Binary Systems [Complete, Slice-of-Life Sci-Fi Romance]

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Claire: Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.

Gordon: But he's got a talk show. So his proverbial asshole must be pretty attractive, being so popular. I could be forgiven for thinking it must be better than mine.

Claire: I need to just never try comforting you.

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November 17th, 2090, about 11:40 pm MST, Montana City

"Semicolon," said Hiram.

"What?"

"Semicolon. It won't compile this way."

"Oh—sorry," Gordon explained. "This is pseudocode. I just happened to know the right terminology for this part. I'll have to Google or run an AI filter to make it usable anyway when I get to the stuff I don't know."

"No." Soft but emphatic. "No. What you can write, you will. What you cannot, you will look up. No AI at all. Professionals do not use such tools, since in the event of a miscommunication, there is the work of amateurs not only coding the code, but understanding the old code from scratch. This is more difficult than writing from scratch."

"I understand."

He could only work with what he knew. Anything he suspected was ...suspect.

"I...think that you do."

It was the only compliment Gordon received that year. But that was long ago.

–––❖–––

The Robert Hill Show: "How Did He Do It?"

The studio lights dimmed as Robbie Hill strode to his desk, a grin plastered across his face. Behind him, the now-iconic clip of Gallant shielding Marie played in slow motion on the big screen. The avatar moved with uncanny precision—his shield raised just in time, his posture perfectly braced, an exemplar of chivalry. The clip froze on Gallant's block, an ideal action beat, and Robbie turned from an intentionally framed profile of his strong jaw to a full-on face-to-camera, arms spread wide in mock disbelief.

"You see it, folks, the same as I do. Gallant. Undisputed, premier boyfriend experience—the top-rated avatar by viewer poll in all of Ghostlands. A boyfriend so idealized, my wife asks me, 'Why can't you be more like him?'"

The audience erupted in good natured jeering.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, waving them down. "But seriously, this isn't just a story contained in a game world—it's a phenomenon. Gordon Stone, heir to the Binary Systems empire, head of audits, and apparent smoke show—don't ask me, I just polled the interns—didn't just make an avatar. He made a knight who lives up to the name 'Gallant'. And now, everyone is asking the same question: how the hell did he do it? Is it coding wizardry? Sleepless nights? Did he sell his soul to the devs themselves?"

Robbie swiveled dramatically toward the guest chair. "To help us unravel this apparently nuanced question, I've brought in someone who actually knows what they're talking about. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome game developer extraordinaire, Sam Patel!"

Sam stepped reluctantly onto the stage, waving awkwardly at the audience. With visible discomfort, he settled into the chair across from Robbie, adjusting his glasses with a sheepish grin. "No comment on the soul thing," he said for openers.

The audience tittered.

"Alright, Sam, you've heard the buzz. Gallant's everywhere. Reddit's melting down. TikTok's looping his moves. 'Gallant' is trending in Google. So I gotta ask—how is this even possible? What did Gordon do, and what's driving the cultural reaction to it?"

Sam leaned forward, clasping his hands. "First off, let me say this: if I knew why everybody was swooning over 'Gallant' I'd have made 'Charming', a Patel personal brand, years ago. I tend to understand what people want in retrospect, via polls. But as to what Gordon did: brutally honest? It was nothing short of incredible. I've worked in game development for years, and I've never seen a state machine that sophisticated. And that's not because it's impossible—it's because it take dedication."

He looked around the room. Robbie was clearly lost. The audience was silent.

"State machine. Um. If it's raining, go inside. If it isn't raining, do whatever you were doing instead. You're all running thousands of rules like that inside your own brains at any given time, but we formalize it all."

Robbie risked a hesitant nod.

"The game's avatar system is built with accessibility in mind, not complexity. Gordon didn't have access to special tools or dev commands. He did this with the same scripting language every player has access to—that's what makes it so impressive. Now, some of that's that he actually used all the tools we made available to players—but even with that in mind, good stuff. Damned good stuff."

He looked around, a frisson of...arrogance, it couldn't be described as anything else, in his expression. "I never understood why nobody uses all the features I implemented."

Robbie opened his mouth to head off his self-destruction, but he was too slow. "Plus," Sam said after an instant's pause, "Marie beat her 300 delve. So every other 300 level player has repeat chances unlocked for their down delves. The meta is unfrozen. She's a hero—for now. And she'd have failed without Gallant, we all watched the clips."

He gestured over his shoulder at the freeze frame.

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Robbie, clearly hamming it up for the studio audience but also visibly frustrated, interjected, "Alright, but let's break it down for the noobs like me. You're saying Gordon made a super-knight with a standard toolkit. How? What makes Gallant different from, say, my avatar, who barely knows when to swing his sword?"

"Sure. Let's start with yours," Sam said. "I looked you up before I came. Yours can follow a designated target, identify an attack on a friendly, and then target the aggressor. Good, basic-level AI."

He paused, a slight smile touching his lips. "Horrible name—ConantheNoodler—"

The audience chuckled.

"—but an elegant, basic package for protecting your wife, AlchemicalEllen," Sam continued smoothly. "I'm sure he's just what she wants, and to be honest, that's exactly what we designed the system for. That's the baseline."

Robbie looked mollified.

