Virtual Horizon

by Kris Schnee

  Marvele fired a bolt of energy from her stunner and missed. Stephanie's beam lasted longer but went way wide. She tried to focus on one target but got clubbed upside the head for a major wound.

  "Help!" said Stephanie.

  "Are you sure?" Horizon asked, reaching into his saddlebags.

  She leaped away from another swing. "Uh, maybe kill one?"

  Horizon flung a bottle at the nearest goblin. It shattered and became a whirlwind of glass that made one of the greenskins scream, shredded in an instant. The other looked terrified.

  "Now fight!" he said.

  The stun-ray made the goblin stagger and grunt, and Stephanie's laser now had a steady target that let her score a minor wound. The enemy recovered quickly and barreled into Marvele, club arcing upward to whack her in the chest. Even Horizon winced; that had to be a [Stunned] effect at least.

  Stephanie said, "Hey, ugly!" and got its attention. She ran away, waiting for Marvele's stunner to recharge.

  Horizon called out, "Use your environment. The arena's hardly ever a big open square."

  The girl took that to heart and scrambled up onto a rock to shoot down at the monster. Missed. But Marvele shot and forced it to duck for cover. It snarled and swung upward at Stephanie, who hopped one blow but then got a minor wound to her legs. She fired again, raking her cutter-beam across warty hide.

  Marvele threw a rock and missed. The other gal scrunched up her nose and leaped from her boulder, crashing down on the goblin's back. They tumbled to the ground in a heap, both of them disarmed.

  Marvele fired her stunner, catching her prey in the head. "Quick, step away!"

  Stephanie staggered upright and snatched the club, raising it in her trembling hands. She swung wildly and hit the enemy's shoulder, causing [Staggered]. Marvele grabbed the laser and did a serious hit this time that made the goblin squawk and die at last.

  Stephanie said, "That actually hurt!"

  Marvele rubbed her chest. "Yeah, ow."

  Horizon landed beside them as a victory fanfare played. "It's important feedback."

  Stephanie took back her gun and said, "I'm surprised you didn't try charming them."

  Marvele laughed. "Good idea. But everybody here is either super beautiful or weird. My old career's probably pointless."

  Horizon said, "You won't be able to stand out just by looks."

  "You got your feathers ruffled talking with me, anyway."

  Horizon blinked. "That's true, and I've seen people crank up the body proportions to gross levels. It might just be your reputation, or maybe you have actual charm."

  She looked thoughtful. "What's it mean to be charming in here, besides the numbers?" She checked her interface. "I just got a point of Guns skill but no Charisma yet."

  Stephanie said, "Sounds like a personal quest."

  "It's good to find one," Horizon said.

  They marched on. Horizon taught them how to form an official party, so that they could share his radar-like scan of sighted enemies. With his scouting they chose to detour around a squad of four goblins and another group of two plus a lizard, then lay an ambush of their own for a loner.

  Stephanie looked uncomfortable after clubbing the little goon. Horizon told her, "Not everybody's willing to hit humanoids in melee. Probably good that we have that instinct."

  "Do you just use magic?" she said.

  "I do some of everything." He looked at his talons, thinking of creatures and people he'd killed with them. It was all just within the Game... though with his human hands he'd proven willing to hurt people, too.

  "You all right?" Marvele asked.

  "Reminiscing."

  They reached a downward slope that took them to a stairway, then a high-tech portal with a save crystal and eerie space music. Horizon checked the time. "Touch the crystal before you go through. I need to get to a meeting."

  Stephanie laughed. "Instead of joining us on a space adventure?"

  "Duty calls! Ping me if you need anything in the next few days, though I'll be pretty busy."

  Marvele bowed alluringly. "Thank you, Horizon."

  "Yeah, thanks!" said Stephanie. "First order of business: a good camera."

  "Hey..." Marvele got more serious for a moment. "This isn't just a retirement home, is it? I mean, can I make myself useful as more than a magic potion vendor?"

