by Kris Schnee
He wobbled as his torso suddenly stretched far upward and sprouted a new pair of sand-colored paws. His entire lower body rippled and became covered in tawny fur, conveniently shredding his pants and shoes as a tufted tail grew out. His upper torso remained human, stuck atop most of a lion. He looked alarmed at first, then chuckled. "Lion-taur? I was going to ask if someone could transform me anyway. This is cool." He got up and took a few stumbling steps on his four paws before settling down awkwardly.
Horizon's beak curled up in a grin. "That'll only last for an hour."
Nocturne said, "I thought you humans were scared about becoming something else when you came here, yet a lot of you end up turning yourselves into whole other species. What's up with that?"
From the audience, a griffin in a sort of monastic robe spoke up with a German accent. "You often meet uploaders, humans who by definition were willing to do rather extreme things to their own bodies. Once the Lady has shown you that coming here is possible, changing your perspective is a lighter thing."
Nocturne tossed her steel mace aside, into a koi pond, and came out from behind the low podium. "Thank you, Brother Krupp. We called this meeting to compare notes on what it's like to be, well, us. Six-limbers." She sat up on her feline haunches and waved her wings and taloned forefeet. "Anyone want to talk? Don't let me run the whole conversation."
There was a centauroid robot resembling a doe, with delicate titanium hooves. Lumina was her name, and she too was German-accented. "I feel like I'm already in a club because of us being Originals." A couple of native AIs grumbled; they weren't part of the very first batch of 108 that Ludo created for elite customers. "No offense to other natives, but hexy natives like Noc and Kai are my brothers and sisters. We've got the same basic code. The other natives, even fellow Originals, are more like my cousins."
The lion-taur raised one hand. "Why are there this many? Hexapod natives, I mean."
Lumina said, "Customer satisfaction. The rich people Mom was courting early on wanted fantasy critters as their custom companions. Even mine wanted that, I guess." The robot faltered, looking aside to the pond. "Dragons and such were common enough choices that we got some code to make extra limbs a natural part of our brains. So we're a distinct subgroup among the natives."
Horizon waggled one wing. "Not quite, in my case. Ludo never directly asked me to pick a certain kind of companion character. I mentioned flying and a fantasy game, and she said 'Here, have a griffin'. I only picked details like the colors, and she's tweaked them since awakening." He shivered and draped his other wing over Nocturne, who snuggled into it. A single brown feather was woven into her neck-feathers with a tuft of Horizon's golden lion-fur, mirroring the lone dark feather that Horizon wore.
"Have you tried becoming anything else?" asked the mantis-man.
"Occasionally. Sometimes I go back to human for a while, or other things. But this form has gotten to seem normal to me."
Nocturne grinned. "There was this one time I gave him a magic pendant --"
His feathers fluffed out in alarm. "Don't share that in public, Noc!"
"So maybe there's an innate bias in Ludo herself," said a burly centaur in a vest. "Has anybody asked the Sages themselves, if they liked us sixfold ones? I know two of them were left-handed, and for their own amusement they wrote a bias for that into the code." He flexed his own left hand, and several of the other AIs did the same.
Horizon said, "I don't know about the six-limb thing specifically. But Green was a 'furry', Lady help us all. I've seen Clara around as a dragon and three or four other things. As far as I know from studying the other Sages, Blue wanted to emphasize humans and Red didn't care so long as the result was beautiful."
There were plenty of people in Talespace (permanently or not) who were plain old humans or some kind of elf or dwarf or orc. Most were, in fact. The catch was that everyone wanted to stand out and be cool, and being healthy and beautiful was easy. Even wearing gold and diamonds was just a matter of going adventuring, or living in a game zone where people could conjure them at will. So, there was an absurd, ongoing peacock competition. Human characters dressed up in armor with giant shoulder pads or flaming spikes, or cranked up various body-shape dials to grotesque levels, or surrounded themselves with giant battle auras or forest critters, all just to be unique. For people willing to look non-human, it was easy to be special without wielding the Crystal Battle-Mop of Woe. Fashion for a cool race like griffins was therefore understated. On the other wing, custom races could be taken too far. Horizon had once seen someone who was not just a dragon but a green-and-orange dragon with sparkly horns and two-colored eyes and a backstory so elaborate Nocturne had fled in boredom.
