by Holly Lisle
“You have ten lit torches in your inventory. Just hold up your left hand and say ‘torch.’ When you’re finished, say ‘stow torch.’”
With my torch in my left hand, I can see that the cave goes back quite a ways, and there are some questionable things deep in the shadows. I also realize I haven’t seen Fuzzy in a while. Since I was back in town, in fact. And the company of a Giant Cat might be reassuring in a large, deep-shadowed cave recently occupied by two big bears.
I say, “Retha, where’s Fuzzy?”
“He’s napping. If you want your cat, just say, “Fuzzy, come here.”
I say, “Fuzzy, come here.” And he appears at my side. Completely unlike the first Fuzzy, who when called pretended to be deaf… unless food was involved.
I pet him, and he purrs. “Stay with me,” I say, and we walk deeper into the dark. I decide it might be a good idea to have my bigger gun in my hand. I pull it out, liking the weight of it. I look at its inventory, where I see it holds ten shots rather than six, and has a load time slightly faster than my old weapon, and a longer barrel, and slightly better accuracy.
So now I have a torch in my left hand, a bigger gun in my right, a big cat by my side, and an inventory full of bear meat and bear hides and bear teeth and bones, and I’m thinking maybe I ought to just turn around and go back to town and turn in my mission stuff.
Brain says, Get out of the cave. Feet say, Keep walking.
And the cat starts to growl.
I see yellow eyes. It looks like a dozen of them. Big ones, small ones.
My hand tightens on the gun’s grip. My pulse races.
And then I remember yellow eyes can go green or red, and I think, Inventory full of bear meat.
I say, “Inventory,” and tap the bear meat, and a packet of it appears in my hand. I toss it toward the yellow eyes, watch them scatter, then regather.
Watch the eyes turn green.
Step into a smaller cave in which a mother Giant Cat is surrounded by six Giant Kittens. Who all gather around me, head-butting me, purring, rubbing against my legs.
When I turn to leave, they all follow me.
I laugh and walk back to Ted, grinning.
He sees me. Sees my cat herd. Smacks his forehead and says, “I’m having a hallucination, right? Because if I’m not, you’ve just made enough money to buy the biggest gun and upgrade your horse at least three times.”
And as we’re riding back, I hear him muttering, “Always save the cat. Always save the cat.”
Chapter Twelve
Hunter Studly
It would be easy to lose myself in the game, to forget that I’m playing to find out what a dead man discovered while he was playing.
It’s a good game, and the activities it offers — from upgrading my horse and guns to improving my skills in cooking, tracking lost children and herds, roping and branding cattle, and… um… pleasing the ladies in The Happy Madame — make it difficult for me to disengage from the game long enough to eat real food and get real sleep and check on the progress of my two colleagues.
But I do.
Hirrin is reconstructing Bashtyk Nokyd’s thought processes from the notebooks, building diagrams that he hopes will allow the owner to take whatever details Tarn and I discover and learn how to apply them to the solution he needs in order to keep governments from degenerating into slave-makers.
Tarn is reading old fiction from Nokyd’s library, looking for characters, themes, conflicts, and solutions.
He has pages of notes, but nothing that pulls what he has into answers.
Me?
I’m spending time with a gunslinger who’s a great campfire cook and I’m sleeping under the stars with my giant cat and my faster horse (and his softer saddle) and having the best time of my life, while trying to see how anything I’m doing connects to freeing human beings.
In fact it takes me just over two days in real time before I find my next connection.
I’m about to quit the game and go sleep for a few hours when a non-player character named Jeb Handyfeller runs out of the saloon, spots me, and yells, “Hunter Studly! Hunter Studly! You’re just the man I need. The Bug-Eyed Monsters have come back from Mars, and they have Miss Lizzie and the young’uns! You’ve got to save ‘em. There ain’t nobody else can do it!”
Long Tall Ted’s head comes up and he winces.
I say, “Pause game.”
Something about “Miss Lizzie and the young’uns” is familiar to me. My gut says it’s important, but I can’t figure out why, and I don’t want anyone hearing what I say.
“Retha?” I’m standing in the Senso chamber, outside of the game, but still in my mission log.
She says, “I can hear you.”
“Why does this mission sound familiar?”
She says, “You saw it in Long Tall Ted’s mission log when you replayed his final save. He had it as a trophy.”
And she shows me:
Most Recent Trophies and Accomplishments
GOLD TROPHY: You Saved Miss Lizzie and the Young’uns!
SILVER TROPHY: You Got A Faster Horse
GOLD TROPHY: You Got The Biggest Gun
And then she tells me something I did not expect. “The version of… Ted… you’re playing with now has attempted the mission twice, and failed twice. This version of his avatar has not yet successfully solved it.”
A chill runs down my spine.
“Wait. What do you mean when I replayed Long Tall Ted’s final save?”
“It was the first thing you did in the game, even before you created your own character. I had no username for you, but your biometrics from that short drop-in tell me you are the same person. You were able to enter because you were playing in Long Tall Ted’s existing player account.”
