Continue Online (Part 3, Realities) Read Online Free Page A

about my future as an armor polisher for our eventual robotic overlords. A few minutes of silence passed while the van drifted along a highway.
    "This unit does have a question, User Legate."
    "Fire away, Jeeves," I said to Hal Pal. Jeeves was a nickname given to the physical shell Trillium included with the job. It, since Hal Pal used both male and female tones seemingly without care, rode around anytime I used Trillium's van.
    "A recent change in user permissions has seemingly locked you out of Continue Online." The AI loved to put out leading statements. As if I needed a reminder of my current situation.
    "That's right." And the whole reason I was in the van heading toward Liz's house this late in the afternoon.
    "Why does User Legate not take advantage of his access code to override the restrictions?" It said.
    Hal Pal's words didn't help my brain process things correctly. How it knew about the [NPC Conspiracy] function didn't make sense until I realized that Hal Pal was an AI. The skill itself related to having all AIs out here in the real world assist me for up to twenty-four hours.
    The ability came with limited uses and a whole series of questions about the future of humanity. AIs within Continue Online gave me an ability that worked with all the AIs outside the machine. That, in and of itself, was beyond questionable.
    I last used it to get the ARC devices to recognize me as an admin on other users' machines. It allowed me to do all sorts of terrible things. For the last month, during my ride around between jobs, I used that access to keep an eye on Requiem's, Matthew's, ARC device.
    "My sister might be reasonable." I doubted it, though.
    "Humans are rarely reasonable in emotional matters," the Hal Pal system responded.
    "No, we're not, are we?" I said while debating my lack of foresight.
    Poor wording and eagerness to resolve Xin Yu's genesis had led to bad decisions. I hadn't been brilliant enough to set aside admin access to my own account because it seemed like a waste of time. Plus it was restricted to the Trillium provided van since that's where I used the password.
    Hal Pal didn't answer right away. Ten minutes later, in the same nanny tone, it said, "Lovely weather we're having."
    Maybe it had decided to finally practice sarcasm. If so, Hal Pal's commentary about summed up my day so far. The overcast sky held true all the way to my sister's home, lovely weather indeed for the conversation to come. Underneath that blissfully dull gray I stewed and tried to figure out what magical combination of words would return life to a normal path.
    If a concept of normal applied anymore. There couldn't be many people in the world who played Continue Online like me. Having direct access to the Voices? My copy of the game was an Ultimate Edition and came with some weird side effects.
    Liz's house was a split level a few hours away from my own. The neighborhood contained at least one home per block that was for sale or rent. She lived in a suburb of New York that had slowly moved away from itself. A digital era filled with computers and virtual reality meetings in ARC devices let people escape the clustered hell holes that most major cities became.
    Our last war had not been kind to this country. Many buildings were destroyed, especially near the old Mexican border. Large cities were subjected to terrorist action and violent protests, families were torn apart as people were shipped off to war. Technology didn't make it better for soldiers, it just made it easier to get them to the frontline.
    We, as a country, suffered far less than many Asian areas. Even now there were still stigmas associated with those from China.
    For a moment, I felt happy that Xin, or her computerized recreation, would no longer need to suffer that being inside a machine. At least I hoped so unless there were cliques within the AI world where they hated those based on real people.
    The whole line of thinking was crazy and served to distract me further