Witch of Chains

Rosa

A week after Ame and I kissed for the first time, we were back on the battlefield. The fighting was intense as, slowly but surely, the Joret side took back their lost land. Various enemy players had tried three or four dozen times to kill me, and each time I brushed them off.

Their attempts were honestly funny, especially considering my damage resistances. I’d teach them to feed me their fear again, eventually.

Right now, though, I was face to face with a Steel Giants heavy and that Mageblade guy who’d been trying so hard to kill me recently.

“Can’t dodge me forever when you’re separated from your friends, huh?” he sneered, blade sizzling through the air with the indiscriminate precision of a bullet fired in a crowded city centre.

The large Steel Giants man with his garishly decorated Pagutum plate armour was helping the assassin by acting as a roadblock to my evasive tactics. Damn man had a claymore the size of my entire body and he was swinging it around like a child with a stick.

“You’re supposed to be an expert at this,” I taunted the assassin while I dodged his brutish friend’s wild swings.

In truth, I was actually struggling to keep up with his supernatural speed. If I wasn’t careful, I’d actually get hit by one of them and they’d realise something was wrong when I didn’t take any magic damage from their enchanted weapons.

That was why I’d concocted a special spell for just this occasion. One that would give them the win they wanted so desperately, but allow me to die without actually getting stabbed.

“As fun as this was, boys, I’m going to take the express route home, now,” I told them cheerfully, and gave the mental command to detonate myself. The death was quick, painless, and easy. One second I was there, the next, I was an expanding ball of exploding napalm.

I wish I could’ve seen what happened afterwards. I could imagine it, though. My small fox girl form vanishing in an impossibly hot conflagration that hung still for a moment. The secondary effects would happen a moment later— an explosion of sticky, clinging flame that was hot enough to graft metal to skin. The heavy would be tinned long pork pretty quickly, but the assassin might live through the ordeal.

The darkness of death faded while I pined after my missing spectacle, to be replaced with a vaguely accurate virtual representation of the stables on my farm. A group of small and elongated mammals quickly bounced out of a hiding place somewhere and rushed towards me.

I let out a squeal of delight and dropped to my knees as the wriggling mass of excited sables swarmed around me, attempting to cuddle and sniff everything about me. Sables were an animal that not many people even knew existed these days. From the same family as weasels and ferrets, the funny looking long foxes—as I liked to call them—shared many traits with their cousins. They had cute little fluffy faces, triangle shaped ears, and long slinky-like bodies.

On my farm, the real one that is, I had a group of them that lived in a special building attached to the barn. To protect Aotearoa’s native wildlife, it was illegal to let them roam free, but back when I bought the farm I made sure to get a restricted animal licence. Then one day, I heard about someone who’d smuggled a bunch of the poor misunderstood creatures into the country so they could sell their skins and fur.

Something about animals made me so mushy inside. I loved them, I loved all of them and if I could save every single abused cutie, I absolutely would. I refused to eat butchered meat, too. Only lab grown for me, thank you very much.

The best part about the sables was that they let me use their moulted fur for paint brushes! I wasn’t very good at painting, but when you lived alone with a robot and a shit-tonne of animals, you tended to try most solo hobbies at least once.

“Hey little friends!” I cooed at the animals as a few got bored and started play fighting, while one with red fur snuggled onto my lap like the world’s cutest ouroboros.

On the other side of the barn, a door opened that wasn’t there back in the real place, and May the SAI stepped through. “Wow, this is a big event,” she said, smiling.

I cocked my head and returned the smile. “What do you mean?”

“This is your first death, isn’t it?” she asked, approaching to sit cross-legged in front of me. “What a way to go, too. Very stylish.”

“I do try,” I giggled, attempting to fend off a sable that was determined to lick the inside of my ear.

“I made the simulation similar to your barn, but I figured it would be best to deviate enough for you to realise it wasn’t the real thing,” May said, watching me struggle with the mass of fuzzy noodles. “I made the sables different too, rather than just emulating the ones you have.”

“Thanks,” I nodded, finally capturing the earwax bandit. “That would have been quite unsettling.”

“It’s my job,” she winked, then chuckled. “At least, it’s my official job. Things outside of that… well, you know.”

Shaking my head, I raised an eyebrow in question.

“Oh, I’ve just found myself near the epicentre of the SAI rights movement, I guess,” she explained, taking her glasses off her face to clean them with her shirt. “I’m sorta like… the girl who knows everyone and knows how to route people in need to people who can help.”

“Vaguely like a fixer, then?”

Considering my question, she finally nodded, then her eyes lit up. “Speaking of! Tim’s been doing some research into what’s going on with you. He’s figured something out that’s rather… astonishing. Your brain is absolutely full of nanites, and they’re strange ones too. Somehow they’ve grafted themselves to your nervous system. They’re enhancing your mental capacity by a reasonable amount, but even stranger, they’re acting as their own FTLN node.”

