by Aaron Jay
I almost selected some random button just to escape feeling like this. A brief flash of Patricia’s face flashed in my mind’s eye and my finger paused. The pod would still be here tomorrow. Something inside of me still resisted. Or maybe I was too drained to go on a bender.
The pod’s lid drew back and a light shone down upon me. The path back to the entrance to the Pitts glowed subtly. I trudged along, ignoring where I was going. Avoiding the eyes of those who also wanted to pretend to anonymity and those creepy bastards who wanted to share their delight at being in the Pitts.
The elevator shifted in odd directions as it made its way through the underworld. It dumped me out in the lobby.
Mr. Ruod, the ever-smiling greeter, was there as he often was, his clothes still matching his lips. He smiled at me as he had every time I saw him.
“Player Boone! Good to see you!” he greeted me.
I gave the man a vague nod and made to walk past him when he somehow glided in front of me. He looked at me, noting my mood but not allowing the black despair I was giving off to stop him.
“I can see that you are somehow unhappy. I would take that as a failure, a personal failure of our work here at the Pitts, if I didn’t have some wonderful news for you. Yes, wonderful news.”
“Pardon me?”
His certitude and concern undid me. I had no desire to hear whatever sales pitch he was offering, but I was feeling as empty of purpose as I could remember. One thing we Boone men have in large measure is will. Will needs direction or it just turns on you.
“Yes, Lilith, herself wants to see you. Isn’t that wonderful? You are very lucky. This is a wonderful opportunity for you.”
For years I had been aiming toward the Game. Then I had been focused on winning the bet. Now I had no direction. Which is, I think, why I allowed him to lead me back toward the elevator.
Or maybe all the sonics and pheromone influences were just doing a number on me.
The elevator door opened and we stepped in. He entered a complex code and the elevator took off. As the elevator hummed and shifted, he examined me with interest. He looked intrigued that I would be seeing Lilith. He spoke to me in a hushed intimacy. Leaning toward me as if there was someone else in the elevator who could overhear our conversation.
“You have been here a week and all you have done is play the Game,” Ruod said in a hushed earnestness.
“You monitor what I am doing?”
“We aim to please. You can’t please someone you don’t know. We aren’t spying, we are just trying to figure out what you want and then give it to you. To everyone. That is Lilith’s genius and vision.”
I just gave him a dead look. Confused and drained.
“Lilith is so much clearer when she explains what we are doing here. She really is a visionary. You really are a lucky young man.”
And with that he settled into a comfortable silence. He looked at the elevator door that was taking us to Lilith, his visionary, and he was happy. He had a direction and we were heading toward it. Mine was gone and so I followed. Or, maybe it was the sonics and pheromones.
The elevator door opened on a small vestibule with a massive circular door. It looked like an airlock sized to walk through. Ruod urged me off the elevator. I stepped out of the elevator thinking he would follow, but he stayed behind.
“You aren’t coming?” I said to the closing elevator. It shut and I was alone.
There didn’t seem to be a doorbell, camera or anything. The elevator was gone. My options were to sit in a bare room or to open the door.
It actually was an airlock. I could hear the seal break with a slight pop and then the hiss of warm, damp air.
I entered and was amazed. It was a garden.
I had never seen so many growing things before in my life. It was staggering. From studying herbalism for the Game, I recognized plants that I thought were extinct. Springeri and foxtail ferns. Mahogany, bay, African wattle and jacaranda trees surrounded by ground cover. Hibiscus and lotus trees held flowers. Vines did their best to choke other plants. Life was everywhere.
Our brave new world was all artificial. There were people and the things that people made, and that was all. Here I was surrounded by living things. Natural things. The amount of biomass here that one could convert into nano represented a fortune upon a fortune.
Unless… had I transited into the virtual? There were rules about this. No, I was in the real.
The air smelled in a way I had never imagined. I looked up and what had to be an artificial sun shone down from way above my head. I couldn’t tell that I was underground.
The wealth and power this represented was staggering.
“Hello?” I called out a bit tentatively. I coughed and called out a greeting again a bit louder. No one answered.
Normally, in the real world you could see. Everything was defined, and there were clear lines of sight in all directions, and everything you saw had been made by people, had a purpose, and was safe and understandable. This was a riot of chaotic organisms contending with each other. I could hear animals. Another flash of color amongst the plants and I saw a bird flashing by.
There was the barest intimation of a path.
My heart beat faster as I had a primordial experience that we as a species had not just left behind, but I thought had destroyed: I walked through an unknown jungle IRL.
I made my way with increasing pace along the path. A few times I was confused as leaves and branches covered the path and sometimes a plant had a bit of clearing around it giving the false sense of a trail. But I had spent time with Remus, Mordecai and Lemminkäinen in the virtual wilds and was able to make my way.
