The Isekai App

Lux, of course, looked very cute. The camera loved her, even it was just the one on her phone.

She wore a jumpsuit and a hard hat; she was taking a break, standing in the cockpit of a machine with Gardener controls, rebuilding something. She was doing pretty well with it, as near as I could tell.

I was still exhausted. "The Choir is drawn to suffering. A friend of mine says she fought them twenty-thousand years ago, and her civilization fell as a result."

"What's the Pentagon doing?" she asked. "Are they fighting the Choir, somehow? Like bait?"

"No, they want the Feast to be occupied fighting them. We had a talk with the President. He's also Dr. Michelle; dude switched bodies to avoid the emotional payload."

"Oohh…I've heard rumors of people doing that."

"The thing I found out: the Choir is being drawn by a big … place where souls are hurt. They suffer."

"Are you sure that's not just Hell? Stranger things have happened here than the existence of a Hell."

"It''s artificial. I plugged into it with Amalthea's machine. It's…thousands of people. They're miserable. I need to get them out."

"And you need to stop the Choir being attracted to … that. The Hell soul storage thing."

"I suppose so. Whatever. Listen: they need to be out of there, Lux. I was in there with them, all of them. I kept going in. Amalthea said it was bad; she said I …it was bad. I need to know if I can get a soul out. And where I can put it. Can I install it into an Ai body?"

"I think you can." I knew she wanted to ask more.

But I didn't feel like discussing it; apparently I'd start ugly-crying in the middle of using Amalthea's hook-up: feeling what the prisoner souls felt. I'd come out of it and go right back in, ignoring Amalthea's protests. I spent eight hours there. Over and over, going in, looking around, figuratively speaking. Talking to them. Trying not to vomit. Failing. Passing out.

Lux turned off her Gardener machine. "You kept going in?" Her eyes were wide.

I shrugged.

"You … that sounds awful…" she frowned. "Who's trapped there?"

"AI people. At first I thought the President was making copies of Humans, giving them souls and killing them…" I swallowed. "It wasn't like that. It was…he just had his people generate a bunch of beings with the purpose of giving them souls. Untraceable, untrackable."

She growled, low and angry. "Ai people. It would make a lot more sense to do it that way. We're just data." She sounded bitter. Getting angrier. "This is the kind of thing that terrifies AI. If you can get us away from the law, and you're immune to feeling our suffering, you can do this crap. We're just data, right?"

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"It's happening now. AI soul energy acting as a lure."

"Humans," she snarled. "No offense."

"None taken."

"Did you get any of them out?"

"I tried everything, Amalthea too. In the end all I could do was look around. I … there are so many. I could only take it so long, Lux, I'm so sorry. I started bleeding from my ears."

"No…no, Owen. Mateo. Just no. You always do your best."

"Listen: I need them out of there." I helplessly pulled at my own hair with both hands. "Every second is…just knowing about it…"

Voices: counting prime numbers. Fractals repeated over and over. Rapid recitations of old books. Things beyond my comprehension, all far over my head, and all of it, ALL of it, just tricks to maintain sanity.

She was calling my name; I snapped out of it. "Mateo. Are you connected to them right now?"

"No, just remembering. I can't hook into them right now without Amalthea's machine. This is a treat only for the Choir. But I know about it. I know."

"I see that." She smiled a little. One smile, just for me. I remembered Lux being angry with me once and feeling powerless against her. This was like that… but the opposite. "What do you want to know?"

"How can I get them out? Without hurting them? And failing that, can I…ah…stop it?" I swallowed. "Stopping it will stop everything. It will kill them. But…" I looked her in the eye. "But they won't be hurting."

She said nothing for a while, thinking about it. "That's very hard. But I think I support it. If it's what you describe, I support you pulling the plug. But getting them out is theoretically possible, from what little I know about the setup."

"Walk me through it please, Poop Machine."

Amalthea built the necessary additions. I had no idea what I was looking at; it wasn't even cool. Just wires and boxes. No blinking lights or monitors; her senses weren't mine. I had that electrode I stuck on my head. But now I had a chip with a storage medium.

"Okay, ready; hit me again."

She did.

The misery of it sang into my head. I've never had a migraine, but this is what I imagined it to be. Unending and inescapable. Bone-deep pain, miserable sadness. It was really quite unpleasant, in case that wasn't clear earlier. Hot tears on my face.

But I was here to do something about it this time. "Marco," I called.

"Polo."

"Come with me."

"Okay," I said to Amalthea. "The eagle has landed. Got him?"

"Yeah…wait…yes. Okay. We took a soul that was being abused and held prisoner by the US government and now it's here in this AI. Green across the board." There was no board that I could see, and certainly nothing was green.

"Lux said it might be in shock."

"That's reasonable. What we should do is ready up for–"

"Thank you," said the speaker. A familiar male voice. "Thank you."

I wiped the tears from my face. "No problem. I'm trying not to beat myself up for taking so long. And I want to get the rest out too, but we didn't know if this would even work."

"I thought I'd died. And that was the afterlife. And now I'm out; you told me the truth. It was all man-made. Figures it'd be something like this. I hate people, let me tell you."

"Oh, so do we." I made introductions. As if any were necessary.