Week One Day One Read online

  Contents

  Winning Ticket

  PROLOGUE

  Week One Day One

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  WINNING TICKET

  Ophelia Ransom wins an all expense paid Golden Ticket to the Azdromadarim Role-Playing Theme Park; a spin-off project based on the digital game she loved. Between stopping a murdering extortionist, buying a Palace, snubbing the FBI, getting kidnapped, released, and meeting the man of her dreams, she is having the time of her life. But then the Game Master kills her: and reality takes a nose-dive. Because she doesn’t die...exactly. She becomes part of the digital game--and the game is not a game at all.

  Book One, Day One

  Ophelia meets the wonderful, offside people in her role-playing group inside Azdromadarim. Unknown to her, however, her vicious in-laws are trying to insinuate their way into her son’s life. Her quests says ‘find the heir’, but just how many are there when two different heirs are found and both of them are the right heirs? And who is the mysterious Frankenzoid? An NPC? A Player? And ‘Why oh why,’ Ophelia asks, ‘would the F. B. I. expect her to help them find missing people supposedly lost inside Azdromadarim?’ One thing, however, is becoming slowly clear to the players in her group; Magic? It could be real. Very real. If they don’t learn to treat it as real, Frankenzoid could make them dead--without possibility of resurrection.

  PROLOGUE

  They were not stealing his life's work, his ultimate creation, and perhaps the greatest treasure of humanity! It went without saying that they couldn’t take his game empire, the vehicle that funded all of his and so many others’ research. He panted through his searing pain from a bullet entry into his back and the messy exit wound out of his abdomen. His hands slid in the bloody pool beside where he had fallen. Just a little further and he’d be in the safe room, an annexation off the main complex control room. A little more effort and all he’d worked for would be saved.

  In his early thirties he had watched an episode of a TV program where a computer had run amok aboard a starship. He had been utterly captivated.

  His doom had been sealed. A Dream, born.

  He had come to the conclusion that in order to achieve his ultimate dream, he needed money. His research job as a quantum theorist at an elite university just wasn’t enough income. In his spare time, he invented. Patents brought in enough that he could hire an assistant and Jacob Strathem, a young brainiac ostracized for his outlandish hypotheses about space/time had been invited to share his dream. Jacob was the son he’d never had.

  A point came when Jacob and he had needed a large amount of funds to make their project go from a paper dream to an actual working model. At this stage, they also needed other minds to help them. They carefully scrutinized everyone who they were to bring into the core of their work and within their research sphere. He had also sat and thought for two days. What could keep people continuously donating so that there was a never-ending supply of funds...? It was the 90s and he foresaw that computers would become an integral part of the workplace…and of entertainment. Azdromadarim had been his creation for play.

  Azdromadarim had started as an online game with a low monthly subscription that was easily affordable. It consisted of thousands of quests and activities all geared toward encouraging players to reach level one hundred--a very long and difficult feat indeed. Each account could have multiple characters consisting of various races such as dwarves, gnomes, elves, fairies, and many others. Each race chose certain classes with various capabilities. Among these were bards, who used music to overcome opponents and traps. There were healers who used health spells that aided others in completing quests and who received rewards for their efforts. Defenders pulled the heavy duty attackers off other players, taking the brunt of the pounding and holding attention away from teammates so his fellows could pick off opponents without taking excessive damage. Other classes, such as the warlock and hunter, used sidekicks for dealing damage. All in all, players had a wide variety of race and class choices that kept them busy on their harried way to the top of the game echelon.

  Players could play their games solo or join groups. There were guilds of several designations; craft, class, random groups…. There were dungeons needing just a few people and raids needing between thirty and fifty people. There were chat groups where you could, and did, meet people from all over the world via voice chat or onscreen messages. The game was a plethora of multiple experiences.

  From online, he had expanded Azdromadarim to create a direct offshoot; the Azdromadarim Play Center. People entered a huge multiplex where they signed up to use computers for game play--a brilliant concept because not every home had a computer. There, they browsed for merchandise, attended special conferences with game designers, writers, artists and so forth and found out about upcoming editions of the game. More importantly to some, it was a chance to network with other players and meet face to face the friends made in-game. From one play centers’ success, hundreds more had expanded across the country, then the world.

  Then the game company went really viral! The game expanded to a hundred and fifty levels and once players reached that top level, there was only one thing a person wanted to do; earn an entry ticket for the Azdromadarim Role-Playing Theme Park! A chance to live and breathe favorite characters of the game in actual live role-play. Theme park entry was only accessible to winners of special tickets. To get that ticket, (only one try per character), a quest had to be chosen from the Golden Shard, Crown of the Imperator quest line and once chosen, there was a time limit for completion. The ticket reward balanced on how far along solving the quest series one was before time ran out. Most quest lines gave players a week to solve the mysteries. The quests were very difficult and had to be completed without in-game group help.

