Continue Online (Part 3, Realities) Read Online Free PDF Page B

dialed over to Vice President Riley. If anyone knew of a legal route to negate this mess, she would. The call went through surprisingly fast.
    "Mister Legate. You have one minute before I need to move on to another situation."
    "Do you have any way to override a restriction placed on my ARC software? I'm unable to access Continue Online." I didn't want to say that my failure as a human being lead to the loss of control.
    "Is this something caused by the AIs within Continue?" Miz Riley waved her hands and pulled up something on her side. I watched her face tilt back slightly and stare down. She must be looking at a report.
    "No." I said. Not directly.
    "Then no, I do not. Your legal matters are your own to solve. In fact, it might be better if you spend less time within the game world, at least for now." She waved one hand and a noise echoed in the background. Miz Riley no longer looked directly at the screen and instead seemed to be motioning someone to sit down.
    "What?" I asked in confusion. There had been hope that Miz Riley would have something for me, anything. A number in legal. An override button or magic laser beam.
    "Good day, Mister Legate. If your status returns to Continue please keep submitting reports," she said with a fleeting glance my way. Someone else's voice could be heard in the background talking.
    Confusion increased and I asked again, "What?" The conversation shut off and another round of dashboard abuse started. My attempt at bringing in the big guns to solve this problem completely failed.
    Minutes passed as the van drove. I mumbled to myself trying to measure up a way out of everything. Checklists were formed, prior history items reviewed, anything to make sense of the whole situation.
    Hal Pal clicked to life behind me. "User Legate," It said.
    "I'm not in the mood, Jeeves." I tried to run through what had happened again in my head.
    "This unit is only offering a warning." The butler voice was back. This time it was male, instead of the female nanny accent being used this morning on the way over.
    "Okay." I tried not to be angry at Hal Pal.
    "There's a storm coming, User Legate. The route home will suffer some detours in order to minimize potential hazards." The artificial intelligence that ran Hal Pal only tried to be helpful. It wasn't at fault for my failures to communicate.
    Detours? My life felt full of them. Just when I finally had a ray of hope, when things were slowly coming together, life shit on me once again. The therapist, Doctor Litt, would get an earful during my next meeting.
    "Thanks," I muttered.
     

Session Forty One – Do Robots Dream?
     
    Doctor Litt didn't have a meeting open for another three weeks. He had calmly stated that we should not do an online one or over the phone. This particular can of worms needed to be opened in person. He gave me an address and time then calmly deferred all my complaints until our session.
    For nearly a week, I moped around in real life. There weren't many useful highlights from those five days. My hours were spent working one Trillium job after another with bitter enthusiasm. It would look good on my stats for the quarter, but honestly keeping employment only meant ongoing funds, losing this job wouldn't break me.
    I did have the van, though. It allowed me to see how the others in-game were doing. Having used the first of my [NPC Conspiracy] access codes to get my van hooked up came in handy. Hal Pal did a lot of the work through whatever magical space science it operated by and granted me under the table admin access to other people's ARCs.
    Of course, my poor wording choice meant that my own ARC account couldn't be accessed and these abusive powers only worked inside the van. That was one of the reasons I had done so many jobs over the last few days. Liz didn't have an ARC which made getting back at her through my real life cheat skill impossible without burning one of the two remaining uses.
    Beth played her character Thorny and ran around a