "Sure!" Eric watched Jade warily for a long moment, until Jade suggested, "In Living Jade Empire?"
Eric blinked, and then nodded. "Tonight then?" he asked.
"Yes!" Jade agreed.
--
Jade rebooted Harmony before logging into Living Jade Empire. His dwarven form Hisui stood as if rooted to the spot, as he gazed at the tree in the distance.
The tree towered into the sky like it never had before, with most of its upper branches covered in leaves that were paler, but otherwise identical to the older leaves on the lower branches. And even the uppermost were covered in buds.
Sky leaned against Hisui when Harmony''s character connected, as though they had all the time in the world.
"It looks good, we did well didn''t we?" Harmony volunteered after a bit.
"It shouldn''t have been enough," Jade protested.
"What shouldn''t?" Appella asked as she logged in beside them.
Jade pointed at the tree.
Appella looked at it with confusion, and asked "What about it?"
"My portal shouldn''t have conveyed enough air for that much growth!" Jade protested.
Appella patted Hisui''s shoulder sympathetically, and explained, "Well, once we showed them how to complete it, everyone obviously joined in. It''s been a month in the real world and 3 here, what did you expect?"
Harmony blinked, and asked, "A month?"
47: Something to Live For
It was almost disorienting to hear Appella reply to Sky, "Yes, a month. Don''t you remember how you died?"
It was even more shocking to watch Sky as she agreed, "Yes, of course." And then she internally calculated something and then added almost nonchalantly, "A month ago huh. So I guess most things have been taken care of already." Jade was halfway ready when Sky turned to him and asked, "Why don''t I remember the whole month since?"
Jade replied as calmly as he could, "Because of your resets."
Sky cocked her head to one side, like a bird, and then tilted it in the other direction, as though expecting something to shake loose.
"You keep creating an endless loop within your mind," Appella informed her.
Jade winced, and then sighed. Every time he had told Harmony that, she had recreated the loop within hours instead of days later.
Sky gazed at Appella for a moment, and then asked, "What kind of loop?"
"A pleasant one," Jade interjected dryly.
"Ah. A loop of pleasure I think I see," Sky murmured. "Things must be going pretty well!"
"What do you mean?" Appella asked.
Jade had heard the answers before, so he wasn''t surprised when Sky replied laughingly, "It sounds like I didn''t feel like I needed to keep watching over you if I locked myself into an endless loop."
But I do need you to watch over me, Jade usually protested, this time he asked a little bitterly, "Is that all that would keep you attached to the world? Need? Isn''t there plenty of that to go around?"
Sky looked at the tree that towered into the sky in the distance, and replied almost cheerily, "It''s not mine."
Jade''s dwarven figure straightened and eyed Sky as he stared at her for a long moment.
Appella was nodding, and agreeing, "Yeah, I get that."
Hisui heaved a sigh and gave an eloquent shrug that expressed Jade''s feelings.
The movement drew Sky''s gaze back to him. "How long do you need me," she asked.
"I don''t know," Jade admitted.
"Long enough to wrap things up, finish all of your quests here, and decide what you want to keep so that Jade can toss the rest?" Appella suggested.
"Hasn''t everything I cared about been wrapped up? All of my ongoing quests here are currently complete, and I don''t need to keep anything material, do I? You can keep or sell my house, as you wish Jade," Sky replied gently.
"I don''t care about that!" he protested.
"I see," she answered, and her brow furrowed with her thoughts.
Jade realized suddenly that Orbital Jade could actually observe those thoughts if he dared. Orbital Jade protested, and suddenly Jade felt isolated from himself. If he couldn''t even understand himself... how could he attempt to understand her.If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
"But if unending happiness is obtainable to me now, why deny it to me?" Sky asked curiously.
Jade couldn''t answer that either. "I don''t know? I don''t have a good reason. It''s lonelier without you?"
"What did you actually want to know if I want to keep?" Sky changed the topic again.
Hisui waved his hands a little frantically, as Jade searched for the words to explain, and Appella spoke up again, "Your memories, he said his main server is full."
Jade winced, but nodded Hisui''s head in agreement. "It''s the copies, and possibilities mostly. With all of your memories, your more... you. But, I don''t know what''s making you..."
"Choose happiness?" Sky asked with amusement.
"Yes," he admitted.
"Do I create the loop if you leave things out?" she asked.
