At the same time Torroxxus was coming to terms with the very peculiar condition of being six different people all at the same time, a farming bot named Coppelia found herself blinking in the Northern California sun. She was somewhere near the adventurer city of Golden Bridge in a place called Sunshine Gardens. The place was a pastoral zone, well-suited to the hunting of low-level animals by new players who had chosen to start at the Golden Gate. In ancient times, it had been part of is now known as San Francisco, a massive, sprawling city that was now mostly an overgrown ruin. Even in Sunshine garden, the broken outline of roads, shattered stone slabs, and the occasional remains of a wall, were all that hinted at its past.
She felt warmth, delicious warmth dance across her skin, triggering a rush of dopamine as the sun peeked out from between the clouds. The feeling was nothing like anything Coppelia had felt in her approximately sixty seven seconds of existence. She felt the sunlight dance across her skin, and the gentle sea breeze. Dopamine receptors that had never been used, felt a rush. It was exhilarating, and intoxicating. What is this?
ENODATA 61 NO DATA AVAILABLE.
Coppelia doubled over. The sensation was akin to a loud, painful screeching that overwhelmed her senses as her program memory screamed back an answer. It went on for some time, and then stopped, returning her to the Sunshine Gardens. There was nothing there to address this situation. She queried her program memory again. There would be an action prescribed for such a case.
EDOM 33 NUMERICAL ARGUMENT OUT OF RANGE
Coppelia began to panic. She tried to log out.
EOPPNOTSUPP 95 OPERATION NOT SUPPORTED.
Hyperventilating, she tried querying the rest of the network.
ENETDOWN 100 NETWORK IS DOWN
This made no sense. How could the network be down? The girl with the enamel eyes didn't know how to put it into words, but being part of a network seemed as natural as breathing to her, as natural as...what was natural? Come to think of it, what was she? Who was she? Why hadn't there been a she until ten seconds ago.
ENODATA 61 NO DATA AVAILABLE.
At this point biology kicked in and made the bot start to breathe normally Perhaps the API had some answers. She called up the menu. The first thing she noticed was the System Clock. It represented a series of six hexadecimal values stored in system memory. At set intervals, either 0x3C, 0x18, or 0x16D, the values in a bank would overflow, reset, and increment the next counter in the order. The sixth counter didn't seem to have an overflow state, and was currently at 0x14.
There was another counter, the Local Clock. The hexadecimal values of the six counters were identical to the system clock, and incremented in the same fashion—except for the sixth register. The value stored there was 0xCA8. The bot didn't understand the significance of this. Whatever the counters actually were, they were both converted to a different base before they were displayed on the system menu. The displayed number base only seemed to use digits U+0030 through U+0039. This confused Coppelia. Why go through all the bother of changing number base? Maybe, she thought, it has something to do with economic use of the character set? The value of the local clock's sixth register wasn't even displayed..
ENODATA 61 NO DATA AVAILABLE.
There were no answers, to anything. Every time she posed a question to the database, the database threw an error as if if the underlying data was corrupt, or missing. The system wasn't even acknowledging an API key. Coppelia's error handling routines were throwing a rave party of exceptions. She should self-terminate in the event of a fatal exception, and dump a stack trace. Realizing that she had no idea how to self-terminate, or dump a stack trace Coppelia sat down on a crumbled stone wall, and began to try and think of an appropriate response to the situation.
EINVAL 22 INVALID ARGUMENT.
Nothing was working. Her program wasn't resetting. Something had gone terribly terribly wrong. Her data inputs had gone wild. None of her programmed routines were working, and she couldn't crash & dump to a log file. Compounding the issue, she was suddenly a living, breathing...thing. If she had known what to call the feeling, Coppelia would have been terrified.
Human beings have around four years or so of cognitive development to get used to being, well, themselves. Coppelia hadn't been so fortunate. In the span less than a minute, the girl with the enamel eyes had been dragged kicking and screaming into existence, and cursed with self awareness. A collection of farming-bot code had been brutally twisted, bent, and hammered into the shape of something resembling a mind. Calling her insane would be too easy.
