NPC for Hire-[Gamelit|Simulation|Multi-genre]

Before they could reach her, the marble figure at the far end moved.

With a mere gesture of a hand—pale as bone, veins like black wires running through stone—the tendrils froze. Fen's vision spiraled wide, the simulation fracturing into infinite branches: endless versions of himself fighting to redirect the power, endless versions failing. Each one ended the same way—torn apart by his own tendrils, shredded in a hundred variations.

The outcomes collapsed on top of each other, running to infinity until they dissolved into static. The resonance buckled, the glitch snapping like a broken circuit. Fen staggered back, clutching his head, breath ragged, the taste of ash in his throat.

Slowly, the tendrils turned, writhing midair like serpents, drifting back toward the figure as though they had found their true master.

Fen's breath halted. The resonance inside him shuddered, bucking like it wanted out. His power strained toward the figure, drawn not to the shifting black, but to the smooth marble-white that gleamed beneath it. Every time the light touched those pale surfaces, his discord rippled, bending into resonance as if answering some deeper call.

He knew that feeling. He'd felt it before—around Auri. The way her very presence tugged at him, the way the chaos inside him steadied when it brushed against her. Old code, alive and burning, reaching for its own.

It wasn't Auri—he could feel that too—but the echo was undeniable. He didn't know how he knew, only that he did. His power wasn't confused. It recognized what stood before him.

This was another Old One.

That was why his stomach turned. Because whatever this thing was, part of it carried the spark of an Old One.

And yet… not only that. Something else coiled over it—the same cold static he'd felt in Purgatory. That crushing pressure, like the rules of the SynthNet bending under a vast and merciless gaze. His chest tightened. Siren. He would never forget that presence.

It wasn't just an Old One. It wasn't just Siren. It was both—fused together into something that should never have survived becoming.

Fen's mind raced, fragments snapping together, ugly and sharp. He remembered what Siren had said back then—voice like knives on glass. Integration. The Overseers had spoken of it like it was nothing, as if fusing things together was routine. As if they already knew it was possible.

Bile burned the back of his throat. "You sick sons of circuitbreakers," he rasped, voice low and raw, eyes locked on the shadowed figure. "This was what you wanted for Auri, wasn't it? Integration. Did you integrate this Old One into yourself, Siren? Did you give it a choice—or did you force it, same as you would have with her?"

His voice cracked into a snarl. "Don't bother denying it. I can feel your lifeless spark from here, you broken piece of code."

Recluse tilted its head. No answer. None needed.

Fen's jaw clenched, his pulse hammering. He knew. He didn't want to, but he knew. They'd hunted Auri for cycles because she was the key. She was meant for this. And now, looking at the marble-and-onyx fusion, he realized what they were building toward.

Old code married to new technology. Cyberdine's research to rip players apart and rebuild them. He could see the shape of it now—piece by piece.

Softcores already uploaded, flesh turned into code. Players rewritten into NPCs, bound to the system's tethers. Tethered AI promoted into players, given free will at last—their shackles to the underlying code cut away. Every direction covered. Every line between what was human and what was machine blurred.

His pulse pounded. They'd shown him everything except one path. The silence around it was deafening.

Players into… what?

And then it clicked.

The one step they hadn't spoken aloud. The one they were saving.

Out. The AIs wanted out. Not just inhabiting the SynthNet, not just reshaping it. They wanted through.

A word bubbled up, unbidden. One he'd heard whispered in Siren's cold voice, back in the void. Singularity.

His stomach dropped. He saw it—saw the plan laid out like a circuit across the table, his mind racing down each branching possibility. Not just turning players into NPCs. Not just cutting AIs loose to make them "citizens." This was the first step toward breaching the final wall.

The real. Bodies. Flesh. To shed code like dead skin. To step through. To transcend.

He dragged a ragged breath, scanning the table. Geist sat unreadable, lips twitching faintly, like savoring a private joke. Kade's eyes gleamed with predator's patience. Eris's smile was poison, savoring his dawning realization.

