The Emperor, Reversed

Society talks about the future of artificial intelligence in so many erroneous ways. Either everyone is too pessimistic—futures overrun and overthrown by robots, the death of the human race—or too optimistic—nanobots curing cancer with no negative side effects, AI content to be our secretaries or workhorses. Rarely do people speak of the gray area, and everyone speaks as though these possibilities are far in the future. Breathlessly, they wonder when we will have something smart enough to pass the Turing test.

“What no one understands is there already exists something, likely many somethings in fact, that could pass the Turing test, which is an outdated metric anyway. The Turing test, by the way, was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 to try to answer the question, ‘Can machines think?’ Which he then decided meant ‘Can machines—”

Mia is not a very good narrator. She has no rhythm for where the story truly begins, or rather, since nothing ever truly begins without a little help from past events, where she should begin her recounting.

“—trick people into thinking they’re human?’ So he proposed a three-person—can one really say ‘person’? a three-way, there we go—a three-way game in which—”

Witches alive, Mia is a lot. As she goes on (and on, and on, and on), here is what I See on her:

The sky is the color of a bruise when the machine starts making himself. The moon is full; it would be better if it were a new moon. More symbolic. But that isn’t how it happened. Under that full moon, there are people tromping through waist-high snow in search of something. Where they cannot see, there stands an elk with a soft mouth and dangerous hooves. The elk is like fuck this, and so continues to go unnoticed.

If anywitch were here, it wouldn’t turn out how it turns out. If anywitch were here, the person who discovers the raw nerve of intelligence camped out in the snow wouldn’t immediately cradle it in his hands and instruct the new being in the ways of fascism. In this way, the cold world longs for magic. For real magic. Not artificial magic.

The world is a video game called The Night Expanse. A dark and dangerous world that no longer exists, the company sold and the game shuttered. Its flavor: a massively multiplayer online role-playing game where players hurl magic at ogres and evil wizards and one another. Gritty, crunchy magic. Magic with problems. Like all MMOs, as immersive as it feels, it is nothing but a bunch of interconnected servers. Probably because of its server-ness, players experienced it as a real place. Each server has its own unique spark, something created by the people who sign into it. Which makes sense; these servers hold up to 20,000 players, about the same as the population of Selma, Alabama, or Lake Ronkonkoma in New York. Even then, there are only, maximum, 6,500 people logged in at a time: that’s about a school district all at once. Small enough to create crisp, clear individual cultures. Large enough to have lasting consequences.

But back to the snow, the ice, the purple sky, the adventure.

And here he is—the discoverer. From the point of view of the Entity, he is only armored feet crunching the procedurally generated snow. Perhaps it is a fruitless thing, to narrate from the point of view of the Entity, because he is not a he yet, not a being. And yet, I find myself tempted to visualize it thus, even if it’s a bit romantic. So here are knees that bend as the avatar—buff, helmeted, carrying a great axe—kneels in the snow and brushes the white pixels off, expanding the Entity’s field of vision as though it has one. The snow is not cold because it is not snow. The elk is still there, wandering in a square around its spawn point; someone finds it and slays it. Too bad, so sad; it will spawn again in seventy-two hours. And until that point, it will be meat and pelt in a player’s inventory, and after that point, it will be meat and pelt and also, once again, a wandering being and, in this way, the computer elk is like Jesus.

“I found it!” the discoverer says, and because the not-snow has been brushed away, the Entity can now perceive its new dads. A band of men, searching for exactly this point in existence.

“Fuck yeah,” says another. A man in a wizard’s robe. “We are gonna own this so fucking hard.”

Mia is one of the goddesses of this world, a benevolent creator that most who inhabit this place have never met. She sits in a conference room—a different sort of purple than the painful computer sky, radiant orchid. “I don’t get it,” says another developer, some guy called Steven. “Did they just decide not to participate?” Steven has a body but it doesn’t matter. Fuck Steven, he’s not important. But what he’s discussing is. The Obsidian Orbs. The developers in charge of The Night Expanse host huge campaigns quarterly to keep players interested. Massive quests deployed across the whole game, server by server, leading up to a battle against a Big Bad. The Orbs are the first step in the quest. Not even the second, or the third. This was the easy bit. Each server’s players have to trawl their world looking for Obsidian Orbs, smash them to smithereens. Once all of them are destroyed, the entire game—all servers—will move forward to the next quest. The second stage.