  The griffin smiled. "Sure you can, and thanks for asking. Go have some fun first though, and get a sense for what your new home is like."

  Horizon waved goodbye and headed out, whistling and thinking. Might've just started a friendship. That's worth more than any gameplay tips.

  * * *

  He took a notepad out of his saddlebags and made it hover while he tapped his beak in thought. Nocturne's arbitrarily-chosen birthday was coming up. He wanted to have a space station designed for her, but a dragon had most of his gold. No time to handle that today; he was late for an Exposition planning meeting.

  The "Exposition of a Thousand Tales" was scheduled soon in Cuba like a one-machine World's Fair, far outdoing the fan clubs and conventions that Talespace had spawned already. Maybe at last, he could pull Linda home with it.

  He hustled through the hotel's deceptively normal halls of jade and marble, waving a wing toward a herd of centaurs he'd befriended. They were terrorizing the buffet. He wasn't surprised the new gal had thrown breakfast out, because the food was still bland or obviously fake. He was used to it by now. A couple of his friends were working on that problem, and he had every reason to think they'd solve it eventually. Smell and taste just weren't a high priority compared to sight and sound. More importantly, the Lady trusted them to work on it without her constant supervision. That was how things worked around here most of the time. The Lady counted on people like him to keep it humming smoothly!

  He passed through the traditional Unnecessary Deathtrap Hall in the hotel -- this week it was a room of swinging blades -- and leaped through a portal to his home, the pastoral world he shared with the other knights and Clara. A corner of the Midgard fantasy world.

  Sunlight warmed his wings. He dove toward the stone walls of their island fortress, but spotted Nocturne trotting along the road outside. He landed nearby.

  She tackled him, rolled, and straddled him. "It's a disaster! The Exposition is messier than anything I've ever seen. Clara has been going over the plans in the great hall. Every byte of them from the food vendors to the taxes has got something wrong with it. Even the... What are those gross things humans use after they eat?"

  "Toilets?"

  "We have to hire some poor human to clean them -- there's some stupid rule against robots for that. The money's going out all over the place and it's all going to collapse and make Ludo look horrible."

  Horizon leaned up to clack beaks with her. She let him stand, and he ran his beak along her wings, smoothing her soft feathers. "You could use a vacation. Want to visit Valhalla again and do some fighting?" There was now a yearly Ultimate Final Epic Battle.

  The less-advertised function of the little world of Valhalla was that people were training with real-world robot designs. By no coincidence at all, Linda would've said, if she knew.

  Nocturne poked him with her talons. "The Lady is counting on us. It's all got to be perfect."

  "Not really. Just fun. Let's see what her other planners are working on, and do what we can."

  * * *

  Horizon entered the great hall. The stone meeting-place was just a dry, open space with some benches and mammoth furs, but everything in the building was something they'd _built_ instead of wishing it up.

  Clara the Green Sage sat on a pillow, waving her fluffy tail. A couple of robots, a winged toaster, a woman in a space uniform with a pineapple insignia, a small brass dragon, and an android sat around, on or over their round table. A fairly typical meeting. He didn't recognize the little girl with them, though.

  Clara said, "We've got to increase the cooling budget to keep from melting her servers."

  Horizon gl
anced at a bored-looking NPC fox footman who'd been watching Clara expound. "Could you get us some drinks, please? Take your time." The fox scurried off now that he had something to do. Horizon said, "How's construction going?"

  Clara tapped the table and conjured a model of a fairground studded with sleek, curving buildings. Many glowed red or yellow, a few green. She groused, "Delayed. Cubans don't know how to work even under Free States rule."

  "Have we got anybody who's actually run a fair like this?"

  "There's a whole other division helping with that part. Crowd control, restrooms, parking, day care; the list goes on. Ludo sponsored a couple of county fairs already for what she called 'experience points'. I was a hardware specialist back in the day, and I'm still overwhelmed by the complexity."

  The toaster flashed and transformed, becoming a human named Che. "Did you hear about the sponsors, Horizon? We just got that dropped on us. It's not going to be an all-Ludo event after all, no more than the old World's Fairs."