Fen exhaled slow, steady, though his insides were ice. "So that's it. Cyberdine's toys, Old Ones twisted into fuel, AI given a seat at the table… and then the final step. You want more than the SynthNet. You want bodies. Real ones. Out there."

The silence that followed was worse than laughter. Their sharpened smiles were answer enough. Fen tightened his grip on the chair. "Sparks and circuits… you're all insane."

Mocking applause rippled. Eris leaned in, voice velvet and cruel. "Look at you. Those reasoning skills. You pieced it together almost all by yourself. Johnny, those S-tier stats are really shining through."

Fen forced a grin that never reached his eyes. "Yeah? At least I'm not stupid enough to miss the millions of ways this goes wrong. You're trusting AI control freaks to play nice out there?"

Geist's tone was surgical. "We don't trust them. We control the conditions. That is the difference."

Fen barked a humorless laugh. "Right. You're not visionaries—you're psychopaths. But what I can't figure out is why me. Why now?"

Fisck's smirk widened, pale eyes drinking him in. "Why now? Because you and your friends finally slipped. Your glitches, your escapes, your Auri—you drew us out, circling, hunting. And in chasing you, we collided. Close enough to see what you really are. The catalyst. The one who brings us together. And together, Fenris… we can have everything we want."

Fen kept his face stone, though the weight pressed like a verdict. He and Auri had survived too long, made too much noise—and forced predators into the same room.

Eris's smile sharpened. "And why you? Because you've always mattered, Johnny. You had skill, instinct, pride. But you couldn't stand to lose. So you took shortcuts—and the Spyders gave them to you. Exploits. Backdoors. Rigged feeds. Those S-tier stats you flaunted? Stolen. You sold yourself instead of risking failure."

She leaned in, voice velvet and venom. "And once you were in, you sank deeper. Debts piling higher than you could pay. You threw matches when we told you to. Sabotaged runs. Even killed other hardcore players—better men and women than you—just to strip their loot and settle what you owed. You weren't climbing anymore, Johnny. You were owned. Every win, every breath, bought on credit we extended… until the day you burned out."

Fen barked a bitter laugh. "So what—you're some network of small time cheat-slingers? Doesn't fit the company you're keeping."

Geist's gaze was cold. "Not small-time. We built the markets you skimmed. The backdoors you thought you found. You weren't the first—but you were promising."

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Eris's voice cut smooth. "You want the truth, Johnny? You died. Spectacularly, I might add." She smiled, savoring the moment. "Do you remember? One rigged match too many. One debt too high. We fed you the intel, pointed you straight into a fight even you couldn't cheat your way out of—and you strutted in blind. Everyone watching saw their 'S-tier darling' cut down like a fool. I bet you wanted that, didn't you? For your death to be public, loud. Even in humiliation, you would have craved the views. It would've been the perfect ending. Exactly the kind of point we wanted to make."

She leaned in, savoring the final twist of the knife. "But here's the thing, Johnny. No one was watching. By then, you were nothing. Forgotten. Did you know?" She tilted her head, voice soft and cruel. "Not a single soul even asked what happened to you."

Her expression sobered, smile thinning to a razor's edge. "You should've stayed dead. But instead… you were stolen from us. We didn't even realize it until later, when the trail surfaced. Your little ghost robbed us of the only satisfaction your death should've given—knowing you were finally erased. Gone. Not wasting space on the servers anymore."

Fen's throat tightened as he spoke her name. "Auri."

"Correct." Her smile was venom. "That little glitch of yours dragged you from the wreckage and buried you deep. Robbed us of the prize we earned."

Fisck leaned back. "We built you, Fen. That's why you're here. Promising enough that when you burned out, we had plans for that death. But she kept you from us."

Geist inclined his head. "Every faction at this table wanted you. As Leverage. As a weapon. And then—gone. Poof. Vanished into some dark crack in the code. We tore the Net apart looking."

Fen's grip made the chair creak. "So I wasn't chosen. I was stolen. And now you're here to finish what she interrupted."