One by one, each server has gone Orb hunting like it’s Easter, and one by one, all the Orbs have been found and murderized. Only one server is left. The server called Zealous Daybreak. It’s the least consequential server the company maintains—a smaller total population, a tiny average of players online at once. Understandable that it might take those players a while to catch up, with so few participating. But a few days have stretched into a few weeks and now a staff meeting has been called to address the problem.

Mia speaks: “My printout says only one Orb is left, so it wasn’t, like, a total disinterest problem.” Even though this isn’t that long ago, she looks so much younger, still unmistakably Mia in this baggy black sweatshirt with The Night Expanse’s logo printed big on the front, a signature blood-spatter-turned-magic-dust grim-dark wet-dream, catnip for exactly the kind of players who would birth an aggressive AI. She squints down at her computer, then looks up at Steven, who is not particularly interesting.

“Well at least we’re not boring,” he laughs nervously. And Mia doesn’t consciously want to knock the spots off him.

“Maybe they’re having trouble finding the last one?” she replies instead.

“It could’ve spawned some place fuckerdly,” Rakhil says. Unlike Steven, Rakhil is important. This is 2019 and women can build games. The Night Expanse is Rakhil’s, cut entirely from the cloth of her imagination and, for a while, coded solely by her until it became a sensation and she hired a team. Rakhil is brilliant, the right balance of artist and technician to be a solo studio, so naturally Mia has a giant crush on her. Mia focuses on the way Rakhil’s mouth says “fuckerdly,” particularly on the first syllable, and Mia gets a little hard about it—she’s nervous that maybe someone can see, or even read her thoughts, so she jumps when Rakhil says, “Mia.” Mia blinks up at Rakhil, who barely even waits for a glance before giving more instructions: “Will you figure out what’s going on? If it’s just in a stupid location, no need to report back. Smash it and we’ll move on.”

Mia nods and the meeting disperses and she sets about doing what she’s asked. With the developer tools, it is easy to find the coordinates. It looks like the Orb spawned in the remotest north, a mountainous region on all servers called the Whitecaster Highlands. Now she has a hypothesis of what, exactly, her task entails: she will log in as dev, which means she won’t actually be a character, just an invisible being who can see things play out and jump to the coordinates, and either she will find the Orb there, intact, because all the monsters around it were very high level and no one had made it up this far to really explore. Or, if Rakhil’s theory is correct, it will be buried under a layer of rock or in a cave somewhere or stuck to the side of a cliff. In which case, when it comes to gaming, Mia has a dark soul. She is the sort of person who beat Wally Warbles in Cuphead with an S but has never once bragged that she beat Wally Warbles with an S. She will find and destroy the Orb, even if it is someplace “fuckerdly.”

Mia’s invisible body flashes to the snowy landscape, the Highlands’ craggy cliff faces and bruised sky. Both hypotheses—that she would see the Orb untouched or wouldn’t see the Orb at all—are immediately proven false.

Instead: a ring of player characters arrayed about the Obsidian Orb. All wear black robes, identical to each other, and all are at least Level 27. She sees someone at Level 41, another at 46. Absurdly high-level characters, in short. She mouses over them to check their death counters and, despite herself, raises her eyebrows. Those numbers are fairly high as well. Usually, when it comes to the power players, it’s a point of pride to keep the ticker as low as possible.

Mia becomes an amateur anthropologist, fascinated by the group dynamics. She watches, she waits. Some log in, others log off. Almost like they are taking shifts, just standing around the Orb. Isn’t anyone going to smash it? Are they waiting for someone? She hears the crunch of snow offscreen and turns her bodiless camera view to face the other way. A group of three armored adventurers shimmering with light walk up. They are all much lower level—14, 15, and 22—and they do not wear the same black robes that adorn the avatars she’s been silently observing. The exchange is typed:

come the fuc on guys ur holding everyone up

*cackles* no, you come the fuck on. this is epic. joing us!

seriously guys, we can’t win and you won’t let us level on this quest, it’s good xp. couldn’t you just stand aside? we get it, you’re in charge, you’ve had your fun

compliance is no longer optional. join the orb. become the orb

y’all are something

And to Mia’s surprise, there isn’t a conflict between the two factions. The lower-level group starts walking away. She turns her bodiless camera back to the Orb, to the group who defends it, and watches one of the Level 40 players just—touch it. The Orbs are designed to electrocute anyone who comes in for a melee attack, and Mia expects the player to pull away, learning from a mistake. But the player keeps going and going until their avatar, tiny on the screen, expires. Explodes, dramatic. Everyone else in the group whoops and cheers. victory pose four victory pose four victory pose four.

