Homegrown System

Alice was only mildly reassured by Titus's smile. The memory of him holding a blade to her throat was still fixed fast in her mind. He reached out slowly and brushed his fingertip across the slightly stinging cut. With that simple touch, it was gone, but the memory remained.

"Alice," she said in response to his introduction. She looked around the room a little bit more. "My laptop?" she asked in a hesitant voice.

Titus shrugged one shoulder and pointed off to the side, where she saw a laptop sitting. She reached for it. He gave her a warning look as she moved, and she froze. "Please?"

Slowly, he nodded. But rather than letting her move, Titus stood up, walked over a couple of steps, and pulled it from the bag. He opened it for her, and she could see the screen cracked along with the case. As he pressed the power key, it flickered to life, showing her login screen. She reached for it, but he closed the lid and shook his head.

"No, I think you have some explaining to do," he said, and she remembered how she got into the situation to begin with.

"All right," she said. "But... the laptop might help."

"I won't keep it from you," he said, handing it to her. "But before you dive into it, I have some questions."

She studied him. "Yeah. Well, I suppose you could say this is my fault."

He cocked an eyebrow. "How so?"

Alice tried to figure out how to start the explanation. "I… may have risen to the bait with one of my coworkers. I was too eager to win one of our arguments and unleashed some uncontrolled AI," she said in a rush of barely intelligible words.

He patted the air in front of them to slow her down. "Calm down. I'm not sure I understand. How did you set an AI on the world? That doesn't explain this," he said, gesturing at the air in front of him. She couldn't see anything but assumed he was indicating a System screen.

"Um," Alice said intelligently. "You're right. No, it doesn't explain that. But I guess I'm the catalyst?" she said. It came out as more of a question than she'd hoped. She gestured to the empty space in front of Titus. "That window is from the game I made."

"Okay. Why don't you start from the beginning, then. What were you doing with this AI? Where did you get it?" Titus asked.

Alice swallowed. "Well… I made it."

The disbelief on his face was slightly insulting. "You don't look old enough to be making world-ending AI."

"I'm 19," she snapped. "Besides, I've been in the PhD program for over four years now. This was related to my thesis project."

A thrill of horror coursed through her at the implications of her words. She'd basically said that the creation of what was now a cataclysmic program was her thesis.

"You were researching how to end the world?" Titus said with incredulity, lacing his tone.

She shook her head, dispelling the thought. "No, no. Not exactly. Um, well, I was doing research in learning algorithms, and I applied some of my research to a video game I had made on the side. I was training it using the supercomputer center, and it got out of control... I don't know what happened."

Titus frowned. "That's pretty out there, Alice."

She opened the laptop, typed her password, and pulled up some files. "I'm not sure how much you know about computers," she said, turning it so that he could see the screen. "But a lot of the code is here."

She still had access to the supercomputer login screen but couldn't connect remotely. The code and algorithm she had kicked off were still available though. He took a look at the screen but clearly didn't understand the magnitude of the text in front of him.

"Okay, say I believe you. That still doesn't explain why you're here. Everyone else vanished."

"Uh, not everyone," she said.

"Clearly," he said, gesturing at himself. "But nearly everyone else did. I haven't found a single other person so far."

"You probably won't. There were some errors in the teleportation to the tutorial," she said. "Some kind of glitch. I saw the error a few times, something with how it calculated age..."

She was surprised to see a flicker of emotion in Titus's eyes at that—and a bit of weariness.

"You know how that happened?" she asked.

He shook his head. "No. I'm not sure why my age would be considered negative."

To her surprise, she believed him, but it felt like there was something he wasn't telling her. Still, she continued to explain. "Well, I think the System chose not to teleport me and gave me all the rewards the tutorial would give people up front."

She pulled up her screen and displayed the one title she had: [Mother of All]. Underneath it was a description she hadn't read amidst the rush of everything else.

Mother of the System. Inherent understanding of all System-related elements.

Titus blinked. "Okay, now I'm starting to believe you."

Alice was slightly distracted though. She pulled up the description of her perk as well, realizing that she could actually do that. [Quick Learner] gave her exactly what it sounded like: the ability to learn quickly and to gather more experience than a normal person. Hopefully, that would help her catch up to Titus in levels. She didn't understand how he was already two levels ahead of her.