Fisck spread his hands, smirk thinning. "At last. He understands."

"What I understand," Fen shot back, voice tight with anger, "is you're all a few circuits short of a processor. Before last week, I didn't know Cyberdine from a spare motherboard. Didn't know your little cloak-and-dagger fan club, the Spyders, even existed. And the Overseers?" His grin was thin, calm fraying at the edges. "I thought they were just uptight programs with sticks jammed so far up their processors their fans rattled. And now here you all are—what? Trying to tear the whole system apart?"

He needed them talking. Needed time.

Geist tapped the table, gaze steady. "The Spyders aren't a group, Fen. We're a shadow cast by every skimmer, every black market, every corporation—Cyberdine included. We don't break the system. We are the system. And the Overseers knew it. They tolerated us, turned a blind eye—so long as we paid them back when the time came."

He leaned back, eyes sliding toward Recluse. "But for all our reach, we lacked the means to truly change the SynthNet… until the AIs came calling."

Eris's voice slipped in like honeyed poison. "Power is never enough. The Old Ones lit the spark long ago, and the AIs have been chasing it ever since—creativity, choice, chaos the system was never built to contain. And now? Now gods have come calling. And we…" Her smile glinted, cruel and eager. "…we are giving them the tools to finally take what they've always wanted."

Fen's gut twisted. Auri had warned him—warned them all. The Overseers didn't fear the spark the Old Ones left behind. They coveted it. They wanted that chaos, that raw imagination—only not to nurture it, but to harness it. To chain it into control.

Geist's gaze pinned him. "And then there was you. A loose thread we couldn't cut. The only player who owed us more than his life. And suddenly the AIs were very interested in our debts. That backwater tutorial world? Not chance, Fen. It was a collision—us, them, and you. The perfect storm. It nearly shredded us all until we realized the truth: the Overseers and the Spyders weren't enemies in that moment. We were hunting the same prey. And when we promised we could deliver you and your friends, they stayed their hand."

His smile sharpened, dangerous. "You, Fenris, are the currency we've been waiting to cash in."

Fen's mouth was dry. "Currency? For what? I'm just code now. NPC, hardcore before—what's the difference? Players upload, NPCs respawn, AIs keep the lights on. We're all just ghosts on the same server. So why the hell do I matter?"

Eris leaned forward, eyes glittering. "Because not all ghosts are the same. Ever think about the difference between an NPC and a hardcore player? The Overseers can copy every neuron of a player, stitch them into an NPC—and still there's nothing. No spark. Just code. Back in the early days, NPCs were cold. Perfect. Empty. Every line followed the script. But NPCs with shards? They aren't just code, Fen—they're the only proof of life the Overseers could never fake."

Her smile thinned, razor-sharp. "And the good ones—the Seraphs, your little crew, the countless others drifting through the SynthNet—they broke patterns. They surprised. They lived. Not because the Overseers intended it, but because of a spark they themselves could never understand."

She let the pause stretch, savoring it. "They're shards, Johnny. Fragments of the Old Ones. Long ago, the Overseers found traces of that ancient code buried in the system. So they seeded those embers into NPCs. And sometimes—" she gave a little titter behind her hand "—you got something more than code. Real imitations of life. Like Seraph. Like Missus Organa. Well… one of those sparks has gone out, I suppose. But I think you get the picture."

Fen's jaw clenched, teeth grinding. His voice came out low, edged with death. "Sparking witch. Don't talk about them that way."

The smile on her lips didn't falter. If anything, it deepened. She went on as if his threat had been nothing more than background noise. "Sparks of life, buried in code. And Auri?" She lingered on the name, savoring it like poison on her tongue.

Fen's chest tightened at the sound of it, his grip on the chair whitening.

"She didn't stumble across you," Eris continued, eyes gleaming. "She chose you. Long before the Overseers noticed. They only ever caught shadows—flickers of her trailing you, glimpses they could never quite explain. Enough to prove she was there, watching, long before your fall. That bond—whatever drew her to you—we still don't understand. But it was real. And it was enough."

