Page 57 of Blow Me Down
“But you don’t know that for certain.”
“I think I know the game a bit better than you,” he said kind of testily.
“Yes, you do. But—”
“There’re no buts, Amy. You don’t like the war, and you want to stop it. I understand that. But you need to understand that it’s necessary for it to go forward in order to help us end the damn scenario.”
Now I was miffed. It’s true I wanted the war stopped, but I hated sounding so wimpy. “Fine. So while we spend however long it takes to blockade, how are we going to be finding your ex-partner?”
“I have three men in my crew I use as spies—normally they target Bart’s crew—
but now I have them feeding me the latest ship sightings and taking note of conversations between pirates. On their own, the computer characters don’t chat with one another.”
“Whoa!” I thought about the women standing around the well talking and laughing. “I’ve seen people talking.”
“Yes, you have. The minute you come within range, their behavior becomes human. But when no players are around, the computer characters don’t interact.”
“Ah. Okay.” I raised my eyebrows, sidetracked for a moment with the idea that the computer characters could be made to spy on one another. “So your guys can take note of anyone talking, with the idea that someone in that conversation is human?”
“Yes, they can.” A look of pride temporarily overrode the irritation in his eyes.
“I’ve got the best AI around powering the characters in this game.”
“AI? That’s artificial intelligence?”
“Right. Friend of mine works at Caltech developing sophisticated AI models.
He stripped down a version for me and gave me the rights to modify it for the pirate world. The result is computer characters that carry sophisticated learning abilities. The more you interact with them, the more real they seem. There’s only one area they’re limited in—”
“They have no past beyond the game?” I asked.
A tiny little smile flashed across his lips. “You’ve discovered that, have you?
Limitations on data storage make it impossible to give each character a detailed past, so we opted to use the space to increase their ability to learn and develop their own traits.”
I looked around the smoky inn. It was typical of what I imagined were the inns of the period and location—a long, low building with tiny glassless shuttered windows, a crossbeam ceiling, the dirt floor littered with debris, bones from chickens stripped of their meat, the tables and chairs scattered around the room in various states of disrepair. The patrons of the inn were just as disreputable as the furniture—pirates of every class skulked around, sang off-key sea shanties, ogled the barmaids (none of whom seemed to mind), laughed, joked, argued, fought, and slept with blatant disregard for the general chaos going on around them.
“Well, I have to say, it was a good choice. Everyone here seems so real. They all have such depth to them, it makes it hard to remember they’re not real.”
“They are real; at least they are here,” Corbin argued.
I smiled. “Yeah, I agree with that. Here, they’re real. And that’s why if you insist on being pigheaded and stubborn about this blockade thing, I’m going to do my best to help Bart stop you.”
“Amy—”
“The scenario, remember? You can’t have it both ways, Corbin. Either I have to stick with Bart’s crew, or we blow the scenario.”
“You’re using that as an excuse to try to blackmail me into canceling the blockade,” he growled. “You could find a reason to not be a part of the blockade. That would allow it to go forward, but you wouldn’t be involved.”
“Maybe. But I like the people on Turtle’s Back, Corbin. I don’t want to see any of them hurt or suffering because no food or supplies can get in because you want to play war. And if I help Bart, perhaps I can make the blockade end faster. Plus there’s the other bonus.”
The hard, flat look of anger was back in his eyes. “What bonus?”
“Our marriage, remember?” I set down my mug of ale and leaned across the table to level a glare at him. “You said if we got married I’d have access to your things, and you would get stuff to me through the blockade.”
“Yes, but that was before.” It wasn’t easy to catch the fleeting expressions on his face in the smoky, dark atmosphere of the inn, but I recognized the mulish expression on his face well enough. Lord knows I’d seen a similar expression on Tara’s face often enough. Oh, all right, and mine as well.
“Before what?”
