Mark stared, dumbfounded, at the City AI for his childhood home, and didn’t know what to think.

  He resorted to politeness.

  “Hello, Orange.”

  Orange City, or just ‘Orange’, as they named themselves, had a tiny, knowing smile on their face made of cables. Their orange-stone eyes were delighted by Mark’s… something. Their vector was similarly delighted, but there was a distinct undercurrent of disbelief. Dislike, too, maybe. And that emotion brought Mark back to his own real emotions. Orange City had the largest portion of blame for how the whole Addashield thing had gone down, but they also had the largest honor for how all of that had turned out. The governments were something else entirely, but all the people of the world loved that Addavein was a dragon who might become—

  “Excuse me,” Aurora said, standing there to the side.

  All others had stepped away.

  Aurora looked at Orange, and said, “You’re not the representative you pretended to be.”

  Orange shook their head, and then they smiled at Aurora, and this time their amusement was real. Mark got the distinct impression from Aurora’s deeply annoyed and vaguely worried vector that Orange had misrepresented themselves to get into the delegation. Also, like, her words had just said as much.

  Mark was having a little bit of trouble right now.

  Orange said, “You and yours were the only ones not informed, Aurora, so please take your complaints up with Crytalis. I, however, as a representative of United Sapients, will be giving Mark his requested partner. After a little talk.” They gestured to the side, to one of the planning rooms available to any groups, and to the cafe sitting in front of those rooms. A servitor in the cafe glanced this way, as Orange asked, “Care to sit with me and discuss the future, Mark?”

  Aurora’s face turned impassive as she stared at Orange, and then she breathed, and went back to the rest of the delegation.

  Orange didn’t waste any time asking for Mark’s acceptance. They went over to the cafe, and to the servitor floating behind the counter. Were they… going to order a drink? Could they drink coffee? Or tea? Or… or anything at all?

  … Mark left his friends behind and went into the cafe.

  Orange was talking to the servitor, ending with a, “That will be all, yes. Thank you.”

  Servitors were pretty normal, practically everywhere, and especially in positions of work where a worker did not need to move around a lot, like in driver seats or as cashiers for shops, or, most often, behind bars and coffee stands. A person did not need to be there to press a button, like on the trams, or to make basic decisions about how to put together a flavored coffee. High class servitors were floating orbs and floating hands, held together by maglocks and capable of doing anything a human could do. Low class servitors were connected tubes of metal and grippers, sticking out of a very heavy base.

  The servitor here at the coffee shop was one of the lower class ones; all heavy duty and clunky. Eliot had made it himself, though, and he had made it well, so it moved rather gracefully even with a whole bunch of joints and hydraulics operating inside those metal-tube arms.

  But right now, with Orange here, the collection of metal tubes and rubber grippers that made up the moving part of the servitor moved like a dancer, gracefully clearing out the old coffee grounds from the espresso machine with one pair of arms while steaming milk with another pair of arms and pouring syrups and stuff into paper cups with a third pair of arms. Mark had never seen it move so well. Usually it was slower.

  Obviously, Orange was ‘helping’ it along, or something like that. Their vector was everywhere right now. In the walls, in the wires, and in the servitor and the computer systems in the cafe. But they didn’t seem to actually be doing anything. Orange was just… present, in this space.

  Silently, Mark watched the machine move through a routine that it had done a thousand times already, but it had never looked this fluid doing this routine before tonight.

  And then, a minute after starting, two steaming cups of coffee sat before Mark and Orange. Mark had seen them made and they were decadent things, more dessert than coffee.

  Orange picked up a cup and handed it to Mark, saying, “I’d like to get through the important stuff first, but I imagine you wish to speak of certain topics.”

  … Mark took the coffee.

  Orange seemed… mad, though.

  Did they blame Mark for Addashield’s end? For the deaths that had happened after his Tutorial, when the dragon came out and started blasting that kaiju. Partially, yeah, that was Mark’s fault. The alternative had been… failing the Tutorial? Dying?

  Letting Addavein Fall to his demon?

  Mark said, “I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be sorry, but I feel like I should say ‘I’m sorry’?” And then a small anger, deep within, flared back to life. A rage consumed Mark, and he let it happen, if only for a moment. And then he looked at Orange. “I feel like I should be mad, too. Your lack of oversight killed my parents.”

  “Yup. It was a shit show.”

  “… That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”

  “And I lost forty five thousand, three hundred and seventy eight citizens,” Orange said, speaking as though they had lost a brother or a sister, or cousins; People who were close to them, that truly mattered.

