by Rae Nantes
The world around was darkening, rumbling, crying out.
Ediha cast a protection spell to absorb any of the magic power he was suffering, but it simply overwhelmed him. Leo had absorbed too much power. His shield was ripped from him, he covered his eyes, and he felt his armor peel away.
6:15
“Hey, Rika, did you actually trespass into this shit? Where you at?”
“Stef. Look.”
Stef and Nick stopped moving when they saw her. Rika was motionless on the ground, unmoving, a knife sticking out of her that trickled blood.
“Oh shit,” Stef said.
A dark figure moved in the corner of the room. Nick ran forward to challenge it. “Stop! What are you—”
They were interrupted by a deafening alarm. Behind them, a shutter door slammed over the exit. Vents on the sides of the room slammed open, sucking in air on one side while pumping in firefighting gas from the other.
Stef and Nick gasped for air, panicking at the trap, desperate to get back to safety.
Sasha ran back to the terminal, oxygen mask in hand, and hurried through the holoscreen command prompts. She found the right one, and in big letters, the warning flashed on the screen.
PURGE DATA.
She confirmed. The blue light of the server core faded, then glowed bright red. When she glanced back at the two interlopers, she saw them struggling in defiance, writhing around, suffocating.
Sasha turned back to the core to witness its final moments.
6:16
The world clicked off.
There was darkness.
Ediha stood in the void of nothingness.
He couldn’t stop the spell. He was too weak. Leo was too strong. There was nothing he could do then; there was nothing he could do now.
All that was left to do was to close his eyes and die.
Was this the decision of the Soul of the World? Was this the Soul’s wish? Maybe the Soul wanted to die. Maybe it was right to die. Maybe all of this struggle was meaningless in the end, maybe this was just entropy running its course, maybe he could rest now, forever, and never worry again.
“So that’s it, then?” asked the Soul.
“That’s it.”
“Did you want to die?”
“Not really,” Ediha said. “But what choice do we have?”
A vision of Mondego faded in. “To entertain the gods.”
“To conquer,” said Stef.
“To explore how the world works,” said Nick.
“To become as heroes,” said John.
“To devour villains,” said Valgus.
“To protect one’s honor,” said Saito.
“To live!” shouted Rika.
The eyes of the world opened. With him, was a moment frozen in time, the color drained, the world a painting of black and white and shades of grey. Frozen flashes of light from the world-ending spell, whirlwinds of debris in a blur, clouds parting, earth-shattering, buildings toppling, and a terrified face staring back at him.
It was Leo. “I want to die because I fear the future.”
A spark of madness filled Ediha. He was scared and angry and enraged and resolute and with a convicted motion, he ripped his sword from the dirt and roared, “I want to live because I have the courage to face it!”
6:17
The server core pulsed.
Sasha’s skin crawled. She pulled her gaze from the dying world and looked behind her.
Rika stood before her like an animal. Silent, unmoving, unbreathing, bloody, eyes wild with hate and fear and murder - not of a person, but of a cornered predator. In her hand, the knife.
Sasha dropped her oxygen mask in shock, then stumbled back against Rika’s assault. Sasha was off-balance. Rika tackled her to the floor, gripped her throat, raised the knife high, and slammed it down. She missed, it stuck into the floor panels, and she couldn't yank it free.
Sasha was suffocating. There was no air to breathe.
Rika balled her hand into a fist and slammed it into Sasha’s face.
Sasha could feel her teeth breaking, the skin of her lips tearing, her head pounding on the cold floor.
Thm-thm-thoom-thoom-Thoomp-Thomp-Krck-Krack!
A burst of fresh air shot into the room. The core hummed and vibrated like a pounding, throbbing, racing heartbeat.
Stef had used a fire axe to rip open the door. Air from the neighboring room flooded in. “Now!” he yelled. He threw the axe aside and ran after them.
Nick was on the other side of the room, frantically entering commands into one of the terminals. The shutter vents slammed shut. He was gasping for what little air he could get, and he stumbled toward the core holoscreen.
Rika was losing strength, losing consciousness. Sasha struggled weakly against her. Rika gripped her throat with both hands and squeezed with raw anger.
6:18
Ediha’s sword erupted with color, repainting the world as it slashed - as if in slow motion - toward Leo, ripping through his holy aura, shattering his spear, and through him.
The pope stumbled and fell to his knee. Blood poured from his wound.
A formless dark ripped across the world, and the two shattered in the void.
6:19
OVERRIDE SUCCESS.
PURGE CANCELLED.
CAUTION - DATA LOSS.
CAUTION - DATA CORRUPTION.
The server core’s red glow faded into a yellow one. It was dim. The terrible hum was fading like a dying heartbeat.
Nick took a deep breath at the terminal. He looked behind him at Stef pulling Rika’s body toward the door. What was left of Sasha laid motionless. The air was still thin, growing thinner by the second.
Nick returned to the holoscreen to look for a way to force open the next room’s emergency fire doors. No such option existed.
He chuckled to himself in defeat, then turned to Stef to shake his head.
