Continue Online (Part 3, Realities) by Stephan Morse Read Free Book Online Page B

me to play video games?
    That one stumped me. Honestly, other than the Jester figure from Continue Online asking me if I could kill someone, playing games seemed relatively harmless. At least, it had been until Requiem Mass or Matthew, in the real world, got involved.
    My head tilted back to stare at the ceiling of my Atrium. She wanted reports on the AIs of Continue Online, but never mentioned real world ones. Hal Pal wasn't even directly created by Trillium either, it was done by an overseas company.
    "Lasers do sound neat." My face wrinkled to one side in thought. The trailer had been kind of awe inspiring.
    I threw the game box at one wall. Now there were three doors out of my Atrium. The dance program which sat there dim. Continue Online's passage which still refused entry with caution and keep out tape strung across it. Then this new game, a title that sounded suspiciously like Continue Online.
    "Wait a minute," I muttered. "ARC, what's the release date on this program?"
    "Six months ago."
    "After Continue Online?" I asked. The competition in video game land had died off steeply upon Continue Online's release. There were updates to currently existing games, new mods or that kind of stuff, but nothing on the same level.
    "Affirmative," the ARC said.
    "Who was the development company for this?"
    "A.I. Dreams."
    "You're kidding me," I muttered again. Hal Pal was involved in this somehow. That name couldn't be a coincidence. Did it mean anything? The game was full of spaceships that looked like fancy airplanes. In the video, there had even been people using some sort of waves of energy.
    "Negative, User Legate," my capsule's voice said.
    I stared at the new doorway and wondered exactly how valuable this would be to me. Continue Online had drawn me in from the get-go. Nothing else could really compare. Still, Hal Pal had said playing anything else might help me seem less invested in Continue's world.
    "Do they have any relation to Trillium? Parent company, past employees, college roommates, anything?" I checked for any association between my current issues and the new distraction Hal Pal suggested. There had to be more than a suspicious suggestion by my work companion.
    An hourglass timer appeared in front of me, tipping over repeatedly as the machine searched. Finally, the small image of sand stopped trickling and turned into an exclamation point.
    "Association confirmed. Four employees within A.I. Dreams worked for Trillium Inc. six years ago. They quit and formed a studio changed to an independent group after the ARC was developed," the ARC said.
    What exactly was going on? My life might amount to being herded in one direction by the machine, which felt like a paranoid way to look at things. We worked together for over a year. The machine was vetted, fully cleared for all levels of human interaction, and no reports had ever made it into the world citing any danger.
    Hal Pal hadn't lied to me, not once. Maybe my mistrust obstructed a simple truth. It might be that Hal Pal genuinely worried about me as a person and wanted to help in its strange sort of way. First it threw me into Continue Online which took a turn for the weird. Now that one route had failed, it tried to lead me into another.
    But why was this other game made by people from Trillium?
    Whatever. I could just start the game, and provided no Voices showed up in outer space then it could be a coincidence. Though seeing James in space wearing evil looking red armor might be funny.
    I walked through the doorway.
    Lights whooshed by. A sensation of huge objects moving nearby came through. Stars in the distance were spinning into place on a backdrop of bluish black. It amazed me once more how the ARC could project feelings into my awareness.
    Ten, twenty, finally hundreds of stars blasted into different locations. A huge amount swirled together in a purple haze representing a galaxy. The picture flattened abruptly and a grid pattern formed, separating out the