She looked at the laptop and powered it off to save batteries. Who knew when she could charge it next? It only had a few hours left in total, and she wasn't about to waste it if he already believed her.

"I'm so sorry," Alice said, the guilt bearing down on her.

Before she could go on a tirade of apologizing and spiraling into self-pity, Titus put a hand on her shoulder comfortingly. Surprisingly, even though the memory of his threat remained, she didn't feel any of it coming off of him right now.

"If everything happened as you say, I don't think it's your fault. That learning algorithm you made was clearly better than everyone else's, seeing that it found this. But I don't think any people honestly believed that magic was real or that an AI could find it. It wasn't an unreasonable expectation. If you had just destroyed the internet or something, I'm sure we could blame you, but this is beyond your responsibility." There was a soothing confidence in his voice that made her take his words seriously. That and the complete lack of condemnation did make her feel a little better.

Alice tried to believe his words, though she wasn't sure how well she was succeeding. "Okay," she said. "So, what do we do?"

She scooted backward against the wall, sitting up even straighter. Surprisingly, her injuries felt a lot better already. "How soon can you use [First Aid] again?" she asked as she rolled her ankle, feeling a slight twinge but nowhere near as bad as she would expect.

He looked at the air in front of him. "An hour for something major," he said. "I can do small things like scrapes right away."

"Well, this will have to do," Alice responded as she twisted, swinging her legs over the cot. Titus helped her stand up but quickly forced her to sit back down as she wobbled.

"I think it's best if you rest for now as we talk."

She agreed, settling back on the bed. She took another sip of water as they looked at each other.

"So, the real question, though," Titus said, "Is what are we going to do about this?"

"Uh," Alice said intelligently. "I don't know. I just wanted to find someone. I felt like I needed to help." She didn't comment on how well that had worked out for her.

"That's why you found the helicopter?"

"Yes. I was tracking your GPS location," she said, trying to find the phone to indicate. Titus pulled out a smartphone from his pocket in a fluffy pink case. She looked at it in surprise, and he chuckled.

"It's not mine. Long story."

She shook her head. "I was tracking that location, and then the pterodactyls pushed me out of the air."

Titus nodded. "I saw. That was a pretty impressive crash. The helicopter was on fire after I pulled you out of it," he said nonchalantly.

Alice winced at how close she had come to being incinerated. He cleared his throat, bringing her attention back to the matter at hand. "Okay, but still. What can we do about this? Can you, I don't know, turn off the System? Bring people back from the tutorial?"

Alice thought about it for a second. "If I was able to have access and trace everything the AI did, maybe," she said. "But I'm locked out right now. I would need to be on campus at least to get into the supercomputer center through the Wi-Fi, though it would be better if I was physically there. But the campus was so crowded with monsters that I couldn't really do much besides just run for the hospital."

Titus frowned. "What level were the monsters?"

"One through ten," Alice said confidently. "Low-level zone."

Titus nodded. "Good. Here, we're at levels 11-20. But when I woke up, I was in a 31-40 zone. I think we should be able to make it through a 1-10 zone if we can get there."

"So, you'll help me?" Alice asked.

"Of course," Titus agreed easily. "I think it's in everyone's best interest to see if we can turn this off. And along the way, I'm sure we'll have plenty of chances to level up and grow stronger, as that seems like the backup plan."

Yes, if everything else failed, we would still want to be strong, wouldn't we?

"Though," he questioned as he moved to get her another water bottle, "What if we just destroyed the supercomputer center? Would that destroy the AI?"

Alice shook her head a little too hard and winced. "No. it's jumped beyond the supercomputer center and interfaced with magic. There's definitely something going on with it. I don't really understand, but I don't think it needs the supercomputer center anymore. But I can trace it from there. And if that goes offline, even if I find some other host of it, I won't be able to find all the others from it. But this is the starting point. And if it gets destroyed—"

Titus seemed to understand and cut off her rambling. "And you're confident you can get into the System from the center?"

"I used to work there," she said. "So yeah, I think so. It's my best chance, at least."

Titus handed her a bag of beef jerky along with another water bottle. "Well, let's get you fully recovered, and then we can head out," he said. "It's a bit of a walk through the forest to the road, but there are cars everywhere."

Alice mumbled a yes through a mouthful of jerky and chewed faster.