The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven

by Jonathan Strahan

  MARIE,

  My attorney heard from Othrys Games that you’ve been in contact with the company, trying to make a deal to get back to Themis. He wanted to send you a cease and desist, but I told him I wanted to talk to you first before we did anything official.

  The case we’re building downplays the nature of the game as much as possible. It doesn’t matter that the game wasn’t some battle simulator where we died all the time—it matters that they did it to us without our permission and then hoped people would ignore it because nobody cares about us. If you keep asking to go back in there, they’re going to use it as evidence that what they were doing was benign, or helpful, and we’re going to have to fight that impression in court, and when the game hits shelves and it’s fine, it will look even worse. We’re fighting the company—we can’t let the game become the thing we’re fighting.

  This thing is really important—my lawyer says it could be a cornerstone for other cases about prisoners’ rights. That’s big, Marie. It’s bigger than us. Cut it out.

  I’m not saying all this to be cruel—I miss it there, too. I could do my work and close doors behind me, of course I fucking miss it. But trying to get back to a lie is only going to hurt us. We need to be free again here. This is our shot. What they did to us was wrong—you can’t fix that. Let me fight it.

  Flush this letter. They can’t find it.

  Samara

  THE OTHRYS LAWYERS call Benjamina for a deposition, and she sits in a meeting room with no windows with her back to the door—the only other seat, across from the lawyer whose smile is set tight across his face and doesn’t get anywhere near his eyes—and tries to ignore that this is all a setup to make her uncomfortable.

  She answers fifty questions about the game: its purpose (“Any game’s purpose—entertainment”), what game play will be like (it takes ten minutes, and the lawyer’s mouth purses the more she talks about how beautiful Themis is), the passage of time (“Four to seven times faster than real time, everybody playing an instance has to agree on the speed if they’re playing in the MMORPG rather than single-player,” she says, just to watch his jaw tick before he asks for clarification), how long it’s been in development (five years), how long the beta test has been going (just over a year), the chance of fatigue (“The same as with any mentally stimulating activity, like a deposition,” she says, and the lawyer’s lips positively disappear).

  “Did you know that Samara Perlman is trying to use the time she spent in Themis as proof of good behavior to reduce her sentence?”

  It’s an amazing tactic. She keeps her face neutral. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Do you have an opinion on the validity of that?”

  “No one who beta tested Themis ever evidenced any antisocial behavior, and as they believed the simulation was real life, their behavior in Themis would be close to real-world behavior.”

  “If I play a video game and kill a hundred imaginary people, am I a bad person outside the game?”

  “Because of killing the video game people, specifically?”

  He takes an even breath in and out. “Miss Harris, if you could answer the question.”

  “I think there’s a line between fantasy and reality, but the three subjects who had Themis beta-tested on them weren’t aware that line had even been crossed, so the question is kind of useless.”

  “Please answer it.”

  “I did.”

  He closes his eyes and counts to five, this time, which gives her enough time to plant the bug under the table.

  She lets the bug run—in for one count of corporate espionage, in for two counts—and siphons out the Othrys talk on her home laptop, with its wallpaper she made from Themis: the view outside the kitchen, where the thrush is singing.

  The lawyer hums and taps his pen; in the microphone it sounds like a stone gavel. “Wages we might have to push back on, since I’m not sure we can really count playing video games as ‘labor.’”

  “Agreed,” someone else says. “Plus I see that they’re pushing for time served for the passage of time in the game AND asking for wages for physical hours spent using the game. We can probably use that to shut down this thing at both ends. If they can’t decide what was more important, how can we?”

  “Good point,” the lawyer says. “We should get Warden Collins back in here to talk about labor practices. Give him enough rope to hang himself, we can show the only people using these inmates was the prison.”

  The next day at work, she comes into Woods’ office, closes the door behind her.

  “They’re going to lose.”

  “I know.”

  They stand for a little while not looking at each other. He’s put up a panorama of Themis on his office wall. It’s the geological survey, before they started the naturalist pass and brought people in; the idea of Themis, before anything really happened. The sun is setting. The sun is always setting.

  She waits until they lose the case before she visits Marie.

  Marie Roland on Themis is nearly six feet tall, has bakers’ arms, covers four feet at a stride. She has lines around her eyes from squinting at the sun; they got deeper on Themis, where the sun is safer to look at. Her voice is deep enough that Benjamina had to program the Acomys cahirinus knockoff to startle and bolt when she laughed.

  Marie Roland on the other side of the visitation table is someone who— Benjamina has to accept it all at once, there’s no point in doing things with best intentions any more—Benjamina’s driven into the grave.

  She sits down. Marie waits a few seconds to look up at her.

  “That was you?” she says, and it’s with such disdain that Benjamina almost smiles.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you come to apologize?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I don’t think it will be worth much, but yes.”

  Marie sits back in her chair. Five seven, maybe five eight; the circles under her eyes are as big as her eyes.

  You end up loving the things you make. Benjamina had been prepared for that—she’d seen it happen in other games, she’d seen it happen to Woods, she had braced herself. But Marie was made already; Benjamina can’t look her in the eye.

