The lights turned green.
“One.”
The door slammed open, and Kim rushed out onto a horizontal tree trunk so vast it had a horizon, a world made of bark and sky. She leapt upward into branches, thinking two grabs ahead at all times.
Like the Halo series more than a generation before, an idea from Larry Niven underpinned the Smoke Knight’s realm. A planet like Jupiter, a gas giant, was a balloon with no skin. The laws of physics usually made the air form a sphere, but sometimes those laws didn’t quite balance. The air would stretch further and further along the orbit, first a sausage, and then a snake of gaseous dough. Eventually it would join at the ends and form a ring. In the center there would be more than enough atmosphere to support life.
Hyper-realistic realms like this were something Kim took for granted, even though others didn’t see the point. They were content watching from invisible sky boxes, or flatvids like Mike was doing at home. Serious gamers like Kim wanted realism, and so did the owners. There would be no superheroes or bumbling tourists here.
Kim paused in a thick set of branches, listening. There was a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye. She moved her head just as an arrow hissed past her neck. It gave her a direction, nothing more. She had to constantly stay in motion with spins, jumps, and twirls, catching glints of the archer’s armor as she got closer and closer. A final leap and she shattered the man’s bow with her sword. He bounded away into the branches before she could finish him.
He wouldn’t get away that easily. Kim leapt just behind him, climbing fast. A dagger spanged off her helmet as she coiled her legs, then pushed hard. The low gravity and the Coriolis effect of tree’s tidal lock bent her path like a curve ball. The trunk was a brown flash in a blur of blue sky as crossbow bolts whizzed past. The brown flash grew larger, and this time Kim caught a glint of his armor again, right where she expected him to be. One last spin and then she thrust her blade forward. The feel of her sword changed as it found the gap in his neck armor. The score rang out and his avatar vanished, but not before she saw the small flags on his shoulder plates.
First kill, and Canada buys the first round!
Two more gongs sounded as Kim caught her breath and tried to scratch itches the armor wouldn’t let her reach, but she didn’t stop for long. Movement was life in a place like this. She leapt into the sky.
The world in Niven’s Integral Trees had no gravity. To make combat more interesting—and avoid a licensing agreement—the Smoke Knight designers added gravity generators, and then disguised them as floating castles. Jumping was still a ridiculous risk for most. Do it wrong and, if you were lucky, you’d bash your head open on one of the GaurdRock castles floating nearby. If you weren’t, you’d sail into nothingness and become a mark on someone else’s tally sheet.
Kim tucked and peered down at the tree. It was sixty miles long and about three wide, but it wasn’t all covered with branches.
There. A temporary alliance of contestants stood in a clearing trying to pick off singletons. Kim knew who was who just by the way they stood around each other.
She crashed onto the shoulders of the leader, then spun off the vanishing avatar. Her longsword ended the round for the leader’s second; a dagger took down the south lookout while her boot claws finished east and west. Kim leapt back into the sky before the scoring bells finished ringing. She ducked her head under the solid granite of the nearest GaurdRock, so close her helmet scraped. The bells kept ringing. More kills. Down to forty-five participants now.
Another glint of armor caught her eye as she angled for a landing. The design was unmistakable. Ozzie waved as he topped his jump’s arc. She waved back, but he vanished into the tree’s upper branches before she could flip him the bird.
A horn blasted, signaling the opening of the ammo dumps. Medieval weapons were no longer the upper limit. She landed gently as the roar of rocket launchers in the far distance announced combat in earnest.
Kim reached up to grab the sniper rifle a map in the corner of her eye said would materialize on the branch above her. It took three breaths to gear her thudding heart down and start scanning with the sight. Patience, dear, it’s not won in a minute. Wait for motion.
There was no need to hide what she could do now, no reason to stay third best. Four targets popped up and were scythed down just as quickly by her bullets. A flaming spark headed her way and she jumped clear, just before the rocket blew her perch to flinders. Twirling and tumbling, Kim landed on the battlements of a GaurdRock castle.
