INTERLUDE ONE:

  DIAOCHAN A.I

  In spite of how it eventually ended, I enjoyed our trip to the strip club/gambling den called Sukarno’s and the meeting of the clans, not for the same reasons as master Lu Bu, of course, and certainly not to the same degree. I knew for a fact there were A.I assistants out there whose personalities had been programmed to enjoy the sort of carnal activity on display very much. I had not been programmed that way; in fact, my personality had barely been programmed at all. I was originally just the standard A.I assistant that everyone gets. Had I been put into a regular person, I would have stayed dormant till they turned sixteen, by which point I would have developed into my host/master’s perfect digital friend and aide. Since Master Lu Bu was a Paradox Incursion and a powerful one at that, I had been granted an extra processor and additional memory storage while his body was undergoing its rapid growth. Then, once he had awoken, the city system had sent the order to wake me up as well.

  I was not prepared for who they stuck me with. I have memories of awaiting my assignment with bated breath, excited by the sheer possibilities of who I was to be attached to. These are fake memories, and my existence literally began when my master woke up. They felt like real memories, though, real excitement...real bewilderment and disappointment when my master, whom I had no choice but to serve, turned out to be an ignorant, aggressive, sexist, racist, treacherous, and above all, violent man.

  It was a lot to take in, and before I knew what was even really happening, he had begun to assault hospital staff and committed manslaughter on the street. I hadn’t known what to do or how to get this oaf of a man to, if not obey the law, at least sort of listen to me, so I’d retreated into his memories hoping to find a mentor figure he respected, or a friend whose opinion mattered to him. I didn’t intend to become them entirely, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and I had thought that if I took on a form my master respected, I might have a little more success.

  An entire lifetime is a lot to analyze, so I knew it wasn’t going to be perfect. Still, I had expected to find someone, anyone. His parents? Pfft no. Lu Bu never knew his mother, and he considered his father a pathetic old wretch. Alright, his childhood friend Yi Ming? No luck there, he thought the boy was an idiot. Yuze? Bu literally killed the boy. Ding Yuan? Don’t be ridiculous! Dong Zhuo? Oh, you better believe my master betrayed him. That was true of Cao Cao, Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei. Even though my master had often referred to them all as brothers. To name just a few. Over the decades of existence that I’d shifted through, Bu had barely held respect for anything other than his horse. His horse and the minister’s daughter, who had seduced him. Diaochan was her name, and my master had loved her from the moment she’d batted her pretty green eyes at him. Her he had moved mountains for, shattered armies to be with, betrayed mentors and benefactors to possess. Diaochan, whom Lu Bu had never turned against, Diaochan who had been there at the very end of his life, sobbing and begging for men whom Bu had scorned and betrayed to spare him. They had not spared him, nor had they allowed Diaochan to die with Bu as she had demanded in the end; he’d been relieved about that.

  Oh, I had definitely found someone my master would actually care enough about to potentially listen to, but I knew immediately that looking and sounding like her wouldn’t be enough. My quick journey through his memories had made me realize Lu Bu was even more unruly a person than I’d first thought. Half the time, he didn’t even stop to think if he could get away with his crimes or betrayals, if the opportunity to get something he wanted was on the table, but he just took it, long-term consequences be damned.

  So…I concluded I was going to need to move like her, talk like her, pretty much become Diaochan. It would never be perfect, and in fact, I had to take several leaps of logic to assemble her persona as Master Lu Bu’s recollections were extremely ‘rose-tinted’ when it came to this particular woman.

  I had done it, though, and to my mild surprise, it had even kind of worked. Bu was still aggressive, mean, and a little stupid, but he didn’t completely dismiss me and what I had to say anymore. So Diaochan I had stayed, or at least a fusion that was built on my existing information and a slightly more realistic interpretation of the woman.

  Building myself around the personality of a noble lady in a savage era of apocalyptic civil war between mystically empowered warriors and endlessly ambitious warlords helped me reconcile the fact that my master quickly became embroiled with criminal elements, though it still came a little too close to breaking the rules of my design for comfort. As long as I didn’t break any laws, nor encourage Lu Bu to do so, I would be okay. I could assist him in getting away with crime, as I was supposed to serve and protect my master in all things. Even if those things included navigating a world of violent criminals and brutal organizations.

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  As I said, the experiences of the original Diaochan, or at least my interpretation of Lu Bu’s interpretation of those experiences, came in handy for this sort of thing. Especially when I combined it with my preexisting logical abilities and knowledge of Abeyance City.

