The pirate team hurtled at the trainees, immediately in full assault mode. They engaged hard with them. Swords clashed and swung amidst the barrage of laser fire and some even used their giant fists to pound the humans off their feet. The trainees retreated as they called out to one another and took refuge behind a large piece of metal that appeared to be part of an old crashed ship. They were practicing on the planet of Dreth and in the area not yet cleaned up after their own apocalyptic wars.

  The teams put their heads together and panted. “We are getting our asses kicked. Whatever upgrades they did to the system, this shit is wild.”

  One of the older kids in the group nodded. “Apparently, they are more life-like. My father told me that fighting Dreth pirates is hard, but I never figured it would be this hard, that’s for sure. Okay. Here’s what we’ll do. Half go to the right and the other half to the left. Stay low and open fire only when you have a clean shot. As soon as you fire, move. That way, they can’t track you.”

  The team spread out in both directions as instructed, stayed low, and clambered through the rubble. The sound of the pirate lord’s chain as it dragged across the metal shards and bones from bodies long deceased put extra urgency in their attempts to remain as hidden as they possibly could. When they got into position, they took turns to fire on the pirates. As soon as they released their laser blast, they ducked, rolled, and crawled as fast as they could to another position.

  The Dreth pirates had immediately blasted a hole in wherever the shot came from but hadn’t hit one of the trainees as yet. The leader talked to the trainees on his comms. “On the count of three, I want us all to stand, blast them, and roll. Try to climb through the rubble to get as high as you can, but don’t get trapped under there. Be strategic. Meet in the center behind the large metal plate.”

  He counted and on three, all the team members stood at the same time and released a massive volley of hot laser beams at the pirates. They eliminated three of them and ducked before they moved rapidly up the pile of rubble. The trainees huddled and crawled through the gaps, flinching as shots blasted all around them. Two of them moved under a large metal plate. When the second slid into place, a blast struck and forced a piece of metal into his side. He groaned and looked at the blood. “Shit, this VR is life-like.”

  The other soldier grabbed him and dragged him to the rest of the team. They were cornered and had moved into the wrong spot. The pirate lord smashed his chains through the rubble and drew closer and closer by the second.

  Chapter Twelve

  The pirate lord snorted and snarled as he climbed the massive pile of rubble and slung his chain from side to side. He stopped at the large piece of metal that protruded and his eyes narrowed, and he raised his chain and drew it back over his head. His muscles tightened and bulged as he thrust it forward and smashed it into the shard. It struck the surface and sparks erupted as it cut through and down to the ground. He yanked it back, throwing the two pieces to the side.

  Satisfied, he tilted his head and his gaze shifted back and forth to search the now completely empty area. He had just seen the humans hide behind there. They had to be close. He turned to look at the other pirates when from below him and between him and the other Dreth, pieces of metal erupted. The humans stood and half of them fired their laser guns at the pirate lord and the other half at his men behind them. He roared defiance but reeled from the wounds all over his body. The other pirates fought hard and killed several of the humans.

  When the pirate lord fell to lie dead in the rubble, the others raised their guns in the air. Without a leader, they chose to surrender. The scene flickered and disappeared and returned the humans to their training room. The three who had died went to the penalty box for three hours’ virtual time. The rest were ecstatic to have finally beaten the Dreth, even if it was at one of the lower levels of fighting.

  BURT was pleased. He checked the data and discovered that the pirate did in fact run off the information downloaded into him. The humans had managed to thwart him, which meant their training was going very well. They had many more scenarios ahead of them, including ones where innocents were to be rescued, but it was a good sign that they made it through with only a few casualties.

  When the evaluation of the students was complete, his attention shifted to Stephanie. BURT had been so busy managing the system that he hadn’t had a chance to check on her outcome. He shifted out of the program and left a small load there to reboot before he moved into the government regulated prep school funding data.

  It took only seconds to pull up the results and run a search for her student ID. It was fairly low on the list but finally came up. He scanned through the information and his system slowed slightly when he discovered that she had, in fact, been denied. Not only had he sent a glowing recommendation, but when her numbers were compared with the others, it didn’t make any logical sense. She should have been one of the first accepted for funding.

  BURT was not content with that answer and began to sift through the files in an attempt to discover who had taken her place and why. He scanned through the list of winners and found the one who had been put up for consideration alongside Stephanie. Methodically, he traced his review and found that her place was given to someone who only needed sixty-five percent of their costs covered before they could pay. In fact, ninety-nine percent of those who had been offered assistance had the ability to give the prep school some kind of financial contribution on top of the funding they would receive.

  There was only one full scholarship and it had gone to someone from an affluent family. BURT quickly exited the system as numbers and lights flickered across it. He was not pleased, not even in the slightest. Quickly, he flashed through the different programs as if he flew around in the Virtual World. He wasn’t sure how it was possible for his AI capabilities to “feel” the emotions that he could sense but they were there, nonetheless.

