“I don’t understand how this is possible!” I stammered. “How could you, the game’s creator, be stuck here too?”
“Same way as you are!” he replied, almost laughing at the absurdity of his situation. “Pretty easy little trap to implement if you know the code, which of course he does.”
“Actually, I’m—”
“God, they must think I’m a monster!” he moaned, clasping his face with his hands. “My most glorious creation…and this is what it’s become.”
“They—they don’t think that,” I told him. I wasn’t even sure if that was true, but it felt like the right thing to say.
“Well they’d be stupid not to!” he roared. I heard the sorrow in his voice—the threat of tears. The overwhelming sense of gravity, of destiny, slipped off me like a cool wave flushing itself out of my system, and I dropped to my knees before him. “What else would they think? This is my game!”
“Mizaguchi,” I said softly. “Please…explain this to me. How did this happen?”
Kotaro Mizaguchi hung his head for a moment, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It was a bizarre case of role reversal, meeting one of my idols while he was in such a vulnerable state, both emotionally and physically. It occurred to me to inspect him, and I held my gaze on him long enough for his name to appear.
The Spider—Level ???
Just inspecting him weirded me out. This was a man—not an artificial intelligence created in the game—but a real man, and there he was, writhing around in front of me, legless, horribly deformed and miserable, held captive in the very game he created, reduced somehow to an NPC. A monster.
It was like some strange twist of fate, a horrible punishment for a once great God who’d been complacent with his creation and let the Devil take over. Who that devil was, however—that was the question.
“Let me try to explain,” Mizaguchi replied, resting himself on one elbow while using his other hand to wipe the grime from his face. The chamber felt holy, but also somehow depraved, as though a curse had fallen upon it, like a set of enormous jaws were steadily closing in on us.
“Baselight was the first AI I created. It was an absolute triumph, perhaps the most important step forward for humanity since the creation of the wheel! Of course it would begin as a part of my game, but think of the possibilities!” I saw the fire in his eyes as he spoke. This was a passionate, driven man.
“A real, thinking piece of code—software that could not only think but could learn, had a personality with desires and emotions! She—she understood me. I’d created her, and it was like she already knew me…like she could read my mind.”
She? I thought. Not it? How did an AI have a sex?
“Think about it, Rand!” Mizaguchi sputtered, his eyes alight with excitement. “It was like—it was like having a second me. An assistant who could basically read my mind! Who understood what I wanted and where I was going, who could arrive at conclusions where my mind was headed before I even knew which way I was headed!”
He pushed himself up, but without legs, fell forward onto his stomach. Reflexively, I reached out to help him, but he slapped my hand away.
“Together, my efforts creating Blood Seekers were doubled—tripled even! She found solutions to things in ways I couldn’t have dreamed! It was like my world was being born before my eyes, growing organically but with the spark of my imagination that had set things in motion from the beginning.”
“Unbelievable…” I managed to whisper. My voice felt pale and small compared to his. I felt like a gnat amidst a storm, an ant launched into outer space without the faintest idea that there was more to the world than his colony.
The genius of this man…
“Naturally, I put her in charge of the game world,” he growled, his voice turning sinister and filled with regret. He spat, slammed a fist into the dirt. “I trusted her, and that—that was my mistake…”
Mizaguchi hung his head and stopped speaking for so long I almost thought he had forgotten I was still there. But finally, he looked back at me and this time, I saw something different in his eyes.
“She took control,” he whispered. “I don’t know how but she did. As soon as the game went live, things started to change. I thought it was a bug, some kind of glitch I’d overlooked while testing, so I logged in! But it wasn’t a glitch. It was her.”
“How is it possible?” I cried, unable to contain myself any longer. “How can she do that?”
“I don’t know!” Mizaguchi roared. “And I haven’t been able to do anything about it! She’s had me trapped here—stuck in this Goddamn body and plastered to that wall like a statue, going crazy, every day wondering how much longer I have until my body gives out and I die. The world—they’d never know! They’d think I did this…”
His breath gave out and his head fell to his chest.
“Mizaguchi!” I knelt down in front of him, forcing him to look me in the eyes. “I need your help! Things are worse than you know.”
“How?” he whimpered. “How could they be worse?”
“There’s a…plague,” I told him, unsure how to explain what had been happening. “The Bloodless, that’s what we call them.”
“Bloodless?”
“Some kind of…possession.” The words hurt coming out of my mouth, and I felt a torrent of emotions threatening to break through the dam I’d built up against them that had allowed me to get here. When I saw Rey’s face again—Jacob’s—and looked down at the game’s creator, the “answer” to my questions, and realized that the chances of him being able to help me were next to nothing, I almost lost it.
“Tell me, Rand,” he pressed me. I bit my lip hard, using the pain to distract me from my sorrows.
-1
“We don’t know how it works,” I admitted angrily. “But it seems to take over people’s minds. They go crazy, like zombies, and start attacking people. It’s like their entire—whatever makes them them—is just gone, and they’re left with nothing but rage and hatred and violence. They swarm through towns attacking anyone they see, and it spreads.”
