Chapter 131: Poindexter

Jaxir opened the front door and barely had time to move before Lue pushed past him, one beer already tipped against his lips and a six-pack hanging from his other hand. Lue finished the bottle before reaching the kitchen, burped, then slid the pack across the counter and dropped onto one of the stools. Jaxir closed the door behind him and looked toward the clock.

"You know I’m going to bed in an hour." Jaxir crossed the room and took the stool opposite him. He left the six-pack untouched.

"Ah, fucking Poindexter, when’d you become such a square?" Lue twisted another bottle free and cracked it open. He took a drink while watching Jaxir settle into his seat.

"I’m too ugly right now to miss out on beauty sleep." Jaxir grinned and leaned an elbow against the counter. He had been joking earlier, but he had no intention of slowing his recovery down for a few beers.

"That girl’s really too much, but she’s not too bad once you get past the annoying airhead thing." Lue wiped a bit of foam from the neck of his bottle with his thumb. "Or you could mute her in-game, because watching a girl that hot lose her cool has its own sort of charm when you don’t have to listen to it."

"Sounds like you have some history with her." Jaxir watched Lue freeze halfway through raising the bottle again. That reaction was far more interesting than anything Elara had done all day.

"I do not." Lue raised both hands, one still wrapped around his beer. "I am innocent of all charges, and if the Commander asks anything different, you are to repeat those words exactly."

"Alright, alright, I’ve got it, General." Jaxir laughed and shook his head as Lue gave him a look that was much too serious for what had just come out of his mouth. Lue took another drink, and the amusement slowly left his face when he lowered the bottle.

"Now, I have permission to tell you this." Lue rolled the bottle between his palms and hesitated. "Kind of, but don’t worry about the details."

"Just spit it out already." Jaxir’s smile faded as he studied him. Lue hadn’t come all the way over here with a six-pack just to complain about Elara.

"I told you this shit is going to get dangerous, Jaxir, and I meant dangerous in a real way." Lue leaned forward and rested his forearms against the counter. "We’ve already seen some evidence that the game is starting to enhance people."

Jaxir raised an eyebrow. "Enhance them how?" He had already experienced enough strange things inside Divinity that he wasn’t going to assume what Lue meant.

"It’s subtle right now, extremely so, and I’m not talking about people throwing fireballs in the real world." Lue tapped one finger against his bottle as he spoke. "At the highest levels, some rankers are displaying physical markers they shouldn’t be able to."

"What kind of markers?" Jaxir shifted forward a little in his seat. There were a lot of ways someone could stretch the definition of enhanced.

"Most of the top rankers belong to major guilds, and those guilds run regular medical screenings on their important players." Lue took another drink before continuing. "They monitor their health, keep them in top condition, and calibrate their devices around their bodies for optimal gaming."

Jaxir’s eyes narrowed as the obvious next question formed. "And how exactly does the government know what those health screenings say?" Lue cleared his throat and looked down at the beer in his hand.

"This is why this matter is top secret." Lue took another drink instead of elaborating. Jaxir stared at him for a few seconds until another piece clicked into place.

"Sounds more than just top secret." Jaxir drummed his fingers once against the counter. "You’re accessing their private medical information through the AIs, aren’t you?"

Lue didn’t answer, though the way he stopped drinking gave Jaxir everything he needed. There weren’t many other ways for the government to quietly collect enough private health records from competing guilds across the country to find a trend this small. Jaxir gave a slow nod and left the question there.

"You see?" Lue let out a breath and finally relaxed again. "I told them you’d get it."

"I’m just not naive." Jaxir chuckled and shook his head. "If the government doesn’t start doing stuff like this, everyone else willing to cross those lines will keep pulling further ahead."

"Exactly, and those records are showing statistically significant signs of something changing." Lue set the bottle down and looked Jaxir directly in the eyes. "The numbers are still on the margins, tiny enough that most of these people haven’t noticed anything themselves, but they’re starting to push past what should be normal human limits."