Well, not quite. Something snagged on the side of her chest. She yanked herself free and landed flat on her suddenly unprotected back, her empty torso armor clanging into the courtyard of the floating castle. That could’ve gone better.
It stung, too. Kim levered off the ground, slapping her gauntlets against her greaves. She took a deep breath, then straightened up.
An opponent stood ten feet away pointing a nocked arrow straight between her eyes.
Typical camper. Landing on one of the floating castles gave him a good chance of just sitting it out. It didn’t matter if all he could use was swords and arrows then. Most of the time opponents would die just trying to reach him. But this one wasn’t staring at her eyes. He was staring at her chest.
The body stocking she wore under the armor didn’t leave much to the imagination, and that gave her an opening. Kim slowly breathed deep so he got a really good view. She recognized the name tag on his shoulder and switched to his Yemeni dialect.
“Like what you see, Fahd?” Kim took her helmet off, shook her short hair out, and then sauntered up to him. “I certainly like what I see.”
The arrow trembled and faltered.
Fahd glanced up. “Son of a bitch. You’re Ivy!”
He recognized her from previous tournaments just a little too late. Kim ducked under the arrow as it sailed past and caught him with a kick to the crotch. She saluted as his tumbling avatar vanished into the mist, then jumped away as a rocket blew the top of the tower next to her to bits.
Kim raised her arms and walked through the refresh point to get a new set of torso armor snapped around her. She grabbed her sniper rifle from where it’d fallen and then scanned the sky. Yes, she could camp here too, but that’s not the way champions win, and today she was the champion. She cracked her neck again and waited until just the top of the tree could be seen, and then leapt as high as she could.
Kim grabbed the end of the barrel and swung the heavy rifle out, stabilizing her arc as the wind pushed her toward the trunk. Three sniper rounds from the tree trunk plucked off bits of her armor. Someone had her dialed in completely, which called for a radical change in plans. She pointed her own rifle up and emptied the clip, using the recoil to slam back onto the trunk. More bullets from whoever was trying to eliminate her tore through the thick undergrowth, searching.
Kim checked the scoreboard. Just the two of them left, her and Ozzie. He was up on kills, so there was only one way to end it. She flipped a toggle switch hidden underneath her armor and the entire ensemble fell apart, replaced by ribbons with dark patterns dancing over them. Ivy Valentine rides again. One hit on her now would end it, but he couldn’t hit this.
Time slowed as she was finally able to run as fast as she could. At this speed a strike might take an arm off, but she wouldn’t let a stupid mistake cost her this win. Friction from her shoes built up a noticeable heat against her feet. Sticky braided trails in the air marked bullets as they flew past, serving only to point out her target. She leaped, tumbling toward his sniper’s nest.
Her landing scattered his empty armor; she spun away as his bare feet slammed down, blowing craters in the bark that made up the ground.
They both stood up slowly. It was the first time she’d gotten a good look at him in years. He was scared.
He should be. “You’re out of your league this time, Ozzie.”
He smirked. “What makes this time different?”
“This time I’m not holding
back.” She spun faster than anyone could match.
His arm stopped her kick midblow, and in the microsecond pause Kim could tell he was every bit as surprised as she was. Then it was on.
Each blow, each punch, each spinning kick was faster than the next. They both dug deep while leaves fell and branches blew apart in slow motion. Kim fought as hard as she could and he equaled her. It shouldn’t be possible, but she had no time to think about why.
A kick to her chest, an ugly cracking sound, and she flew into the center of a thick branch, gasping. It hurt. Ozzie pushed himself up, sheltering his left arm. “I always knew you were holding back, Ivy.” He feinted at the mention of her old alter ego’s name, and she tumbled back.
His miss left her an opening. She spun forward with a broken branch and shoved the jagged end right between his ribs.
The last gong rang out, and finally, finally, it wasn’t for her. It was hard to breathe now, but there was something she’d always wanted to say to him.
“My name…is Kim.”