  Horizon earperked. "You mean the US robot-sellers, and Draupnir salesmen, and... Damn, tell me FAE isn't involved."

  There were plenty of rumors about the government AI, none of them pleasant. Some said that it had multiple player accounts within Thousand Tales, so that anyone you met might be a different kind of non-human intelligence. How its many supposed schemes fit together, nobody was sure.

  Clara smacked the table. "That damned murder machine!"

  One of the robots, a sleek black humanoid with a cape, explained. "Sir Horizon, we are already very aware of the need for security. You and your wife might be more useful in the other meeting, with the gamer crowd."

  Horizon started to answer but shut his beak. Nocturne said what he was thinking, though: "We're not just playing, Misha. We might not have the technical skills of you and Clara, but what we do is important too."

  "Go do your customer service, then." Misha shooed them away.

  Horizon scowled. "If it's that difficult a technical talk, why have you got that girl here? Or is she someone important with a kid avatar?" He didn't like seeing adult players do that, and some zones banned it outright.

  She waved to him. "Hi, mister Horizon! I won a race yesterday!" "Oh! Hi, Maria. Didn't recognize you."

  Clara gave Horizon an apologetic shrug. "I made Ludo read something called the Evil Overlord's List. 'Put an ordinary kid on your council to see if she can spot flaws in your plans.' A unicorn racer is as close as you get to ordinary around here."

  Maria grinned.

  "Fine, then. I'll be off to do human-resources things." Horizon slinked toward the exit.

  Che said, "One of the fairground sponsors is Westwind Transhuman Designs."

  He froze. Linda's employer. "Marketing what?"

  "Spaceflight."

  "I... should look into that."

  The uniformed space woman at the table wasn't someone Horizon knew personally. She stood and said, "I'm out too. My skills are either far too advanced or just irrelevant; I'm not sure which."

  The griffins went outside to the courtyard, chattering about security and Westwind. Some foxes were training humans in acrobatic swordplay. Horizon said to Nocturne, "I've been checking in on the seastead; I helped deliver some hardware so --"

  Pineapple had exited the knights' hall behind them. She charged Nocturne and started punching her. "You damned pirate! Did you think I'd forget?"

  Horizon was too stunned to react at first, but then he pounced the woman and raked his talons across her chest for a major wound. He stood on her, glaring down. "What are you talking about?"

  Nocturne had recovered quickly and now stood beside him, her feathers bristling. "Remember when I told you I'd been called into a fast-forward space world to play a minor villain? Pineapple here was the star character. She couldn't tell I was just acting, when I attacked her ship."

  This woman with the silly name had been in an isolated bubble-world, pretending to have space adventures -- and made to forget they were a game! Completely irrelevant to everyone else's life, not at all real even from Talespace's perspective. Except, it'd been running at great expense and surreal, extreme speed, producing valuable research into the life cycle of uploaded brains. The data format that most uploaders now used had come from that experiment. But the woman was told, Those last two centuries you experienced were just a test lasting a year or two, and nothing you did mattered.

  Pineapple glared back at them. "It was just a game to you. That was my entire life. You shot at people I cared about. You murdered them and they didn't come back!"

  "They weren't real. Your thinking friends had no chance of really getting hurt."

  "I didn't know that at the time!"

  Horizon said, "Nocturne, can we talk somewhere private?"

  They flew to a nearby hill. Nocturne fumed, "It wasn't wrong. She needed adventures and threats."

  "Yes, you weren't trying to hurt real people. But this was a weird situation where she didn't know the danger was a game. As far as she knew, you weren't there to help her have fun."

  Nocturne screeched and flung up her wings. "Then why the heck would I assault her starship with plasma gravitron grapple missiles?"

  "That's what she wanted to know."

  "I can't ambush someone with killer space jellyfish if I have to announce them first." Nocturne clawed at the rocks beneath her, shaking her head. "I guess the lack of context was the problem."

