AIN SOPH, Part 1

by Paul Juser
artwork by Kip Ayers

Andy McCarthy programmed AIN SOPH to help people. He never intended any damage when he installed the program in the brain of a monster. Andy’s first video game, “Chainsaw Jack,” was called the sickest assault on sight, sound, and taste to hit the market in years. The survival-horror expansion to SpectraCom Video Art's popular Tactical Adventure Online system where players explored a growing world of fantasy role-playing. The games eponymous slaughter-machine stalked Player Characters across nine terrifying new environments on Grave Island.

If the games eponymous murder-maestro were not enough, a crashed Templar war-galley provided ghosts that attacked through earth, water, and walls, pulling players apart in a fashion more horrific than anywhere in TAO. Bloodfeast Die-Jest called Andy brilliant. Astro-Zombie E-Zine awarded Andy the coveted 5 skulls for the extreme dismemberment scenes. Braineater.com held a contest where players sent in their most gruesome screen-shot. The winner was a user named Queen Wasp, whose picture showed her elf priest being drawn, quartered, split, sliced, and shredded by a cloud of skeletal figures in flowing robes and rusty armor.

While not writing exciting new scenarios, game designers were required to work in the game, traveling the TAO world answering Terms of Service complaints and hunting mercenaries who recovered rare items to sell for real-world money. Though strictly forbidden in TAO TOS, many players would rather pay a MERC to raid a castle or cavern for desired equipment. Twenty dollars was a small price to pay for a battle axe that sent waves of fire, scorching enemies to cinder.

Moderators led parties of NPC White Knights to help enforce decisions. White Knights were the strong-arm of the Emperor, and even high-level PC's were unlikely to last long in combat against them. Andy was hunting a notorious MERC named Gollum the Goblin when he stumbled on his follow-up to "Chainsaw Jack."

Having built some of the fastest and most accurate AI in the game, Andy considered his real art to be sculpting landscape and terrain. He spent many late nights in his office shaping hills and fluffing forests, work that most designers leave for the interns. Andy had taken particular care shaping an ocean floor around Grave Island that most players would never see.

Frustrated in the search, Andy's character, Duke, relaxed with a swim. Purchasing WATER BREATH potions at a dockside item shop, Duke dove down to inspect how Grave Island had integrated with the existing terrain.

At the north tip, Andy discovered a new wall had been formed in a sheer valley, where a node created three different monsters per turn, or approximately four an hour. Two were twisted sharks that swam off and devoured any PC unlucky enough to come within range. The third was a ScornFish. While always spawning in the water, ScornFish were unable to swim, and could not escape the undersea valley.

The trapped ScornFish spawned at a rate of 1.25 per hour for a long time. Players call this regular phenomena “overpopulation,” where a new geographic abnormality causes monsters to accumulate unreasonably. Depending on how many monsters got stuck in a nook or cranny, a lucky PC was almost certain to level up when he found it. A dwarf from Senesal reached a level cap when a glitched node spawned too close to a river and washed an untold number of goblins to a space of dry land no bigger than single character. No one knew how many goblins the Berserker Dwarf slew with a single sword-thrust, but an email circulated that the offending designer had lost his job due to the error.

ScornFish were like lizardmen, big and ugly creatures that attacked with long, dragging arms , or bite with a shark-like mouth full of pointed teeth. In their natural state, ScornFish ambled toward the nearest beach to attack the first PC, NPC, or monster encountered. Most players looked down on ScornFish. While considerably tough, they were clumsy and easy to avoid, and yielded no items or XP worthy of the time spent in combat. However, if an army of this size were to reach a PC settlement, players would be hard pressed to drive the monsters back into the sea.

Leading this army would require an unprecedented commander. Andy designed Automated Intelligence Network Sophisticated Optical Parabolic Hyperbole for his Master’s Thesis. The startling upset of grades narrowly prevented him from being thrown off campus. AIN SOPH showed 85% accuracy for problem solving and leaps of logic, which Professor Habernacky called “miraculous.”

Using a formulated question, or even a jumble of words, AIN SOPH assembled a battery of data-bases allowing students to hear, see, and even feel their answers. The young, idealizing Andy had envisioned a future of realistic learning environments, where students could march at the side of Darius the Great, pilot a descent on the Moon, or be chased through the underbrush by a Deinonychus. Adult, career-oriented Andy shoved AIN SOPH in the brain of King Dagon, a visual homage to every giant lizard/fish/dinosaur to ever stomp across the silver screen.

King Dagon was so big that PC’s engaged in combat would never see more than 1/3rd of the monster, whose claws could sweep away an entire warband. It's razor-filled mouth could swallow a dragon and rider without chewing. No weapon or spell in the game did more than a single point of damage, and King Dagon rarely stood in place for more than one combat round. Even worse, King Dagon gave ScornFish the ability to swim. When the monster was complete, Andy plopped King Dagon in the ocean trench off Grave Island.

King Dagon’s first attack came Christmas morning, when the beast surged out of the ocean at Odessiya, a port city on the south shore of Grave Island. Most players were offline, busy unwrapping their “King Dagon” expansion packs, which unlocked a multi-angle video of the attack. Viewers could toggle through ten different perspectives of the event, which were posted to the game’s website as it happened. PC’s already logged into the system found themselves stars of a real-time war video, crushed to bloody spots under the feet of King Dagon, or torn limb from bloody limb by an insurmountable force of ScornFish.