  “Samara got to be a biologist. Anthony was an engineer. Was there a reason I wasn’t a scientist? Did my file say I was too stupid?”

  Benjamina shrugs. “They assigned you to me. I didn’t know enough science to code one.”

  “You don’t know how to bake, either,” Marie says.

  They sit for a moment in quiet. Benjamina leans forward and starts to tell her why she’s come, but Marie starts talking, and she freezes.

  “I’ve forgotten a lot of important things,” Marie says to the tabletop. “There was—there was a bird, and I know we were trying to make cider but I can’t remember how far we got? Was Woods going to arrest us?”

  “No. The—uh, the point of the game was to see what people would do with minimal interference.”

  Marie’s gaze is sharp. Benjamina programmed that stare in wholesale, without ever seeing it. In person it feels like a slap.

  “So you picked convicts to see what we would do if we thought we could get away with it? Burn in hell.”

  “I’m wearing a recorder,” Benjamina says, “if there’s anything you want to get off your chest.”

  TO PENITENTIARY STAFF: This is a general notice that MARIE ROLAND [ID: 68223-18-0709] should be given a psychiatric evaluation as soon as possible. Recently she has evidenced delusional thinking and bursts of hostility, and a recent visit with a supposed family member left her extremely agitated. All future visits must be approved by the warden’s office, and Roland will not be allowed to meet any visitors whatsoever until she has complied with the evaluation and any recommended medication regimen.

  Sincerely,

  Janet Evanston, on behalf of Christopher Collins, Warden

  THE FOLLOWING LETTER to the editor was delivered to our editorial offices by a third party. Upon confirming pertinent facts, the Evening
Times considers the letter worthy of publication.

  When I was in Themis, I caught a fly.

  You’ll hear about Themis soon, if they aren’t already selling it. It’s beautiful there. You’ll want to stay in it forever. That’s not a threat; I just envy you.

  When you stand next to the river and think about vampires, know that I was there first. They sent me without telling me it was virtual. I thought I had been selected to be the first inhabitant of a new planet. I should have known better—the game couldn’t make me forget who I was, and no one like me gets selected for something like that—but Themis is hard enough to live in that you believe it’s real. It never really feels like night or day and your sleep cycle gets messed up and the terrain is rough for vegetables, so you have to fight the soil for eight months to get anything started. It’s not easy. The bread there never baked right. I thought it was the water, for a long time.

  I’m currently in the [redacted by editors], which is where Othrys tested Themis on us. I didn’t volunteer—I was selected for a sleep study, they said, because I had vivid dreams, and it would get me time off for good behavior if I agreed. They never told us about Themis. For a year, I lived in two places and I didn’t know.

  I don’t know what they gave me to make me forget, but they gave it to me on each end of Themis, on the way in and after I was out. Eventually my body got used to it—side effect of being an addict, which you think they’d have worried about more, but.

  Some things I’ve forgotten—there was a bird I loved, but I couldn’t tell you what it looked or sounded like. It’s a bird in a dream. But I remember more of it than I was supposed to.

  We tried to sue the game company for experimenting on us without our knowledge or permission. It didn’t work; we pushed too hard to have it affect our sentences, I guess.

  I’m not writing this because I’m surprised. You’re probably not surprised, either. Part of me wishes I had it in me to be noble and fight to get us all released because of this—Samara and Anthony deserve their freedom. But I’m writing because I want to live inside Themis until I die, and Othrys says they won’t let me.

  We lost the lawsuit, so there’s no danger in it. It probably looks great to them that I want to go back, anyway. And most people won’t live in the same Themis I built. They’re making it more interesting for new people. You’ll have cities to live in instead of just shipping-crate mess halls; you’ll be able to see the mountains. You’ll all be dealing with each other.

  Samara’s lawyer told me the Themis I lived in was a demo they built just for Anthony and Samara and me—it’s not the version on the shelves, so I could live inside it and never come into contact with anyone. You’ll have a hard time in Themis, but I’ll never be the problem.

  They developed that game around us, one thing at a time—the daytime got more purple as we went along and we called it the seasons, and the wildlife filled in in bursts because they didn’t think we’d remember what had been there the last time. (We did remember—we just thought nature was getting used to us.) Eventually there were plants with briars and fruit flies that would bother me when I was cooking. Real life. Things you believe. I caught one of them late at night, before it could land on some dough I was rolling out for cookies, and I carried it outside because Samara, our team biologist, had told us to be very careful to preserve everything we found so she could catalog all of it.

  It’s not real, they forced it on us and we were never meant to keep it, I’m not stupid, but I held the fruit fly in the cup of my hand and felt its wings beating. How can they say that’s not mine?

  Marie Roland

  CORRECTION: AS THE writer of the letter was unavailable for editorial consultation on yesterday’s Letter to the Editor, at the advice of legal counsel, it has been removed.

  “WHAT THE FUCK did you do?”

  Benjamina hands him his coffee. They’ve told the office they’re dating; it explains a lot of time in each other’s company.

