Continue Online (Part 5, Together)

by Stephan Morse

  “You’re right,” the tall lady said. “I’m not your wife.”

  Responding felt difficult, so nothing was said. Instead, the next motion for our waltz was initiated. The elf danced very well—she had been designed for grace.

  “You’re not quite there yet, but I don’t mind a dance partner. It reminds me of the first man I ever loved,” she said between steps. “Have you ever loved anyone?”

  Nodding was simple enough. Music changed, then the dance shifted. This new movement was far slower.

  “Love is important. Now, my wild man, he”—she emphasized the word with a laugh—“was a grumpy old cuss, even when we first met, but he was full of fire and energy. And the passion! If you don’t mind me saying, he gave me a night I will never forget.”

  Processing the statements of females typically proved difficult. This occurrence was no different.

  “I waited on the far shores for him. Every day I would stare out across the seas. Elves, my kind, said I was possessed by Selene.”

  “Were you?”

  “No more than any woman left in his wake. There was life to him that we did not understand. The other Travelers with him, they were also driven, but we were… enamored of those first to visit our world.”

  She slipped a step, but there was no pain. One motion kept moving into the other as the music slowed down further.

  “So I waited every day until the world started to crumble. I stood upon the shoreline where he had left me. At the last minute before the world ended, I swore he stood before me, protecting me, even though the Voices of the outside world had called him home long ago.”

  “He sounds like a good man.”

  She looked down briefly, then smiled radiantly. Her white teeth shone, and her green-bark clothing nipped at the edge of her partner’s clothing.

  “He was, and powerful.” She nodded rapidly, then beamed once again. “Will helped us all. I want to believe that my wild man saved me so that I could help you, even if all we do is dance.”

  The statements took time to process. Their words were measured against other prior statements, then results were found. None of them felt fit to share, so instead another response was chosen.

  “Dancing is relaxing.”

  “You’re quite good, but your wife might be jealous,” she said.

  “Perhaps.” There was a pause as her statement processed. “Do you know where she is?”

  “Outside this bubble of safety somewhere. As is everyone who survived the end of the world, if the Voices are kind.”

  “To find her, we would need to leave the safety of this place.”

  “We would, but I won’t leave until you’re ready.” She nodded as our swaying stopped. The unnamed elven woman lifted our joined hands and squeezed tightly.

  “You’re right.” Vision swiveled around then. “Perhaps it’s time to move forward again.”

  “I couldn’t be there for my wild man. He… refused to cross over. He said he was too stubborn and no one would ever want him around.”

  “That is difficult to understand.”

  She nodded but managed to keep a smile upon her face. “But I know someone out there loves you, and she’s waiting for you to come home.”

  “Yes. We should leave here.”

  “I’ll be right here with you,” she said.

  Lights crawled out of the mirror, then gently floated into the faded outline. Slowly the figure standing in a room, staring into the mirror, gained focus. The man in the reflection frowned then began fading.

  The world lost focus as gold crackled against my eyesight. My mouth hung down to try to speak.

  “I.” The self-aware thought confused me greatly. I was a strange concept to have for the first time.

  A line of code hiccupped, or the processors stuttered. My legs buckled, despite the digital impossibility of buckling my knees. My eyes closed again, and memories started compiling together. There had been a last stand or a battle against some great force. It washed over me, burning away my life in surges of electricity that consumed my human shell. Then I fell, dying, to the bottom of a great abyss.

  Yet here I stood, sort of. This body felt as real as any within an ARC device. There was declining warmth against my hand and pressure from feet standing upon the ground. A faint smell of berries hung in the air.

  “I’m alive,” I said.

  The world around me was strangely quiet, save for a tall female with pointed ears. She stood calmly while smiling. Her face looked familiar, but no name came to mind. This woman was not my wife.

  “I’m alive,” I said again, to her this time. “But I was dead.”

  My eyebrows scrunched together in confusion. Additional memories stacked up against each other, then slid into place. Moments ago, I had been staring at Nona Kingsley. Before that, it had been Jacob.

  “I was a Hal Pal,” words that I’d never expected to utter came out.

  “Are you all right?” the slender woman asked.

  “No.” My stomach shook and my heartbeat felt uneven. Numerous pieces of information were piling up against each other. A dozen different views on my life overloaded me worse than [Sight of Mercari] ever had. The ring on my hand bound me with a woman, but her face escaped me as sickness rose up. “I don’t feel right.”

  I bent over and threw up. Colors of all sorts spilled along the flat ground into a pool. Inside the puddle danced images from my life before the ARC. One clear, untouched portion of the liquid showed pictures from school; they melted and aged from kindergarten to adulthood.

  Nearby, videos played back from my time in the ARC, then skipped to college graduation. My own voice came out a handful of different times from the pooled mess. The sound of clients on the phone played back. My own happy voice laughing and making dumb jokes sounded distant. Each inflection and change in pitch came with new colors.

  They melded together as words flashed through. My head shook from a noise like ringing mixed with static. I reached out to smear the liquid on the floor. It didn’t feel like vomit, but closer to oil or gel. I heard myself a hundred more times before everything connected.