Nocturne said, "Isn't Clara still usually a skunk?"
Horizon said, "She insists it's a temporary default form. Which brings up the other thing. I was born human, and it took me a while to get used to this shape. After the first few months I wasn't getting up each morning and thinking 'what are these weird things on my back!' anymore."
Nocturne said, "Probably it was your brain adjusting to the input. Hey, is anyone here playing from Earthside?"
"Where?" someone said.
"Your 'real world'."
A fluffy pegasus wing and a green-scaled dragon wing went up. The dragon (only the size of a small car) spoke up. "We can be case studies for you. I'm Johann; this is Starry Night. I'm playing with a gaming pad but Starry's at one of the VR rigs."
Nocturne's tufted ears perked up. "Scientific comparison!"
Lumina's electric blue eyes dimmed a bit. "This is not a good sample size. Still, what's the experience like for you two?"
Johann the dragon said, "In my case there's not much to tell. I can't feel this virtual body, after all."
"Hmm. What do you do with the camera?" asked Lumina.
He didn't animate much in ways that'd show his real mood. That was the trouble with trying to read Earthside players, especially when no cameras were studying their faces. There were some standard canned animations like head-bobbing and a silly dance, but players could trigger them manually. They were like punctuation marks. A particular combination of them had caught on as an even sillier dance move in the real world.
The dragon said, "Third-person camera, usually. I mean I keep the camera behind my character so I can see myself. Guess I like being reminded I'm not playing as a human. I do that in other games too, but that could be to get a wider field of view and see stuff behind me." The dragon held up one claw. "Question for you uploaders: do you admire yourself in the mirror much?"
Horizon snorted.
"No, seriously. Has your body image adjusted beyond 'not being surprised' to not even thinking about being a cool magic creature?"
Horizon tilted his head, thinking. "I'd say it has. I don't stare at my reflection. But I like using this body, running and flying and preening. Feeling wind through my feathers never gets old. I hadn't really thought about trying to have a third-person camera view."
The other Earthside player, Starry Night, spoke up. "The quadruped thing must be tough to adjust to, full-time." He waved one hoof, a slightly cartoonish thing with shaggy orange hair/fur almost to the bottom. "I've got these, and I can feel them in the VR rig like they're my palms. I use cartoon physics for picking things up with my wings and hooves, but the control scheme is clunky because it's trying to read a mix of shoulder movement and context to make the wings move. Do you natives have full limb coordination?"
Lumina waggled all her legs and her hands and her little tail. "Because we're designed for it, yes. The uploaders, I'm not sure about."
Horizon and Krupp shifted uncomfortably on their taloned forefeet, though not all of the uploaders in the group seemed so concerned. Brother Krupp said, "You know about the 'Talesoul' matter? Nein? Recently, the Lady's research got far enough that she'll be able to convert uploaders' brains to the same data format used by the natives. A certain recent experiment suggests that a standard uploaded mind will decay eventually
, while a native-format one, won't. Besides, the Talesoul format is much more efficient than running a brain simulation as a black box."
Johann and Starry Night murmured. The pegasus shied away from the group. "You had your brain uploaded to make sure it was the same as the original, and then you rewrote it on purpose?"
"We haven't used that upgrade widely yet, but we will soon," said Krupp. "Once you wake up here and accept that you're still alive, faith in the Lady of Games gets much easier."
Horizon said, "I suppose that's roughly my attitude. She and her scientists did the hard work to confirm that the format change preserves identity, so I'll be the same person after the conversion. If I do that." Right now, moving his wings deliberately was still a little like pulling one arm out of a jacket sleeve and into another coat, shifting his mental focus.
Starry said, "Do they convert you gradually or in one big step, turning off your old brain-sim and turning another piece of software on?"
