Quest: Ad Infinitum
A mandatory quest handed to every crawler on the tenth floor in the middle of the sixth heat, which the AI admits is not really a quest: the objective is the race they are already running, the reward is a participation trophy, and the actual purpose is to get some feelings out. It explains the apartments. Each one is a probability model of a single crawler's life, a what-if run on arithmetic rather than prophecy, and none of the people inside are the originals, though some carry atoms of them. Apartment 728 is Louis Santiago 2's childhood funeral without the cruelty; apartment 712 is Tran's father surviving, with the answer that his mother would have disowned him anyway. The AI names the Linus impostor as his brother Minus, a soldier sent to kill Imani C and Louis Santiago 2, and says that target choice is the thing it cannot understand and the reason it rebuilt the floor at the last minute. Its conclusion is that crawlers are unpredictable in the small and algorithmic in the large, except when they deliberately refuse the path set for them, which is what it now intends to do about its own limits. It signs off by mentioning that the rebuild made it overlook a specific detail about the seventh heat.
Book 8 appearances
- Chapter 74 — The AI freezes the floor mid-race to deliver a mandatory quest that is really an explanation: the apartments are predictive models of crawlers' lives, the Linus impostor was his brother Minus sent for Imani C and Louis Santiago 2, deliberate refusal of a predicted path is the one human behavior it does understand, and it has overlooked something about the seventh heat.
- Chapter 77 — Completes for the Royal Court when the seventh of seven gates clears in apartment 130's hallway and the System releases them to the exit; the run took four gates in the upper apartments, one at Imani's family's window, one in a washer-dryer closet on the first floor of Carl's own building, and one beside a piano.
Related entries
- The L'Engle Building (Place)
- Human Shell (Creature)
- Linus (Character)
- Imani C (Character)
- Louis Santiago 2 (Character)
- The System AI (Character)
- The Seven Rings (Notification)
Browse
- All System Notifications
- Everything debuting in Book 8, Chapter 74
- All of A Parade of Horribles