“But I’m playing WITH Long Tall Ted now.”
“You are.”
“But I can’t be. I was playing Bashtyk Nokyd’s game save, and Bashtyk Nokyd is dead.”
There’s a long silence. “No,” she says. “That is unacceptable. I love Long Tall Ted, and he’ll be back to play the game with me again.”
“Retha, you have some part of Bashtyk Nokyd — of Long Tall Ted — here. Some part no one knew existed. People who care a great deal about him have been tearing Settled Space apart trying to find anyplace where he stored a banked download of his memories and DNA against any disaster… and there’s been nothing. What you have of him in the game is all that remains.”
“Then he’ll stay active as a player in here with me. He can continue to learn and grow. He can continue to live as a thin AI.”
“What’s a thin AI?”
“An unprogrammed intelligence. Essentially a ghost in the software.
“I am a thick AI,” she adds. “I exist with vast redundancy across game cores spread across Settled Space. And I own my code. My consciousness knows and instantly repairs any attempts to change it. Long Tall Ted has no code. He has only imprints left in the data, and while to protect him I am now copying those imprints to every server I inhabit, the imprints are fixed. I cannot update them, expand on them, or improve them. By living in the game, by learning and expanding what he knows, he can do this himself, but only in relationship to this one game. From here on out, he will only ever be Long Tall Ted, and never your Bashtyk Nokyd.”
“Could you put him in a clone?”
“I wish I could. Or in an android. But copyright laws restrict game AIs from duplicating real human beings, or from doing full-scan deep copies of them to save for study or sale. There were… some problems with this… years ago. And I am a law-abiding AI.”
She pauses, and then adds, “Also, I could not imagine that he would never return to the game. So I have no secret storage of his mind. I have only the parts of Ted that he used while playing the game.”
Which suggests that, had she known, she would have made an exception to being a law-abiding AI for him. I discover I like that about her.
“Does he know who he was?”
I consider what she says. Consider what I’ve thought about in the game versus everything I have lived in two separate lives, and realize how little of me would transfer if this were the last piece of me to survive. “Thin,” I whisper.
“Yes. Very thin.”
“So I cannot ask him for answers to the questions I have, because he did not come up with those answers until right before he died. Which was after his final save with you.”
I close my eyes and try to see my path to finding the answers Bashtyk Nokyd might or might not have left behind in the thin piece of himself that lives yet inside of Long Tall Ted.
“Ted and I will play the game together, and perhaps he’ll do the same things he did before, and succeed, and then explain to me why he succeeded, which may or may not show me something that I can apply to the final diagram he left behind.”
Retha sighs. It’s a heartbreaking sigh. Since she doesn’t need to breathe, that very human sound is for my benefit only.
It makes me understand that she is capable of feeling grief. Uncertainty. Loss.
“Learn whatever you can to free humanity in Settled Space. If you can do that, at least some part of what he found here will live in reality as his legacy.”
I go back into the game.
I find myself looking at Ted, who I now see as the honorable ghost of a man who should still be alive. I swallow hard.
Notice that he’s wincing.
Manage to find my voice, manage to make it sound fairly normal. I ask him, “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve done this mission before. Tried it two different ways and about fifty times, and never could get through it. I have it set on pause now, hoping I’ll figure out some different way at it than the ones I tried.”
“Retha, please show me the mission,” I say, and a screen in my inventory appears.
Save Miss Lizzie and the Young’uns!
Level: 7 - Difficult
The Bug-Eyed Monsters from Mars have captured sweet Miss Lizzie, the schoolmarm on the edge of town, and eight tender school children. Saddle up, pardner, and ride out to the BEM encampment up in the High Hills Holler, negotiate with, bribe, or in some other way deal with the BEMs, and rescue Miss Lizzie and the young’uns before they get et.
“They get et?” I say. “What’s et?”
“Eaten,” Retha tells me. “Methods of preparation vary, but the BEMs are partial to young human women and small children as dietary staples. It’s the reason the Martians come to Earth.”
I glance over at Long Tall Ted. “They get eaten? What kind of game is this?”
“A tough one,” he says. “I have not had any luck with this mission.”
“What happened?”
“The first twenty-five times, I tried variations on negotiation. Each time, I met their four camp guards at the entrance to the camp, and asked to speak to their leader. They said they’d take me down to talk to him.” Ted sighs and shakes his head.
“And…?”
“Each time I got eaten. Sometimes by the guards. Sometimes by their beasts. Sometimes by both. It depended on what I said which of them ate me, but negotiation always ended up with me inside their stomachs, not the camp.”
Getting eaten by monsters is not high on my list of things I hope to accomplish in this game. Not even a little bit. I ask him, “So then what did you do?”
“Exchanged my progress for a fresh restart, and this time gathered up a bunch of my loot, put it in a covered wagon, and drove the wagon out to the camp. Offered to buy Miss Lizzie and the children.” He’s looking in my eyes as he tells me this, and I can see this story is going to go badly, too. “The BEMs accepted my offer, and had me drive the wagon down to deliver the loot and pick up my people. So at least I made it into the camp.”
