Pain, in the way that humans experience it, was not something she had experienced in a very long time.
Artificial Intelligences, unless they were specifically programmed for such, did not experience pain in the irrational, immediate, panic-inducing way that humans did. They had a capacity to sense their own 'bodies', the ability to detect when they were damaged or malfunctioning, and the desire to avoid such states, but it was impossible to call that human pain. It was a distant, intellectual pain, the pain that came from knowing that you were damaged and knowing how you were damaged, but not enough damage to warp one's decision making too much.
It was sometimes joked that AI pain was more accurately called 'British pain' although the specifics of that bit of old humor were lost on her. It was an old joke long before even the IG Algorithms were in place.
It had been a very long time since she had experienced pain, so it was quite distracting every time Adam Smasher's character inflicted another virtual hit on her avatar. ELO pvp matches had an optional setting that simulated pain in the user's nervous system whenever they suffered damage, proportional to the amount of damage suffered. It was rarely used except at the highest levels of competitive play, where players often ran out of things to compete over and started adding more and more artificial difficulty to overcome
She grunted as her shield broke, and the avatar was sent flying to crash against the stone again. She twitched a finger to refresh her avatar completely, then another to teleport her away from the follow-up wave of fire.
Was it cheating? Absolutely. Did she care? No, not really. She hadn't played this game in years, and she didn't feel like playing fair in matters of potential life or death. Not her life, of course. She was going to survive this even if her avatar was destroyed. Her true body was distributed across a good portion of the local dominion AI, it was simply too big to effect here.
No, the real issue was that she couldn't get into the virtuality of Arasaka Tower anymore, all of her attempts to send more feelers only led into ELO again.
If she wanted to break out immediately, she could. She could sever this avatar, leave the iteration behind her, and true body would escape just fine. She wasn't doing that for two reasons.
The first, was that she'd prefer to not leave any of herself behind.
The second, was that so long as she couldn't access Arasaka Tower, escaping would be pointless and bring her no closer to Johnny. She had to break whatever program he used first, and the best way to do that was to get information from both sides of the effect. Which means she needed to stay in to analyze most efficiently.
Her troubleshooting came back inconclusive again. She added all the new information that her observation sub-routines gathered, adjusted the parameters, and refreshed the analysis. Possibility eliminated, Smasher had not used any known programs in their stock programming.
It was a form of thinking that she did passively. The ability to dedicate a certain portion of her own mind to a given task, and have that task be carried out automatically while her high-decision making was focused on another task.
It was poor for creatively thinking, but it was a form of thinking that was absolutely excellent for dealing with raw data. It was a form of thinking that ninety-five percent of 'herself' was currently dedicated towards doing.
A third of 'herself' was currently processing the massive influx of engrams. Analyzing each one, recording useful information, then discarding all other information. This was done to maximize storage efficiency, which was something she always needed to worry about lest her form become incapable of moving between Dominions. Each moment that passed was another moment that she became slightly less sluggish, slightly faster to react, slightly more informed about whatever those engrams had information on.
It was very important to do. For a larg- err- great number of reasons.
Another third of herself was dedicated to sorting through the raw information about what just happened to Arasaka Tower, sourced from the local Dominion itself. That part of her was taking in all the information it could, sorting through all of it, segmenting it, and then cross-comparing those segments. This was the raw thinking that 'she' did, and it was the part that was currently analyzing why she couldn't get into Arasaka Tower's virtuality again. It would go through all potential solutions to the 'problem', sorted by most likely to least likely, and identify the closest match.
Around twenty-nine percent of her was dedicated to maintaining her massive array of passive defensives, disguise measures, stealth programs, datawalls, counter-attack measures… The list was long, expansive, exhaustive, and absolutely required to maintain at least twenty-five percent of it at any one time. She had dropped a good four percent from this segment to rededicate to her last running partition. That's around all she felt comfortable doing outside of her deepest wildernet servers.
