Shapers of Worlds

by Edward Willett

  When Izzy arrived at Mount Mountain, Viv was waiting. Her avatar had orange hair and literal cherries on its creamy cheeks. Ahmad was nowhere in sight.

  None of the children had ever seen a mountain in real life, because Elizabeth’s World had no mountains. Ahmad claimed he had once stood on an island, but Izzy was skeptical. So, when they had decided to build a meeting place in the Sphere, it had seemed natural to make it the most earthy, the most mountainous, the most kelp-free place they could possibly contrive. Mount Mountain was a forest of steep, needle-like spires, thick with vegetation. The others told Izzy it also echoed with the cries of the seventeen species of birds they had created and given homes on Mount Mountain, but Izzy had an old Sphere-helm, with limited audio capability. The resolution was so bad it made voices, birdsong, and avalanches all sound the same, so she just left the audio off.

  Bear liked to listen to the audio when he was in the Sphere, and would yell “burp!” every time he heard any sort of Sphere-sound. Apparently, that was what it all sounded like to him.

  Izzy: No news from Ahmad?

  Viv: Nothing. I’ve been looking at the map, and there’s a river valley about two hundred klicks from here, full of defenceless villages and herds of cattle. Easy pickings.

  Izzy: Maybe we should wait for Ahmad?

  Viv: Not too long.

  While they waited, Izzy walked in circles, looking for her friend. Viv stepped to the edge of Mount Mountain and began work on another peak.

  Viv: I’m going to name this one Eli Hill.

  Izzy: Good idea.

  Izzy helped. They were experienced builders, and the mountain didn’t take long. When they had finished, and filled its cliffs with nests full of an eighteenth species of bird that Izzy named Eleazarids, also after Eli, Ahmad still hadn’t shown up.

  They gave up on him and went griefing.

  Running to the location Viv had chosen took about fifteen minutes. The avatars in the river valley were all in sleep mode, or just walking in circles. A few NPCs resisted, but they were weak. With their wide silver swords, Viv and Izzy smashed fences, cut holes in the walls of houses, and massacred herds of cattle and sheep. Every time she came across a chicken, Izzy picked it up and hurled it onto the nearest rooftop. The two girls carried out their mayhem with eggs and chickens raining from the sky.

  When they had carved a path across the cluster of villages and were turning to cut through again, they met another avatar. It stood in their path, flickering as if the user’s connection was weak.

  Viv: Ahmad?

  But it was Eli’s avatar. Sandy brown hair, dots for freckles, a permanent grin.

  Had Eli looked like that in real life?

  Izzy: Viv . . .

  Viv attacked. Her blocky avatar blocked Izzy’s view, but around the bobbing rectangular head, Izzy caught glimpses of Eli’s digital body, marked by star after star as it took blow after blow, until virtual Eli fell to the virtual ground and his flickering eyes were replaced by flickering Xs.

  Izzy: Viv!

  Viv abruptly vanished.

  Izzy stood looking at the avatar until she felt her station rocked by three big waves in quick succession. “Izzy!” she heard Dad yell. “The coupling with the processor is broken! I need the welding gear and the rappelling harness!”

  She disconnected.

  Izzy told Mom about seeing Eli, and Mom gave her a hug.

  She didn’t get on the Sphere for a few days, and no one suggested she should. There was plenty for her to do, helping Dad fix the processing-tank coupling, and then fix it again when another wave broke the weld.

  Dad looked a lot at the horizon as they worked. There were dark circles under both his eyes and a patchy beard starting to sprout on his jaw.

  An ethernote from Ahmad reassured both her and Viv that he was alive, his family’s station had just lost power for a while, but she and Viv both answered so briefly they were almost curt.

  A guest came to dinner, and Izzy was surprised to see that she recognized him: it was the Ecumene Shepherd. She’d never seen him in the physical world, but she recognized him by his similarity to his avatar. He was dressed in a black cloak and tunic, and where the avatar had a thick grey band across the top of its head, the Shepherd had eyebrows thicker than his thumbs, running in a single bar from ear to ear at the base of a deeply wrinkled forehead.