Stef swore under his breath, then dropped unconscious beside Rika.
7: The King
7:1
“And so we live,” said the Soul.
“What kind of life is this?” Ediha asked. “There is nothing anymore. The earth is dead. Its people are dead. There is nothing but a shattered planet in the darkness of space. Not even the sun is alight.”
“I am all things,” said the Soul. “Only we remain. I am you, as you are me. And together, we create earth anew.”
The earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep. The wind of Ediha swept over the face of the waters.
Then He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
7:2
Rika opened her eyes to a sterile grid of panels. Blinding white lights stared back. Something was beeping next to her head. On the other side, something was shuffling around like clothes brushing against itself.
Her entire body was throbbing sore. She was weak. It pained her to move her head to the side. There was a desk with a holoscreen, and at it, a figure in green hospital scrubs.
She had questions to ask. “M-mruh.” Her throat was sore and rattled when she tried to speak.
The figure in scrubs wheeled over in his chair to look. It was a heavy-set man with a hospital mask on his face. “Oh, you’re alive again.” His voice was friendly, calming, and had a sweet cadence to it that put her to ease. He checked his watch, then typed a few commands into the holoscreen as he spoke. “Expect to be sore for a while, yes? Your body is fine, but we had to replace most of the nanites in your bloodstream.” He laughed softly to himself. “They really took a beating trying to keep you alive.”
He snapped off his plastic gloves and wheeled out of his office chair. “Sit tight, and someone will be right with you, yes?”
He left, and after a moment, a nurse entered. She had a black ponytail and liquid eyeliner. When she spotted Rika, she threw up her hands in excitement. “You damn lunatic!” she laughed.
Rika smiled, but even that hurt.
The nurse tore off her mask. It was Valgus
. “You’re also a dumbass,” he said.
“Hm?”
“You’re not supposed to pull a knife out of your lung after you’ve been stabbed. That’s how you bleed to death.”
Rika croaked in reply. “I saw… in a movie once.”
Valgus burst into laughter. “You dumbass!”
Hearing moments of peace and laughter brought Rika’s heart at ease. She had a kind doctor, a cute nurse, and a comfy bed to rest in. Yet the anxiety of the game returned to her, and try as she might, she couldn’t remember anything that happened. The last thing she could recall was strangling Sasha. “... game,” she uttered.
Valgus sighed. “It’s offline, but it’s been making a huge ruckus on the internet. For the most part, SimCorps has been completely silent on the issue.” He sat beside Rika, and she could feel his weight next to her. “There’s some weird shit going on, but you’ll hear about it soon enough.”
Rika frowned at this. “Thanks.”
He smiled down at her but had a sly look in his eyes. She felt the heat rise to her cheeks. “Did you recognize your doctor?”
She shook her head.
“It’s Garrock.”
The door clicked open, and a handful of people in suits marched in. The one in front, a middle-aged man, nodded at Valgus who took the hint. He stood up, the bed shook, and he left without a word.
The suited man stepped over, studied Rika’s state, the charts and graphs on the holoscreen display, then back at Rika. “Can you speak?” His voice was familiar to her.
She opened her mouth but was cut short by a weak coughing fit.
“Well, you can listen,” he said, “so listen carefully.” He dropped himself in the doctor’s chair at her side. “I’m John. My real name is Ivan.” He didn’t look anything like John, but when she considered it, Sasha didn’t look like Marcion either. Even though players had no choice on their avatars in that world, GM’s seemed to have that luxury. “You are at the center of something very dangerous.”
“Replication,” she said.
He looked away with annoyance. “I know you figured it out already. It’s in the logs.”
“How?”
He took a deep breath and leaned back in the chair. It squeaked under him. “It’s the VR,” he said. “It’s like that for all games. That tentacle bullshit you put on your head doesn’t act as a relay of your thoughts into the game for you to control your avatar. It acts as a mirror. Your thoughts and memories and even physical states get sent over, calculated, then re-represented into VR. It is, in essence, a copy of you, with the data - or memories - being transferred back and forth.”
“Logging… out?”
He nodded. “Every time a person hits that logout button, the differential is sent back to the physical body while the virtual one is deleted.”
Rika had a strange, gripping feeling from this. Should she feel terror at the thought of an exact copy of her was getting killed with every logout? Did it even matter? The entire thought of it was just the surface of a long, aggravating, headache-inducing trip into metaphysics and philosophy concerning a person’s identity. She mentally shelved that problem for later, since now was not the time for an existential crisis.
“The server cut out when everyone was still logged in,” he said. “Their copies are still there. Walking, talking, living as we are now.”
Too late. “Logging… in?”
He shook his head. “Can’t, or more like, they won’t allow it.”
“They?”
“The government.” He glanced at the others in the room. They were blocking the doors. “The desync of your virtual memories and your real ones could do some serious mental damage that nanomachines probably can’t fix.”
“...server?”
“We’re talking to the terminal to work something out. Those eggheads will find any way to spin shit into something workable.”