  My chest muscles heaved even without a body. Gradually memories became fuzzy, then recalling specific events took work. I struggled to hold on to some. One, in particular, made me freeze and stare at the digital capture of my life.

  I remembered the first date my wife and I ever had. It was at a children’s petting zoo. Going there had been my mother’s idea, not mine. A small goat tried to eat my fingers, and a girl laughed wildly. Her face used to split in two when she was truly amused. At that moment, I fell in love. Before that, I’d had chances to escape. After our day in the petting zoo, all hope of living as a being separate from that woman vanished. We had been eight years old.

  Finally, the replay of a thousand different experiences stopped, and everything almost felt whole. My vision bobbed up and down as I tried to reconcile what was around me with all that had happened. I was dead, but this wasn’t the afterlife. Not if an elf stood nearby.

  The dance room where part of me had been sequestered away stood empty. White flooring looked dull. The bits of a one-way mirror were turned sideways, and light flooded out into our dark hallway.

  “You, I know you,” I said. “William Carver, you were the first woman he ever wrote about.”

  That memory sat fresher than it used to. I felt as if it were possible to reach out and touch that recent moment directly. One arm reached toward the air in front of me, and a box displayed.

  Carver’s Journal Wrote: After my very grateful parting with the elf, I set my compass south. There was a desert there that boasted of giant lizards.

  “And he left me to chase down his great foe. Then you brought him back to me, even if only for a moment.” The elf smiled and didn’t look sad at all.

  Her comment brought other thoughts to mind. This whole situation didn’t make sense at all. If the ARC had burned me out, then how did I reconstruct? Beyond that, how exactly did this vir
tual reality exist without the various worlds Mother had created? None of it felt right.

  “Nona,” I whispered.

  Lia’s mother had done something absolutely crazy. Genesis. That word was the same one used by the Voices when referring to Xin’s resurrection.

  The wedding ring glimmered on my finger with a captured rainbow. My fingers twisted around the ring to try to summon her, but the spell didn’t function. A message popped up telling me that we weren’t on connected systems.

  My head bobbed up and down while I gazed at the sign of our connection. The message didn’t say she was dead, only elsewhere. Xin was out there, on the other side of a beam of light. Near madness gripped me as I tried to figure out if I should laugh or cry.

  Session One Hundred Eight

  Pieces of Us

  The inkblot floor splattering faded into boards. I looked up and tried to align myself with the area. My forehead wrinkled in disgust at this unfamiliar location. The world held still as the ballroom gave way to a replication of the old ARC’s Atrium. A barren version of my small house didn’t look any better.

  “This feels natural,” I said to the elf.

  She was walking through the quiet room, looking for secrets inside empty cabinets. No other items were here besides a doorway to the garage. Through there would be the throne room instead of a Trillium van. I knew because that had been me on both sides of the glass. At least, it had been in some sense.

  “You’re a Voice, so your magic makes this very easy,” she said with a shrug. “But you’re slow. Do you know how long it’s been?”

  My senses weren’t completely lined up. Time failed to move correctly. I reached for an ARC interface, and the system responded. Even the bubble display and float boxes felt familiar. Neither memories before the fall, or after as a Hal Pal unit, provided a hint about this seamless linking of intent and result.

  “This is wearisome,” she judged my bare rooms.

  The world slowed while a thumping sound increased. It reminded me of a heartbeat. Extra sensations were being buried, then realigned with old human feelings. Each one fit in with the whole, and Xin’s view on the world started to make sense.

  It did feel like being human, or maybe my memories were being rewritten. My heartbeat jumped again. There were too many issues to catch up on. Head shaking didn’t help, but it was time to move forward through all these final steps.

  “Can you add some trees? I would very much love to see some trees. They’re good for you, you know?” she asked.

  Adding trees would be extremely easy. Putting in a forest wouldn’t take that much work. The options to edit my Atrium, if this space was an Atrium, were only half a thought away. My mind traveled down the pathways to borrow copies of great forests from Internet photos.

  “A friend of mine liked to trade questions. If you tell me your name, I’ll see about getting you some trees.”

  She smiled. “Of course, Grant. I am Nia Eve.”

  I nodded. Time lagged again as my mind started processing even faster. A space for trees was set aside, going out far to the east until it bumped into a sort of wall. The room flashed and another doorway opened, leading to a pocket of land created for her.

  Nia Eve ran off without a pause. I chuckled. Dancing with a faint version of myself for months must have been mind-numbingly boring. She could have a day or two to herself while I tried to figure out how to move forward.

  There were plenty of issues going on. I filtered through the memories to get myself in order. My fingers typed, then brought up a list. All the old reminders and notices from Continue Online were still there. Seeing it firsthand made me realize exactly how important being logged into the ARC had been.

  How much of who I was had been lifted from being inside the machine? That might be why I’d spent so much time dancing with Nia Eve instead of coming out from the white room. My entire year before Continue Online had been the same sort of process. Before that, I’d spent occasional hours with Xin when we couldn’t meet up in reality, and watching first-person movies. ARCs weren’t new to me or humanity.