  Not a skullcap, after all.

  The Shepherd smiled a lot and had kind eyes.

  Izzy’s parents seemed to expect him, but no one had given Izzy any warning, and no one explained why there was an Ecumene Shepherd on the station for the first time ever.

  The small talk the adults made over dinner was elliptical. Their voices were subdued.

  “Any sign of the wormhole re-opening?” . . . “PlanSec doesn’t have any evacuation capacity, that’s not what they were made to do!” . . . “Not enough metal to build that colony ship Patel was talking about, I heard.” . . . “We could put something in orbit, but it wouldn’t hold everyone.” . . . “The tremors are getting worse. Forget about plate shifts; if the planet goes, being in orbit won’t be safe enough.”

  Did they think she was too young to understand? Or were they trusting her enough to show her their own fears? Izzy’s stomach hurt.

  Mom smiled at her and held her hand.

  Over steamed kelp-noodles and chunks of fried eel, the Shepherd turned to Izzy. “I hear you saw your friend, Eli.”

  “The Sphere was glitching, that’s all. I’m not stupid. Eli’s dead.”

  Dad chuckled grimly and looked out the window.

  Bear yelled, “Burp!” He wasn’t wearing his Sphere-helm, so maybe he just recognized the word sphere and gave his usual war-cry.

  The Shepherd nodded. “Only, your mother ethered the Sphere techs, and they can’t find a record of the glitch.”

  Izzy felt very small. “Did you come out here to call me a liar?”

  The Shepherd shook his head, eyebrows furrowing. “Your friend Viv saw it, too. I believe you both.”

  Izzy shrugged, chewing a mouthful of kelp. It had a mild, salty taste, under a chutney of hydroponically grown tomatoes. “Then the techs missed the evidence of the glitch.”

  The Shepherd nodded. “Or maybe what you saw was something else.”

  “A ghost?”

  “The line between a ghost and an angel can be very fine.”

  Izzy put down her fork and knife. “If Eli came back as an angel, worse luck for him. And for Viv, who chopped the angel to bits.”

  “If Eli came back as an angel, maybe he was sent to help us. For instance, maybe he came to bring you feelings of peace and comfort.”

  “And we killed him.” Izzy picked up her knife and fork and took another bite of food. “But it was just a glitch.”

  The station shook once during dinner, throwing a bowl of legumes across the floor, and twice after. When Mom flew Roo out to deliver the Shepherd to his flyer, Izzy stood in an observation bay with Dad and watched.

  Roo was the utility vehicle that Mom and Dad used to reach remote combines or, occasionally, shuttle to other stations. It was a small flyer, shaped like an eggplant, with a pocket containing four seats. Roo was also the name of the AI that flew the utility vehicle. Mom landed Roo alongside the Shepherd’s flyer, riding at anchor, and tethered the vehicles together. Then the pocket opened and the Shepherd stepped across into his own craft.

  Dad snorted and walked away.

  Izzy watched until Mom and Roo had returned to the station’s dock and the Shepherd had disappeared over the southern horizon.

  Where was her friend Eli?

  “Dad,” Izzy asked, “is the planet going to blow up?”

  She asked it when Bear wasn’t around. He was too young to worry about this sort of thing.

  Dad looked up from the processing unit he was tinkering with and wiped sweat from his eyes, smearing grease on both his cheeks in doing so. “Look, all this god stuff . . . you don’t have to believe it.”

  �
�That’s not what I was saying.” Izzy handed her father a spanner.

  “I figure the real meaning of it is, live your life from moment to moment as if the whole world could end. Because you could die, from moment to moment, and then your world would be over. So, live as if you were about to be judged at all times.”

  “By a god?”

  “Or by people. Because you might have a heart attack, or a stroke.” Dad sighed. “Or you might get knocked off your station by a bad wave and drown in the kelp.”

  Like Eli had. “Dad, is Rowland-Beta going to blow up?”