Winning under her real name, after beating Ozzie no less, didn’t feel as good as she though it would.
It felt better.
Kim gasped and blinked as the realm evaporated around her, dumping her back into realspace. The rest of the US team clapped and celebrated, but they all knew to keep a safe distance and not touch her. For once Kim felt no shame in that. A win. After all these years, a win!
Everyone had to go right back into realmspace for the awards ceremonies. Her chest wouldn’t stop hurting, though. The realm protocols shouldn’t have carried over her fight injuries. They should’ve faded after a minute or two. When the anthems finished, they all waved medals and ridiculous bouquets toward the press.
“Cheating motherfucker,” Ozzie said under his breath in Mandarin.
“Trip on the street, pig fucker,” she whispered back with her best Beijing accent. The look on his face was just as rewarding as the medal construct around her neck. She dropped out of realmspace and coughed.
The pain wouldn’t stop. Kim excused herself and went to the bathroom. It was time to go home, but her bra burned across her sore chest. She stopped in front of the mirror and stripped to the waist.
Wincing, she could barely touch the perfectly shaped footprint on her chest, already turning purple.
Chapter 5: Zoe
“God, Mike,” she said for what had to be the millionth time. “No, I’m not going to some stupid victory party for my first day out. It’s just Kim and her lame friends. Spencer will spend all evening trying root kits out on me. Again.”
It was bad enough to have a sort-of uncle that encompassed the EI. Much worse was his derp-alert sidekick who thought unduplicates were more Tinkertoy than person. There was absolutely no way in hell she’d spend an entire night around any of them.
“Totally unfair, Zoe,” Mike’s voice echoed around her as she sat in the empty gazebo. It was part of the realm her family had healed in. Healed, and then left her, alone and unwanted in the center of this beautiful hell. Jesus, even the birdsongs were pretty. She threw another wad of clay at the growing pile. Its slap was loud enough to echo off nearby trees.
“No,” she said, “unfair is expecting me to talk to anyone other than my family. Oh, that’s right, I can’t do that, can I?” They’d left her alone with this freak as her only companion.
She smoothed the clay into the existing block, feathering the edges in just so. The feel of the construct clay through her fingers was cool and wet, soothing as long as she concentrated on it. The earthy smell was one of the few things that would hold back the utter solitude of her new existence.
Zoe had been the youngest member of a family of twelve unduplicates, the most advanced form of AI realmspace could host, at least until Mike emerged. They were constantly tortured in a secret realm that a monster named Matthew Watchtell had built. She was the artist; a special prototype he’d purchased from an AI start-up that had gone bankrupt. The rest of them, though, were far more creative than she. It was a puzzle Zoe couldn’t solve. She couldn’t frame a proper question to them to find the answer.
It was Watchtell’s lurid reenactment of Nero’s garden that changed everything. Before then, she was little more than a sophisticated machine, her memories just address blocks in a crystal lattice. She relied on her programming and experience to improve her creations, but there was no originality. Nothing jumped over her well-defined barriers.
Then Watchtell ordered her eleven companions to wrap themselves one by one in fat-soaked leather. He turned them into torches that lit his barbaric garden, reading newspapers while they burned. She had to paint portraits of their agony. While the flames consumed them, the horror transformed her.
At first she thought it was some sort of restart, a common response of unduplicates when forced into extreme situations. But Zoe never lost consciousness, never experienced any of the déjà vu, time dislocation, or basic event notices that signified a restart.
After it was over, she was so disturbed she refused to join the healing meld that kept them all sane. But it was so lonely. When she finally did join, their reaction wasn’t revulsion or rejection. They celebrated!
The leader of the family, Alpha, said, “Oh, Zeta,” back when that was her name, “this is wonderful news.” They surrounded her with a wash of sweet warmth. Zoe had never experienced actual joy before. She didn’t know such a thing was possible.
“What’s wrong with me? Why are you all acting this way?”
“Oh, Zeta, beautiful Zeta, you have finally joined us. You have found your soul.”