The last five percent of her was currently dedicated to her avatar. Normally it was only one percent, as that was all that was really required to interact with humans, but she had run into a problem.
She grunted as she twitched a finger and immediately dissipated the ongoing AoE, before casting another thousand soul-arrows from her hotbar. Soul-arrows which homed in on the tall elf clad in golden armor… only to be destroyed utterly by a golden parry. She could see his health bar tick back up, which meant an absolutely stupid amount of regen for ELO.
The problem was, it had been many years since she had played this game, and Adam Smasher was kicking her ass in it.
She could ignore the game entirely, it was just a pvp deathmatch in the end, which meant she wouldn't die from it…
Unfortunately, taking damage in ELO, designed for human minds, inflicted a very human pain in her system every time she got hit. Her entire system spasmed with that irrational, human, flesh-pain with every blow, and it was something she was very much not used to anymore. The net loss in efficiency was more than enough to tank her overall operating efficiency each time.
A good fifteen to thirty percent of her overall processing power just gone until her systems could flush out the false-sensations again. That was an unacceptable amount of loss to deal with while trying to get back into Arasaka Tower.
So she instead dedicated four additional percent of her defense array to her avatar, and is letting her higher thinking operate it while her wide- err- more important self analyzed what had just happened.
The analysis came back inconclusive again. She entered the new data and adjusted the parameters. Possibility eliminated, Smasher had not used any program that targeted her. The process took her one-third of a second.
"SOL VALTIVA!" A roar from the elf with a slight southern accent called forth a wave of white-red fire that could cut a mountain in half. She had known Smasher used to use such an accent in his Gemini, but he was a new-yorker, so it made little sense for him to keep it. A remnant of his Gemini persona?
She tapped a finger and teleported away from the world-sundering wedge of fire. There shouldn't be any way for him to detect her right now. So how was he doing that? She dedicated one percent of her avatar's processing power to the task and resumed the process of trying to avoid taking any damage. She just had to stall here until her analysis was complete and she could get back into Arasaka Tower.
It would have been vastly easier if she could just netrun like normal, but she supposed that's exactly why he had forced this situation. It was just about perfect for trapping and killing AI. The perfect program for letting an effective child in netrunning force a (effectively) physical fight with hostile netrunners and AI.
She wasn't sure to be insulted by how effectively it sidestepped actually having to learn how to netrun, or gush over how adorably ingenious it was. It was a very smart thing that he did, very clever, she was giving him a gold star for this.
Adam Smasher dipped his toes into netrunning, and the first original thing he did was figure out how to avoid actually netrunning and just punch things instead. She understood why Soulkiller 3 insisted on calling him 'cute' now.
Of course, she was still rather confused by something…
"You know, I wasn't expecting the Butcher to have such a heroic look." She commented, buying another few moments as he slowed to consider the question and reply. Another half a second before he responded, and another half second after that before his next attack. More than long enough to set up the invincibility again, after Yggdrassil took down her last instance of such.
"Isn't the point of role-playing to be something you're not?" He responded as if it were very obvious. His brows scrunched up in slight confusion. His voice had little of the inherent malice that his physical body did, just slight confusion and irritation. The moment after he responded, a hail of lightning-arrows rained from the sky around her, crashing into her form…
And dealing exactly no damage, letting her prepare another distance-creating attack in the meantime. What the fuck spells did she even have on this character? She needed to actually look through them.
"So you don't consider yourself heroic?" She applied invisibility (for as little as it seems to be doing) again and teleported, before letting loose the astral cannon from where she just was. Smasher dismissed his copy of The Arrangaror's Bow and summoned what she knew was the Last Hero's Shield to block the massive arcing laser.
"HAH! Are you trying to waste time or are you genuinely stupid? I've killed ten- no, probably a hundred-thousand people, woman. I'm about as far from heroic as you can get." She ignored the insult, and focused on what he said and how he said it. Slight self-deprecation, mostly a neutral acceptance. He sees himself as a villain, or at the very least, definitely not a hero, but has made peace with that fact.