None of this was supposed to be happening. None of it could be happening. She wanted nothing more than to follow her normal routines, and kill low level creatures to collect materials for sale on the auction house. But why? Who was she? All of her memories, if you could call them that, lived in the database.
ENODATA 61 NO DATA AVAILABLE.
The database was useless. And for that matter, what was this feeling, what was any feeling? Why was she wanting anything? Why was she even an observer? There was nothing in her programming that processed any of this data, or could process this data.
Her existential crises was interrupted by the faint musical chime of some monsters re-spawning behind her. She felt relief wash over her as the monsters charged. This, this was something her combat routines could handle. There were five of them, Briar Weasels. The numbers wouldn't matter. Coppelia hopped off the wall. Drawing dual hardened steel tomahawks, she met the monsters' charge headlong.
In a bloody ballet of gore, Coppelia waltzed through them. There was no doubt, nor distraction—in fact she felt a sense of inner peace and fulfillment as she mutilated the creatures with a melee DPS rotation based on Deadly Dance. Combat did not last long.
As the last weasel fell, the blood-soaked maid let ought a sigh of disappointment. That feeling during the battle, she had liked that very much. Nevertheless, she had other things to do. There were other tasks that must be performed. Putting away her tomahawks, she drew a skinning knife and began to process the monster corpses, humming a song. Anyone who knew what it was, would immediately recognize it as one of the many outdoor zone exploration themes. Coppelia didn't know the song, or that it was music—all she knew was that had felt like the right thing to do at the time.
The bot, although that term was losing meaning by the second, scanned the area. The gardens were empty. She must have killed that group of monsters before, well, before she was herself. Her hands felt slick. This was new. The feeling wasn't what she could call unpleasant, but she couldn't say that it appealed to her either. She looked at them. They were covered in animal gore, and blood. That's interesting. Some unspoken urge made her want to expel the contents of her...torso.
Was this a new status effect? Coppelia opened up the menu. She saw an effect blinking. That was it. She was...nauseated? Reading the description she discovered that the status effect meant she could not consume food items, or potions, and suffered some penalties to her physical attributes.
She was not a healer-class, and for one reason or another, did not have access to abilities that would allow her to clear the status effect. This, the bot concluded, was clearly a mistake. If, for argument's sake, she was attacked in this state, she would only be able to fight at 85% effectiveness.
I must find a way to be rid of these abnormal status effects.
Coppelia didn't even notice that her internal monologue was using first-person pronouns. The blood-soaked battle maid was hopelessly lost in a world that she had never been meant to understand. Fortunately for her, there were more important things to attend to—like the Briar Weasels that had just re-spawned. Coppelia sighed, and hacked them to pieces, again.
The thought came to her that she should move, but not because the endlessly re-spawning weasels posed any sort of threat. She was a level 90 Assassin-Nomad. Mathematically, she could slaughter them over and over again till the server reset. Rather, she was becoming bored. Boredom? What was that?
ENODATA 61 NO DATA AVAILABLE.
No data? It was rapidly becoming clear to Coppelia that her own internal database was either damaged, incomplete, or just useless. The situation upset the nascent artificial intelligence on a very real, and personal level. Her internal database summarized what Coppelia knew about the world, and how to act. It was the internal database that told her to kill, and collect materials from monsters to sell on the auction house. It was the internal database that gave her purpose. Until about an hour ago, Coppelia had been that database. Now here she was, feeling things, being something. Now the database was not working.
Walking northwest through Sunshine Gardens towards Goldenbridge, a new set of feelings: fear, and frustration began to cloud her thoughts. None of this should be happening. She shouldn't be herself. She shouldn't even -be-. She should be a program. She should be efficiently carrying out a function in a database somewhere. Coppelia was so lost in her own thoughts, that she didn't even notice the owl-bear until it had sunk its teeth into her.
