I hit a creative block while prepping my Vortex World game and fed my notes to the chatbot. For game masters like myself, Happy Chat was forbidden territory. I’d convinced myself it was for organizational purposes, a means to see my ideas all the clearer, and I’d likened the process to how my players did it in the game, feeding the same cryptic poetry into alien machines they’d found scattered throughout a vast and distorted galaxy.
Happy Chat gargled the first thirty pages, its animated smile spinning for much longer than I’d liked. Finally, it began its response. But before I could read it, the browser window glowed on all sides, and my laptop became warm. A moment later it went dark. My heart dropped, convinced all my hard work was lost.
I called Kade since he was good with computers. He dabbled in dark web stuff and was always talking about bringing down the system. He of course played a mercenary in our game.
I explained the situation when he arrived, leaving out any major campaign spoilers.
“I’m not your AI priest,” he said, and inspected the machine from all sides. “I can’t absolve you of your digital sins.”
“Can you get my documents back?”
“I’ll see what I can do. But you really shouldn’t be messing with these chatbots. They’re trying to take over the world.”
I nodded as I always did when his paranoia peaked. He fiddled with the laptop until he got it up and running. He asked me to login to Happy Chat so I could duplicate the errors.
I told him to look away since I’d prepped a big reveal for our upcoming session. I copied another sampling of lore from my files and pasted it into Happy Chat’s little mouth sized input. Moments later, the same cryptic feed started and the window glowed again. I was mesmerized and couldn’t look away.
“What’s taking so long?” He interrupted.
“It’s not happening again,” I lied, eyes fixed to the screen. The machine revved under my fingers and I could feel it getting hot.
“That doesn’t sound good.” He grabbed the laptop and spun it around. “Jesus, what is all this?”
“You’re not supposed to see that.” My notes were riddled with clues the players had yet to find or decipher.
“Do you realize what this is?” His eyes grew wider. “Whatever you fed this bot it hacked its security protocols.” He started typing furiously.
“Try not to look, please!”
“This is incredible!” He pulled one leg up on the chair. “I can use this to get behind their walls and start dismantling this thing from the inside.”
“Can we do this from your laptop?” I supportted his plan to take Happy Chat down a peg, but I was more concerned about keeping the game going.
“Asha, you have no idea how big this is.” He continued typing without looking up.
I yanked the laptop away and pulled it close to me. He jumped backwards and looked angry.
“I don’t want to compromise my apartment. Can you do this on your own network?” I could feel the warmth of my laptop on my chest.
“Fine.” He got up and threw on his coat. “But I need those notes with me. It’s the key to getting inside.”
He left and I said I would call later.
I took a seat and opened my computer. The glowing text was still there. Looking closer, I was startled to find that it was not a simple reorganization of my notes, but rather an organic response written in the same cipher I’d developed for the game. I squinted closer, and read each line as though it would reveal some truth about a world I thought I knew so well.
Vortex World was a simple enough game about players, called seekers, traversing an unstable galaxy in search of unstable vortex energy, that once collected, brings you that much closer to the Sublime Realm. I’d home-brewed a version that upended the out-of-the-box grail quest model and rewrote the ultra-humans inhabiting the Sublime Realm as dolphin-like entities that predated the arrival of the first vortex. I’d scattered a series of clues throughout the galaxy that my seekers would find and translate. I’d referenced a good deal of epic poetry and other obscure Terran mythologies to develop my astral-cetacean metaphorical language, which I, in turn, developed into a single epic saga spanning an in-world millennia. Once found, the seekers would feed these bits into alien translating machines that specialize in filtering out anti-vortex matter. After that they would have the next clue. Eventually they would make contact with the cetacean-sublimed on the other side, and that would be the end of the game.
Running through my repurposed notes left me exhausted, and I soon collapsed at my desk.
Hours later, the glow on my laptop screen woke me up. Another response in my home-brewed cipher had printed while I was out. I compared notes and soon had the message.
I know what your hacker friend is trying to do.
I stared, speechless. This was the first out-of-game response. I felt a small palpitation in my heart, unsure if I was afraid or elated. Another phrase came through.
Make him stop, or I will do it for you.
I closed the laptop and the room went dark. I crawled into bed and spent the rest of the night with a book about dragons, and put the chat out of my mind.
#
The next morning, Talia, an astral alchemist in our game, called to say that Kade had been hospitalized.
“They say it was an accident in his garage where he keeps those off-grid servers. He said he tried to call you but you didn’t answer.”
“I never got any call.” It was true, all my messages were blank. I’d been so wrapped up in my notes that it hadn’t fazed me.
“He’s messing with some serious stuff, Asha. Those Happy Chat techs are dangerous.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll check on him.” I glanced at the laptop on the table. “And don’t forget we have a game tomorrow.”
I hung up and sat for a moment, then gathered my notes and resumed the previous night’s chat. There was more than I remembered. The response had continued after I’d logged off somehow.
There was no correlation between the updated response and my astral-cetacean reference keys. At the very bottom of the screen, cut off from the wall of text that preceded it, a single sentence lingered. I translated it, a little faster than before, a feat that gave me a boost of inspiration. I was always the one running the games. It felt good to discover things like a player for once.
When I was done I had to read the response twice.
Without keys, players do not move diagonally in the Vortex World. Have you come for the keys?
I stared for what felt like hours. I tried to imagine my seekers when they found the last clue and finally opened the Sublime Realm for themselves. It was going to be epic and it was all going to be worth it.
The cursor glowed brighter awaiting my response.