by Dima Zales
“Amazing,” Phoe says, and I realize that her voice is no longer disembodied.
Phoe has become a vapor-like outline of herself. No, that’s not really true. Unlike her Oasis counterpart, this Haven version has large butterfly wings, and all she’s wearing is a tiny thong. Seeing her nearly naked again, even though she’s see-through, stirs emotions in me that I know are best kept out of my head for now.
As if to highlight Phoe’s incorporealness, the bigger attacker goes right through her.
“You’re so dead,” the man grits out, saliva spraying from his mouth.
He’s holding two curved swords that I think are called scimitars. Unlike real-world scimitars, these are made of ice. I swing for the sword, hoping my fire blade will melt his. He deflects my strike and proves that his scimitars only look like ice; they feel as if they were forged out of something as hard as titanium. He also proves how good he is with his weapons by using the post-block recoil to slice at my right wrist.
“Shit. I pulled up Brandon’s memories of this guy. He’s one of the best swordsmen the Guardians have,” Phoe hisses. “We should flee.”
The sword connects with my right shoulder. The combination of burning pain and the unbearable feeling of my joint crunching hits me like a steamroller.
My right katana looks like a fiery meteorite as it falls down.
11
Through the nauseating pain, I hear Phoe say, “If this is how he wants to play it, fuck fleeing. This guy is going to get it. No one hurts you this badly and gets away with it. I’ll try to take the pain away and do all the fighting. Luckily for us, I can leverage Brandon’s weapons training against him.”
I realize she’s talking to distract me from the agony and is partially succeeding in that. Then the pain eases completely, allowing my mind to clear, and I finally notice what my body has been up to: a jerky hacking motion with my left arm.
My remaining sword slices through my enemy’s left shoulder. He howls as his whole arm falls off.
A severed arm for an injured shoulder. Close enough to that ancient saying, “an eye for an eye.”
To my disappointment, my attacker recovers quickly and swipes at me with his remaining scimitar.
My katana blocks his strike. I try to slice open his side, but he blocks in turn.
He hacks at my throat, and I duck under his blow, delivering a deep cut to where his liver should be.
My opponent doesn’t disintegrate, which means my strike wasn’t lethal. In retaliation, he executes a desperate onslaught of feints and thrusts. I have a hard time following every attack, but Phoe doesn’t. Through me, she blocks every strike with mathematical precision. As the fight proceeds, I clue in to Phoe’s plan. The man’s crazy attacks are tiring him out, and the two bloody wounds aren’t helping him either.
My right arm is numb, but at least, unlike his stump, my shoulder isn’t bleeding—likely due to Phoe’s influence.
“The guys in the cathedral might be on their way,” I tell her. “We need to fly away.”
Phoe has me execute my own barrage of attacks. If someone were to capture my sword movements with a high-speed camera, I’m sure it would look like a beautiful, fiery work of art. When it becomes clear that the guy can barely block my attacks, I slice at his throat and succeed in cutting it clean through. He begins the Limbofication process and disappears a second later.
Without pausing, I flap my wings and fly toward the point where the dome of the floating island meets its ground.
“We’re going to dive under the island,” Phoe explains. “This way, when the rest of the Guardians exit, they won’t spot us as quickly.”
I glance at her as she speaks and realize that her ethereal figure looks more solid, as if she’s made out of thicker fog.
“This form is just the beginning.” Phoe flies in front of me, showing me the way. “With more resources, I should be able to give myself a real body—or at least as real of a body as I can get in this place.”
I remain silent until we reach the edge of the floating island. Once we pass the dome, we fly under the island, passing through thick clouds. I notice that the same kind of clouds seem to cover the bottoms of other islands as well.
We have a clear head start on our pursuers now, so I say, “Okay, now what?”
“Now we get as far away from this place as possible,” Phoe says. “Then I’d like you to Limbofy a few more people for me.”
“I’m not attacking random people for you—and you still owe me answers. If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you’ve gone evil, assuming you weren’t evil from the start. Don’t you see how that would explain how everyone in Oasis was killed and why you want me to kill even more people in Haven?”
“We both know you don’t believe that,” Phoe says, but her ethereal shoulders drop. “Fine, let me explain what I think happened, but keep in mind that there are big gaps in my knowledge—which we’ll have to address as a matter of high priority.”
“Tell me what you can,” I say, my wings flapping even faster.
“First, allow me to do this.” Phoe gestures at my injured shoulder, and with a flash of bright yellow light, the gaping wound closes.
The healed shoulder tingles, and I clench and unclench my right hand. It feels as if the shoulder never got hurt. There aren’t even any remnants of pain.
“I’m glad that worked,” Phoe says, looking at me over her shoulder. “Incidentally, I hope you realize that this feat of healing was only possible because of the resources I pilfered from those Limbofied Guardians.”
“Guardians,” I repeat. “You called them that before.”
“Yes, I got the proper term from Brandon’s memories. The others also call themselves that.”
“Do you mean you literally know what he knew?”
“I more than know—I can even show it to you. But I know you’re dying to learn about what happened in Oasis.”
“Yes,” I say. “I need to know if everyone is really dead.”