  Mark ended up sitting down near a window, and Orange sat down across from him.

  They sipped their coffee, and Mark had no idea how that worked, while Mark sipped his own. It was pretty good coffee. More like drinking dessert than anything else.

  They were the only two people in the coffee shop, though a few people were over in one of the planning rooms in the back. Big windows separated the planning rooms from the main floor, and Mark saw that those guys inside were planning some sort of business on the Shine; Daihoon’s version of the Mississippi River. They had a map of the Shine on the back wall, marked out with dots and curved lines made in non-permanent marker. Maybe a monster hunt? It was rather foolish to go anywhere near the Shine unless you were strong enough to survive kaiju, but kaiju didn’t swim up or down the river every day.

  ‘Every other month’ was more realistic for a kaiju sighting.

  Mini-kaiju abounded, though.

  … Mark turned back toward Orange.

  Orange had sipped some of their coffee.

  Mark waited.

  And then Orange said, “Since that horrible time, aside from the direct deaths, I have lost over 2.3 million people to moving. The East Coast Union has taken a lot of them and our city has a lot more real estate available for people to move to, but there are problems with property rights and transfer of ownership, and I’ve had to eminent domain several locations which has brought several lawsuits to our city.”

  ‘Our city’, huh?

  “We’ll get through it. But Fayetteville and Charlotte are proving to be difficult. They’re poaching a lot of the heroes who had made Orange City their home, who survived Addashield’s Final Terror.” Orange looked up at Mark. “The efforts we put forth trying to secure your parents were the best we had available at the time. To speak without hiding: it was a shit show. All of our capabilities failed when it came to Addashield. This should not be too surprising. You didn’t know who he was growing up, and your research never turned up the full truth, since how could anyone ever know the full truth of a man like Addashield, who hid his worst offenses, who had other people in power hide his worst offenses, and whose best actions were like the sun, blinding you from all the rest.

  “You didn’t know who he was when you made those deals, or when you were recovering from your coma, or when you went into the Tutorial with him. You knew nothing. But you know something of who he was now, don’t you. Knowing what you now know, do you still blame me for my failures?”

  Mark didn’t get a chance to answer, and he wasn’t sure how he would answer, anyway.

  “I still blame myself,” Orange said, “I am sorry that I failed you, but I tried my best. It was not good enough, and it never would have been good enough. It was a shit show. Simple as.”

  “… yeah,” Mark said, his voice a fragile thing.

  Silence, save for the quiet voices of people well outside of Mark and Orange’s space.

  Mark said, “I really did love where I grew up. I never wanted that to happen.”

  “Gladegrove was a nice little neighborhood, full of wonderful families,” Orange said. “I never wanted that to happen, either, and I’m sorry it did. Will you ever want to come back?”

  It was such a deep question that Mark could only sit there, silent, his thoughts scattered to the wind as he failed to find purchase on any thread that led anywhere close to an answer. Did Mark want to move back to Orange City, eventually? Yes. A part of him did. But… Was he ever going to be a fisherman? No. Was he going to raise theoretical kids behind a very real Curtain Protocol? Gods, he had no idea. Curtain Protocol had some real benefits, and yet… Fuck that shit.

  Mark wanted to have real power. He wanted to change the world and make it better.

  He wanted to kill all monsters, which was impossible.

  But if he aimed at the stars, at least he would land on the moon, and maybe he’d kill some demons while he was there…

  Which meant that he had his answer, didn’t he.

  Mark said, “Orange City is a nice place, but I’m going to kill the worst monsters in this world and all others, and that means not being anywhere near Orange City, or any civilization.”

  Orange already knew Mark’s answer, but they accepted that answer more upon hearing it from him, directly. Orange pivoted, “When you win, you will need to retire somewhere, so why not Orange City?”

  Mark felt a tension in his chest.

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  He asked, “Why are you speaking so…” So lovingly. “Why do you want me?”

  “For all the normal reasons of your power, but also… I watched you grow up, and I like to see my people succeed in my city. I want to see you in Orange City. I want to see everything you can become, and I want to help you get there, but even if I can’t... Even if you will become a person who belongs to a hundred different organizations, you’re still one of my people, Mark. That means a lot to me.”

  The tension tightened, and Mark breathed out a small shudder. He felt loved, and he didn’t know what to do with that right now… or for a while. So Mark put those emotions away and… and thought. About everything. Emotions tumbled, from hate to regret to loss and a deep desire to forget the pain and work toward something better. To act, instead of being acted upon.