  I stepped through the bedroom toward my ARC and looked for the item I had placed under the bed as a Touchstone. My heartbeat felt steady despite the situation. What would be under the bed in a box?

  My fingers lifted the shoebox lid. In a small bundle of plastic were the incinerated remains of my wife’s physical body. One hand went to my mouth, which hung open. My stomach muscles clenched. Beside the ashes sat a small folded card with indented words.

  It’s all real, User Legate. As real as you dare believe it to be.

  – Hal Pal

  “Of course it is,” I said only after swallowing. The ashes of my wife were meant to be a hidden secret that helped separate the virtual from reality.

  Thinking back to the ARC memories left me muddled. A lot of moments were glossed over, like any portion of the past. I couldn’t recall what had happened between some big events any more than I could recall first grade, or second. The pieces were there, but dull across all thirty years of life.

  The box closed. My hand slid across the top, feeling the thick grain of cardboard. Did it matter that the real Xin was dead? Virtual her and I were more alike now than ever before.

  I waved one arm, and the box went away with half a thought. Being the master of my domain felt nice. Just by closing my eyes, it was possible to see that Nia Eve was running through the woods. She searched for something. These extra senses were like [Sight of Mercari] in a lot of ways, and I wondered if that had been part of the intent. How deeply did Mother’s plotting go?

  My feet tread a steady path toward the garage. Instead of benches, there was only a single metal-looking throne that reminded me of the [Mechanoid] days. My hand lifted to the throne. Data came back from the connection. Visual, audio, weights, and pressures that transmitted themselves like heavily covered skin. It felt close to being in a thick wetsuit or layers of padded clothes for winter. With a wave of my hand, the image changed through different units.

  Sitting in the seat realigned my senses with the remote Hal Pal unit. There was a slightly sluggish response along with muffled limbs. The room transformed, and I found myself sitting in a huge warehouse filled with ARC units. Each one was a shiny duplicate of the ones from before. They were stripped down, without bedding. Headboard displays showed readings for every unit’s patching process.

  Pressing my fingertips against the machines felt dull. I moved past the rows of machines toward a workbench. This Hal Pal unit had been operating on a form of autopilot. Most of them were following orders generated by the Gate program.

  “Mmmhm,” I mumbled.

  The bench had a few spare parts on it. In the center was a mechanical dog. It sat there wagging a plastic tail as this remote body approached.

  “You’re not a very good Dusk,” I said to it.

  The toy barked once at me, then did a well-balanced backflip.

  With a thought, the unit received new orders, then my vision flipped over to another Hal Pal unit. This one stood in front of a client, alongside their human companion.

  “What the shit are these prices! You’re forcing an upgrade on me and I have to pay!” the man shouted.

  “The charge is for your replacement equipment. This ARC hasn’t been serviced for two years,” a tiny woman responded. She stood slightly behind the repurposed Hal Pal unit.

  “The price has dropped over forty percent from where it was a year ago. This is the best offer you’re likely to see,” I said to both of them. The man turned his anger toward my remote unit, and I shrugged. “The facts are indisputable. If you do not wish for the replacement, it’s certainly possible to only perform the upgrade. However, degradation of your connection will only increase risk as time moves forward.”

  The man grumbled but consented in the end. I flipped over to the Hal Pal unit inside Nona Kingsley’s office. She sat there staring at data streams and sighing wearily every few seconds. I was aware of a dozen different
tasks being performed in the background, but they became easier to disregard as the hours went on.

  Breaking the ice with her felt odd. We had been working together in this office off and on for months, but for most of those, I had basically been in a coma. A virtual version of a coma, where my mind sat a million miles away in a pocket doing what I enjoyed most. Except dancing with another woman had never been the point. Those dances had all been intended for Xin, and she was out there somewhere.

  “We’re almost eighty percent complete,” I said. There were a lot of numbers in my head, and the rest were only a fingertip away. Even the mere thought of our progress started a feed of information that looked like any other ARC interface. “Our original figures expected to reach eighty-five at most. I doubt we’ll get the last five percent even if we offer bribes.”

  “You’ve changed. You’re using possessive statements.” Lia’s mother looked exhausted but pleased. It was a far cry from her bouts of sadness over the last few months.

  “Yes,” I said while nodding. “I’ve come out of my shell, so to speak. Thank you, Nona.”

  “Grant?”

  “I think so.”

  “You were in there for a long time,” Nona responded. “We input the ring and wedding footage almost a month ago.”

  That threw me off. A month was a long time to pass while sorting through my memories. How long had I spent bent over that ink? How much longer had the conversation with Nia Eve been, and creating her forest?

  “I created a room for the elf, Nia Eve.” The words slipped out before any real thought could be put in. I blinked a few times while staring off.

  “She was a saved program we found, snagged from the server, then put on a private drive. She’s remarkably intact compared to most. Most”—Nona winced and looked conflicted—“are in shreds, but any partial personalities go into a compressed file. It makes them easier to keep off the radar.”

  Slowly her words lined up with mumbles over the last few months. I had a few sets of memories trying to line up.