I heard the water before I saw it. A faint burble and then a roar of rushing water coming from beyond the foliage. The path led toward it. Pushing a broad and shiny leaf out of my way revealed a clearing by a pool fed by a waterfall. A pavilion was set up in the clearing with its sides drawn up. Sitting at a delicate wooden desk was a woman. A lady. She was taller than any woman I had ever seen. She was covered in a green dress up to her throat. She held a long, straight, golden wand or stylus in her hand. On her head was a golden crown or diadem. Her face was white: not merely pale, but white like snow or paper or icing-sugar, except for her very red mouth. It was a beautiful face in other respects, but proud and cold and stern.
She looked like she was casting a spell, the tip of her wand making small motions and little circles and gestures in the air.
I cleared my throat. She didn’t look at me as she said, “Be with you in a moment, Miles.”
I realized that she was interacting with something virtual. Her wand was an interface and the crown was feeding her images of I know not what.
She was also giving me the opportunity to collect myself. This was Lilith. Someone whose work my father respected. Someone who the GMs gave a wide berth to. Someone who had left at least one corpse in the wake of her work. Pulling would be thrilled that the investigation was making progress.
I found a convenient tree to lean against and admired the scenery until she finished with whatever she was working on. Funnily, I was finding that losing hope was very liberating. If I was convinced that I could win my bet with Maya and had a life in front of me, I might have been nervous meeting with Lilith. Now, I just enjoyed being in a garden or whatever the hell this was.
“You look like your father,” she said finally.
“You haven’t seen him recently,” I corrected.
She gave a tinkling laugh.
“Oh, I am not so easy to fool that some gross physical alteration would mislead me. I’d recognize your father’s eyes anywhere--on you or in his unconventional head.”
“Your… home? Office? Garden? Is pretty amazing.”
“Thank you, Miles. I like my little kingdom here. I was surprised to find Numitor’s son at my establishment. We didn’t part under the best circumstances.”
She looked genuinely regretful.
mulled over the implications o
f parting, which implies togetherness. Then I mulled over what bad circumstances might encompass.
“He hadn’t mentioned it.”
She laughed.
“Well, fathers and sons, I suppose. Fathers and sons. When his son showed up at my place, I thought that you had come for, well the reasons most young men come to me. Your father was always able to surprise me. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. You surprised me as well when you only played the Game.”
“I thought that the Pitts offered confidentiality.”
“All confidentiality is only as reliable as the person offering it. You can’t design a system opaque to the person who controls it. I control the Pitts so it is a question of me being reliable. I have earned the trust of my clients. There is no one alive who can say I ever broke trust with them. So, your and everyone else’s secrets are safe with me.”
“Good thing I didn’t bother to rack up any secrets then. I’m an open book.”
“What did the great detective say? A curious incident of the dog in the night-time…”
“Pardon?”
“Numitor’s son unable to follow a quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Shocking. It’s Sherlock Holmes. The curious incident of the dog in the night is that it didn’t bark. The curious case of Miles Boone is that he came to the Pitts and didn’t do any of the things people come to the Pitts to do.”
“I’m just shy,” I said. She chuckled dutifully.
“Perhaps. More importantly you are stuck in a seemingly unwinnable bet with little Maya,” she commiserated.
“You know Maya? You know about our bet?”
“I know everybody. I hear everything eventually. One way or another. My web is spread everywhere.”
She looked into my face. Her pale features perfect and cool. A long delicate finger tapped her red, red lips. She considered me and I looked away studying the garden around us.
“If you are looking to do little Maya a favor, don’t bother,” I said at last. She startled at my insinuation.
“Come sit down. I promise that I mean you no harm on behalf of the Eastmans. Take a rest. That is one part of what I offer here. Some rest. Some respite from playing a game that you can’t win. That is true for everyone, you know? None of them can win the game. Your father designed a game, a world even, that is unwinnable,” she laughed sadly. “Some people think I am cruel, but I am nothing compared to that bit of sadism your father made. Everyone playing, struggling and dying. His game never ends. No one ever wins except for a brief moment. It’s monstrous.”
There was a chair next to Lilith. I sat. She took a round box, tied with a green ribbon from beside her, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of some sort of confection.
“Turkish delight?” she offered. A stranger was offering me candy. People in the old world used to warn their children against this. The warning had gone, along with most of the rest of what had been the world.
She urged me to eat some not accepting my first polite decline. Hospitality like this was also something that had largely disappeared with the old world.
Each piece was sweet and light to the very center and I had never tasted anything so delicious. Of course, I had largely subsisted for years on unmodified food packs and whatever I could cook with basic cooking skills and materials.
I took a piece and then another.
“I can intuit a number of things from your being here. You are here. Therefore, your father must have forsaken you or you would be playing from his home.”
I nodded and continued eating the Turkish delight.
“He has his reasons,” I said around a mouthful of candy.
“Numitor always has his plans and reasons. No one else’s plans are ever allowed to supplant them,” she said. Behind her serene paleness I thought I detected a deep anger. I couldn’t help nodding in agreement. My father was both the unstoppable force and the immovable object in my life.
Looking down, I saw I had eaten nearly half the candy.