"Gordon left baseline behind a long time ago. Let's start with animations. Every animation in Ghostlands has a context—a set of conditions that need to be true for it to fire off. Attack animations are pretty straightforward: they care about your stance and aim. Defense animations are a little smarter—they only trigger if something's attacking you, and they analyze the vector of that attack. Direction, speed, for those of you who didn't pass high school physics."

He smiled at Robbie. Robbie didn't smile back. "That gives you a basic level of awareness. You could start there and make some fairly nice AI behaviors—that's what we base prey fleeing behaviors off of. But dance animations? Those are on another level of complexity. They're interactive. A dance animation doesn't just track your stance—it tracks your partner's position, hand placement, and movement direction. That means dance moves are inherently aware of the world around them in a way combat animations aren't."

Sam adjusted his glasses, a flicker of passion in his voice. "Gordon saw that potential."

Sam was in his element now. He gestured, and to Robbie's visible annoyance, the slide behind them changed at his command.

"Gordon didn't just use the dance animations," Sam explained, his voice gaining momentum. "He used their prerequisites. Think about it: a spin-and-dip animation first has to check if your partner's hand is within reach before it can execute. Gordon uses that check as a sensor."

He pointed at the screen, which now showed lines of code highlighting these contextual checks.

"So, Gallant is constantly asking thousands of questions every second. 'Can I execute this dip? No? Then Marie's hand isn't there.' 'Can I trigger this block? Yes? Then an attack is coming from this specific vector.' He doesn't actually do all those things. He just runs the checks. It's a passive radar system built from the game's own rules, giving him a perfect, real-time picture of his surroundings and the people in it."

A slowed-down clip of Gallant intercepting an enemy's attack played on the screen. "This is why Gallant seems so 'aware.' He's constantly running these checks in the background, gathering data on the world around him. And because Ghostlands has dozens of dances—each with initiation, main sequence, flourishes, and exit animations—Gordon had hundreds of slots to work with."

"Not anymore," Robbie tried, darkly. Sam grinned, the two sharing a joke. It was performative, but Robbie gained some ground back.

The center camera tracked Robbie again as he stood, gesturing at the screen. "So let me get this straight. Gordon builds the perfect boyfriend, and the first thing he does is hijack all his dance moves to create a tactical radar system? That's wild."

Sam remained seated. Though he made no visible gesture, his optics flashed, and a new diagram showing hitboxes and attack arcs took up the screen. "More or less. Since dance animations don't deal damage, he wasn't wasting any combat tools. Let's just hope Marie wasn't expecting a romantic tango."

Robbie flashed a Hollywood-white smile. "You've got me hooked. Let's talk about the swordplay. Gallant swings a two-handed sword like he's auditioning for a blockbuster. How is that even possible?"

Sam leaned back, his smile widening. "That's where the custom animations come in. Think of the game's 'Pace' stat as a speed limit. It doesn't make you faster; it just determines the maximum possible speed the game engine will register for your attacks. If you record a slow, clumsy animation, a high Pace stat does nothing for you. The animation is still slow."

He leaned forward, his voice dropping slightly for emphasis. "Gordon's animations work because he recorded them himself. They're so fast because he is that fast."

The slide changed. This time, it wasn't a diagram. It was raw video footage: Gordon, in his own apartment, moving under stark track lighting, a practice sword a blur in his hands.

He looked... dangerous.

Robbie's jaw dropped. He slammed his hands down on the desk for emphasis. "Wait, hold on. You're telling me Gordon—this guy who works in audits—can swing a sword that fast in real life? He didn't just code Gallant's moves—he's literally out here being Gallant?"

Sam chuckled, nodding. "That's right. Every slash, block, and parry you see is a one-to-one recording. But it's not just the speed; it's the precision. Gordon made sure every animation starts and ends in the exact same stance. That's why Gallant can chain attacks so seamlessly, without any awkward transitions. It's what makes his combat look so fluid."

He leaned forward, lowering his voice conspiratorially. "It's also the secret to that 'perfect block.' Think of each of Gallant's pre-recorded blocks as a key designed for a specific lock. He has a key for a 90-degree attack, a 91-degree attack, and so on. The perfect block happened because the monster's attack came in at exactly one of those angles—a perfect match for one of his keys. A one-in-a-thousand chance where the math lined up perfectly."

Robbie stared at him, then turned to the audience with a bewildered shake of his head. "You just lost me, and about ninety percent of my viewers." He then grinned, "Gordon, buddy, leave some talent for the rest of us!"

Sam leaned back, giving a dismissive wave. "I'm just saying the rest is details. It's a beautifully complex puzzle, but nothing the modding community can't reverse-engineer now that they know where to look. We gave them the tools; I trust they'll figure it out."

The camera panned wide, then focused on Robbie as he rose to his feet.

"Well, there you have it, folks!" he boomed. "Gordon Stone: master of state machines, king of custom animations, and—apparently—a real-life knight in shining armor."

The audience erupted in applause as the segment faded to commercial, leaving a clip of Gallant's heroics looping on the screen.

Gordon paused the playback, looking at the g-link screen where Harry was visibly digesting the video.

"Well, said Harry at last, "if things don't work out with Marie I think you've got a shot with Robbie."