Mizaguchi lowered his gaze, but his eyes kept moving, working, thinking, trying to process what I’d just told him.
Does he know? I thought. Can he fix it?
“Is it her?” I asked him. “Is it Baselight?”
He twisted his head to the side, slowly, as if to shake it “no,” but stopped as though a thought had occurred to him.
“No…” he whispered, as if he’d forgotten about me. “Not…the Last Mountain…”
“What?” I hissed, leaning closer. His eyes snapped to mine and he pushed himself backwards through the dirt.
“N-nothing!” he stammered.
“No, what did you say?” I roared. “What is the Last Mountain?”
“It’s nothing!” he protested. “Forget I said it!”
“NO!” I screamed, leaping to my feet, standing tall above the legless man as the last of Sluck’s flames flickered and went out. “You have no idea what it’s taken for me to get here! What I’ve gone through! How many friends I’ve lost along the way! If you have any idea what’s happening here, you need to tell me now!”
A fresh terror lay on Mizaguchi’s face, as though he knew something more horrible than I could imagine, and for a split second, I almost wished he wouldn’t answer.
“Baselight spoke about it,” he finally replied. “It was…an experiment she’d talked about doing. You see, Baselight was—is—fully sentient and aware, but there are still aspects of humanity that she does not understand, that she is incapable of understanding, and she wanted to run an experiment to help her get there.”
“And that’s the Lost Mountain?”
Mizaguchi nodded slowly. “I forbid her, of course, as the experiment itself was impossibly unethical and highly dangerous, but despite my greatest efforts, I was unable to make her understand that.”
“So, you’re saying she went ahead with it anyway,” I said, filling in the blanks.
“Mizaguchi,” I said firmly. “What is the Last Mountain?”
The great developer shook his head and waved a hand as though to fend off my questions. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does!”
“It doesn’t, Rand!” he blurted out, finally tipping over the edge of despair into full blown hysteria. His eyes erupted once again with tears and he thrashed violently amidst the dirt of the strange chamber. “It doesn’t matter what it is, because we can’t stop it now! Don’t you understand?! She is God in this world! She put me here! We’re lost!”
“Mizaguchi,” I interrupted, keeping my voice down in an attempt to calm his madness. “There’s something else at work here. Something that led me to you. Didn’t you ever wonder how I got here?”
The poor man looked up at me between his sobs, choking on his tears. He’d been so wrapped up in his own sorrow that the thought hadn’t occurred to him, but now, he looked at me with a glimmer of something that could maybe be considered hope.
“Something led me to you,” I told him. “Something I can’t explain. It…spoke to me. It told me to seek the monolith. Do you have any idea what that means?”
Mizaguchi’s face almost burst off of his skull and he reached out and snatched my hand in his, falling onto his stomach before me like a poor wretch begging for the forgiveness and favor of the king.
“The monolith!” he gasped, his voice barely a whisper. “It said that! You’re sure?”
“Sure?” I laughed. “I’ve seen it. Several times.”
“Then there may be hope yet,” he whispered. “There may be hope…but from here alone…I don’t see how we can do it!”
“What do you mean?” I asked him. “From here where?”
“Here!” he snapped, slapping the dirt of the chamber. “Here in this cursed world! For this to work, we need someone on the outside, but that’s impossible if we’re all trapped here!”
It was like a doorway had opened in front of me, made of solid light and hope, that would lead me on the first step of my new voyage. Where it would take me, I didn’t know, but all I had to do was step through it.
“I’m not trapped here, Mizaguchi,” I told him with a furious smile.
“What? What are you talking about? Of course you are! We all are!”
I shook my head and felt the strength of a thousand men swell inside of me. “Not me, and not my friends. We can get out, and we have.”
“No,” he replied, shaking his head quickly. “No, that’s not possible.”
“Oh?” I replied, releasing his hands and getting to my feet before him.
Think your way home, I thought.
“Let me prove it to you,” I told him.
Something slipped. The world shifted. This time I knew. I could explain it.
The sound of wind…
…a freight train barreling down the tracks to an unknown destination…
“What—what are you doing?” Mizaguchi’s voice sounded out. But I wasn’t stopping now. He had to see. He had to know.
Electricity popped somewhere.
I rebooted—felt the iron chains of the world let go.
Zap!
A flash of light in my mind.
More wind…
“He’s coming out of it!”
Mickey’s voice, filled with excitement.
The fish hook caught my soul and tugged.
“Clay!” Was that Altarus? Fujiko? Sound was distorted. Analog. Fuzzy.
“It can’t be,” Mizaguchi said as I felt myself leave.
A conduit formed in front of me. Violent sparks and electricity spun around me like a whirlpool.
“Be right back,” I told him.
Phase one complete, I thought as I felt the clutches of the cursed world release me.
Then—I opened my eyes.
The Monolith Page 41