  They nodded at the same time, then flew back to Pineapple. Nocturne dipped her beak and said, "I didn't understand that you had no idea the rules were different, that nobody important could really die. Sorry."

  Pineapple said, "Nobody important? My two best friends weren't the only people who mattered to me. I don't care that they were some special smart grade of AI and the others were dumber. But everybody except me and those two got snuffed out like they'd never been."

  Horizon said, "It does matter. It was a difference between a real person and a game character."

  "Who else is on your 'not real people' list? Do you go by race or religion or what?"

  Horizon took a breath and held up one wing. "I know you were away for ages. But didn't Ludo explain the player/NPC distinction?"

  "I was told afterward. After I'd grieved for lost friends."

  He said, "When you interact with background characters, they're just Ludo's puppets. She's the one you were really befriending. When some of them got shot by Nocturne, the person you were really interacting with wasn't hurt. No one was."

  "I was."

  Nocturne said, "We all misunderstood what was going on, all right? I'm sorry my awesome space raids did more harm than I thought. Long-term, we'll have to either inform people better about what NPCs are, or not hurt people who don't know."

  Pineapple rubbed her forehead. "That's as good an apology as I'm going to get. I'll have to take this up with Ludo later. Don't we have a fair to plan, now that we've been relegated to the kiddy table?"

  "There's something else," Horizon said. "Those many things you experienced... Shouldn't you tell people about them? There are recordings."

  "Yeah, studied by scientists to compare to my brain data."

  "I mean, what if you pulled out the best parts and made stories of them? Something that other people could see and appreciate. If you did that, the life you had will get remembered by other real people."

  The woman's eyes widened.

  * * *

  She and the griffins jumped through a portal to another world. The other meeting was being held in a virtual model of the actual fairground, a construction site in Cuba. Walls of concrete and glass curved along green trails of the newly-invented roadmoss, a sturdy gengineered ground cover. Horizon took to the air to look down on it. The site used its small space beguilingly, forming a city of streets and pavilions twisting around a park with a tall spire.

  Nocturne joined him in the sky. "When this project is completed, Ludo wins, right?"

  "It's not that simple," he said. He started to explain
the complexity and ambiguity of Earth again.

  Nocturne gave a chirpy giggle. "I know. Quit trying to apologize for the Outer Realm. It's fun dealing with the hard stuff sometimes. Let's land and see it like humans will."

  The group working here was strolling past the buildings, arguing. Horizon recognized a few of them. All ten wore human bodies except for one stubborn elf. "Sir Nocturne," said one of them. "Maybe you can settle this for us. How crowded should we let the place be, considering that you're going to be walking around in it?"

  "I am?" said Nocturne.

  It was Horizon's turn to grin. He draped one wing over her and said, "Ludo agreed to have griffin bots walking around."

  "Several kinds," said the elf. "Three lives each, as she put it."

  The space woman, Pineapple, looked unnerved. "I hope you don't mean that literally. It's not like you're expecting them to get blown up." Everyone fell silent. "You are. Why?"

  Come to think of it, there was that robot model with the "expansion ports" hidden under the wings.

  A man named Ryan, wearing plate armor, conjured a simulated riot. Suddenly, furious people were yelling all around! They waved protest signs saying "Uploading Is Murder" and "Stop the Robot Cult" and chucked flaming Molotovs at the buildings. Sir Ryan was the only one not to draw back in fear. He'd been an early recruit for the knightly order because of some real-world heroics that eclipsed Horizon's, making Horizon feel guilty to be nominally in charge by seniority. The human knight said, "We've been walking around as humans to get a better feel for crowd control, but I expect trouble even beyond what you'd get from a sports game or a rock concert. The Cuban government and the federal AFS one have thrown their support behind us. We're building infrastructure, after all, and showing off technology, and drawing tourists. What I need to know is what our robot pilots will do when something like this happens." He pointed to the rioters.

  Horizon said, "Seeing this, I definitely advise having only a small crowd on the first day."

  Nocturne nuzzled Horizon. He hugged back and said, "What about human security guards?"