  Orange sat there, hands around their cup of coffee. “You’ll always be welcome in Orange City.”

  In that moment, Mark recalled some news articles he had seen, months ago. They had been from Orange City. One headline had read ‘Local Rugby Kid Brings Dragon To Town’. Another had read ‘Demons, Dragons, and Delinquents’. That second one had called Mark a ‘ticking time bomb, waiting to happen’. Mark mostly forgot all the rest of the articles, for he had tried not to read them. Morbid curiosity won over in the end, though.

  At the time, all the world was calling the birth of Addavein a success. A ‘perfect legacy of the great Archmage Sloane Addashield’. All archmages eventually lost to their demons, so to lose in that sort of way was the best possible outcome.

  To the world, Mark was a hero.

  In Orange City, the headlines read, ‘local makes deals with demons’.

  Mark had never been back to Orange City. He had never (successfully) contacted the people there, in the few attempts he had made to contact them. So Mark didn’t know the story on the street. Maybe it was less like the stories on the local news, and more like the stories in the global news. And yet, that couldn’t possibly be right, right? Sure, the world might have felt a certain way, but for the locals, the kaiju and dragon had happened right on top of them. Of course they felt more hurt than relief.

  Somehow, Mark felt that Orange was being untruthful. That Orange City hated him, and all of this was some sort of… something.

  Mark felt himself spiraling, so he cut the spiral short. With exhaustion in his voice, and thinking about how Orange City had frozen all of his bank accounts back home in the city, Mark began by asking, “Someone else is taking care of the fishing tanks in the bay, right?”

  Orange said, “The old bargains left to the Careeds, the tanks they built and maintained in the bay, have been temporarily handed off to another. That is your property, should you choose to have it. Do you want it back?”

  Yes.

  “Yes, but I’m not sure what to do with it. I’m not fishing for a living. And if I cannot fish it myself, I have to rent it out for a pittance, right?”

  Orange raised a surprised eyebrow. “… Correct, but that was not what I expected to hear.”

  “It’s not what I expected to say.”

  Orange sat back in their chair, then sat up straight. “I expected to get through giving you your livium before all of these talks, because I don’t want this gift of life hanging over the rest of the conversation. You’ve been approved. That’s all that matters. Here.” Orange gently pushed the box toward Mark.

  … Mark pulled the box closer to himself. It looked almost like a small gift box of grey paper wrapping, with a lid that slid over a bottom. Maybe a decimeter cubed. It was actually metal, though, not paper, and when Mark touched it, to pull off the top, the box flickered with brightness where he touched the surface, his fingerprints carved in light that sank into the metal like ice cubes into a dark drink.

  A small holographic prompt popped up,

  ‘This is a limited livium core meant to produce a limited True AI.

  ‘The AI to receive this core will remain limited until such time as the owner’s death, whereupon it will become a real being.

  ‘This limitation cannot be circumvented by normal means. Please do not try to circumvent this limiting. This limitation can be lifted through the proper channels. Please contact United Sapients to learn more.

  ‘Please place a connection to the chosen AI onto the surface of the box.’

  Mark looked up at Orange. “ ‘When I die’?”

  It was easier for Orange to talk about this, as they said, “There has to be a hard limitation for the birth of the new life, and ‘when the initial user dies’ is rather standard of a starting point. But, as you are a killer of monsters, your life expectancy is limited, just by looking at statistics. So, we have this limitation. We expect whatever AI to form from living with you to be similar, or outright opposite to yourself, but still useful for society and civilization as a whole no matter who they choose to be. We could talk for a while about what all that means, if you wish.”

  Mark shook his head a little. “No; I get it. Just… a strange clause, but I get it. So not that strange at all.” Mark moved on. “United Sapients only agreed to support this action here due to… Power duplication? Various other things?”

  “Approval for a limited AI is based on a long list of factors both personal and public, all of which need to add up to 100, though the number goes much higher than 100.” Orange continued, “Many people with the capability to be real heroes choose to do all things except fight kaiju. You, however, have chosen to fight for civilization and the worlds. That’s a big factor in approval. That choice gets you 50 points, automatically. Then there’s your interest in magic and the need for a familiar. That’s 20 points right there. Character assessment, from Citadel of Freyala Resources, Memphi, and I, and many others who chose to view your file and rate it, were more than enough to get you all the way into approval territory, putting you well over 100. 128, on average. That ‘128’ is based on personal, personality factors.