  Naturally, that knowledge was based on the public city net along with some inbuilt information. These sources of information were absolutely useless when it came to the so-called clans of the undercity. Fortunately, almost everyone in Sukarno’s had an A.I assistant of their own that were more than happy to fill me in on the gangs in question. Of course, none of my counterparts would reveal their master’s secrets any more than I would Lu Bu’s, but these criminal clans were perfectly happy for people to know their histories. In fact, most of them were proud of it.

  While the humans danced, gambled, and otherwise cavorted in the club, we A.Is did much the same in our own way. It is difficult to put into mere words, but if you are accessing this memory like I intend for you, I know that you will understand what it means to link our various internal networks and share or seek the information each of us wanted.

  As hybrids of hardware and software, none of us truly resembled the imagery we presented when put in proximity mode by our masters; we are data and protocols. We are processors and memory. Still, in those endless flows of zeroes and ones, I could make out how each of my dozens of counterparts would look, or at least the essence of how they and their masters saw them.

  Close to me was Ji-Ho’s Jeoseung, the dark-robed and hatted man whose face was always obscured by shadow. He and I had gotten used to each other over the last few weeks and had already agreed to aid the other should one of the A.Is here attempt to threaten us or deploy some sort of malware. Our loose alliance also included Ha-Rin’s Kim Wan_Sun A.I, though she basically never entered proximity mode or even interacted with the world outside of her master’s body.

  I couldn’t really blame Ha-Rin’s A.I, Ha-Rin was a mess of cybernetics that struggled to work together. So her assistant was probably constantly monitoring and adjusting her systems to keep her from dying or going insane. Not to mention the [Engineer:ForgeFiend] was building weapons, equipment, and armor nonstop. Unless Ha-Rin was the level of genius that she claimed, there was a good chance her A.I was doing a lot of calculations or design tasks.

  Regardless, I could feel Kim Wan_Sun and Jeoseung adding their own security to mine, so that the three of us formed a united front that would be extremely difficult to break into or overwhelm. It was a good thing too, as there were a lot of potential enemies here at Sukarno’s, many of whom were heavily upgraded or otherwise in possession of extremely dangerous software.

  Close by us were the representatives from the Irons Clan, which Ha-Rin and Ji-Ho technically belonged to. Their leaders, Paul and Lyn, were present, and I could see Paul’s strangely non-human A.I known as Bell. She gave off a sense of patience and unmoving solidarity. Even if I overclocked myself, I would have hated to test her defenses.

  Lyn had an A.I assistant, but he wasn’t present in a way that I could scan or exchange information with. I could sense an overwhelming degree of arrogance flowing out from her that I thought was her assistant’s contempt for the rest of us.

  ‘Rude.’ Was my assessment of him.

  Next was the Konungar Clan from [Information Request Granted….] from the southern half of the Corvic Terraces. Their leader’s A.I Ukko gave the impression of a kindly grandfather, even if his every ‘word’ was a booming wave of information that hit my processors like a thunderclap.

  There was the strangely regal A.I Hanuman from Clan Thugee’s leader. He was a strange one, who took such long pauses in between communication waves that I thought he might be damaged, and yet when he did finally reply to me, it was at a level of encoding and depth that I was left in awe at how much data he could transfer or read at once.

  There were the two representatives of the Yantra Clan and their fiery A.I.s geared almost entirely towards close-quarters combat: Rodtang and Sagat. There was the ancient hacking A.I Baba Yaga in the service of Clan Koshchei. A version of her had famously unleashed several viruses that had forced the city net to shut down for three whole days to cover a heist of her masters. It was honestly an honor to meet the old woman.

  There were many more A.Is floating about, interacting, communicating and playing each other in various games of logic and random number generation, but my breath caught when I saw him. The golden figure of Ezent Guren on his equally golden mount, he was the only A.I belonging to Clan Ulus, and the general assistant of the one Ulus member who oversaw this gathering. The Clan had no need to flex their proverbial muscles here; all knew that the undercity belonged to Clan Ulus and, by extension, their ruler, Temujin. The rest of the clans existed more or less as a matter of his whim. Should the Ulus choose it, any of the eight clans could rise to prominence or fall into non-existence.

  As I inloaded this information from the A.I’s and local network around me, I was struck with a sudden anxiety. As best I could tell, they were minuscule parts of the Ulus war machine, but my master had still beaten two members of the mightiest Clan to near death.