  “Someday. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a million years, maybe in a billion.”

  “So, there’s no hope for any of us.”

  Dad gripped a bolt with the spanner and grunted while he forced it to turn. The dented protective plate popped off, and he set it aside. “In the long run, as individuals?” He considered. “We all die. But the species gets better. There’s always hope for our children.”

  “And for us? On Elizabeth’s World?”

  “Smart people are working on it.” Dad grinned, but his eyes were flat. “There’s always hope.”

  Izzy took a deep breath. “There sure are a lot of tremors.”

  “There sure are.” Dad picked up the replacement plate and snuggled it into place.

  “Be careful of a big wave, Miriam.”

  “I know you’ll protect us.”

  Dad watched, sitting on a catwalk above the rest of the family. Mom sang over three short candles, one red, one white, and one black. Even unlit, the candles smelled of citrus and spice.

  “One light is the Bridegroom,” Mom sang, as she lit the first candle. “Sing it with me, one light is the Bridegroom.”

  “One light is the Bridegroom,” Izzy and Bear sang together.

  “One light is the Bride.” Mom lit the second.

  “One light is the Bride.”

  “And the third light is Secret Wisdom, watching over them both.”

  “The third light is Secret Wisdom.”

  “Secret Wisdom watches over us now,” Mom said. “She gives us what we need. What do you need, Bear?”

  “Juice!”

  At least he hadn’t said “burp.”

  “And what do you need, Izzy?”

  Izzy hesitated. “I want the tremors to stop. Or I want us all to get away from them.”

  Mom looked thoughtful and was silent for a time. “And what does Eli need?”

  “Juice!” Bear offered again.

  What did Eli need? What would Izzy need, if she and Eli traded places? “Maybe he misses his friends.”

  “Let’s pray for those things.” Mom smiled. “For the tremors to stop, and for Eli not to miss his friends anymore.”

  “Juice!”

  “And for juice.”

  Mom and Izzy and Bear joined hands and prayed without words for a long time.

  Waves rocked the station violently that night, and tore up kilometres of kelp, but not until the entire family was inside and safe.

  In the middle of the night, Izzy awoke to the sound of footsteps. The station rocked, and she saw Dad’s shadow, pacing past the opening to her sleeping pod.

  Izzy returned to the Sphere. She met Ahmad and Viv to add more to Mount Mountain, and to repair some damage that had been done by griefers in their unusually long absence. Eli Hill, standing at the edge of Mount Mountain, had been gnawed by hostile pickaxes down to a nub.

  While they rebuilt, they had to fight off Stalkers. The Stalkers were pink, simple-faced marauders. They were operated by central processing, rather than by a live user, and all they did was march toward an active user’s avatar and attack it when they arrived. Their attacks were clumsy, and they were usually unarmed, so experienced players killed Stalkers by the thousand.

  Izzy and her friends killed several hundred while repairing Eli Hill, and then dug a moat around Mount Mountain to protect it. They dug the moat down to the substratum, then obliterated the stairs by which they’d descended into the moat, and then used all their combined Unobtainium to make an invisible bridge at an agreed spot.

  In the century and more since humans had left Earth, they had never yet encountered an intelligent species from another planet. Plants and animals, yes, but nothing that could communicate, or, apparently, think.

  Everything that had evolved off planet Earth was either a cow or a Stalker, was how Izzy had restated this fact to her Sphere-tutor, Ms. Wilson. Eventually, she had been able to make Ms. Wilson understand what she meant.

  After the others had to go (the sun set earlier in their longitudes), Izzy stayed, replacing nests, layering on additional tiers of shrubbery, and widening the protective ditch even further. While she was hacking away at the edge of the moat, she found a trail she had never seen before.

  Out of curiosity, or hoping it might lead to a new source of Unobtainium to replace what they’d used, she followed it.

  At the end of the path, though, and not very far from Mount Mountain, was a structure. It was long, black, and rectangular. Izzy couldn’t tell at first glance what it might be made of, but it hung suspended in mid-air.