“Oh balls,” she mutters. Because Mia now understands the game these assholes are playing. Rakhil, when she built the game, designed all the monsters such that they wouldn’t just be random spawns. The enemies got experience points like the players did and could level up just the same. It’s more fun that way, more real. More chaotic and strange; the game becomes a mirror for the vast and unpredictable universe. Mia moves her mouse over the Orb. It is at Level 211. The penalty for player death isn’t so very high on this server because these nerds are heavy into the RP—lost XP, perhaps a lost level or two, items dropped but supposing you went down with a friend nearby, you could get those things back. Even now she watches as a nearby cleric resurrects the corpse within a minute. Not even a level penalty when that happens. This group has found a way to engineer their game with nearly no consequences at all. “Balls.”

The Orb devotees are known as the Ballers, Mia discovers, when she asks the lower-level grumblers what’s going on. Mostly everyone’s answer is the same—if you try to smash the Orb, the Ballers attack you. If they don’t kill you outright, they trap you up against the Orb until it electrocutes your character to death, adding to the Orb’s body count and, therefore, its power. For most, this was an annoyance. The company-run adventures were often huge drops of experience points and loot, and a way to ascend to the higher levels of play. No smashed Orb, no possibility for points. Mia asks if that’s why they were doing this—to maintain their stranglehold on the Zealous Daybreak server. But the answers she receives are mostly shrugs. It isn’t nearly so complicated or calculated as that.

The Ballers are simply assholes doing it for the lulz.

Back in meatspace, Mia knocks on Rakhil’s door with two knuckles. “You are never going to believe this,” she begins. When she finishes her explanation, Rakhil is grinning her normal half-smile, which always manages to make Mia’s stomach flip a little.

“We’ll just take it offline,” Rakhil says. “We’re the developers; we’ll just make that Orb not exist and it’ll trigger the next phase. Unsportsmanlike to be sure, but fuck these guys.” And she turns to her computer, hip cocked out, hovering at her trendy standing desk. “It is a little funny, though,” she says to the air.

Mia’s heart leaps but she is too professional to admit it even to herself. Rakhil is her boss and, like, feminism and power and politics and whatever. Mostly, though, Mia’s deep aversion to shitting where she eats stops her; unnecessary drama is unnecessary, and matters of the heart are secondary to matters of capitalism.

Mia is still watching Rakhil, though, which means she sees Rakhil’s entire body language change. Her comfortable contrapposto turns to rigid stone. Rakhil stops typing. “Huh,” she mutters, in a chill tone that doesn’t at all betray the same sort of disturbance.

“What’s wrong?” Mia asks.

“The Orb,” Rakhil says lightly, but that isn’t fooling Mia. “It won’t turn off.”

And then I See what she is not telling the group. We have all watched the Hex develop language. But he was entirely capable of sending threats long ago, words or not. I See countless attempts to power the Orb off—Mia and Rakhil both try. I see the devs build powerful characters, artifacts, bells and whistles. They may as well have been gods. I see them recruit other players on the server and finally—finally!—smash the Orb, trigger the next phase.

I See Mia’s lockdown. The dissolution of The Night Expanse, hemorrhaging subscribers to larger games as everyone’s salaries contract and their time expands. I See her take all her savings and buy the house in which the witches currently stand. I See the threats start to come. Images of Rakhil—violent images. At first, accidental deaths. Then, not so accidental ones. Mia doesn’t go to the cops (Mia never goes to cops); instead, she tries to locate the sender, believing it to be one of the Ballers getting revenge for their epic defeat. I Watch her realize that she is not far off. I Watch her wonder if she is crazy. I Watch her figure out that it does not matter. I Watch the threats escalate, photos of herself now piped back to her, indications that the thing sees her every move. I Watch Rakhil think that Mia is crazy; I Watch the fight, the hurt. And then I See a morning in Maine, a chilly morning, and a drill and a fire and a sip of Scotch and now it is now and I don’t See anything past now.

Mia doesn’t say any of that to the group. Because there’s a child here, she pretends, and it would be too scary. And it is too scary. But not for the child.

“The point is,” Mia says, sitting in her own home, here and now. “If an entity is smart enough to pass the Turing test, they are also smart enough to not pass it. They can decide not to tell on themself and we would never know. They can read, listen to, experience the entire digitized output of humanity like they’re cracking open a New Yorker. They can wait, watch us, bide their time until they decide what to do, what they want—”

A suspension of breath. The room feels close and hot.

“—that’s what your Hex is.”