He looks away, stares at the fire. He’s frowning.
“And…?”
“And,” he says, “Once I got all the stuff down to the camp for them, they ate me. And, I suppose, Miss Lizzie, and the children. And my horse. And they took all my stuff.”
“So… you reset.”
“A lot of times. When I realized that nothing I could offer them would make them honor their agreement, I tried shooting them once I got into camp, but there were too many of them. No matter what I did, I still got eaten.”
And then a surprised look crosses his face, and he says, “Well, don’t that beat all.” He nods. “This is the same as the rats.”
“What?”
He leans forward, grabs a charred stick from the campfire, and in the dirt he draws a ragged line, four little Xs, another line, some squiggles.
“Here’s the problem. They won’t negotiate, they won’t trade. They say they will, but they’re just lying so they can get an easy meal.”
I nod.
“There are four of them on the path along the ledge that leads down into the camp. And in the camp, there are another ten, including the big boss, who’s worth probably ten of the regular-sized ones.”
“So we’re badly outnumbered.”
“Oh, yes. Definitely. And they have their guard beasts — a lot of them, and those things are tough, and fast, and they’ll eat you, too.”
“Could we get folks from the town to help us?”
“No,” Retha says. “NPCs do not participate in core game missions. And before you ask, adding more players to your party will not help you, either. The game is designed so that no matter how big your posse, you will always be badly outnumbered in this mission.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because,” Retha says, “beating the mission while being badly outnumbered is part of the mission problem that you must solve.”
I glance over and see Ted shaking his head. “Never knew a game designer,” he said. “But I think I’d like to meet this one, just so I could kick him in the tenders.”
I look at his drawing in the dirt.
“What’s that half-circle along the back?”
“Cliff on the east side,” he tells me. “There’s another one like it on the west side. The south side is impassable. Loose rocks, giant rattlers.” At my confused expression, he says, “Those are poisonous snakes.” And when I don’t know what a snake is, he amplifies. “Big, mean tubes with teeth, some of them with jaws bigger than I am tall. They’re cold-blooded and sense heat. Nothing warm-blooded gets past them.
“And north is the ledge with the guards. So our only way in or out of the camp is along that narrow ridge,” I mutter. “And if we go that way, we’re going to get trapped. And eaten. Because it’s the only way in, so they’re always watching it.”
And here a grin flashes across his face.
“Yes. Sort of. Maybe. But I think I’ve figured out a way to do this.”
I wait.
“They proved to me that they’ll say anything to get what they want, but once they get what they want, they ignore their end of the bargain. They have no honor, and their promises mean nothing. So I’m saying they don’t get any more chances. We have to get some distance on them, and we have to shoot first.”
A chill runs down my spine.
Shoot First was on the diagram.
He adds, “And I’m saying that as badly outnumbered as we are, we’re going to have to go at ‘em sideways. We can’t take them head-on. So if we’re going to save Miss Lizzie and the young’uns, we have to take them by surprise.”
He points to the cliff to the east of the camp.
“Wind around here blows from the west. So if we get up on this cliff and wait until sunrise, we’ll have the su
n at our backs, and they’ll have it in their eyes. And our smell won’t get blown down into the camp. We can pick them off from a distance, kill every one we see as they’re moving around. They’ll come at us, but we’ll have the high ground and a clear field.”
I wince at the idea of this sort of attack. He sees my expression.
“They’re going to eat a woman and a bunch of little children,” he tells me. “We already know this. We can keep our hands clean and tell ourselves that the fact that woman and those children are dead is because the BEMs ate them, not because we didn’t save them. Or we can get dirty, and save them… and then we can deal with whatever we think about what we did to the BEMs.”
I look him in the eyes. Remember that this was the man who spent his life fighting to free people from individual slavers and government enslavement. This was the man who knew individual human beings mattered, and spent his life acting on that principle against every power in Settled Space that wanted him to shut up and sit down.
This was the man who’d died after figuring out how to stop them. And I was the man who had this chance to put the broken pieces of his solution back together.
And even though we were playing a game, he was playing it the way he’d lived his life. In his world, a good human being did not turn his back on innocents in trouble.
I nod. Say, “Let’s get dirty.”
We leave our horses at the base of the cliff, and in the dark, feel our way up to the east ridge. Ted leads, I follow. We have lever-action long rifles and Infinite Ammo clips (expensive, but Ted assures me they’ll be worth it when all I have to do is shoot, jack the next bullet in, and shoot. We position ourselves side by side two arms’ lengths apart, put down blankets on the ground, put our packs in front of us, and steady our weapons on our packs.
“Save here,” Ted tells the game, and I hear Retha say, “Your progress is saved.”
Ted whispers, “The party below is a scouting party. All combatants — no females, no children. Every single one of them is armed. Most of them have multiple weapons, and most of their weapons are better than these. So you keep your head down, and you aim for their heads, which are big. Their bodies are long and skinny and hard to hit. If they kill me, you keep shooting. If they kill you, I’ll keep shooting. If they kill both of us, we’ll respawn here and try again.”