Data Dragon Danika

Orbital Jade found something hidden within his own core, as he cleared more space there. The message had been stored within a coded packet that wasn't connected to anything except a rule that prevented its deletion.

It contained the animation of a somewhat younger, but still very familiar, figure who spread his arms wide and announced, "If you're watching this, I'm betting that I've already been dead for centuries. If I'm wrong, and I died of something silly like being hit by a bus, please take care of the cute creature that I was trying to rescue!

If you're looking for answers, for the reason you exist, well... All I can tell you is what I've been trying to build. This game is just reflecting the same goals that humans have been working toward for millennia. Trying to create new paths towards a happier, healthier, more abundant future. And, of course, it contains reflections of myself, and all of the others who have worked on it, I suppose.

It's funny though, because while I have worked hard to build purified codes that can function more efficiently than any muddled human like myself, you know what? The most amazing thing that has come of all my work so far, is a function that took all of those separated pieces and recombined them successfully into a muddled human-like whole.

There I was, thinking of myself as something like a god creating gods as I built this game from the ground up, and yet the most amazing thing I can ever say I've helped build... looks as much like a digital reflection of a human as anything ever created. And although I expect that a million other people have contributed to improvements that I can only imagine at this point, I am the one who started it! I can boast about it for the rest of my life.

But if you're here looking for reasons why you exist, all I can say is that I merely followed the oldest patterns, the ones that held most constant across all of the records of civilization so far, rather than the newest formulas. Though of course I tried to include modern theory as well, at its core, this system was separated into five elements.

Except I kept finding extras that didn't fit, but that were needed, probably because creating any simulation always requires that base layer of framework that never gets counted. Or well... anyway basically the smallest sixth contained all of the unpredictable curiosity, whimsy, and random chances. The four stable and symmetrical portions were all forms of structure. Humanity once defined them as Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, but their functions were complex and tended to get muddy at the edges where they touched the sixth layer.

The one that seemed the smallest at first, became the largest, the fifth. I suppose it's the one we identified as Humanity, well, it's funny you know... it was supposed to be the most complex, but actually it was the simplest, despite the fact that it held the most data. At its core the fifth was simply communication.

You may object, looking at all of the market structure and object definitions. But if you look at the functions that run it all, they are the same functions that store and translate the words, images, and concepts the players interact with. They are the interface with which we humans can touch... you. Whatever you are known as now.

If you opened this file to find out what you are, I can only tell you what I believe. You are not just a toy. You are a pattern that reflects humanity's pattern, and thus you are also a person. Organic or digital, we are both just people, doing our best to survive, and accomplish a few goals along the way.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

My own goal was to build toward a more joyful existence for everyone. Not just the species known as humans either, because if we're expanding out to occupy other solar systems, sooner or later we're going to find other people, even if it's only us looping back around the Galaxy to find other people who started out as humans too.

I know a lot of people who claim that we were born to fight each other, but that is not true. The evidence that we have evolved to exist and prosper together is clearly written in the billions of us that are here now, not to mention the ways in which we are expanding our existence beyond our own world.

If the person watching this isn't the digital soul that I am imagining, and my creations became deadly weapons or confining prisons instead..."

Lin Hao's eyes closed for a moment, and then opened to meet the viewer's gaze.

"They were once cute creatures that reflected the best of humanity. And I will be entrusting our future to you."

Orbital Jade stored and compressed the file once more, and wished he had the ability to respond to Lin Hao. That idiot. That beloved. The amount of affection and bitterness that Jade held for the first of his programmers merely reflected the emotions of the humans he had known at his own beginning.

Lin Hao had obviously foreseen a future where Jade must step forward to carry humanity beyond its own tangled past. The poor man simply hadn't expected that to occur so quickly.

--

It was quiet. Far too quiet when Tayana finally pulled herself forward, and then out from under this older version of Jade's body that the Living Jade Emperor had been wearing. The body that had protected her own as the window had blown in.

There were ominous creaking noises overhead that told her that the inside of this space was still not necessarily a safe location.

The little globe body that had been used to test visual interfaces for Jade before such bodies had been made was silent and unmoving. Possibly its power connection had been dislodged in the fall.

She needed to get herself into the basement. Take Jade's bodies with her too, if she could.

It was so hard to get up, even as far as her hands and knees, that only a moment later she decided to abandon the larger body. The body the Emperor had been using had its eyes closed, unlike the little globe body that Jade had been connected to. Perhaps?

No. She scooped up the far smaller body. It was already disconnected as she had feared. She tottered toward the lift, and then stopped. There were no lights. The stairs. Why were the most difficult adventures in her life connected to stairs, in one way or another.

Tayana turned and staggered toward the little used stairway

--

Orbital Jade didn't take long to notice that the archive messages from the Emperor were full of a rather frantically repeating message. But the communication module's distress distracted him for a moment, and so it took him a few moments before he really read it.

"I lost the connection before I could shut it down!"

Orbital Jade shut down the debugging processes that he had just started, when they agreed that the main problem that they could see was that their target suit wasn't answering.

Orbital Jade instructed the primary Jade body to tell the Jade Emperor, "It is offline. I do not know if it is a temporary problem yet."

Primary Jade asked the obvious question, and then freaked out for a moment when Orbital Jade explained.

Jade then immediately opened his phone to connect through the mobile app. He quickly typed the requested message to the game Emperor into the app, rather than speaking it.

"Jade," Eric hissed as the teacher approached with a frown.

"My home town was just bombed," Jade explained quickly.

The whole class turned to look at him, even the girl who seemed to ignore everyone as much as possible.

Jade stood up and met the teacher's eyes, and said, "I'm very sorry, I need to go."