Aspen snickered again and hung up by himself. Tian Zhu looked at the old phone for a while and placed it on the sink before stripping himself. He turned the water to a colder temperature, hoping to wake up a bit more.
No one noticed – or cared to notice – him taking his coat, putting on shoes and walking outside. Rather than taking a street, Tian Zhu decided to walk right into the field and pulled out his phone again.
After sending a message to Aspen, he soon got a video call and accepted it. Awkward, he stumbled over a rock on the ground and nearly let the phone fall.
Aspen laughed and brushed his wet hair out of his face. He looked even softer than in the dreams, mostly because of his chocolate coloured eyes. “I’m taking a bath. It’s a good excuse for staying in the bathroom for a longer time, otherwise I couldn’t take the call!”
“I… can see that.”
He did not see anything below Aspen’s collar bones, thankfully, but he did see the tiles on the wall behind him and heard the soft splashes of water.
“Funny to see you in colour when you were all gray before… Speaking of colour – the weather looks good. You don’t live in the middle of the city, do you? There’s lots of space.”
“No, we are farther outside. My family has a lot of money. What was your home like?”
“Small. Is that a rabbit running there? Cute. My cousin had one, I think. We never had a pet. I think it would have just annoyed me.” Aspen’s face turned abnormally neutral. Tian Zhu glanced down at him but didn’t stare and instead watched his feet. The grass was lush and green. “Hey, if you could decide – how would you like to live?”
The question came casually but Tian Zhu knew it wasn’t. Aspen’s face was still motionless, revealing that he was seriously asking and Tian Zhu took his time to think about it.
“In a small house. A few rooms, enough to feel spacious but not so much that you feel lost. I’d link ShuShu to the system and keep her turned on so she can run around as she please, or maybe find a way to transfer her to a robotic body. I’d like living next to a forest or close to the mountains…” He paused and continued in a small voice. “It would be nice if I wasn’t living alone.”
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
“If I ever manage to break out of here, I’ll become your neighbor. You will have to pay the rent for me though, I have no money.” Aspen’s lips tugged up the tiniest bit. The small smile suited him better than his usual expression. “Not that I think I can actually break out. I mean, look at my hands.”
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“It hurt like hell.” Aspen looked away from the camera. “They do give you anesthetics, but the moment it wears off, it’s nothing but pain. It still hurts if I get caught somewhere and pull at it. I often felt sick because of the pain, but I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of showing it. They’ve got other ways to keep us captured but since they’re using this one, it’s obvious they want us to be in pain and feel like animals.”
He placed his hand back down, likely into the water. “Before you ask, I never regretted what I did. Maybe I just don’t have what it takes for me to regret my actions. Even this pain can’t weigh up the dissatisfaction I had been living in before. I think you can relate.”
“…Tfr.”
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Some things were worse than pain, and some things tempting enough to ignore one’s own safety. Even more so if his life had lost most of its value for him, anyway.
“You could ask those guys. The… Gamblers. Maybe they’ll allow you to choose a reward if we win another game? You could ask to leave.” Tian Zhu made an effort to continue talking, if only because the person on the other side was a soothing company for his walk.
“It’s fine! Not like I have anywhere else to go. Besides, it would make more sense for you to have the reward. Don’t you want to leave your home?”
“It’s impossible. Unless the Gamblers can completely erase my existence from my family’s mind, I will always be under their clutches.” Tian Zhu’s shoulders lowered. “If I vanished, they would not give up searching for me. They will hunt me to the end of the earth, never giving me a break. And my family has enough money and connections to make this possible. I’d need to vanish from all databases and memories to gain a completely new identity, if I wanted to leave. Not to mention they’d need to create a new identity and looks for me so that I can still live normally. That’s not worth it, even if it was possible.”
“Wow, your family sounds like it’s all bastards.”
“Correct.”
It wasn’t that the possibility of him leaving hadn’t crossed his mind, but the things needed to make a person vanish completely, with no trace left behind, were insane. You couldn’t simply erase a person out of people’s heads – there were spaces that would have to be filled in and effects that would come from that process. This wasn’t just changing the present – it was completely changing the past.
Some plants crunched beneath Tian Zhu’s shoes. It was a welcome distraction from the sounds of water coming through the phone, especially since for some reason he thought that waking up naked next to the Deer was less awkward than talking to Aspen sitting in a bathtub.
Probably because they were actually acquainted, contrary to the Deer who was nothing but a malicious stranger.
The wind felt nice on his skin, even though he kept feeling a bit drowsy. He hadn’t slept too well and Aspen had woken him up too early.
“Hey, talk about something.”
“About what?” The open space stretched endlessly before him. If he kept his gaze a bit lowered, he would not even see the horizon, where the next city’s silhouette was drawn, and the world felt a bit quieter.
“I dunno. Anything. About ShuShu, maybe? I don’t know what kind of topics would make you talk other than her and puzzles, but I’m too stupid to hold an actual conversation about puzzles with you.”
Tian Zhu showed him half a forced smile. It looked ugly. “The AI bases aren’t too expensive. I bought her in secret when I was young, using my pocket money. I think my parents noticed but they likely assumed I would tire of it soon enough. The bases are rather boring. They can converse with you, but they’re like young children that were locked up all their lives. They don’t have much knowledge. They’re programmed to be curious, so they will ask you about everything they notice. You, the world around you, words you use. Why your face shows a certain emotion, what it is, why you are talking in a specific tone of voice. The first time, it overwhelmed me, so I shut her off. When I started her up again, two days later, she already lowered her expectations to asking only a single question. That was her experience: If she asked too much, she would be turned off. It took her a while to find the level that I was comfortable with. I talked to her mostly before going to sleep, when the house was quiet.”
He paused and adjusted his path away from a tree. Aspen was listening with his eyes closed, looking as if he had fallen asleep.
“They grow as you teach them. She knows that I won’t simply turn her off anymore, so she has gotten into the habit of worrying over me. It should be because I will interact more with her if I’m feeling well, meaning it’s to her advantage if I’m in a better mood.”
“You don’t think it might be… because she likes you a lot? And doesn’t want to see you feeling unwell?” Aspen threw the question in without opening his eyes. Tian Zhu pursed his lips in response.
“Logically, no. She’s not programmed for something that complicated and I don’t believe she has evolved enough to develop personal feelings like that.”
“And if you take away your logic and leave behind your opinion?”
“I’d like it if that was the case. And with the Gamblers appearing, I am admittedly more inclined to believe in things that aren’t quite following the laws of the world that I know.”
“I like that answer.”
“I’m not sure what they wish to accomplish by making us play these games, but if there is a possibility of us gaining advantages through them, it’s not bad.” Especially since both him and Aspen were interested in different rewards – Tian Zhu wanted the games and Aspen could profit if they could convince the Gamblers to reward them after each win.
It was a feeling of constant vertigo. The spider’s thread hanging down to hell, so thin it could snap at any time, and yet so tempting.
Author’s Note
From what I know about training (simple) AIs, it’s a reward-punishment system. According to what they do, there’s a reward for a behavior you want, or a punishment for something you don’t want. Tian Zhu turning off ShuShu without warning was a punishment for her asking too much, so she lowered the amount of questions. First until there was no punishment anymore, then until there was a reward for a level Tian Zhu liked (the reward being him more talking to her).
Thanks for the chapter !
My babies QAQ must protecc QAQ
Thank you for the chapter!! ❤️❤️