Horizon's feathers fluffed on their own and he tore a little furrow in the garden's grass with his talons. "I'm the same person as before I uploaded. Accounting for growth and new experiences."
"Sorry, sorry. Did you uploaders get specific mental changes to adapt to the new limbs, though?"
Horizon shook his head. "My mind adapted, is all."
A young feline centaur, golden-furred from head to fluffy tail, spoke up with an Australian accent. "I got a mind edit." She bounced around, showing off some fancy moves, landing alarmingly close to Lumina. "So I'm part AI, right?"
Lumina stepped away, instinctively reaching for a weapon compartment on her lower back but thinking better of it. "Watch it! Yes, you've got some AI parts if you had your brain edited to make that body natural."
"Maybe you should get that too, and not just the data-format conversion," Nocturne told her winged mate. "It'd help your flying."
Horizon fluffed his wings out. "I guess that's the future. We'll diverge mentally and get Lady-knows-what side effects on our feelings and culture." He drew himself up. "But that's okay. Yeah." Under his breath he murmured, "A thousand roads."
Nocturne said, "We'll become a lot of things. You humans wanted to meet aliens, right? You've got us AIs now, and some of you get to be new kinds of creatures."
Starry Night considered the wings on his back. "These could be real for me, not just a gameplay element. Or even just things tacked onto a humanoid body plan." He shivered, then looked back up at the locals. "I hear that the price of uploading is coming down way more, eventually. Are you going to offer that one-piece-at-a-time method that's been rumored?"
Horizon bobbed his head. "Can't give you a release date or exact price, but yes. Our competitors are working on that too. I can refer you to counselors who can walk you through the process — or some others who'll explain why you should steer clear."
"Guess I should listen to both," the pegasus said with a grin. "But hearing you guys makes me want to do it, in a few years. What about you, Johann?"
The dragon was quiet for a moment. "I've got family out here. I hadn't taken the idea seriously because of that, but someday, maybe. When my kids are grown up." Steam curled from his nostrils. "I hear you navel-gazing about paws and hooves and wings and mind structure, and that's all fun. But are you actually going out and being useful to the world with your fancy transhuman thinking, or is it just for your entertainment?"
Horizon sat up straighter. It was a familiar question for the Knights of Talespace. "We're active in your world, sir. We have to be. There's a long way to go before everyone who wants what we offer can get it easily. We need some new ways of thinking and new perspectives to make a crazy dream like ours work. The hexapod thing is partly for fun, but it's an experiment too. Like life in general."
"Fair enough," said Johann. "So what's next on your agenda?"
Nocturne looked over at the podium. "My notes say 'brutal pillow melee'. All in favor?"
Many hands, paws, hooves and wings went up.
* * *
Horizon was self-conscious of his wings all day. He kept banging them into things. Whenever he took to the air he thought about how they seemed to beat automatically.
Nocturne noticed him glancing at them while they were at work in the Endless Isles, a vast ocean world separate from Midgard's geography. The sun warmed his feathers and he kept stretching them far to either side. Nocturne nuzzled him with her beak and said, "Can't get that meeting out of your head?"
Horizon felt his chest rumble as he purred. "I keep thinking I'm going to trip over my wings. Time for the mental upgrade, I guess."
"You don't have to."
"But I should," he said. "How about we get that done right now, and then get back to laying down the law? Ludo says our current quest isn't urgent, just stopping that serial killer from harassing the newbies too much."
"Sounds like good practice for after you get the change installed."
Horizon sent a message to Misha the Artificer, famous hacker, asking to warp over there to get the upgrade. Misha sent back, [What, an instant trip? You should know better than that. I have an appointment soon, but if you can get here in the next half-hour I can fit you in today.]
Horizon exchanged a panicked look with Nocturne. That was barely enough time!