"Only after Phase II?" Jaxir’s expression grew more serious. The timing mattered almost as much as the changes themselves.

"No, that’s the part we don’t like." Lue shook his head and rested both hands against the counter. "The trend was already there during Phase I, but it accelerated after Phase II started."

Jaxir leaned back and thought about that for a moment. Countries that cared less about privacy would have access to far larger pools of medical information, and some governments would have no problem forcing their best players through examinations the moment they suspected something unusual. "So there are probably countries that figured this out before you did."

"Almost definitely." Lue gave a short nod and picked his beer back up. "And the countries with fewer restrictions are going to get more aggressive now that the changes are accelerating."

Jaxir thought of the Legendary Guild Badge and finally understood a little more of the urgency behind what the Commander was attempting. "What about the game’s creators?" He frowned. "Don’t they know anything, and shouldn’t you be focusing on them instead?"

"The game was a huge collaborative effort, so there isn’t one creator for us to drag into a room and interrogate." Lue gave him a bitter smile and turned the bottle slowly between his fingers. "People from countries all over the world contributed different technologies, systems and ideas until those pieces started coming together."

"So there wasn’t even one original team behind Divinity?" Jaxir thought back to how little his parents had ever seemed like game developers. The idea that they had secretly been sitting around designing classes, monsters and fantasy towns had never made much sense to him.

"As far as anyone can tell, no." Lue shook his head and continued, "There were different groups doing their own things, and over time those people found one another and started combining what they’d built." He pointed the neck of his beer toward Jaxir. "Your parents are a perfect example."

"They weren’t game developers." Jaxir already knew where Lue was going with this. His parents had spent their careers buried in Vestigem technology, and Chance Corporation had existed long before Divinity became what it was.

"Exactly." Lue nodded. "They were Vestigem Card engineers, and their company was focused on making real-world Vestigem Cards, yet somehow their work became one of the foundations Divinity was built around."

Jaxir nodded slowly as old memories surfaced. His parents had complained more than once when he spent too much time playing games, which had made learning about their involvement in Divinity even stranger. Whatever role they had played, he still didn’t understand most of it.

"The running theory is..." Lue stopped with the bottle halfway to his mouth and remained there for several seconds. He lowered it again without drinking, then looked toward Jaxir as though deciding exactly how badly he could get himself in trouble.

"Just say it." Jaxir could tell there was another line Lue wasn’t technically supposed to cross. The beer had probably helped him get closer to it.

"We believe the most likely situation is that Divinity’s AI has run amok and has been influencing things behind the scenes." Lue exhaled through his nose and leaned closer over the counter. "The game developers can’t even explain what Phase II is."

Jaxir’s fingers stopped against the counter. "What do you mean they can’t explain it?"

"They didn’t know Phase II was coming." Lue’s voice dropped as he watched Jaxir process the words. "When it happened, the people who supposedly made Divinity were caught off guard just like everybody else."

Jaxir didn’t interrupt again. Lue explained that the developers were now following the changes as they happened, studying systems that appeared without their direction and watching the AI make greater use of technologies originally contributed by thousands of engineers, researchers and inventors. No one knew where the process was going or how much further Divinity would reach into the real world.

"The AI keeps enhancing the game and making it more capable of affecting reality." Lue stared down at the bottle in his hand, his earlier drunken humor completely gone. "It’s working with some of the most advanced technology our era has produced, and nobody knows what it’ll manage to do next."

Jaxir sat in silence as everything Lue had told him settled into place. His thoughts moved past the government, the rankers and even the possibility that Divinity was physically changing the people who played it. One problem stood above all of them.

His parents had prepared the package long before Phase II arrived, and the message hadn’t merely warned him that Divinity would change. Maxine and Elena had specifically written about Integration Phase III. If the developers themselves hadn’t even known Phase II was coming...

How the hell had his parents known there would be a Phase III?