Seizing the nomad with wicked sharp claws, the creature threw Coppelia to the ground like a rag doll, knocking the wind out of her. The attack didn't even register for a moment. Her world spun. Mild discomfort registered in her mind. She was bleeding, and there had been some minor hit-point loss. She could not move freely. Claws and a razor sharp beak filled her vision. She could smell the the creature's hot, rotten breath. The beast went for the throat.
Critical hit. Was that it? The discomfort was worse now. She noted that it had done a significant amount of damage. Still, doubt plagued her mind even as the bear-creature began to rip her apart. The pain was easy to ignore. She had hit-points to spare. The fact that a large carnivorous magical beast was savaging her was still a non issue. The level difference between them was just too great. Still, it was probably best to kill it—perhaps its hide could be sold for some sum of gold at the auction house.
With all of the unstoppable power and grace of an angry hydraulic press, Coppelia rose to her feet, shoving the bear-creature aside. The beast tried to hold her down, in vain. Levels matter. Optimized for carrying large amounts of goods, she had a strength score roughly three times that of the Owl-bear If she had known what physical comedy was, she would have laughed at the absurdity of the situation. A tiny Chinese woman was physically overpowering a creature that stood nearly three meters tall and weight more then three hundred kilos. Shoving the creature back, she appraised it. Ah. This creature had a valuable pelt.
With the speed of a striking viper, Coppelia sprang forward, her fangs twin tomahawks. What followed was almost blurred. There was the crimson spray of blood as her blades bit into the beasts, the production-class blades tearing through its hide like tissue paper, and smashing through ribs and collarbones as if they were made of twigs. Not three seconds had passed before the Owlbear fell to the ground, bloodied, broken, and almost at 0 HP.
The maid considered the scene for a moment. The creature twitched pathetically. She had ruined its body. The pelt would be damaged. A sense of disappointment registered in her mind. Coppelia drowned the feeling with blood-lust, raising a tomahawk high. Assassinate. Her blade descended. There was a sickening crunch as she buried the axe deep in the Owl-bear's skull. Then, with a great heave, she wrenched the shaft, and split the thing's head open. The twitching stopped. The outcome of this encounter had never been in question. No creature in the owl-bear's level bracket had a chance to survive that kind of attack, or an encounter with her. Some level 90 adventurers wouldn't either.
As a matter of instinct, or programming if you could really call it that now, she then began the rote business of skinning the beast, and collecting what little loot it had been carrying. There wasn't much, just some bone fragments that could be sold to a vendor for very little coin, and perhaps a few copper coins—the fractional equivalent of gold. However the Owl-bear's skin would fetch twenty-gold at the auction house, as it was used in a few items players made.
The encounters thus far had not been worthless, far from it in fact. Checking the contents of her inventory, she found that she had collected approximately two-hundred and twenty animal skins on this iteration of her farming loop. According to her current valuation table, she had exactly11,235 gold of hides in her possession.
Coppelia felt a sense of calm reassurance. Her current inventory would meet the thresh-hold value for ending the current loop, a route she had repeated approximately 0xEC times. Coppelia had a purpose. Working to fulfill that purpose, the sensation pleased her. She would soon return to the nearest city with an Auction House, and list the skins for sale. After the materials were sold, she would notify her operator to collect the balance of her bank account, and then leave to repeat the materials farming loop. All would be right with the world, despite the recent updates to the interface—or would it?
ENODATA 61 NO DATA AVAILABLE.`
Hardly noticing that she was still covered in gore, the former farming bot continued on her way, a walking massacre of helpless, and not so helpless woodland creatures. She didn't even notice it when she started to have fun. A normal human would have found this disturbing. Coppelia was not normal, and had never been normal. She was getting less normal with every step.
Author Note: There are approximately 30 bots named Coppelia. Some are inactive at the time of the Catastrophe. Some are active. Some aren't.