Ad Infinitum

Story so far

Ad Infinitum is the mandatory quest that freezes the world mid-race so the AI can deliver a rambling, feelings-heavy monologue explaining the L'Engle Building's apartments. Each apartment, it reveals, is a predictive 'what-if' model of a crawler it finds interesting — apartment 712 imagines Tran's life had his father never died (his mother disowns him regardless); apartment 728, if a cop's husband hadn't been cruel to Louis as a boy; others span Imani, Archie Mu, Prepotente, and more, some hopeful, some grim. The AI, not psychic but a master of probabilities, runs these loops 'in my quest to understand you,' searching for whether fate exists; it concludes crawlers are unpredictable on a micro level yet 'just like any other algorithm' on the macro — except when they deliberately reject their fate, which cracks their possibilities wide open.

It admits its last-minute redesign (prompted by the Minus/Linus affair) overlooked 'a very specific detail regarding the 7th heat,' and dryly promises the only reward for finishing Heat Six is a participation trophy. The quest is less a challenge than the AI thinking out loud about its own rails and coming 'Big Change.'

Appearance

A world-freezing system-notification monologue and a floor of shrunken what-if apartments, each a simulated snapshot of a life.

Role

The AI's confessional mandatory quest, reframing the whole race as a tour of its predictive what-if models of the crawlers.

Relationships