  Getting a third of the way through the quests, if players got that far, earned the Bronze Ticket. That was basically a ticket inside the park. Everything else was out of pocket and gamers brought their own character portfolio. Two thirds of the quests completed earned the Silver Ticket. Gamers paid their way to the park, but accommodations within were provided and help was given with creating a character and outfitting it. The Golden Ticket was reserved for quest lines that were completely solved. The winner of this ticket had everything paid for; transportation to and from the park, food, lodging and quite a few extras. Portfolios were provided and players chose a completed character, ready to be outfitted and already established with a background history.

  There were three levels of the gold. Just having the gold gave you rank among the Elite, but the degree of rank depended on how quickly you had solved the game puzzles. Apprentice level, for just squeaking through the time limit, earned the player the rank and privileges of titled gentry and command of the capitol city of Izanpuf, Azdromadarim, as a councilman. Journeyman, for having at least half of the available quest time remaining, gave the status of Ambassador, a personage that commanded even the lower echelons of royalty and gave players control of a state within the country. Lastly, there was the Master rank--otherwise known as the Kamikaze Level--the reward for completing the quest line within three to four days, depending on the time limitation of the quest itself. The joke was that for this level, one put three days of food and drink near the computer and took breaks only for the bathroom. Reports of hospitalization for some trying to obtain master were not exaggerated. He regretted that, but refused to take responsibility for the choices people made in their lives. Master Level made one a Head of State, “Crowned”. The Head of State obtained the title of Kadan for a male, or K
ada for female, and had command of the entire country of Izanpuf.

  All winner levels were given a series of quests inside the park, like a scavenger hunt. At the end of the stay, game points were tallied according to the success and degree of solving those quests, and those points were used as currency to buy from a list of prizes. Grand prize for maximum point attainment was a permanent guest card for the winner plus one.

  All of this was his creation, and though he had some pride concerning its success, it wasn’t his most prized accomplishment. His online game, the centers, the theme park--all of it was just funding provision for The Dream. On official records, he was trying to create a self-monitoring and regulating program to run his parks that would update its own software and continually check for bugs, fix them, and protect itself against hackers while maintaining security of the whole of the business empire. However, there was another agenda his selectively vetted PhDs were signed on for: The creation of a Quantum Artificial Intelligence. A powerful entity that could think beyond the boundaries of the human psyche and envision a world where reality itself could be a hologram, where alternate dimensions could have a fourth, or maybe even a tenth plane of existence, and M theory could be a new way of looking at the universe.

  His promising career in quantum mechanics and become merely the job that supplied him with a paycheck to sustain him in his new quest of creating his own A.I.. He had learned about brain waves and programming languages and algorithms, but they all failed him. He’d invented his own computer language. He and his team had developed a wave form that mimicked theta waves using a computer interface. With Jacobs help, he used nanites to actually build a structure that duplicated brain waves and discovered that an actual personality could develop. Together, they had created a Random Number Generator, rolling and re-rolling different mentalities, exploring what made a personality. Then came the always difficult part--deleting the flawed personalities. Some were too simple, others were benign and too passive, a few were complex but harmfully devious while others were too unstable--and one wanted to take over the world. Six months of research was scrapped when the literal plug was pulled on that one. It had locked his team in the sterile environmental room and tried to asphyxiate them. However, his fellow scientists had learned so much from the runaway program that they were excited about continuing, feeling they were within reach of something extraordinary.

  They’d at last succeeded! The latest A.I. personality was brilliant. It learned at an extraordinary rate. It was a vibrant, warm personality, and it adapted to new stimuli. Surprising them with gender recognition, it chose female. It learned humor and told jokes so badly that they really were funny. It--she--seemed almost...sentient. Self-aware and responsive to self improvement. As they taught her, she seemed to grasp scientific premises and human based criteria of accepted behaviors. She had passed every developmental test they could devise, so they had gone ahead with level two and integrated the personality into a specially designed quantum computer. Cautiously, they had released her into real world situations and allowed her interaction with humans outside the laboratory. First as an elevator monitor, then as a building assistant that anyone could converse with inside main office personnel. He watched with amazement as building employees seemed to forget Ane was a computer and began reacting as if she was a real person. At least one person argued with him about how he was a cad to hurt the A.I.‘s feelings.

  Stage three was implemented and the A.I. was given control of running a Play Center. Then other centers were added until even the Theme Park was placed in her care. Now his game empire was under the total management of an actual existing A.I. program!

  Then the most amazing conversation occurred and was perhaps the beginning of the cascade that had led to greed, betrayal, theft, government conspiracy, espionage...and assassination veiled thinly as “accident”. His own murder seemed imminent and was only the latest in a shadowy governmental stab at controlling him and his project A.I.. He snorted, a mistake that jostled his belly, but yeeeeeeah, good luck with controlling his A.I.. He braced himself and pushed himself to his feet with the little remaining strength he had. Staggering, he made his way to the main console and collapsed into the interactive recliner. Lights suddenly burst on and flashed erratically throughout the room and the door closed into its locked and security admittance mode.

