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The servers were running sims.

He saw hundreds of simulations running at once, which was not possible for a single server.  Someone had slaved many other servers in the building to this one, simply using this as a primary node to support them all.

God, this had to be a significant fraction of the servers in the building, he realized.  There was no other way to be running so many simultaneous simulations.

They were nothing simple, either.  Picking one at random, he soon realized that it was running the simulated life of an extinct dinosaur, Priororaptor.

He ran through his data on the dinosaur, trying to find if there was anything significant about it . . . Discovered in the mid-21st century and named for its discoverer, Henrick Prior . . .  A very average dinosaur, but from its very complete fossils and trace evidence, it was rather well understood.

Made sense to simulate it if you had a good idea of how it might act.  He’d heard of it being done for extinct animals – running simulations of plausible environments to try and guess more about their potential behaviors.  They were very rare, though, for many reasons.

Why was someone doing it on Gohhi of all places?  And why hide it?  There was probably no legal issue doing it, but the price of running sims this detailed was exorbitant.

He did see that many users were watching a livestream of the Priororaptor – it was actively hunting at the moment.  Could that be all this was?  Entertainment?

“You have found something interesting,” Kell noted.

“Yeah.  Someone has basically hollowed out this server farm from its proper function and they’re running sims on it.  Like . . . simulating the lives of animals, if that makes sense.”

“Simulating?  Pretending to be the animals?” Kell asked.

“Yes, basically.  Extinct things like dinosaurs . . . I guess there’s some market for such things, people love to see them-“

“They were mildly interesting,” Kell noted.  “But they also bit quite often.”

“. . . well, maybe tell that to the sim writers.  But . . .”

He sat on the floor, trying to get more comfortable.  “These kinds of sims are a gray-area, ethically.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, any decent sim is doing one heck of a job pretending to be a real creature.  That creature, as far as it knows in the server, is alive.  It experiences birth, growth, pain, and eventually death.  We ban it in the SU without very good scientific reasons, it’s . . . not something to really play around with, you know?  I mean, I know I would hate to find out I’m just a simulation . . . can you imagine that?”

Kell smiled.

“Anyway, it’s not exactly illegal here,” Urle continued.  “but they’re illegally taking over a ton of processing power to run these.  And I have no idea what it has to do with us . . .”

“I can imagine what it is like,” Kell said.

Urle didn’t understand him for a moment.  “What do you mean?”

“Being simulated – I am familiar with this concept.  Perhaps you are overly-concerned, as I experience no discomfort.”

“Kell – what?  What are you saying?”

“I am not what you think I am,” Kell replied.

Urle felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck.  “What do you mean?  You are Ambassador Kell, right?”

“You perceive me as a being in the shape of a human,” Kell continued, looking around the server room.  “Yet you are not perceiving the whole – or what this body truly is.”

Urle was trying to make sense of Kell’s words.  “The whole that . . . well, we’ve wondered why your stated weight is said to be around thirty tons, yet you don’t tip the scales at anything like that.  Is the rest of you . . . curled into a higher dimensional space or something?”

Kell looked at him, a rare expression of surprise and pleasure on his face.  “That is an apt description.  But there is more to it.  You believe you are talking to the Shoggoth, but you are speaking through . . .”  He paused.  “I find the word is lacking.”

“Interpreter?  Vessel?  Shell?” Urle ventured, feeling a sense of unease grow.  Kell was never this candid, so why say these things to him now?

“There is a fish that lives in the ocean on Earth,” Kell continued.  “It lives far deep down, where there is no light.  From its head grows a swollen bulb that emits light.”

“An anglerfish?”

“Perhaps that is the name.  This bulb is a part of the creature.  Other fish see it and interact with it.”

Realization dawned, and Urle took leaned back, away from Kell, without thinking.  “You’re a lure.”

“I am something that you understand and will wish to interact with,” Kell said.  “But do not take the comparison too deeply – I am not simply a mindless tool on the end of the fish.  Imagine if the lure felt, thought, learned – separate from the fish.  It both is and is not the fish.  Limited, lesser in many ways.  Yet because of this, it is better able to make the small fish understand it.  They are not frightened by it, do not simply flee at the sight.”

Urle stopped, feeling a terrible urge to move further away from Kell, who was looking at him dispassionately now.  The deep darkness of the room carved shadowy valleys into his face, and his eyes appeared sunken into his head until they were drowned in the darkness.

“A virtual program,” Urle said.  “You’re not the Shoggoth.  You’re . . . just Kell.  A creation of the being that is made to . . . interact with us.”

Kell smiled again, and while the gesture attempted to convey warmth, it failed utterly.  Instead, it looked inhuman, a grotesque caricature.

A puppet.  With a mind, but a puppet all the same.

“You begin to understand,” Kell said.  “When you look at me, you believe that I am cold, uncaring, about your kind.  And it is true – the Shoggoth does not care.  You are beneath it – beneath me.  How can it view your ephemeral existence otherwise?  Do you know how many times in its age it has seen a tall and ancient tree that had withstood millenia of storms tip for little reason and then wither away?  Seen generations of life be spawned, grow old, and then fall, never to rise again?”

Kell stepped closer to him, and Urle felt his heart pound.  Something in Kell’s voice changed, not simply the voice of a man, but with an echo of something else, like multiple voices speaking at once.  Nearly in harmony but not quite.  Each voice a little different, some more human and some less, but behind them all a puppeteer.

“I have seen life itself nearly extinguished on the Earth.  This universe does not exist for you – you are not the universe contemplating itself.  If anything is, it is Shoggoth kind that speak for the universe, as we were here before you and we shall be here after you.

“But in this ‘lure’, as you called it, the being you call Kell, I can begin to replicate your kind, to understand the universe through your eyes.  I am part of a whole, but as I learn more about your kind, I begin to incorporate the human into the Shoggoth.

“More than most others, you have been instructive, Zachariah Urle.  Others have taught me much, but you . . .”  Kell’s head tipped and a smile came to his face.  “You are more human than most.”

“But why are you telling me this?” Urle asked, his chest hurting, his head swimming.  Errors were cropping up in his HUD, his systems not understanding how to accept his current state of mind, his current inputs.

“Because I have no choice but to trust someone,” the thing that was the master of Kell told him in its many voices.  “And I am beginning to trust you.”

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