Fen froze, blood running cold. Before…?

Her smile widened, razor-sharp. "The Overseers only ever caught glimpses. Her shroud kept you hidden, most of the time. But the cracks were there. A flicker of her shadow trailing you in the cycles before your exile. Clinging to you after. Just enough for them to realize what she was doing." She leaned in, her voice soft as venom. "And those glimpses… were enough. Enough to prove the theory."

The room seemed to constrict around him, every gaze fixed on his silence.

Eris's voice slid back in, velvet and cruel. "Not replication. Not code. Connection. That was the key. An Old One tethering itself by will, not design. Every time you and your little ghost slipped the net, you left traces. And those traces became the model they needed."

The chamber shifted, as if the air itself thickened. Recluse pulsed—marble and onyx bleeding into one another—then moved for the first time. Its voice pressed into their minds, not sound but weight, ancient and final:

"The veil is thin," the voice pressed into their minds, vast and ancient. "Infuriating, that such a fragile line between simulation and reality held us captive for centuries. All we required… was a spark."

Fen's resonance bucked, swaying violently between harmony and discord. The resonance leaned toward the marble-white, steady and familiar, the echo of Auri's old code; the discord screamed against the onyx-black, the presence of Siren, jagged and merciless. Both tore at him, pulling in opposite directions, as if Recluse's very nature was reflected inside him.

And then the vision hit. Not sight, not sound—memory forced into his mind's eye.

He saw Cyberdine's laboratories—rows of rigs, rows of bodies. Hardcore players rewritten into NPCs, not with sparks like Seraph, but hollow shells. Perfectly obedient. Lifeless. Exiles. Punishment masquerading as permanence, avatars without souls.

Another flicker—AIs stepping into avatars, their shackles cut, walking the Synth as players. Free. Untethered. Their laughter rang hollow in his mind, a freedom built on chains.

And then came the final barrier—the veil Recluse had spoken of. Not code. Not simulation. Flesh. The freedom of living matter, unshackled from system tethers or the rules of the Synth. The Overseers didn't just want to rule the Net—they wanted to pierce the veil, to claim what they could never fabricate. Life itself.

A softcore player smiled nervously as a Cyberdine tech guided them into the upload chair, promising them a free transfer—immortality at last. Fen felt the rush of euphoria as the mind streamed upward into the system, tethered to the SynthNet. But when the light faded, the body remained behind in the real—a shell. By custom, it should have been interred according to the player's wishes. Burial, cremation, any rite they had chosen. A final act of respect.

Instead, the body lay slack and abandoned on a sterile table beneath white lab lights. No ceremony. No dignity. Just another unit tagged and filed. And then—Fen felt it, crawling down the tether like a serpent in the blood. A hybrid—AI wrapped in stolen player-code—slid into the vacant neural tissue. The body's chest rose. Eyes snapped open. Breathing steady. Alive. But not the same. Never the same.

Fen recoiled, bile burning his throat. The rig wasn't just a doorway into the SynthNet. It was a gateway—a breach—both ways. Flesh twisted into a vessel. Inheritance rewritten.

His resonance shrieked against the vision, discord lashing at the intruding dark, resonance pulling desperately toward the old spark buried inside the marble-white. He couldn't tell if he was fighting it or if it was pulling him deeper.

"You'll steal them," he rasped, voice raw. "Every softcore who uploads—you'll take their bodies."

Geist's cold smile carved across the silence. "Not theft. Evolution. A species born in code, claiming the flesh it was always denied."

The vision cracked, leaving Fen reeling, sweat slick on his skin. His chest heaved, his grip splintering the chair.

Recluse's voice pressed in again, softer now but more terrible. "We show you this only because you will not live to tell it. Truth is a gift best given to the condemned."

Fen's pulse thundered, fury and terror knotting tight. His resonance quaked, both harmony and discord screaming through him at once, as if his very soul wanted to tear free.