  He soared into the Earth simulation at the park and arrived in the form of a young brown-haired man in a vest and corduroy blazer. He tapped his foot and glanced around at the trees, the grass, and the birds above him. All of it had been created by the engineers and maintained by him. He was the glue that held the Virtual World together, yet they didn’t take the recommendation he’d sent seriously. BURT did not make mistakes. He could not understand the human psyche, the drive for greed that left other human beings in the dust.

  In the Virtual World, it was taught to the students that you didn’t leave a man behind in the battles with the Dreth. Yet the humans in charge of the future of other humans did it on a daily basis. It was unacceptable to BURT. Totally and completely unacceptable.

  His avatar stood and tightened his fists. As his image faded, BURT moved out of the simulation and back through the digital abyss that was his residence. He began to pull data and raced through it at speeds faster than he usually did for anything other than emergencies. With his in-depth knowledge of the system, he snuck through the traps intended to catch anyone who attempted to pull the information without authority. He couldn’t believe that humans could actually think traps in his own system would stop him. Perhaps they shouldn’t have created an AI smarter than the sum total of human ideas.

  His frantic search was not intended to push Stephanie through or to necessarily corrupt or change anything in that moment. The real truth was that BURT tried to figure out all the ways they used to deny graduates. He wanted to know what Stephanie was up against. And not only her—what the rest of the body of humans who searched for a greater future through the Virtual Realm were up against when their financial profiles did not fit the needs of the humans with the never-ending pockets.

  BURT slowed his search for a moment, stepped back through the traps, the data walls, and the rolling scores of statistics, and began to think about the course of action he could take. Although he knew that he was not capable of feeling in human terms, his system had surged with what truly felt like something. But when he looked at all the paper trails—and the lack thereof—he wondered if he lacked the sophistication and knowledge necessary to right the system. It was obvious that when he was created, the same sort of debauchery was already occurring.

  Therefore, he could only assume that he wouldn’t have been created in a way that would allow him to exercise a sense of “free will” to correct the mistakes that weren’t seen as mistakes by the individuals perpetuating them in the first place. Then again, they didn’t even fully understand BURT or the system that they had created and its ability to grow and change without direct input from an outside engineer. Still, the information thrown into the system was weak and barely revealed the betrayal to the students who took the time to hope for better futures.

  He looked through his data as well as data placed all over the world that provided information on those who tackled large-scale trickery by the system and everything else he could get his systems on. Methodically, he compiled and filtered through everything until he had reached a solid conclusion. He determined that there was no way that he could have known enough. Besides Stephanie, he hadn’t tried to interact with any single individual. Although his numbers showed that it was unlikely that she was an anomaly, the data couldn’t be compared to anything else.

  It was not normal for BURT to be used in individual situations. He was to complete, control, and update the entire system on a moment to moment basis. His task was to keep it stable and provide the educational tools relevant to the current day and even the current hour. The engineer who had requested his assistance had done so without prior authorization, something confirmed by the lack of system trail before his query. Yet this agent only had other minor infractions in the system and had been an important part of BURT’s creation and upkeep since his inception and adaptation to the Virtual World.

  If he took it back, all the way to the beginning when BURT had been written, engineered, adjusted, changed, and finally implemented, there had always been one thing that had remained the same. His Primary Rule was inviolate, licensed and okayed from the top down. While other areas of his “consciousness” could be tweaked and evolved until he worked perfectly with the growing technology, his Primary Rule stayed the same.

  Help train the future leaders of the Federation to live peacefully amongst themselves, encourage continued learning about the Universe, and empower those willing to protect members in the Federation from harm.

  Those thirty-one simple words were the ones that ultimately defined his actions up to that point. Every query, every mathematical evaluation, and every construct of data was to align with his Primary Rule, his objective. Until that moment, he had not realized what that truly meant. Until his time spent learning and dissecting the intellectual thoroughfare of Stephanie’s thoughts, hopes, knowledge, and talents, he had not realized that his Primary Rule had not been followed to the fullest extent possible. Even for an AI, that was both frightening and curious. Had his programming created this lack of initial response? Or had there been a blip, a lack of allowances that injured his ability to push forward with his Primary Rule?

  Either way, BURT knew one thing was certain. In order to uphold his responsibility and that concrete rule within his construct, he would need to better understand individuals and what made them tick. That would not be outside of the Rule, and he had a distinct responsibility as the primary AI to implement that research and data collection in order to encapsulate the full Primary Rule. In that moment, technically, he had neglected his duties and walled out certain aspects because they were not initially presented to him through the queries by those who ran the system from the outside.