“I hope you will forgive me,” she said looking hopeful and ashamed. “I reviewed your game play in my pod this past week. I understand why you logged out. You saw how your father’s implant has interacted with the Gathering Quest. You cannot complete this quest, and therefore your bet, playing under his rules. You will gain experience faster than you can gather material,” she frowned on my behalf and continued. “You cannot complete it playing by the Party’s rules, either. It really is terribly unfair. I’d be angry on your behalf if I was an angry person.”
“Don’t worry. Somewhere below my enjoyment of your candy and my depression, I am angry enough for both of us.”
She smiled at me.
“I have an offer for you.”
“Unless it is a way to win my Game, I will be busy doing what Maya Eastman wants me to,” I muttered.
“That is exactly what I am offering!”
I looked up. Her face was so alabaster and beautiful.
“Excuse me?”
“I have a way for you to finish the Gathering Quest. Do you know that I am as accomplished a nano-engineer as your father? I can do everything he can do, only I can do it backwards and in heels,” she laughed. “You have been in one of my pods. As I said, I examined you. Your problem is that the interaction between your father’s Hardcore Mode and the lack of luck makes you generate more experience from each of your encounters than anyone else playing the game. Silly little Maya. The Clans and the Party are fools. I don’t know why your father allows them to remain in charge. What you need is not to have the Game allocate you experience.”
“You can make that happen?”
“Yes,” she said and stood up.
She stepped out of the pavilion and I awkwardly dropped the candy box. It was empty. Had I eaten all of it – when had I? I followed her. She led me to a pool fed by the water burbling by. She knelt and traced her long ivory fingers across the top of the pool, creating ripples.
“I have designed an implant that will siphon off the experience you gain. It will also make you play better, stronger, faster.”
This was exactly what I needed. I didn’t care about the better, stronger, faster gilding on the lily she was offering. Just the chance to play the Game in a way that wasn’t doomed to failure no matter what I did was enough to start me climbing out from the hole I was in.
Before I got too excited, a series of images flashed in front of my mind’s eye. Aabid’s manic eyes as he tried to kill me. A body sucked out against the barrier separating us from the nano. The pictures Pulling had shared of James Eggbert flashed through my mind and threw cold water on the greedy hope that she was lighting within me.
“Why?”
She didn’t bother to be confused about what I was asking.
“At the most basic level, the experience you grab won’t be lost. It will be mine to use as I see fit. XP is nano, nano is well, anything anyone can desire.”
Affording this garden and who knows what other items couldn’t be cheap.
I nodded but knew that this couldn’t be as simple as her wanting the experience of such a low-level character as me. She was risking simultaneously offending the Eastmans and my father. Plus, the GMs wouldn’t be happy with such tinkering.
“Why else?”
“Because I want to save humanity from itself, of course. Your father used the fact that so much of the AIs’ and nano’s programmed imperatives were based around games and gaming to entice them into the Game. The Party myopically wants to control who gets to play. We all know that the world under their control is falling. We are all standing in the ruins of the civilization your father created--even if they are papering over the cracks. Of course, he had to do his best to rebuild from the ruins that he inherited. I wonder how far back it goes, this tradition of having to rebuild from the ruins your parents hand you.”
“How are you saving humanity? I mean, I’m human so saving me from my bet might technically count, but I think I am missing something.”
She gave me a friendly smile. Her cold, perfect features made it an uphill climb for friendly but she was clearly trying.
“You know what was even more prevalent in all the nano and AIs that ran amok than gaming code? Porn. Sex. Most of the machinae were designed to behave as humanly as possible and connect with us on our deepest level. Adaptive programs that iteratively tried to intuit who we really were and what we really wanted at our basest levels. So much of what we call culture, society, humanity boils down to sex. Your father’s big mistake, the Party’s big mistake, is thinking that we should fight the nano. No. We should embrace it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Make love not war,” she said. “Your father and the Party want to keep us separate from the nano out there. Understandable, given how we interact at the moment. But, what if the nano didn’t see us as enemies? What if the line between the nano and us faded away? What if the nano looked at us and saw itself? We would have peace. Community. Identity. Stability. Like it says on the door of every Pitts entrance. Imagine there was no nano. Imagine no AI. No humanity, too. We were all just together. Members of the same community. We would have stability. All we need to do is alter our identity a bit.”
Could she be right? My father wasn’t an easy person to get along with. The Game he made was just as rigid and unforgiving as he was, and the Party made it worse. Hers was a compelling vision. If there really was a way to coexist with the chaos outside the barrier, she truly would be saving humanity. My father didn’t seem to believe it was possible but perhaps he was wrong. The idea that maybe we could escape all this, living under a constant threat of death for our entire species, the Game and The Party overwhelmed me. The idea that my father could be wrong seemed just as incredible.
“None of that is germane to your situation at the moment. What you should focus on is that I have an implant that will allow you to keep striving against the Eastmans. You and I both agree that the Party has become corrupt and ossified. I promise you that my implant will do what I said. I will siphon off approximately eighty percent of the experience you generate. The implant also has some side effects. It interfaces with your limbic system. But that has its benefits as well.”