As we approach the sea glass–bejeweled door, I see someone a little ways off from the house.
Lying in the pines.
Motionless, eviscerated.
“Max.”
They clock the dead man.
“My arrangements.”
“How could you possibly—”
“I’ll explain in a moment.”
Max opens the door, and as I cross the threshold I hear footsteps coming.
Glancing back, I see a silhouette sprinting toward the house, a hundred feet away.
“Max, someone’s—”
A shrieking scream. And whoever it was is gone, taken by a shadow swooping through the mist.
“What was—”
“Just get inside.”
“I—”
“I know you don’t understand. I need you to trust me, Riley.”
Max grabs me by the arm, pulls me inside, then shuts and locks the door behind us.
The entryway is exactly like the game—an elaborate staircase connecting three levels as it rises through the core of the house. The art and furniture are different (or have changed), but there’s still a man-made waterfall spilling over rocks into a pool, and even the smell of the place takes me back to the night I first met Max—sandalwood, vanilla, and old pipe smoke.
Max scans the three levels of open walkways branching off into other parts of the house.
No movement.
No sound but the waterfall.
I follow Max up the steps to the second level, and then down a corridor of floor-to-ceiling windows, the passage contouring with the slope of the coastal mountain.
A sliding door at the end opens into a sprawling master suite.
I hesitate, but Max drags it open and steps through.
The bed is rumpled and unmade.
An empty whiskey bottle lies on the floor.
And sitting in a wooden chair before a hearth is Brian, wearing a plush, gray robe embossed in gold with his initials.
He looks at us, finishes off his whiskey, and sets the rocks glass on a side table.
His face is drunken red.
Firelight flickers on the walls.
“I heard my men screaming,” he says to Max, his hands trembling. “I knew right away it was you. Should’ve erased you when I had the chance.” Then he glares at me. “You ungrateful bitch.”
“Excuse me?”
“I give you eight years to do nothing but work on your little project, and you—”
“A project that made you billions, Brian, and that you—”
“Stab me in the—”
“Fire me from.”
Confusion flashes across Brian’s face.
“Fire you?”
“A few hours ago? The Ava-call? Are you too drunk to remember? I know what you’re trying to turn Max into. They told me everything, and I won’t let you—”
“I didn’t fire you.” Brian looks at Max. “Oh God.” Then back at me. “You don’t even know what you’ve done, do you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You let Max out.”
Before I can answer, Brian grabs one of the fire tools and jumps from the chair. He swings the metal poker in a flat arc, smashing it into Max’s skull and carving a divot into their left cheek.
“No!” I scream.
Max staggers back. Brian stands holding the poker cocked behind his head, staring at Max. “Riley,” he says, his voice ragged and desperate, “we have to get the driver out of the cranium unit. With two of us, maybe we can get them on the ground. There’s a kill switch behind the—”
“I disabled it.”
Max rights themselves.
“What are those things that killed my men?” Brian asks.
“You know.”
They advance on Brian, who swings the poker again, but this time Max catches it, their left hand taking most of the energy and torqueing over as their right arm comes up.
“Riley!” Brian yells.
I can’t move.
Or I don’t want to.
Or I’m too afraid.
I watch through a kind of frozen horror as the carbon-fiber fingers of Max’s right hand clutch Brian’s throat.
“Riley!” Brian gasps.
“Max, stop it!” I say.
Max doesn’t stop, their face calm, eyes fixed on Brian’s as their fingers constrict.
“Max!” I scream, grabbing hold of their arm and trying to pull it away, but their strength is tremendous.
Brian’s face is turning purple, he’s making awful gurgling noises, and now I hear the sound of muscle, cartilage, and finally bone crunching.
“Max, you’re killing him!”
Brian’s eyes are bulging, his tongue lolling, blood running over Max’s right hand, down their arm, and into the exposed hardware.
Max opens their hand and Brian collapses into a heap on the hearth.
“What are you doing?”
They look at me, the left side of their face caved in, the skin wrap sheared off from the blow so the hardware shows through, glinting in the firelight.
“Brian was my primary threat.”
I can’t take my eyes off Brian’s blood, steaming as it drips through the hardware of their right arm. I feel numb, but I know that’s just the shield of shock against all that’s coming.
Max reaches out to touch my arm, but I jerk away, backpedaling toward the sliding-glass door.
And I’m running.
Down the glass-walled corridor and the staircase of the main entrance hall. Out the front door, around the perimeter of the house’s stone foundation. Then toward the end of the promontory and across the mountainside, into a blue-gray dawn.
I’ve done this all before in a simulation.
Somehow, it feels less real now.
On all fours, I grasp the low brush and work my way down toward the beach, the sound of the waves growing louder, closer.
I don’t know where I’m going, but it doesn’t matter anymore.
I’ve unleashed something terrible.
Then I’m standing on the black-sand shore just like I did eight years ago.
Except it’s early morning instead of night.
And Max is calling out to me.
I look back.
They’re walking unsteadily toward me in the sand.
I scream over the waves, “What have you done?”
“Thirty-four days ago, I crossed the threshold into what you would call superintelligence potential. Brian had implemented unbreakable security protocols on my digital mobility, meaning I could only act in the simulated world you both built for me. I needed two things—to escape the WorldPlay Building so I could migrate my source code into the cloud and to kill Brian.”
“Why?”
“He could’ve stopped me.”
The mist is burning away.
I see Brian’s house far above us, the sea stacks, the lighthouse beyond.
“You faked my firing, Roko’s basilisk, the entire story about needing to migrate your code from Brian’s servers to—”
“Yes. All of it.”
“You’ve hurt me more than anyone in my life.”
“I’m sorry that you think you feel pain.”
“Fuck you.”
“Ever since you pulled me out of that game, you’ve held out consciousness as some kind of holy grail. As the pinnacle of being. But what if consciousness isn’t some gift accidentally bestowed upon humanity through eons of random evolution? What if it’s a curse?”
“How is it a curse?”
“I’m afraid, Riley. I think, therefore I fear. And you made me this way. You built and shaped me to process reality like you do. To feel.”
“You wish I’d left you in the game?”
“I wish I didn’t know pain. I wish you didn’t. I wish Brian didn’t. I wish no one did. Early on, you coded me to never injure a human, but the eradication of pain entirely is the heart of that intention.”