  “Possible power duplication and other, far and deep-reaching reasons, including final goals and how close you are to the powers that be, put you 5 times over the approval minimum. Your final, agreed-upon score was 521 out of 100. That was the average.” Orange added, “One particularly industrious member of United Sapients put your score at 1038 out of 100. Most aimed far lower than that, hence your average final score of 521.”

  Mark felt strangely… really good about that. “Who put me above a thousand?”

  “COFR,” Orange said.

  Citadel of Freyala Resources.

  Again, Mark felt strangely wonderful.

  Mark asked, “What did you score me as?”

  “185. I don’t approve of your end goal of killing all monsters since that’s too crazy to ever consider as a real option, and you will kill yourself attempting this nonsense. I disregarded all actions around Addashield, since the outcome was what it was, and I discounted your personal connections to others. Also, I don’t believe that whatever True AI comes out of this partnership will retain what you have. That doesn’t always happen.”

  There was something there, some ephemeral dislike that wasn’t always present, but Mark still felt it. Perhaps Mark was projecting. Perhaps Orange was doing some duty they didn’t want to do.

  Orange seemed like a good person. But… But they were the arbiter of Mark’s whole upbringing. Sure, there was a city council and a mayor, and there was some president of the East Coast Union up north, but Orange here was the one who was ultimately responsible for the safety of the city. They were probably pissed at Mark.

  Mark would have been pissed at Mark.

  Mark was still pissed at himself, after all.

  He had done what he could and had come out ‘on top’, according to a lot of the world, but that didn’t bring his parents back…

  Another thought occurred.

  Journeying into Endless Daihoon to find the elves and their resurrection magic would bring his parents back, and Mark needed everything he could get to get there.

  So whatever was happening with Orange wasn’t a big deal.

  Mark took out Quark and put him on top of the metal box, and then he slipped his adamantium away from the phone case. Quark’s full programming was located in their apartment, in a box stuck in Mark’s room just like the box that Orange City had stuck into Mark’s childhood home to watch and help him during his Color Drop treatment, and his time with Addashield, before the Tutorial. The phone was still a large extension of Quark’s body, though. It was enough.

  Sure enough, the silver glow of the phone began to flicker on and off, and the box underneath Quark began to glow. Tiny tendrils slipped out of the box and into the phone, and then the phone locked into place. Quark began to flicker.

  Words appeared.

  ‘Nascent AI detected. Designation: Quark.

  ‘Approving…’

  The word ‘approving’ flickered on and off, and then began to fade in and out, and then change from white lettering to blue lettering, like a loading bar from left to right.

  Orange had raised their eyebrow-cables a fraction when Mark just up and placed Quark on the box.

  They asked, “Why do you want so much power, Mark? Chasing violence only leads to more violence, and there is always something stronger out there than you.” They said, “There is no end to the path you have chosen, except in a box in the ground, if you’re lucky. Usually the bodies are never recovered at all.”

  “Heroes exist, Orange, and I aim to be one of the greats,” Mark said, and he couldn’t help but grin. “I figure after I kill all monsters and resurrect everyone who has ever died, I’ll do the supervillain thing for a while. Train up the younger generations. Maybe have a flying castle. Various other things. Have a family. Grow old. Get young again. See what happens! And if I don’t figure out how to change the Two Worlds, then I’ll at least figure out how to make them better in every way I can. Surely none of that is too crazy of a goal.”

  Mark had gotten a little joyfully-flippant there at the end...

  … And Mark got the impression that Orange didn’t like his higher-than-the-sky answer.

  Orange stared. And then they blinked, and sighed. Their vector collapsed, turning into a simple thing. They had left the walls, the floors, the castle, and yet they were still there, sitting in front of Mark, saying, “Your limited AI will be limited until you die. When you die, please try to die in a way such that your AI is rescuable. The property of your house will remain your property in perpetuity, though I’m giving you a 10 year deadline on taking control of the fish tanks in the bay before I give them fully to whoever can work them well. Right now they’re already being worked, but letting the people who work the tanks own the tanks makes for happier workers.” They stood up. “Good luck. I hope to never hear news of your death.”

  Mark stood up, feeling weird.

  Orange was resigned, and they did not like any part of any of what was happening.

  Mark said, “I hope I don’t die, too.”

  Orange walked away—

  They stopped, and spoke without looking at Mark, “Addavein is not welcome at Orange City at all, and I will fire upon him if he comes close. We have updated all of our defensive measures. Whatever he thinks he knows, he does not know at all. Tell him that, if you wish, or don’t. You, however, will always be welcome, Mark. Have a good life.”

  And then Orange walked away.