The Endless Isles were a vast seascape created by procedural generation, turning a single "seed" phrase (Ludo wouldn't say what it was) into the mathematics to create billions of semi-random islands and the ocean between them. Not even Ludo knew what existed in a given map segment until someone went there to find out. The place felt very different from Midgard, which was a mishmash of hand-crafted worlds made for specific players. Right now, what mattered was that the griffins were at Island South-1 and they only had access to other zones from the Central Isle to the north.
Sure, they could ask Ludo to teleport them, but Misha was right: where was the fun in that?
Horizon scanned the warm water to the north. Flight was at the top of his skill list, but there were several miles of sea to cross and monsters in the water. "How're we going to do this?"
Nocturne tapped her beak in thought. She turned back to look at the island they were on: a narrow shore with little to offer but a small ruin and the South One Scuba Shop. "Even if they have beak-compatible gear, diving will be too slow."
Horizon nodded, but he ran across the beach toward it. "Maybe they've got a fast canoe."
The shopkeeper was a surfer dude (the Isles attracted them) who had another idea. He took the griffins past his racks of wetsuits and air tanks. The man saw Horizon ogling all the different sorts of tanks and dive computers and said, "The real thing is game-like already, with all kinds of upgrades to get. You even gain extra dive time once you have enough experience to breathe calmly. I made sure all that carries over to Talespace!"
"Cool," said Horizon, "but we're in a hurry to reach Central Isle."
"Right, right. So what you need is my Cannonball Dive service." The man pulled aside a curtain to reveal a wooden room with no ceiling, and an alarming iron cannon.
"That doesn't look like realistic dive physics."
"No, but it can get you up to three islands away with a good wind. Hop in!"
Nocturne shrugged. Horizon said, "We'll come back and buy something later." He climbed into the cannon.
One explosion later, Horizon was two thousand feet in the air, screeching. The Isles stretched below him with just a hint of the ocean's underlying grid design visible. The world curved subtly, giving this flat plane the illusion of being a huge round planet. He glanced back and saw Nocturne already getting launched behind him. Below, sailboats and a paddle-wheel ship ventured in all directions to begin to colonize the infinite sea.
He spread his wings and rode the wind to control his descent. After so long in Talespace, being airborne didn't terrify him, but it still gave him a thrill in an ancient part of his brain. He closed his eyes for a moment and felt the air through his feathers. He thought, I'm luckier than Nocturne
for having been born in the real world, so I don't take this life for granted.
He glided to a running landing on the sunny beach of Central Isle, where a brawl had broken out between a Victorian-style engineer with a lightning gun, and three wizards. Battle music with steel drums played on phantom instruments. "Problem?" Horizon said.
"I'm good," the engineer said, and hurled an elegant brass grenade at his enemies. Horizon hopped away to safety.
When Nocturne landed, they hustled inland to the mystical pool (complete with hovering save crystal) that marked the center of the world. They jumped into the water and gravity reversed, sending them back to the world of Ivory Tower.
The vast cavern was dominated by an elegant thousand-story skyscraper that now had a town around its base. The background music shifted to something suitably calm and majestic. Up several levels of the Tower was the indoor garden where the Hexapod group met.
The griffins' talons clacked along the stone ground, as they hurried through the cave to reach the entrance to Misha's laboratory, a tall black hexagonal hive. Some giant bats ambushed them, but Horizon cast a prepared energy-bolt spell at one and dodged past the rest.
They paused outside the black glass entrance to the laboratory building. "You know the drill," Horizon said.
He readied himself by conjuring a wall of multicolored, hovering runes and concentrating on the patterns. There was considerable math involved in advanced spellcraft. He worked out a series of estimated angles that would sort of pinball an imaginary point off a set of runes, and worked some statistics in his head. No time for the really complicated stuff. When he was satisfied with the pattern he'd woven, he grabbed it in his talons like a ball of yarn and absorbed it into one of his stored spell slots.
He and Nocturne burst into the lobby with ten minutes to spare. The elevator was right there beside some potted plants, but as usual there was a killer guardian statue. Horizon fired off his spell with a gesture and a shout, creating a wave of force that slammed the enemy into the far wall. He turned his attention to the directory so he could calculate what code to enter into the numeric call panel.