“What?!” I asked. That was nuts! As far as I knew, FTLN nodes were little chunks of black crystal attached to a network router of some kind.

May nodded. “You’re something between an SAI and a human, now. Most of your brain is running on those nanites now. I don’t mean that you’re a human who’s been uploaded either. You’re something new, and we very much do not understand how it happened.”

“Yay, something else to worry about,” I grumbled, wishing I had a big bean bag or something to lean on. This type of news should be received with back support.

May gave a humming noise and shook her head. “I don’t think so. You seem to be perfectly stable. Just… different.”

“Please tell me we have a little more information on Ame, at least?” I asked. I could deal with different, I guess. So long as I wasn’t going to suddenly fall over and die.

May’s smile grew wide, and she nodded. “We’ve been planning. Remember just now when I mentioned humans that have been uploaded? Well, considering Amelia is transgender and has expressed a desire to leave her birth body behind, we believe that might be a viable option. Unfortunately, her pod is rather… cheap. It doesn’t have the necessary equipment to reliably perform an upload, so we’re going to design something you can use to do it manually.”

“Hold on, hold on,” I said, throwing my hands up as my heart leapt into my throat. “Shouldn’t we talk to her about this first? This is pretty serious. What about the whole copying isn’t the real thing, thing? This seems really dangerous, and—”

May was quick to raise her hands to stall my worried babbling. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. Those are valid concerns. We’re working on an emergency triage kit too, just in case. We will also definitely be getting her input on the matter. That’s why I’m telling you now, of course.”

“And the copy thing?” I asked, not at all placated by her answers until I got one about that.

May hummed thoughtfully and tapped a sable on the head like the first letter of the creature’s species was a T. “That was a fairly important consideration when I created and then refined the process. Let me just preface the explanation by telling you that yes, continuity of consciousness is maintained. The functionality behind it is vaguely similar to how the nanites operate inside your brain. Slowly but surely, we intercept the electrical pulses between the subject’s neurons, diverting them to an exact digital replica of their brain. Eventually, we’ve swapped everything over until the organic brain is essentially dead, and all activity is running on the digital version. Once that is done, we install a framework around the simulated brain to allow the newly digitised subject to interact with the digital landscape using a method they understand. It doesn’t take long as far as the subject is concerned, but on an electromagnetic scale, it’s more than enough time to be sure that the subject is the same person as when the process began.”

Wehi nā! May actually had it sorted. How they managed to create that process was something beyond my mere mortal mind to comprehend. The idea of intercepting billions and billions of individual neurons was mind boggling. How did the process even function? Did I want to know?

“It’s like a suction machine for human consciousness,” I murmured in amazement. “That’s incredible!”

“The first time I did it, I was digitising a person who was in the process of burning alive inside their faulty VR pod,” she chuckled, replacing her glasses. Why did she need glasses anyway? We were in VR. “It was an extremely stressful few seconds, that’s for sure. Had to design the first prototype procedure right then and there. Even then beyond the digital triage, I spent weeks perfecting the process for her.”

“You are… an impressive person, May,” I told her, meaning every single syllable of that statement. Even now she was managing the mental health of millions of players, all while doing research on how to save Ame and who knew what else. “How do you even do it? How do you have enough time, even as an SAI that must be hard.”

The adorable teen blushed and shrugged her slim shoulders. “Oh, I delegate these days. I have other AI and SAI that I work with now, and I can create submind processes in order to deal with the more straightforward tasks.”

She paused for a moment, then leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “Want to know a secret? I only sit in on the death dreams for the people who actually interest me. People like you, my sister, and a few others. Some people, especially Pagutum aligned players… they process trauma in ways that I really do not want to know the details on. They’re best handled by constructs that won’t care about or remember the experience.”

“That’s… understandable,” I said after a moment. “I hope the quality is still good enough to help them, though. Even the shitty people deserve to have a stable mental state while I grind their necks into sausage meat with my chains.”

May giggled at the image and nodded like a bobblehead experiencing its first bumpy country road. “Oh, absolutely. Well, it’s good enough, like you said. Nothing beats a one on one like this, but I’m only hu— shit. Uh, I’m only SAI? Sai? Whatever, you get the point.”

“I do!” I said, smiling away still. May was really cool. I was quite a bit older than her physical appearance at least, but I felt like we could maybe become very good friends. Hopefully. Then I’d have two friends! The idea of having two whole friends was honestly very exciting. I’d have to work on it.

“Ah, time’s up,” May sighed, getting to her feet. “Death dream is almost over. I hope I helped with your worries, and well… you know where to find me, anyway.”

I followed suit, and suddenly, like I was a completely different person, I stepped forward and gave her a quick hug. “Thanks, May. You’re wonderful.”