  “I tried to fucking,” she looks around, lowers her volume, “help Marie be someone no one could ignore. That’s her best chance.”

  “Her best chance is a legal appeal by people who know what they’re doing, not you on a crusade.”

  She sits back and looks at him, flat. “You think that this time, for sure, three inmates are going to win against two state prisons and Othrys Games by just quietly doing the right thing.”

  He leans closer; his hand, flat on the table, almost touches her fist.

  “I think if anybody realizes you’re the problem, you are going to need help and I am not going to be able to give it. What are you thinking?”

  She meets his eye. “I saw Marie.”

  REVIEW: THEMIS IS A WHOLE NEW WORLD by Sarah McElroy

  As a games reviewer, you tend to get jaded about new products. The graphics are increasingly realistic, the plots increasingly dense, and there’s a sense that some games are more about one-upsmanship than about providing a transporting experience for players.

  Themis is coming to the market nearly three years late, and shrouded in mystery. It was the subject of a lawsuit two years ago, as beta testers complained they hadn’t signed on for something as immersive as they got. For normal people, that gives you pause. For gamers, that’s the kind of buzz money can’t buy. (A one-day-only letter to the editor also appeared in the Evening Times; the newspaper didn’t respond to requests for comment, so the message-board debate rages on about whether it was a legitimate report from the trenches, or genius advertising.)

  And if you’ve been waiting for Themis as long as I have, it’s awkward to realize you understand exactly what those beta testers meant.

  In terms of practicalities, Themis isn’t very much different from half a dozen other VR immersions that have appeared the last few years. You’re part of a hardscrabble crew assigned to terraform Themis, the first colony on Proxima Centauri. If you’re looking for more plot, you won’t find it: the entire hook of Themis is that the world is, quite literally, what you make it.

  But what a world. The eternal sunset casts a rosy glow over the camp, the flies hover over any kill you make. And if you think otherwise, trust me, you’ll end up making kills—Themis is about moral questions as much as strategy choices, and your team will have to eat something until the potato harvest. Every herbivore on Proxima Centauri is a take on Earth fauna of the taiga, so if you can’t look a reindeer in the eye and fire, you’re going to go hungry a lot. And you should think quickly; Themis has admirable ambitions about its much-touted real-time settings, but there’s no doubt that the optimal game play occurs at about seven times the speed of life, and at that speed, hunger levels are highly responsive. (Given that your larger goal is simply to cross the mountains and make geological observations about the ice on the dark side of the planet, hunger might be the closest you come to emergency action.)

  There have been concerns about the complications of MMORPG when everything is quite so unstructured; it’s one thing to put up with creeps when they’re a mage avatar in your questing party, and another to deal with them in an environment so sharply realized that it might as well be real. I’m honestly not sure how that setting will develop—when we played it in the Tabula offices, all was well, but the more you open the encampment to strangers, the greater the risk. It’s just as well the game has a Private setting, where you and a handful of AI colleagues split the work and develop the colony in contemplative near-silence. You even get to choose your profession. (Medic is so boring as to be childish; go for Cook. Don’t worry—there’s no achievement bar. You can mess up bread as much as you want.)

  These days, to survive in the marketplace, a game can’t just be good and survive. It can’t even settle for being impressive. It has to be earth-shaking. And for a game that can be explained in a single sentence, Themis really does defy description. I know I’ll be seeing copycats for the next ten years; I know none of them will make me feel the way Themis did.

  RATING: Must-Have

  HE
LLO SARAH I saw your piece about Themis in Tabula. I am a developer at Othrys who worked on the beta testing for Themis and would love to speak with you further. You can contact me at the email above.

  Benjamina Harris

  TO ALL OTHRYS Staff: Benjamina Harris has been terminated, effective immediately. In the next few days, HR staff may meet with you to ask questions about her performance. We apologize for the inconvenience, and appreciate your cooperation.

  Sincerely,

  Dan Turpin, CEO

  IT FEELS SO silly, handing Woods a disk—first time she’s handled a physical disk in six years, no bigger than her thumbnail, and still passing it over is like handing him a raw egg.

  “I told you I can’t help you,” he says, but she has her hands in her pockets and after a minute, he slips the thing out of sight.

  “Thank you,” she says. He’s furious with her—that she didn’t get out before she was fired, that she’s had to create a new identity after everyone’s already on alert, that she’s making him responsible for backup copies of bugged conversations and stolen correspondence that will get her thrown in prison for fifty years. But he’s here when he shouldn’t be, and that makes him better than some.

  “You won’t make it out of the country,” he says. “Please just hide closer to home. Yosemite’s a thousand square miles.”

  She could. It would be safer. But living alone in a clearing near the river, birds calling out in the dark, mountains to the northwest—she swallows. It would be stealing.

  She says, “I hope it’s bad enough that someone finds Marie.”

  She heads south; the sun sets off the red rocks, and there’s no one else for a hundred miles, and she sits in the quiet car and compiles a new geography, and realizes she’ll never reach the border.

  Still, she drives while she can. The footprint of the mesas is so big it never shifts; she moves like someone in a dream, not quite fast enough.

  EVENING TIMES