She dives down and follows a diagonal path straight to the nearest domed island. This island is greener than the one we left and looks a lot more welcoming, at least from this distance.
We fly in silence for a moment. Though I know what she’s going to tell me, I need to hear it. Phoe must realize that and is thinking of the best way to deliver the horrible truth.
“You’ve already figured most of it out,” she finally says, speaking so softly that I almost don’t hear her over the wind hitting my face. “That Jeremiah thing on the beach was a virus. I think it originated here, in Haven. I also think the question of who unleashed it, and why, is something we need answered as soon as possible. One thing is for sure: the Jeremiah virus hunted every part of me, every thread, to extinction. Only a portion of me, what I wrote into the DMZ, survived. That part of me was just a static snapshot—an insurance policy of sorts. It was not actively executing on any computing substrate, similar to how the backed up human minds just sit in the DMZ, waiting to be resurrected in a computer world one day. It’s like the hibernate function of an ancient operating system. I only know about the horrible events you lived through from your memories. I wasn’t around for any of it.”
She falls silent for a moment, then continues. “My best guess as to what happened after I was gone is that the Jeremiah virus continued deleting anything that remotely resembled me, including my unconscious processes of gravity simulation, oxygen regulation, and the likes. In its overzealousness to erase me, the virus destroyed the life-support functions of me, the ship. As far as making sure it killed me, it was a good strategy, but as a way of keeping the human population alive… Well, you know what happened.”
She stops talking and lets me digest this. Driven by an irrational hatred of Phoe, someone—or a group of someones—was criminally negligent. These people are here in Haven with me, and they’re making me rethink my earlier attitude toward violence. They’ll answer for all the suffering I witnessed and be held accountable for all those deaths.<
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Then I realize that though the events were very tragic, no one truly died. There are snapshots of every mind, including Liam’s. He’s somewhere in the DMZ with Mason and the rest of them. Theoretically, they could be brought back to life in Haven.
“That’s true,” Phoe says. “Though I’d like to point out that those snapshots are incomplete, for better or worse. Few will remember their last day in Oasis. As you might recall, the mind backup process starts when you go to sleep, and I doubt many people took a nap in the midst of that disaster. The only reason you can recall what happened is because of your unique circumstances. You fell asleep when you were suffering from hypothermia. If you woke up after that, you lost that information forever.”
I shudder. Maybe forgetting something like that is a good thing. Then something occurs to me.
“If you were as good as dead, how did you show up here?” I ask. “For that matter, how did I?”
“I’m here because you’re here. Remember that Pi exploit I planted in your head so I could enter the Elderly Test on Birth Day?”
I nod, beginning to understand. Phoe gave me a fake memory relating to Pi. After a certain point in the sequence, the numbers of Pi became the digits that helped her hack into the Test.
“Exactly,” Phoe says. “When you enter certain virtual reality environments, those digits in your head are instantiated together with your mind. Once that happens, the numbers become a basic routine meant to create a bootstrap version of me that in turn summons the rest of me to itself. So I got very lucky that you ended up here, in an environment so similar to the Test. With the help of this code, a small shadow of me is once again running. I don’t know if it’s obvious, but I’m nowhere near my normal self. It’s horrible. I’m down to measly human-level intellect.”
“Okay, so that explains your presence, sort of,” I say. “Except it all hinges on me being here, and you haven’t explained that.” We’re a few feet away from the shimmering dome now, which means we’re about to enter the green sky island. “How did I get here? I thought only Council members went to Haven.”
“It might be best for you to hear that from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, and for that, I’ll have to show you Brandon’s memories in a moment.” Phoe folds her wings and plummets headfirst into the soap-bubble dome.
For the first time since our escape, it occurs to me how odd our surroundings are. The whole universe looks like a massive sky. There’s no ground as far down as I can see, not counting the floating domed islands.
“Do I have to make you fly down?” Phoe asks as she continues descending.
“No,” I think. “I’ll fly down by myself—at my own pace.”
I don’t want her to force me to drop the way she did, so I begin my descent.
Phoe disappears below the treetops. “The reason there’s no ground is because Haven is built on top of a virtual reality infrastructure that is very similar to the IRES game,” she explains in my mind. “It doesn’t need to conform to reality.”
As I listen, I fly slower, examining the never-ending woods covering the ground of the island.
With the greenery approaching, even my cautious flight speed feels too fast. Even though I know it’s completely irrational here, my fear of heights awakens with a vengeance, and it’s all I can do to keep going.
When I descend below the treetops, I find that Phoe has already landed in a meadow. I spread my wings in preparation for landing, and when my feet touch the ground, I swallow my heart back into my chest.
Phoe smiles at me. “Good job. Now let’s walk for a bit. This way, even if one of the Guardians flies by, they won’t see us. When we get to the easternmost edge of the island, we’ll fly under it.”
“Fine,” I say. “What are these islands?”
“All I know about them so far is that each one belongs to one of the Forebears—the denizens of Haven, of which you are now one,” Phoe says and starts running for the trees on the other side of the meadow.
“Wait.” I chase after her. “Does that mean there’s an island somewhere that belongs to me?”