As with all great writing, Andy McCarthy should have revised the mountain of code making King Dagon’s brain one last time. A line buried deep allowed the monster to access SpectraCom’s “Sephiroth” search engine. The command had existed before Andy even worked for the company, which was the main reason he forgot to turn it off. In a program meant for the education of school-children, Sephiroth had no equal. For a marauding monster bent on the destruction of everything in its path, this was a recipe for disaster. Unencumbered by transfer rates, King Dagon accumulated millions of gigs of information on every subject it encountered. Fighters, priests, dragons, trolls, land, sea, air, King Dagon became an expert on the world it inhabited.

In the mean time, King Dagon raged. Appearing no bigger than any other red dot on the OverWorld Map, the monster would burst from the depths to stomp ports, villages, cities, and most PC’s within. A horde of ScornFish were left to clean up the mess. Attacks happened on average of one per day. Forums and chatrooms were dedicated to the organized hunt and defense against the creature. Players struggled to predict where King Dagon would strike next. Unbeknownst to these players, and even to Andy McCarthy, King Dagon frequently ran web searches for its own name, allowing the monster to follow these same conversations. Slowly, King Dagon built a data base of information about itself. The Internet was developing self worth.

Gollum the Goblin followed these conversations as well. The bards sang that Gollum the Goblin could recover any item, and his services were in great demand. For $30, Gollum fought his way through the Tarnikesh jungles to find LORD ALTEMONT'S SCEPTER and resurrect a Night Elf thief slain when her player left the room without pausing. A fighter paid Gollum $50 to recover an ODIN SIGNET worn around the neck of the Magma Troll Litch in the Fire Caves of Magnasium. Gollum picked his way through the Ork Krags for a GOBLIN KING'S HORN, that he sold for $150 in an online auction. Gollum had even made his share of visits to Grave Island, recovering the rare Templar weapons and armor dropped when the ghosts were defeated.

Gollum the Goblin was played by Will Whatley, a computer tech at Dunwich Community College in the backwoods outside Boston. The secret to Gollum’s success was a bootlegged CTHULHU DAGGER from TAO’s predecessor, Fantasy Quest III, which had never been translated to English. The weapon could kill any monster in a single strike, and was the only way to slay the final boss, Apophys. Will had little trouble adapting the code from FQ3 to TAO, making Gollum the Goblin nearly unstoppable. Some weeks passed that Will's salary at DCC was a supplement to his TAO earnings.

Both Gollum and his bootlegged CTHULHU DAGGER existed only on Will’s personal computer, which had been masked, disguised, and rerouted so his location could only be narrowed to Dunwich campus. DCC refused to shut down their network without proper legal procedure. Short of finding Gollum the Goblin and “physically” killing the PC, moderators had almost no hope of ending the MERC’s career.

Was it chance or fate that brought Gollum the Goblin to the hands of Andy McCarthy and Duke at a dockside tavern in Corinth? Gollum was delivering an artifact known as LAPIS EXILIS that he took from a tribe of Fire Ogres in the Salamander Desert to the east. Will had been paid $30 to collect the item for a dwarf named Balin played by a girl named Lilly Kat. Will detected Duke and his White Knights approaching on the OverWorld, and was in the process of slipping out the back door.

King Dagon ruined everything. Just as Gollum the Goblin stepped into the back alley leading to the main road out of Corinth, King Dagon surged from the ocean, tossing aside three docks, toppling a dozen ships, permanently ending the lives of 42 PC’s, and flattening the sword shop next to the tavern. The alley filled with rubble, causing 74 points of damage to Gollum the Goblin, and cut off Will's escape route.

Andy McCarthy was as surprised as anyone to see King Dagon, but that wasn’t enough to waver from his prize. Being a designer to the game meant Duke could not find a death as permanent as that of other PC’s stomped to goo by King Dagon. Gollum the Goblin was a much more appetizing target.

DUKE: You are guilty of mercenary action, punishable by termination. Surrender peacefully.
GOLLUM THE GOBLIN: U gotta fight

White Knights were not impervious to the CTHULHU DAGGER. Will killed two before Gollum the Goblin was surrounded. Andy McCarthy and Duke stood back and watched as the most notorious MERC in the TAO world was cut down. All Gollum’s weapons and armor were left in a spinning backpack floating above the cobblestone.

Duke stepped forward to claim the CTHULHU DAGGER for himself. Unfortunately for Will, King Dagon turned back to the ocean and stomped Andy’s whole party to goo.

King Dagon ran “MERC” through the Sephiroth search engine. Then King Dagon searched “real-world money.” Then “Real World.” For the first time the monster came to understand the difference between what happened inside TAO, and its connection to everything else across the Internet. A subsequent search for “money” came up with practical personal finance advice, calculators and investing tips with business news, stock quotes, and financial market coverage, effectively showing the monster the heartbeat of this new-found “real-world.”

The average person could not use a simple web-search as a jumping-off point to hijack the global economy, but King Dagon was different. Being itself a computer program, the monster was able to follow other paths and avenues through the digital world and slide it’s tendrils into banks and financial institutions. Only a few hours were required before King Dagon was able to route all money in the “real-world” through TAO to a series of SpectraCom bank accounts.

The Internet learned greed.