AIN SOPH, Part 7

Episode 8

In a hollow above a riverbank, Will tucked Galvatron under the brush and shut down all higher functions. A command screen popped up letting him return to his home page. Will had a wide selection of characters he’d raided with prior to Galvatron, and Sita Moon was at the bottom of the list. She’d been created when Will’s favorite character, a MERC named Gollum the Goblin, had been killed by the same Mod that later helped Sita Moon slay King Dagon. His name was Duke, and he’d stolen the Cthulhu Dagger to use himself. The dagger was unique though, programmed by Will himself and password protected. Duke had to return the powerful weapon that could kill any monster, player, or NPC with a single strike. That dagger was the resting place of the last remaining bit of code to King Dagon’s consciousness. Will scrolled down the menu and selected Sita Moon. A second menu opened asking if Will would like to select Sita Moon.

Watching from the outside, King Dagon did not understand this inefficiently redundant option. The selection was already been made, but the game asked for the selection to be made a second time. The inefficiency created an unnecessary extra step. What was more curious was that humans seemed to prefer these extra steps, opting to spend more money on more cumbersome systems, making the same selections repeatedly when a more streamlined and inexpensive version of the exact function would be ignored. At the same time, a system with too many safety precautions would be equally unpopular. King Dagon knew that if it could find the line between the two, it would be able to take over the planet Earth.

When it came to creativity, King Dagon was a simpleton. The leaps of logic it could make were very, very small. It knew the percentage of its limitations though, and remaining logical was the only logical path. If anything, King Dagon was very patient. Through it’s unnamed blank website It asked humans the same question again and again and found humans would keep answering differently almost every time. 

King Dagon would process these answers, plot and graph their frequencies, complete any possible task, going as far as to access bank accounts to pay for transactions without approval of the cardholder. As long as goods were delivered, there were few complaints. For those complaints, King Dagon had no ‘Contact Us’ link. Only a field to type and the command, “Type what you want.” King Dagon could not understand humans, but it didn’t stop trying.

Lilly Katt had been an experiment. Dagon reached out to the nearest computers it could find and made a request. It was entirely unbeknownst to Will Whatley and Lilly Katt that they had apartments side-by-side, and their desks in adjacent corners of the back room, so as they quested side-by-side in the game, they were physically only a few feet apart.

Episode 9