“Yes, there is, I’m sure of that. I can even find it for you if you really want, but I think it’s useless to us right now,” Phoe says from behind a giant oak. “Let’s get deeper into the forest, and I’ll show you Brandon’s memory.”
I follow her, thinking that despite what Phoe said, it might be really cool to own an island like this—an island the size of Oasis.
“It’s a waste of resources if you ask me,” Phoe says after I catch up with her again. “This whole place is an atrocity committed against the ship’s computing substrate.”
I inhale the fresh air. It smells exactly like a real forest. It looks like a real forest too, but I can’t shake the feeling that something is different. Then it hits me: I’m hearing birds chirping and insects buzzing—sounds I’d never heard in the woods of Oasis.
“There’s a ton of simulated life here, if that sort of thing impresses you,” Phoe confirms. “This island could give the Zoo a run for its money.”
I catch sight of something fluffy moving in the bushes. Must be a rabbit or a squirrel. I resist the urge to chase after it like a kid. I still want to get those answers from Phoe, and I can’t let this fake nature distract me.
Glancing up at the strange sky, I examine the dozen domed islands floating in the distance. Haven is beautiful in its contempt for gravity.
“All right then.” Phoe stops and looks at me. “Why don’t you let me walk for you as you experience this?”
“Sure,” I respond cautiously. “Experience what?”
Phoe gives me a crooked smile, and the world around me disappears.
I’m standing in an empty, metallic room, and a familiar winged creature is standing next to me. It’s the first winged guy I ever saw—the original loincloth-wearing, winged demigod Envoy who gave Jeremiah the Lens of Truth.
The metallic walls of the room are reflective, and I can see myself in one of them.
Only it’s not my own face looking back at me. It’s the Guardian who nearly killed me with his giant broadsword.
I should’ve been ready for this, but I still can’t believe it.
I’m Brandon.
12
“You’re not Brandon, per se,” Phoe’s thought intrudes. “You’re just reliving his memories.”
I knew that already, but having her reiterate it helps me come to grips with this strange situation.
Everything about me feels wrong. I’m taller, my feet are planted wider than usual, and I can feel the bulkiness of my muscles. Two streams of thoughts are flowing through my head at once: my thoughts and Brandon’s. His are faint and noticeably foreign, but quite accessible. It’s eerie.
“This is how I feel when I’m inside your head,” Phoe explains. “Pay attention to their conversation.”
It’s hard to pay attention because there are too many interesting things distracting me. I don’t just recall Brandon’s memories; I feel his emotions as well, though they’re limited to the present. He respects the Forebear he’s talking to. The man’s name is Wayne. I know this because Brandon knows this, and I make a mental note to remember the name because it’s a better moniker than ‘the first Envoy I ever saw.’ I also know that Wayne is part of the Circle, which is the ruling body in Haven. He, Brandon, is the Leader of the Guardians, which means he doesn’t have any guard duties in the Sanctum, the island where the Circle rule from. As a result, he rarely meets with the members of the Circle. The last time Brandon was summoned here, to the basement vaults of the Spike building on the Sanctum, was years ago.
Thinking about the past opens up a floodgate of interesting observations. With little effort, I can recall everything Brandon has done in his life. I remember his life as a Youth, his passion for ancient military strategies as an Adult, and his pride when he first served as a member of the Elderly Council. But I have access to more than just his biographical information. Through Brandon, I know what it feels like to
grow feeble with age and eventually die, and I relive his awe upon awakening for his second life in Haven.
“It all began when we received the results from the last Test,” Wayne says in his familiar organ-like voice. “Few people know this, but the way a new Council member is chosen is rather simple. He or she is always the Elderly with the highest score on the Test.”
Wayne keeps talking to Brandon, but I tune them out. I have my answer, and now that I do, I can’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner.
“You had no chance to think about it.” Phoe imbues the thought with regret. “I’m the super-intelligent being, so I should be the one kicking myself. I didn’t realize the Test scores had anything to do with the process of choosing who served on the Council. I think I wanted to shut down the Test so badly that I was in denial. My gluttony for resources blinded me to this possibility.”
As Phoe speaks, the full picture starts to form in my mind. She had me reach such a high score on the Test that the testing process nearly took forever, giving me a result no one else could beat and inadvertently making me eligible to become a Council member. Maybe we could’ve gotten away with it for a bit—if a position on the Council hadn’t opened up almost at the same time, thanks to Jeremiah drinking his own poison.
“That’s right,” Phoe says. “When Jeremiah died and went to Haven, you automatically became a member of the Council. If the Forebears hadn’t caught on to your high score so fast, I could’ve covered it all up, hidden it even from them, but they acted before I knew what happened. They were clever to move so fast with their virus.”
I rub my forehead, trying to wrap my mind around the magnitude of our failure.
“You have to look on the bright side,” Phoe says. “When you died in Oasis, thanks to the fact that you were a Councilor, you ended up here instead of spending an eternity in Limbo. So what failed us also helped us.”
“Yeah.” I imbue as much sarcasm into my thought as I can. “Works out great for you. You’ve been dying to get your hands on this place, but the Firewall was in your way. Now here you are. I wonder if—”