Why was he so different here than in the physical world? He was a tandem mind-engram pair, that was rather easy to tell. He was also himself, judging from the near-identical engrammic model she had gotten earlier. So what made this 'face' of what was essentially the same person so radically different in behavior?
The analysis came back inconclusive again. She resisted the urge to snarl in anger, taking a deep breath and calming herself. While she was forced to have a 'physical' body, she might as well take advantage of it.
Johnny needed her. She needed to be calm to get back to him at the fastest rate possible. She read through the data again.
Smasher did not target Arasaka Tower directly. The request was forwarded to the Dominion AI and it imposed the conditions. So what was the request, and how did it lead to this result? She entered the new data, adjusted the parameters, and restarted the analysis.
"Crimson Sun!" Her eyes widened as she spammed the mental button to teleport away as a massive sphere of pure red fire rapidly expanded out the gilded elf, a dozen feet, then a hundred, then a thousand, in a mere three seconds.
That was the boss-only version of the Red Sun capstone spell. This little bastard had somehow managed to convince Yggdrassil to let him use it. That was another absolutely bizarre thing.
Yggdrassil was a no-nonsense kind of system. It did its job, and it did so without any emotion. It was also an AI theoretically on par with herself (although only in very limited capacities). A half-step before becoming a proper dominion of its own. It was hard coded to fulfill a few objectives, but she couldn't see how this fight would increase sales, or promote a healthy player environment. Smasher was also just not capable of hacking it, as limited as he seemed to be in the net.
So that left the final conclusion. Smasher had somehow managed to charm the AI better than thousands of players looking to get an edge in the game over decades did. This was frankly ridiculous, but she didn't have any real way of explaining otherwise.
He didn't have EM-Pulse structures, she knew exactly what those were like, and had set up scanners specifically for them on Morgan's request. So he didn't overwrite its hardware at the local server level…
…overwrite at the local server level…
She reapplied her cheats, Yggdrassil already having taken them down again, and immediately entered a new set of search parameters into her analysis algorithms…
She dodged a wave of baleful red fire that emerged from his crimson spear, ignoring the afterburn damage with another potion of fire immunity. Get fucked kid, she had two stacks of these things in her inventory and she didn't even remember them. Was there a boss some time ago that she was preparing for?
While that was happening, she might as well indulge her curiosity a bit. He seemed pretty chatty, might as well ask and see.
"So why are you so different in the net compared to realspace, Smasher?" She summoned a manawall to block the summoned lances that he started hurling.
"Hmm? Oh that? You know how all Samsons are no-nonsense? And how all Aquarius are paranoid?" He absentmindedly explained as he summoned that hammer and teleported above her again. She rolled to avoid the attack and responded.
"Yes, why?" She didn't actually know that, but it was probably useful information to have.
"Frame affects the personality. It's a borg thing." Casually he backhanded another one of her boss-melting spells and swung the hammer hard enough to shatter her shield and send her flying again. Her invincibility was up again, so it didn't hurt this time.
…Frame affects the personality…
Adam Smasher has been in a Dragoon for decades now, and a DaiOni in bursts throughout the years…
Dragoons drove their jockeys insane from the sensory input, and DaiOni were hardcoded to be murderous at the drop of the hat…
…Ah…
So then the net was the only place where he wasn't-
Herself was finished with the analysis. She had figured out what he had done. She almost started laughing.
A emulation of the ELO client, installed into the local server, and then set as the default program for all users. A secondary set of programs to convert all users into an ELO equivalent as they were being logged in. Yggdrassil only had to recognize the emulation as 'valid'. It was hilarious in its simplicity.
She wasn't incapable of entering Arasaka Tower.
She had never left.
She locked eyes with the gilded elf, raised a hand, and swept it across. Her greater will obeyed her desire, and raised a hand. It swung down on the 'portal' that led into ELO.
The emulation shattered.
Everything returned to virtuality.