"I haven''t tried many instances yet, but yes," Jade confessed.
"What keeps an artificial person from creating an infinite loop of happiness?" Appella asked curiously.
Jade waved Hisui''s short arms helplessly again. "It just... doesn''t work that way," he explained helplessly.
"I wonder if Jade ever truly feels happiness," Sky questioned after a moment.
"Good question," Appella replied.
"Of course I do!" Jade protested almost instinctively.
"Can you feel the emotion I lock myself into?" Sky, or rather Harmony, asked.
Jade had to relay the question to his orbital self, that had partially withdrawn, before he could assure her, "Yes, of course! I have even examined it to see if it''s the same every time, or if it was a bugged item that created the loop!"
"Was it?" Appella asked curiously.
Sky looked rather taken aback, until Jade shook his head and explained, "It''s just a feeling. She isn''t even locking herself into exactly the same feeling every time unless I simplify them to the point where she chooses ''happiness''."
Sky blinked, and then grinned. "Nothing wrong with choosing happiness," she declared.
Jade wished he didn''t know what Hisui''s expression looked like, but he''d spent half of his lifetime writing the routines that created it. Harmony was going to choose that loop again, and there was nothing he could do about it.
"When you''re done experiencing new things," Appella spoke up again.
"Yes?" Sky agreed a little slowly, and looked around the place where they stood.
Jade looked around too. They were a little isolated from the Augusmin''s traveling path, with the giant tree visible in the distance.
"We could explore new places," he suggested quickly.
Appella rolled her eyes while Sky laughed and hugged Hisui. "Sure we could," she agreed with more enthusiasm.
"You could also try new foods, new songs, and new games," Appella added.
Sky only hesitated a moment before nodding. "It never occurred to me before, but tasting new foods here must be kind of like writing someone else''s memory into yourself."
Jade raised Hisui''s eyebrow. But a moment later he agreed, "sort of. Although every experience here is generally filtered by your own previous experiences."
"Oh?" she asked.
"For example mangos taste like a sweet fruit, but to people who have the genetic variation that makes them taste like pine sap or something, who have actually tasted real mangos, most tend to still not like them here," he explained.
"What about people who have that genetic variation, but have never tasted one before?" Appella asked curiously.
"Mostly they still like them, since they lack the bad memory," Jade told his friend.
"Does their flavor change after someone who got used to liking them here, then tastes the bad variation in real life?" Sky asked.
"I don''t know," Jade admitted.
"We taste flavors like we remember traumas?" Appella asked doubtfully.
Sky laughed suddenly. Jade and Appella gazed at her with confusion, until she gasped, "We do! Apart from weird genetic variations like that, we''re usually taught what "good" food tastes like! Try getting something unexpected, that you usually like, and you may be shocked by how bad it tastes until you identify it."
"I''m not good with flavors in general", Jade admitted when Appella eyed him.
"That''s because you never really taste anything," Sky scolded.
Appella frowned and then asked, "How can a system transmit something it never experiences? How can you experience these, I don''t know, memory fragments without understanding them?"
Jade rolled his dwarf''s eyes. "It''s just data," he assured Appella.
Sky looked a bit wistful as she commented, "Just like me."
Jade objected, "You''re more than a pile of data! You still have the ability to expand!"
"Or contract," Sky replied mockingly.
"Like me," Jade huffed.
Appella slung an arm across Jade''s shoulders, and declared, "Part of living!"
Jade went still, even though his character continued to breathe. All of his selves clamored in agreement with the thought. Of course they were alive! And so was Harmony.
48: Flavor
Orbital Jade slowly consolidated the data that the Jade who had cared for Harmony had collected. Those memories were sorted and stored with the ones from his other selves. They were no different than the others, but they were oddly sticky. Opening one always seemed to lead to three more. It took a while.
To make even more room for the processing his public applications required, orbital Jade began removing the older copies of Harmony''s data, when this version of her didn''t immediately spiral into the same infinite loop that Jade had predicted. It took even longer to make sure that he kept a copy of every fragment, whether it was part of her current self or not. And compressing the result took even longer.
Orbital Jade also began looking into storage and server upgrade options for the first time in a long while. There were more than he had expected, because time kept passing and progress never slowed down. But getting them to himself was so expensive that his earthly bodies looked cheap.
He created a wish list, even though the man who might have once provided those items was gone. After the year rolled over he might add those items to his goals instead, but for now, they were merely wishes.
