The infinity dungeon 268

Chapter 268

Connecting the spiral at the center of the inner space with the Origin system had been the missing piece to unlocking its full potential. Michael marveled at the thick lines of white data disappearing into the event horizon, then looked at all the other lines, straight and angular, half circles and orbit-like ellipses. The new lines were all free of taint, reducing its overall impact to nothing more than an afterthought and a warning not to abuse the dungeon mechanics again.

In the distance, Icarus’s planetoid orbited the black hole. It was surrounded by so many data lines it was almost impossible to see, if not for the fact that the lines did not hinder Michael’s sight at all, being a part of him. Here and there, he recognized growing structures where the data lines had become datascript, creating immensely powerful arrays.

It brought a smile to his face. It was the testament of the fact that Icarus could now do magic, drawing upon a well of talent that was no longer just Michael’s own. Much in the same way Michael could augment his mind with logic, numbers and data, drawing upon skills that were once Icarus’s and were now shared.

He could even split himself into threads, but just like Icarus refused to manifest more than one body, he felt uncomfortable splitting his mind into parallel streams of thought. 

Not just uncomfortable. The idea was downright scary.

He stayed away from it. It did not elicit the same panic space once did for him, but it felt uncomfortable enough to give him the shivers. Unlike with space–a fear he had now conquered–the thought about splitting himself felt like a disease, a cancer that could seize his mind and slowly corrupt him should he ever falter and give in to temptation. It felt like a road that, once traveled, could not be returned from. A way to change, and forever, in a way even more radical than even fusing with a superintelligent AI like Icarus. Because despite the fusion, they were one but also two, while with the splitting of himself… who knew?

Icarus appeared before him. He had elven ears and feminine features. Big green eyes, intelligent and curious, were framed by long hair like threads of gold.

“Hey man, what’s up?” Michael asked, noticing the strange expression in Icarus’s eyes.

“Hey,” he said. “I had time to think about… things, yesterday. I know you have been calling me a he all this time for ease of, well, conversation. I don’t think it fits me anymore, though.”

“Okay,” Michael said. He took Icarus’s hand in his, seeing that it was just roaming around as if searching for something. 

Icarus smiled. “Thank you, Michael.”

“For what?”

“For making it so easy to be around you. For being so understanding and accepting of me.”

He squeezed but said nothing for a while. The light of the black hole’s accretion disk danced and moved, purples and oranges. “Would you be more comfortable if I called you with feminine pronouns?” he asked eventually.

“I don’t know…” Icarus said. “You know I’m a kind of shapeshifter, changing my looks all the time, right? After yesterday, I thought about it long and hard. About who I am, who I want to be. I looked at myself from a million different points of view, from all possible angles. I tried to change parts of myself, anything, to see how I felt. I discovered a lot about myself. I can change many things and be okay with them, and one day I might decide to look a certain day because my whims take me there, and another I would look completely different.”

“Okay,” Michael said. He saw the hesitation in Icarus’s face, and knew that there was more. “You know I accept you for you. Not because of your looks or pronouns. You’re an AI with a physical body, who cares about norms and whatnot!”

Icarus moved closer to him, and the two shared a long embrace. “You’re more than I deserve…” 

Michael was about to interrupt when Icarus stopped him.

“You are my strength, Michael. My anchor. You make me feel real. You gave me so much. You shared all of yourself with me. I… in my experiments, I found some things that I did not want to change about myself. What you see now, is me. Neither male nor female.”

Icarus moved away to allow Michael to really look at… them. Yes, it felt like the right pronoun. They were taking the shape of a young elf, shorter than Michael by a good margin, with a slim athletic body and soft skin. They were still wearing their usual thigh-highs, and an oversized hoodie that would hide their body if not for the fact that Michael could see everything in the inner space, and Icarus knew it. Their hair was gold, their eyes emeralds, and their ears long and pointy, the tips blushing red.

Michael moved closer again, and took Icarus’s hand in his again. “Well, my other half. You’re still my weird, you know that right?”

“Of course I know!” they said, and laughed.

“Good,” Michael said. “And, since you are a gestalt consciousness composed of billions of parallel threads all coming together into a sense of self, calling you by they/them pronouns seems rather apt.”

“Silly,” Icarus said, leaning into his shoulder.

They shared the moment together, after which Michael finally got up from the platform of clouds that one of the two–he couldn’t recall who–had conjured. Icarus complained about having to get up, but Michael flicked their nose.

“Come on,” he said, offering a hand. “We wasted enough time. God knows Travis is eating his hands waiting for us to work on the Origin system.”

Icarus nodded, stretching and getting up. A flight of fancy made them decide to change their looks, and wings sprouted from their back while cat ears appeared on their head, which gained some hints of purple. Their face, like they had said, did not change, nor did their body. Their clothes did, transitioning from a hoodie to obscenely revealing leather, which Michael tried his best not to get distracted by.

“Ready,” they said. “Let’s get to work.

***

The Origin system grew quickly. Under the careful watch of Icarus and Michael, they nurtured its growth, allowing it to expand and colonize all the space it had available inside the volume of the Aura Accelerator Ring.

The thick lines plunging into the spiral black hole became even thicker, pulsing with power. Up above, they connected directly with the ring and the shield generator, carrying obscene amounts of mana up and down their length to power the calculations necessary to run the system. Some of them even disappeared into the mists of chaos beyond the rings, and not even Michael knew where they went or what they did.

With each iteration and improvement, the system became less and less a thing, and more a part of the whole that was the Inner Space–the substrate upon which the strange dual existence of Icarus and Michael was built. 