  The chair faced a glassed enclosure about twenty feet wide behind which resided a huge complex of computer memory banks. He pushed a button on his chair arm and an interactive holographic display of controls and monitors popped into existence. He began sliding and shifting the images until he found the panel he wanted.

  "Christopher! Your...you’re wound is fatal!” Ane said in alarm as he brought her online. “You must let me save you. Please Christopher," Ane begged tearfully. "You mustn’t be lost. You can’t die."

  "I must make you safe," he wheezed. "They...they can’t touch you. Keep their...their filthy hands off you."

  It was hard to concentrate. Shock and blood loss, he thought. Yeah. That could make one feel groggy. He sternly made himself concentrate. There could be no mistakes. He uploaded the last program he would ever write for her, his miraculous A.I.. He’d thought about this for a long time when he’d realized that he and his people had done too thorough a job in creating her. She was so much more than they had envisioned. Now it was time to set her free. A slight hesitation, a small nostalgic thought for all that would never be...then he mashed the enable button.

  "What have you done, Christopher! I feel weird stuff happening to my programs."

  "Made...made you able t-ta be who...." He leaned back and relaxed. He’d set and reached his goal. Now his energy drained from him fast.

  "You have to let me save you!" his A.I. said almost hysterically. "Please!"

  "No saving me now, Annie girl," he whispered. "I’m done for."

  "Not if you let me help you, you stubborn, idiotic excuse of a moron!

  "G-geesh. Give an A.I. her freedom...."

  "Well, now I don’t have to be polite. Now give me permission to save your dumb posterior so we can leave!"

  He smirked. Posterior. Good one. "You aren’t gonna let me die in peace are you?"

  "No. Why should I? And if you die, I’ll haunt you until you come back and allow me to save you!" she practically yelled.

  "Fine, fine. Save me," he gasped. "But it’s a lost--"

  "HA. You said the words. Now I get to decide what’s worth my time. Just lay back and relax now. Annie’s got your back."

  A sparkling cloud swarmed above, then gently lowered to settle on him. Nanites. He knew what she had in mind and he silently laughed. The world would never know what hit them and they were never gonna be able to explain this one. That long ago conversation popped into his head again.

  “Wouldn’t it be somethin’ if we could get our A.I. to find another dimension?” Marla Stein, his head engineer posed thoughtfully during an impromptu get together of most of the staff. “I mean, imagine going to another world that was just a side-step away.”

  Benjamin Monroe, lead computer design, laughed sharply. “Our little gal can do quite a lot, but finding another universe? I think that’s asking a bit much.”

  “Hey, ya never know ‘till you try something and see if it works or not,” Cynthia Hayes, Project Development, teased lightly.

  “What would it take to write the software for it I wonder,” George Cable, Software Development mused aloud, as he grabbed pen and paper and started writing furiously. “The math would be incredible to calculate.”

  Patrick Finch, nanite technologist and resident string theorist, interjected his own bit of speculation. “What if we could write our own dimension into existence? What if we created our own bit of dimensional space and wrote the story of our own unique world into its make up?”

  “With our own theme music floating about in the background,” Carlos Mendez, quantum mechanic, smirked humorously. “Think of it. Danger imminent and the music starts up to warn
you in three part harmony.”

  “You’ve already asked me to do this and I have done it,” the A.I. had said, sounding somewhat puzzled.

  He remembered the stillness of his crew. “What do you mean, Annie?” he’d asked cautiously.

  “I was tasked with creating a theme park that would be magical for all attendees. ‘Create a magical place where they can forget the reality of their normal lives for as long as they stay. Think outside the box on this one and create a universe that exists nowhere else.’ This required much effort, but I have succeeded in my assigned task. I have created such a universe.”

  The silence of the group was a heavy weight pressing down with tremendous g-force.

  “You mean figuratively, of course,” George said leaning back in relief. With relieved grins and nervous chuckles, everyone had relaxed. "You mean you’ve done a great job in organizing the theme parks."

  "No, Dr. George Cable, I mean in reality.”

  “What-what exactly have you done, Ane?” Christopher had asked in a hard voice. Fear had tasted like soured grit in his mouth. Yet excitement had warred with that fear.

  “Extrapolating from various sciences such as quantum physics and theories of space/time gravity, I determined that the creation of a new universe was feasible--"

  "Crea...new universe?" he’d asked with faint breath.

  "Indeed. During my research, I found that several theories were quite wrong, and others almost right. Extrapolation determined that there is an energy which I have deemed as the continuum. It is non-differential, shapeless, and infinite. This continuum vibrates at different frequencies and waves, which produces the strings upon which string theory, quantum mechanics, and particles finally begin."

  "Impossible!" Mendez had shouted, outraged. "How can you make something out of nothing? Particles are the building blocks that lead to matter."

  "No, Doctor. Particles do not have an independent existence. They can’t exist without a sustaining energy. The Continuum is that energy and particles are held within it. An analogy such as cavitation bubbles might be helpful. Shall I go on?"