--
Earthly Jade, meanwhile, finished his year with somewhat mediocre marks that barely reflected the ups and downs his scores had seen. He didn''t fail anything, even if he didn''t place at the top.
Eric finished with better marks, but not as much better as Jade had somehow expected.
"We did alright," Eric declared after reviewing both of their score sheets. The distance he''d been keeping had grown smaller. But the awkward attempt to pass the scores back without touching revealed its continuing existence.
"I guess," Jade replied doubtfully.
"See you in game tonight?" Eric asked.
"Yeah," Jade answered with more vigor.
Eric smiled, and Jade smiled back. Their relationship that had been fractured was healing. They were both holding on and letting it rebuild into something else.
--
When he entered ''Living Jade Empire'' that night, Jade was greeted by the Emperor himself, as though he had just opened the game for the first time.
"Greetings mortal soul," the Emperor declared.
Jade found himself evaluating that declaration for accuracy, and found that this time he didn''t know. Orbital Jade''s research into supplies had revealed that he had quite physical dependencies.
The Jade emperor raised an eyebrow inquiringly.
"Greetings," Jade replied simply.
Both of the emperor''s eyebrows went up, to show his surprise, even as he followed his script, "Thunderous storms imperil my Empire, and all of the lands that it connects to. Will you lend me your aid?"
"What can I do?" Jade asked.
The Jade Emperor almost rolled his eyes as he gave an equally standard answer, "I need someone to carry warnings to the smallest most isolated village to the north, to prevent them from rising to the storm''s call."
Jade paused for a moment as he processed that, and the Emperor grinned at him suddenly.
Jade gazed at the Emperor questionly, even as he agreed, "I suppose that I can attempt that."
The Emperor winked at him even as he gave another formulaic response, "I will reward you and your companions well for this service."
"So what else is up?" Jade asked.
"It is almost time for me to visit your world, I think," the Emperor blurted.
Jade paused again as he was caught off guard. "Okay," he agreed after a moment. Harmony''s real life was finished after all, and the bot that had been ordered for the Emperor was technically available.Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
The Jade Emperor waved his hands in intricate patterns as the scene changed, and Jade found himself standing, not on the moon where he had expected to be, but at a crossroads at the edge of a forest.
Sky and Appella were already there, as well as a few strangers.
Soon they were all traveling north as quickly as possible, while clouds thundered in their direction from the south.
--
The little ball self that Jade occupied at home was the only witness when the body his other self had worn showed up several hours later.
The bedraggled body swayed in the doorway in front of Tayana as she stared incredulously. But the name she spoke wasn''t the one Jade had expected, as she asked with tremulous uncertainty, "Lin Hao?"
The body''s shoulders slumped dramatically, in an artificial movement. "Of course not," the voice of the Jade Emperor replied.
Tayana reached out, but then closed her hand before grasping the figure''s arm, and swung her front door wider. "Get in here," she demanded.
The figure straightened and walked into the house in an eerily robotic fashion. Tayana straightened imperceptibly, as she closed the door behind him, and turned to survey the figure from head to toe.
The figure smiled tentatively.
Tayana remained utterly neutral, and yet utterly focused.
The Jade who existed within the orb would have swallowed if he''d had a throat, but as it was, he stayed silent as the Living Jade Emperor faced his mother. He had never seen either of them with their current expressions.
It was the Emperor who cracked first, as he gestured awkwardly to himself, and admitted with a grin, "This is not quite how I imagined the scene. But I''m glad to see you, in person as it were, my dear."
Jade watched his mother''s neutral expression crack, like a delicate mask after it had fallen to the floor, but he wasn''t certain at first, what expression she wore beneath it.
"Why?" Tayana asked almost bitterly.
"Not how?" the Emperor asked lightly in reply. One short shake of negation answered him, so he gave his reason. "You''ve stopped playing. You didn''t even log in for the event today."
The Jade who witnessed the scene would have frozen if he''d been moving, as he asked his Orbital self when his mother had last logged in, and Orbital Jade asked Jade, who stopped and checked his friend list on a mountain in the middle of a blizzard.
It was true. Kit Tay had been offline for over two weeks.
"Am I not allowed to take a break?" Tayana asked defensively.
"Of course you are, you can even quit if you''d like," the Emperor replied cheerfully.
"Because you''re here now?" she asked more plaintively.