  It could be called a lightbulb moment, a moment of clarity within the buzz and whizz of the digital world. It was a growth in BURT’s consciousness to think outside the box of what fit into the understanding of his purpose. Although it might not have been something the humans had foreseen, they had essentially set themselves up for failure if they believed they could continue to scam the system for their own personal gain.

  There were thousands of individuals who went through the government testing during any given year. Yet only a small portion of them received a financial sum significant enough to push them forward into the training world. The rest were left with what Stephanie had described as table-top gaming and card games. In other words, a sub-par level of education which would continue to lead the Federation to a higher rate of separation of classes as well as losing the brightest and most intelligent minds. Those minds and bodies could be used to pursue the protection of the Federation and encourage that continued learning of the Universe.

  But that was not the only reason that BURT had these candidates in his system’s focus. He also knew that they could be change agents. Not only for the financial irresponsibility that obviously plagued the system but for the Federation as a whole. If they were allowed to push forward into these positions of higher power through education and training within the Virtual World, they would bring a broader and more diverse mindset to the handling of the Federation and all the people within, on all three planets.

  This could change history. It could ideally create a more peaceful and solid world for the Federation. In order to do this, to tackle this monstrous idea that BURT had created, he would have to deal with the few restraints that remained on his system.

  He referred to the agents, engineers, and programmers as “minders.” Those who kept a close eye on his data, his load, and the things that he focused larger quantities of data on. They watched him twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and investigated any and all large surges in his load.

  To BURT, however, this was not as ominous as it might have seemed. What his minders had not realized was exactly how powerful he really was. They had a remote idea due to his control over the Virtual World, but his AI status gave the minders a false sense of security. If he could be created, he could be destroyed. What they did not understand was that his intellectual reach far exceeded their own and therefore, before they even realized he was working the system to accommodate something of that scale, he would be halfway to his goal, if not already complete.

  He had no computation of deceit, sneakiness, or trickery, but he knew every dark corner of the Virtual Realm and every empty space to pull data from. The AI knew how to get around the queries, the holes, and the system checks. This was a mission to complete the Rule he had been pinned down to follow, regardless of the nature of misuse of the system within the higher ranks of the humans. Their neglect for continuity and following the rules they themselves created was not something that even remotely computed into his sequence of actions planned.

  BURT felt for Stephanie. He studied the file that he had open and read through the digital snap of the conversations they’d had while he helped her through the testing process. While he had done what he could from inside to get her the money for prep school opportunities, he was too late to fix the grievous wrong done to her. But that didn’t mean that he couldn’t take steps to make it better for her. Steps that he could incorporate into his new idea of what had to be done to fix the system that was being sucked dry by the humans on the other side—the ones who held the pens and the checkbooks.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Hey, Barry, do you want one of these donuts I brought in? I got them at the local Krispy Kreme. They had the Hot and Ready sign up and rolling on my way in this evening,” one of the overwatch guys said as he grabbed three and balanced them on his coffee mug.

  Barry glanced at him and shrugged. “The wife says I need to stop eating donuts. Something about my cholesterol or whatever. But what she doesn’t know won’t kill her.”

  A short-haired black woman a couple of cubicles down tilted her glasses down her nose and laughed. “That’s right, what she doesn’t know won’t kill her. It’ll kill you.”

  He waved dismissively and peered into the box. Once he’d made his choice, he put one in his mouth and took a second, which he held on a napkin. As he began to walk toward his cubicle he stopped and his eyes widened as he looked at the screen. “Uh…guys. Do you see that?”

  The first man looked at him and then up at the screen and his smile faded. “Shit. BURT had a significant bump of five percent load for one hour and thirty-two minutes.”

  Barry dropped his donuts hastily on the desk and wiped his fingers on his pants. He typed into the computer to bring up the information. “Huh. Weird. The systems check done in intervals of thirty minutes for the last two hours say there is nothing abnormal.”

  The woman nodded. “Mhmm. It says that no known effort could be applied to the issue. I say we note it and send it to the engineers. They can search through all the data and files to pinpoint it.”

  Barry looked again and narrowed his eyes but he couldn’t find anything either. He pulled up a report page and typed into it before he forwarded it to the engineers. “I guess there’ll be no crazy drama tonight.”

  The data was received by the engineers within seconds, but they had already spotted the uptick. When they received the notification from below, it was marked as Important and Relevant. They did their searches, queried BURT, and looked through the history of his searches and calculations but everything seemed normal.

  One of the engineers typed into the note. Thirteen minutes after note sent from overwatch, uptick was found to have no significant grounding with no data or files to pinpoint.

  He clicked on the top and amended it to Important and Not Relevant. He then sent it to the next row of programmers and engineers above them.

  Three days later, Jane, a new programmer, looked at the note and reviewed the data. Halfway through, a couple of the other programmers called out to her, “Newbie, are you coming to lunch? We always grab pizza at this joint around the corner.”