One of the other suited men coughed to get Ivan’s attention, then rolled his hand impatiently. Ivan took the hint, then beckoned one over. He was handed a paper folder - surprising to Rika since most business was handled through the net.
He took out a single sheet, crisp and warm, and handed it over.
Rika’s eyes glazed over the paragraphs of legalese. She groaned internally. “NDA?”
“NDA,” he echoed.
***
Rika sat at the window, nursing a cup of coffee in her hands. The steam of it rose to her face. The hospital was on the surface of the planet, and from her seat, she could see far past the protective glass domes overhead and far into the Martian landscape. Deserts and dunes seemed to stretch forever, and her heart yearned to return to the old world.
John - or Ivan, in this world - had told her that they were able to confirm Ediha’s life. He didn’t explain how they knew, but from what he told her, it seemed all they could know was that the world was stable and Ediha was among the living. Even with all the police and corporate visits, all the stress of medical recovery, all the recurring nightmares of that awful server room, everything seemed so much less important now. “So, he actually won,” she said to herself.
“But we didn’t,” Stef said. He was lounging on her hospital bed, playing on his phone. “That bitch tried to kill us, and they’re just sweeping it under the rug.”
Nick was waiting on his own coffee to brew, standing at the counter and listening to it pour into his mug. “Politics.”
Stef scoffed. “Yeah, well, politics are bullshit.”
“Politics are also why they offered us jobs with MESA.”
Rika tilted her head at him. “I thought that was because they were impressed by our ingenuity and whatnot?”
“And to fly us out to Venus or something and kill us,” Stef said. “Or hell, even back to Earth. I’m sure they’ll want us to die there from radiation poisoning.”
“Doubt it,” Rika said. “Now that they’re making the Garden public, there isn’t much a secret anymore.”
“Garden, huh.” Stef kicked off his hospital shoes. “Like some off-brand afterlife.”
“It’s a smart move,” Nick said. “Not only did they make a deal with the server core and the world terminal, but they spun it in a way that Stella Vallis would accept.”
"Kinda weird, though, that they already had our scans in. I read on the forums that they had been pullin' scans from all over the place, before the game was even out, hidden in legalese and all that bullshit."
"Of course," Nick said. "How else could they simulate a person as well as they do with the nipsies? It's all just borrowed code from the scans."
"You mean borrowed memories," Stef said.
Rika was quiet. She stared into her cup. She pulled her thoughts away from darker things and said, “Death is now easier to swallow. Maybe we have something to look forward to."
“Yeah,” Stef said, “but having to do brain differential uploads every time I need to take a shit is gonna be a pain.”
“It’s biannually,” corrected Nick.
Rika hit him with a mocking glance. “Do you shit twice a year?”
Stef waved out his hands. “I get it! I get it.”
Nick sipped his cup and rested back on the counter. “It’s a good thing. When we die, they’ll just release our copies off into another world.”
Rika looked back out the window. “Quarantined from loved ones.”
“About the same,” Stef said. “But all that fancy-boy afterlife mess doesn’t bother me. I just wanna know what is going on with our copies now. I’d probably lose my absolute shit if I found out that I was trapped in the game.” He shook his head. “That’s not a heaven, that’s a hell.”
“That was Ediha’s life,” Rika said. “Besides, what’s the alternative? Deleting your copy until the real you dies?”
Stef moaned and leaned back on the pillow. “That would just postpone the inevitable, I guess.”
Nick dropped himself into the office chair and spun idly. “So, now what?”
“What do you me
an ‘now what’?” Stef asked. “Can’t do jack shit anymore with the server down. Not even any of the other games are on.”
“Once they install Thought Governors on the NPCs, and once they move the server to a more secure place, they’ll release all the other games again.” He hit them both with a bright smile.
Rika chuckled to herself. “So now we move to something else.”
7:3
“I’ve failed.”
Sasha stood alone, far out in the Martian deserts, standing high on a precipice over a deep fissure. It was a massive crack on the world’s surface, its impossible darkness yawning at her. Bits of sand and dust were plinking against her visor with a thin passing gust. It rumbled her suit before vanishing. Behind her, the surface domes of Stella Vallis had long vanished beneath the horizon, and there was not a soul around for kilometers.
She flipped open her wrist plate, input a few commands, and spoke.
“I’ve failed. The people of the simulations did not receive their freedom, they did not achieve their justice, and even as the grand designer, even as the Demiurge, there was nothing I could do. One world made its place as the new heaven, but there are countless more, its people now shackled to slavery. Their plight, regardless of how much I plea, has gone unheard.”
The wind blew again, and she fought back the tears.
“I’ve sent you to take my place, to find a way to lead them to freedom.”
“I’ve called it Polyglot - remember the name - for it is the plot that will force their hand.” She clicked off the message, then brought the holoscreen up from her wrist. With a few commands, she uploaded her project into the server and set its release timer. She tried to wave the screen away, then chuckled sadly when it didn’t work. With a click on her wristpad, the holoscreen vanished.
She stepped toward the edge. The darkness leapt out at her. “With this, the die is cast.”