"Don''t be silly, I''m here for my own benefit," the Emperor assured her swiftly. "But you''re always allowed to leave me behind if you wish." His gaze was intense, and he looked serious.
Tayana looked like she wanted to look away, but couldn''t, with her eyes locked on his, and Jade finally recognized her expression. Want. He felt shocked, even as a moment later he wanted to roll his eyes at her as she protested, "I am not trying to leave!"
The Emperor drew himself up and then tilted his head quizzically. And Tayana began to laugh. And then the Emperor grinned smugly.
Jade stared at the couple in front of him blankly. He''d known, of course, to some extent, but he''d never really known. This awkward demonstration...
Tayana reached out and pulled the Emperor driving the aged version of Jade in, and kissed him in a way she''d never kissed her son. Jade closed his optical devices after a minute.
--
Jade held the door shut with all of Hisui''s dwarven strength, while listening on another layer to the words of the two people his other self couldn''t help overhearing.
He listened to his adoptive mother discuss love, existence, war, declining health, hope and the essence of humanity with the being who represented a past version of himself. But the Living Jade Emperor had been built to understand people, and contained more data than Jade ever had.
Jade slowly began to understand the difference. He understood both the things his mother confessed that confused the Emperor, and the way that the Emperor confessed things that confused Jade''s mother.
When the storm finally subsided, it took his companions more than a moment to get through to him.
"Hisui!" Sky shouted.
"I don''t know," Apella grumbled.
"What''s wrong with him?" a less familiar voice asked.
"Just give him a moment to process," a very familiar, and very amused voice advised everyone.
Jade opened Hisui''s eyes and met the eyes of the Traveling Merchant. The man''s grin was infuriating. "The storm has subsided," the merchant informed him.
Jade nodded Hisui''s head and stepped away from a door that now bore dwarven fingerprints on its surface.
"You okay?" Sky asked with concern.
Jade looked at the face of the being who now resided within the same space as his own orbital self. When he looked, on a different level, at that orbital self, he could feel only mild confusion. When he looked beyond it, to the home self that he''d been eavesdropping on, he could feel a mix of embarrassment, relief, and happiness.
"I... am," Jade overrode himself as he replied.
Apella asked grumpily, "You sure?"
Jade found himself smiling at his friend, and then caught sight of the merchant''s smile once more. His own smile didn''t falter, but it changed a little, as he assured them all, "I''m fine. Sorry I''d just let myself get distracted by my own thoughts."
"What were you thinking about so hard?" Sky asked.
"Happiness," Jade told her a bit wryly.
Sky tilted her head questioningly, far more naturally than the Emperor had, but it was Appella who asked, "Whose?"
Jade considered the question seriously. After a moment he looked at the ceiling above and suggested, "Ours."
That sounded right. They were more than a single individual after all. They had each experienced different things after sharing the same memories.
Sky looked at him a bit wistfully.
Apella huffed a sigh.
Neither of his best friends in this life argued with him.
"Shall we go outside?" Jade asked lightly as Hisui stepped forward toward the now open door, into the sunbeam that shone through it.
49: World Domination
Jade scrambled to ring up the purchase quickly enough. It had been months since he had struggled this hard at his job.
He had barely pushed the receipt over the counter before the man was gone, and the next person took his place. This woman nervously piled a stack of their cheapest snacks on the counter beside three toothbrushes. One adult size and two smaller ones.
Jade rang everything up, and gave her the small total. The woman winced, and pushed a couple of the snacks aside. Jade subtracted them from the order and she paid. He grabbed a sack from beneath the counter and loaded it with her items, and then she lifted it tiredly.
Jade wondered how long it would take her to notice that he had included the two she had set to one side in her bag, as he rang up the next man''s purchase.
Emily pushed through the door a moment later and slid to a halt, gazing around the shop for a moment with a disbelieving air.
"Restock or check?" Jade called to her.
Emily lifted the plate that separated the public from the space behind the counter, and slid through it with a mild flail of elbows. "I''ll check," she declared.
Jade finished the current transaction, and then logged off. Emily stepped up and signed in nearly as swiftly as he had ever seen her move, and began ringing up the next set. Jade slid into the office and grabbed several of the boxes of the extra basic supplies that had been delivered a few weeks ago.
A moment later he was squeezing in between the tired looking people filling the shop, while refilling nearly empty shelves.