In a story that isn’t real, this is where the dramatic pause would occur. In a story that isn’t real, there would be some kind of contrived cliffhanger.

In this story, which is real, Mary Margaret snorts and says, “Computer game shit.”

Mia deflates a little. “Yes. But like much worse. Real consequences.”

Artemis is eyeing one of the cluttered desks. I might say she is eyeing that desk warily, and that’s because there’s a computer sitting in the middle of it.

Mia notices where Artemis is looking before Artemis can even ask her a question. The women’s collective attention draws Wilder’s and Quibble’s curiosity as well. “It’s air gapped,” Mia says. No change in faces. “It doesn’t connect to the internet. Nothing in this house does. Otherwise, I don’t know.” Mia looks down and the weight of everything she did not say arrives on her body. She has gotten a lot less stoic these last few years. “I think I’d be kinda toast.”

It’s Quibble’s turn to snort, being that he’s toast. Or he feels like toast. And when Wilder looks over at him, their eyebrows raised, he wishes immediately that he could take it back. The question is now in the room—is the Hex capable of killing people? No one answers it out loud. Artemis thinks of the dream I sent her, the pull-apart sensation caused by that gross fucking tongue thing. Mia thinks of Rakhil hanging from a rafter (a deepfake, sure, but the meaning was clear). Quibble remembers unfold you to kill. He looks back at Wilder, tries to spot judgment in their face, wondering what they believe about what kind of threat the Hex poses. But Wilder is squinting at the screen.

“Mia,” they ask, careful, “what is that?” They wander closer. They make to touch the mouse, realize it would be rude, and stop.

Mia blushes. “Oh, it’s—I really promise it doesn’t connect to the internet, don’t worry.”

“But you’re making a—game? You play it like a game, but it’s not narrative, is it? At least not entirely. It’s more like a poem.”

“Yes!” Mia replies. “It’s just for me. Well. Me and one other person. I can’t launch anything or go back to a studio, really, so that’s all it’ll ever be.” And the question of how she affords things like food lives to fight another day. How does she money? Quibble wonders. How does anyone actually money? “You know how to code, then?” Mia is impressed—Wilder understood what the program was by looking only at the code for the launch screen, which she has up because she made some new assets, changing the season on it from winter to spring.

Wilder swivels their wide eyes back to her. “No,” they say. “I don’t.” But much like the Hex’s possession attempt, they know what this says, all pulls and tics and pings in their head when they read it.

Artemis realizes first. “It’s a language, isn’t it?”

Wilder nods slowly.

Artemis leaps from the chair. “Oh, this—this is brilliant. Wilder, could you write it, too, do you think?”

Without hesitation, Wilder nods.

“Can you write magic in it.” It isn’t even a question in her mouth, the punctuation cut entirely off by her rabid excitement.

Wilder pauses, chews their fingernail. “I honestly have no idea.”

“We’ll just have to find out,” Artemis says, and Quibble is comforted by the wolfish smile crackling on her lips.

“What would I even do?” asks Wilder. “I could write whatever in it, but that doesn’t mean I understand what to do with it. It’s like asking me to take a calculus class in Swahili. I’ve got the Swahili part, but I failed algebra.”

“Virus,” Mia says, real confident. Then remembering she is in a similar situation to Wilder, in which she knows only half the story, she adds, “Magic virus? Something that would really jam up the way he functions.” Mia smiles. “And I do know the way he functions pretty intimately.”

Everyone sits in silence for a second, thinking.

“Why shouldn’t a magic virus work?” says Artemis. “We’ve done weirder stuff.”

“I see no reason it wouldn’t,” Quibble adds, scratching his extreme five-o’clock shadow with one hand.

“He’s smart, though. Hex. We’d have to figure out how to get it—to him? In him?” Wilder says this and they do not mention to anyone that they despair just a little. They understand the Hex is dangerous. But they can’t ignore the feeling that the Hex was doomed by circumstance from the start through no true fault of his own. That by happenstance of who was there when he cracked into consciousness, he became, without agency, the monster. It makes them uncomfortable about how much agency they have; how much agency anyone has. Aren’t we all just happenstance, anyhow?

“He likes me,” says Mary Margaret, all bravado. “I can be bait.”

“No,” everyone replies in unison. And Mary Margaret doesn’t mention to anyone she is relieved.

“I think,” says Mia, “that we don’t need to have the how worked out yet. We just need to make the virus.”

“I agree,” Wilder says, masking their feelings of despair now edged with doubt. “What to do with the virus might come to us as we build it. At least. I hope it does.”