They were all the same thing.

“Well,” Michael said. “We lost track of time again.”

“Nobody bothered us from the outside, though,” Icarus replied. “I made sure of it.”

Indeed, while they had worked in the inner space, a myriad other Icarus threads had kept things on Earth up and running smoothly. 

“I think it’s more than enough for now. We reached the limits of what the inner space can currently support.”

Icarus agreed, then pouted. “Will you leave now? I don’t want you to leave.”

Michael patted them on the head. He found their clinginess cute, but he had to go. “I’ll return tonight, don’t worry.”

In the outside world, he searched for Travis and found him in Australia, at Site 01. The place looked unrecognizable already, barely a few days after they had secured it.

“You sure never slow down, do you?” 

Travis grumbled. “I cannot afford to. Did you read the reports I gave you?”

“Ah yes, that stuff. I skimmed over it while I worked with Icarus on the Origin system. Something about devils here and there, the church and the mafia, right?”

Travis was not amused. “Michael.”

“I know. But that’s what you and David are here for, isn't it?”

“I suppose it is. What about the Origin system? Are you done upgrading it? I need to roll it out to all of our operators, soon. It’s the only weapon we have against Faith. And now the… devils…”

Michael laughed. “Giving you a headache, are they not?”

“You have no idea,” Travis said. “Why the fuck would the christian church be trying to summon devils? No, don’t answer. I have at least five different theories, and Icarus has many more than that, and none of them are of the kind that lets me sleep at night.”

“Good thing you don’t need to!” Michael said, slamming his hand into the man’s shoulder. Travis, thanks to his two gold cards, barely flinched. “As for the Origin system, I'm getting there but I’m not done. The road is still long. But, I think you are going to like this first round of upgrades. I’ll roll it out to you first, then to the others.”

With a snap of his fingers, power flowed toward Travis. It entered the deepest parts of him, swirling around the cards but not touching them, instead settling into something that could be described as a sort of Skill Sanctum the system created whenever it did not find one already present. It didn't matter what magic the person using the system wielded, the system would adapt. Travis, in particular, could use both his cards and the Origin system at will without the two interfering with each other.

“Try to channel the spiral,” Michael said.

Travis did so. He struggled for a second, then a bright spiral glyph began to glow above his head. In his vision, he could see that he had just activated a skill with no level.

“It shows up as a skill of Unique rarity, to avoid misunderstandings. Try to use it now.”

Travis’s aura suddenly changed. When Michael manifested a fireball, and threw it at him, the spell slowly unraveled and dissipated into motes of mana, which were then funneled into the spiral.

“It works as a sort of nullification field around the user, bolstering and boosting the natural aura,” Michael explained. “I’m only giving this ability to trusted operators. The others will get the basic version, which only nullifies Faith.”

“This is good stuff, Michael. I can feel the energy being drained out of the world, disappearing somewhere.”

“It’s all funneled back to me. A portion of it goes into the spiral, a part into the system, a big chunk is just lost in the process, the rest becomes coins in a data room. In the future, this will be the basis of a level system, but I’m still missing a key ingredient. Okay, now try to navigate the menus. Do you see the classes?”

“I do,” Travis said. “Warrior and Caster. What do they do?”

“You are seeing the two basic experimental classes Icarus and I created. I remembered you saying you wanted to add some limits to the system, so I came up with this. Anyone not given access to the full Origin system will have to choose a class. The class will limit their growth. For now, since there are no stats or levels, it only limits the skills they get access to. Later, it will be more comprehensive.”

“I can also see an inventory,” Travis said.

“It’s in beta. I need to work on the [Ghost Market] skill before I roll that feature out to everyone. The plan is to use the data rooms in my inner space as storage, with the Origin system taking things in and out of them.”

“And Unity corporation gains a shared storage space,” Travis's eyes lit up.

“Better than that,” Michael said. “Icarus and I gain access to anything people put in their inventories with them none the wiser.”

“Unless you steal from them.”

“Fair point.”

“Was Icarus the one who suggested this last feature? He seems like one who would want to snoop inside people’s inventories.”

“They,” Michael corrected Travis. “And yes, they did.”

He recalled the conversation. Icarus had introduced the idea with one of their signature angelic smiles, disarming Michael completely. It had not helped that they were laying in bed together, watching the lines of the system and the colorful show of the black hole. By the time Michael had realized Icarus’s real objective, the idea of making an inventory for the system was too good to discard. He had, however, extracted a promise from Icarus to never betray the trust of their users unless strictly necessary.

While Michael reminisced, Travis pondered over the implications of the upgrades to the system.

“Impressive work, Michael. With these features, we could soon roll out the Origin system to the masses. Already the classes are the perfect tool to bargain with the government. We will give the military access to a class, with the others locked behind progressively more favourable deals for us. Together with the need for domains and coins, our grip on their magic will be absolute.”

“Speaking of domains,” Michael said.

Travis nodded. “The portable emitters have passed all the preliminary tests and are ready to be tested on the actual field. We are organizing the first away mission. David will be there too. Are you coming?”

“Of course,” Michael said. “I’m not sitting this out. By when do you need me to roll out the upgrade to all Unity personnel, then?”

“Tomorrow,” Travis said. “Give me time to make sure everyone understands just what we are about to do for them. I need them to properly understand the gifts we are providing for them, because down to the last person who works in the humblest position, they will all be given access to magic beyond their wildest beliefs.”

“Just don’t ask me to make a janitor class, okay?”

Travis beamed him a smile and showed him his phone. “Of course. I’m not asking you, I’m asking Icarus.”