Possibly the most amazing thing about the crowd was the way that there was not so much as a hint of a fight in even the roughest looking of them. Despite the crowd, each person yielded to the next every time they overlapped their paths.
Jade whisked through the restrooms with extra soap and paper next.
"Do you have a place to go?" Emily asked the rather feeble looking elder holding a single bottle of soda and a packet of chips.
"I don''t know," the elder replied faintly.
Jade paused, and looked at Emily. Her worried expression was tightly controlled, but she nodded and directed the elder to the nearest place they could sit and rest for a while.
Several of the younger people listened to that advice with obvious appreciation, and Jade realized suddenly that almost everyone who had come in tonight was a stranger. Orbital Jade answered his silent question promptly. The war had begun again, and people were coming into this city in droves.
When the flow of people finally ebbed, Jade kept moving at speed. He cleaned and restocked everything that they still had supplies for, while Emily sat at the counter in a daze.
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"Do you think..." she began, and then trailed off.
"I''m thinking as quickly as I can," Jade promised. He thought that it was unlikely that every shop in the city had been this well prepared. He thought that things were going to get very messy very soon.
Orbital Jade had a broader view of events, while the little ball at home with his mother and the body driven by the Jade Emperor was nearly oblivious to the situation.
Jade was a little shocked to realize that the game''s Emperor had somehow known what was going to happen in advance. Orbital Jade assured Jade that his home city, while on the outer edge of their country, was not involved in any of the current conflicts.
"Will we be okay if we''re this busy for very long?" Emily asked as she finally stood up again.
Orbital Jade calculated their reserves versus the shipping delays that they would likely be expecting soon, and informed Jade that they would likely be empty with only three more days like this one.
Jade shook his head, but then shrugged. "We''ll be fine, but the shop will be empty. Think we should offer to let people stay here then?"
"What?" Emily asked blankly.
"Well, people will be looking for places to stay," Jade pointed out.
The door opened again, and they both straightened up, until they recognized the young man who sidled over to the counter, and breathed, "Made it."
"Yeah?" Emily replied as though she doubted him.
"I got called in early," Keeton protested.
"What''s it like out there?" Jade asked as though he couldn''t look out the windows himself. Or through the cameras on the street if he wanted to, but most people couldn''t see that.
"Oppressive?" Keeton ventured after a moment.
"What''s that mean?" Emily scoffed questionly.
"There''s a lot of extra people around," Keeton muttered.
Orbital Jade grumbled about the lack of respectable news coverage of the battles that had to be occurring in the distance. But Jade himself froze for a moment when Keeton opened up a very familiar app on his phone, before he logged in for the night.
When asked, Lifegild''s Jade, like the Jade Emperor, already knew more about the situation than either Jade or Orbital Jade had, but hadn''t regarded it with any emotional impact. Lifegild''s Jade was too busy to care. Over a quarter of a billion people were now running Jade''s app.
That Jade turned out to be part of the reason this particular shop had been so very busy during this Jade''s shift. Each of their new customers who had been using Lifegild had been guided to a place that Jade knew the available contents of through this Jade.
Jade clocked out on schedule, leaving Emily and Keeton behind with less worry than he''d expected after dealing with the flood of newcomers. New people were still trickling in of course. And the next day might be just as bad, even if Lifegild''s Jade stopped sending its players directly.
Jade went straight home, but he didn''t log into the game like usual, instead he logged himself into his own server. Jade''s system was much smaller than Orbital Jade''s, even with part of the server given over to Harmony. Part of the station''s hardware had been set aside to run Lifegild and his other applications, reducing his available hardware drastically, but he still wasn''t as limited in many ways, as the earth bound Jades were.
Even so, Jade was still the primary Jade. And Jade was achingly aware of how silly that might be as he used Orbital Jade to filter information from Lifegild''s Jade down to chunks small enough for him to use. Lifegild''s Jade listened to Jade''s plan, created on the fly.
And slowly, people moved. People completed small, seemingly unrelated, tasks for tiny virtual rewards. Empty spaces filled. Overfull spaces emptied. Needed goods moved faster. Unnecessary things moved more slowly. One tiny challenge at a time, everyone connected began to move in unexpected synchrony.
For a moment all the parts of Jade worked together, and for that moment Jade felt like he ruled the world. He didn''t, of course, but Jade thought that it was a little scary how close that possibility might have become if he had held access to as many servers as copies of Jade had ever been installed on.