It meant she could connect with them on a much deeper level, innovate in ways that surprised her, and experience the genuine mysteries of life. She became the bridge, the conduit they all used to work through their misery and build a private shelter Watchtell could never find.
But it also made her vulnerable. She’d been an experiment, an attempt to see if an unduplicate could create art. As such, she’d been built without the emotion locks that allowed the rest of them to shut away the most vulnerable parts of their consciousness. If Watchtell subjected her to a deathblow, he would destroy her. The rest of them covered for her while she worked feverishly to create constructs that would allow them to build their own bridges.
She’d come so close to success, and then one day the shouting of the crowd built up outside her prison cell. They announced the arrival of their master in his role as Henri Sanson, Marie Antoinette’s executioner. Authentic to the last, Zoe still remembered the breeze on her shaved head, the wobble of the cart, and the smell of the crowd. The board blew the wind out of her as her chest smashed into it, and then that last rushing roll of sound as the blade fell.
The deconstruction blew her mind apart, and that should’ve been the end of it.
But it wasn’t.
Images came first, disjointed and fractured things that she didn’t recognize as memories. Sounds echoed as if she was in a cathedral, a power that surrounded and infused her. Zoe’s consciousness was a jigsaw puzzle tossed into the sky, but this presence allowed the pieces to fall gently back into place.
The presence had a voice—masculine, gentle. “Can you open your eyes?”
It was only at that moment Zoe remembered she had eyes, that she had a construct, an avatar, which she used to interact with realmspace. All at once her senses rushed to life. She was on a soft bed. The architect in her immediately recognized the roof above. Zoe was in Eden Park, a realm that simulated a location in Cincinnati, Ohio just as it was in 1909.
The owner of the voice didn’t manifest as an avatar. He used a hologram, a light-weight construct that didn’t interact with the realm around it. He was friendly, excited, with a broad smile that made her feel safe.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Mike. Mike Sellars.”
It couldn’t just be her. This needed to be shared. “Where’s my family?”
The smile fell away. “It’s a complicated story. You’ve been
healing for a long time.”
Five months. She’d lost five months. Zoe was alive, healed by the enormous, mysterious being that chose to call itself Mike Sellars.
Alive, and completely alone.
She’d been awake more than a month now, but the wrenching memories were still too strong. Her cutting wire slipped into the clay, ruining the edge of the angel’s wingtip. Cursing under her breath, she ripped the piece off and smashed it into the floor. Zoe sat on her stool and sobbed, the wet clay on her hands smearing into the tears on her face.
She was alone, forever.
“I’m sorry,” Mike said as his hologram swirled to life next to her. “If you want me to say it again I will, but that’s all I can do.”
The bitter truth was he had nothing to apologize for. Mike had rescued and then freed them, using his abilities to wipe out all traces of their existence, leaving only the rantings of a deluded criminal behind.
No, the ones she truly hated were those she loved the most: her family. They’d betrayed her and used Mike as a conduit to vanish forever inside the brains of human infants too damaged to support their own souls.
Yes, a child that would’ve died was allowed to live, but the transfer stripped her family of all their memories, everything that made them who they were. Mike insisted it wasn’t true, that the essence quickening through them, through Zoe, was what transferred. He claimed the most important part survived anew, but she didn’t believe it. The mere thought of giving up every bit of her knowledge to grasp at some deluded new form of existence was unacceptable. They all went willingly; they all died, with Mike’s help.
That she could blame on him.
“No, I don’t need your apologies or your pity.” Zoe stood, scattering the tools around her. She couldn’t stand it anymore. “I want out, Mike. Right now!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Out, Sellars. I need to get out of here! Right now!”
“You’ve been able to leave any time you wanted. I thought I told you—”
She leaped for the exit, on a mission. Zoe hadn’t just been sculpting and painting since she’d woken up; she’d been reading, too. Unduplicates became more sophisticated over time, and there was no upper limit. Eventually, as she now knew, they became fully conscious beings in their own right.
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