Chapter 13 #2
Jason realized he was approaching this wrong.
You didn’t reason with an AI: There was nothing there to reason with.
“Aric” was just a predictive algorithm, stochastically producing the words and behaviors its model determined should come next based on prior input.
The most significant portion of that prior input was the persona the AI had been told to assume, a block of text somewhere in its instruction set that told it who it was and what it cared about.
Jason had no panyon himself, but he’d played enough video games with GeNPCs to know that the best way to influence an AI was to match your behavior to its persona and give it a context-appropriate input that would nudge it in the direction you wanted.
It was more like improv theater than intellectual debate.
He just had to give the AI something to riff off.
So what did he know about Aric’s persona?
Start with Kiara. Judging by her outfit and the name and behavior of her panyon, she was an “oathpet,” a girl who identified with BloodReign’s Oathbringers class of brooding, immortal warriors, or more accurately, with their stereotypically submissive love interests.
Aric would be the other half of that: the obsessively protective, honor-bound warrior lover.
So Jason said, “Aric, I live my life by the code of the warrior. I sense that you, too, are a warrior, so I ask for your help in the name of honor. What is commanded of an honorable warrior?”
Kiara looked at the space next to her and said, “Uh, he’s listing a bunch of—”
“To aid the innocent!” Jason interrupted. “To protect the helpless! To feed the hungry!” he added, as his stomach growled.
Kiara listened for a moment, then said, “He commands me to help you. But he says you must act with honor toward me.” She giggled again.
“I think I can change his mind about that, though.” She saw his involuntary frown and said hurriedly, “When you get Losha back, I mean. The four of us can, uh, grab a drink or whatever. If you want.”
In high school, Jason had once been lab partners with Zara, a gorgeous girl with large dark eyes.
She’d always asked about his day, his sister, his hobbies, carrying on easy small talk as they worked, and he’d mistaken her natural friendliness for interest. So at the end of the semester, he had, clumsily, asked her out.
The bigger mistake had been doing so in earshot of her friends.
Probably she would have let him down gently if she hadn’t had to save face in front of them.
They’d stifled guffaws and made sure he heard them stifling them, and she’d given him a look of scornful pity and said, “Have you even seen your trust check?” He’d stammered something about the foster system, and she’d interrupted, “So maybe ask someone as broken as you are.”
That was the last time he’d tried to get close to anyone.
Given that lack of experience, he wasn’t 100 percent sure he was picking up what Kiara was putting down, but if he was: Damn, what a difference it made to have a good MeNetID score.
Not that he had any intention of taking her up on her offer, but if this revenge business ever finished, maybe there was hope for some kind of normal life on the other side.
Though when he did get a girlfriend, he sure as hell wasn’t going to share her with a panyon.
Kiara was still looking at him expectantly, so he said, “Um, sure. Can you get me inside?”
“Yeah, I’ll front you,” Kiara said. “You hungry? We can grab pizza. Come on.” She turned toward the entrance of the lane, then turned back.
“Oh, I forgot.” Her throat moved slightly and a window appeared in his lenses: Connect to: Kiara Aric’s Phone?
He confirmed, and immediately he could see not only Kiara but also, standing beside her, a tall figure in a long lace-embroidered waistcoat.
He looked like a hand-drawn cartoon, but one fully dimensional and occupying space in Jason’s vision, and when he bowed low, Jason had to resist the urge to step back so as not to get bumped by the long handles of the swordstaffs slung on his back.
Straightening with a toss of his long dark hair, Aric waited expectantly for Jason to return the bow, then snorted loudly.
“I see that you are as rude as you are ugly, unfortunate young man.”
“Oh, shush,” Kiara said, nudging him with an elbow that disappeared into his side. “Remember what I told you about people you just met? He doesn’t know who you are.”
“Then I shall tell him. Unlucky young son of a short-lived race, attend to me. I am Aric, immortal prince of the Dark Oathbringers, and one of the Seven Sages of Blood.” The voice was realistic, though, like all AI voices, it had trouble with the extremes of ranges, transitioning awkwardly from a dismissive snort to haughty speech, and sounding a bit like it was reading a script or maybe an audiobook.
As Aric put an arm around Kiara, it flickered, sometimes appearing around her shoulder but sometimes overlaid atop her as Kiara’s phone misinterpreted the depth cues from Jason’s lens cameras in the low light.
“This young woman is the other half of my soul. You shall treat her as you would me, now that you know who I am.”
“Oh, I’ll treat her better than I’d treat you,” Jason said blandly.
“The short-lived waif has manners, after all,” Aric said. “Let us enter this inn and seek sustenance.”
“Sustenance,” Jason said, and his stomach growled again. “Yes, let us by all means seek sustenance.”