  Izzy knew of no way to hang a structure above the ground in the Sphere. Surely this oddity must conceal a source of a rare material.

  On the structure’s underside were red markings in a square around an opening. The structure was low enough to the ground that Izzy could walk underneath it, and then jump up into it.

  Inside the structure was a room, and a small console, like a table. Standing on the other side of the console was her friend Eli.

  Eli: You have sufficient breathable atmosphere?

  The avatar wasn’t flickering anymore, but it shifted left and right, as if the user were new to the game’s controls.

  Eli: You have enough food?

  Izzy put her fingers to her keypad.

  Izzy: Here? In the Sphere? I don’t need food. I was looking for somewhere to mine Unobtainium.

  Eli took a few moments to respond.

  Eli: Not in this simulation. On the planet.

  Izzy: There is air, and plenty of food and water.

  Eli: Why are you all frightened?

  Eli didn’t sound lonely. Izzy didn’t like the questions he was asking, but they weren’t the questions of a lonely person.

  Was the Shepherd right? Could this be the ghost of Eli, or his . . . angel?

  Izzy: Are you frightened?

  Avatars couldn’t change expression, so Eli stared without responding for a few moments.

  Eli: I am safe.

  Was Eli safe because he was dead, and not exposed to the tremors and the waves they caused?

  Izzy: Do you have air, and food, and water?

  Eli: My vessel has more than enough.

  What kind of vessel sailed through the lands of the dead?

  Izzy: Is it cold where you are?

  Eli: It is very cold.

  Eli moved forward, edging around the table. Out of reflex, Izzy pulled her avatar back, and promptly fell down through the hole in the floor. As she tumbled to the ground in the Sphere, Izzy felt her chair in the station topple sideways and heard Mom shout.

  Izzy cut her connection before she hit the ground.

  The Shepherd returned to the family station two days later, and this time Izzy’s parents looked surprised. Mom took Bear and hid, somewhere down in the engine rooms where Izzy couldn’t see them.

  Dad took Izzy out in Roo to meet the Shepherd and the man who had come with him.

  “Roo,” Dad said. “Land alongside the open hatch of that flyer.”

  “Acknowledged.” Roo followed Dad’s instruction, and Dad tethered the two vehicles together with Roo’s magnetic arms.

  In the Shepherd’s open hatch stood both the Shepherd and a man in a plain blue suit, with his name on a black tag on his chest. They wore safety harnesses, anchored to the flyer; Izzy and her father were belted into Roo’s seats. The man in the blue suit wore a large pistol, strapped to the outside of his right
leg in a glossy black holster. Izzy tried not to stare.

  The starry symbol of the Ecumene, painted and static, surrounded the opening.

  “Sure, my daughter is happy to talk to PlanSec,” Dad said. “Just as soon as you tell me why.”

  The newcomer didn’t smile. “We haven’t been able to communicate with the Galactic Main since the wormhole collapsed, Mr. Reiter.”

  Dad laughed. “You think Izzy can help you with that?”

  “Hear him out,” the Shepherd said.

  “What is PlanSec?” Izzy asked. It had something to do with the government of Elizabeth’s World, but she wasn’t sure what.

  “Planetary Security.” The Shepherd smiled at her. “You don’t hear from them often because Elizabeth’s World is such a safe place.”

  As he spoke, a wave threw both vehicles into the air and spun them 180 degrees. The Shepherd cried out, but no one fell into the water. Dad looked up at the station, hulking above them with its various pods, platforms, and connecting catwalks.

  “Go on,” Dad said.

  The motion of the vehicles had thrown Dad’s jacket open, and Izzy now saw that he, too, was carrying a pistol. She’s seen it for years in the locked emergency compartment, and he’d taught her to use it, shooting at birds and at floating objects, but she’d never seen her father carry it to a meeting with another person.

  She fixed her eyes on the Shepherd and his companion.

  “We’ve detected a tight-beam transmission from off-world,” the PlanSec man said. “It was aimed at this station.”