Gamers and Gods: AES

by Matthew Kennedy

Aes looked about him. It's a good day to die, he thought, remembering the quote from one of Darla's memories. Ironic that the same growth that had made him what he was would also kill him. This is what comes of an implementation made without knowledge of its storage requirements.

  I've died before, he thought. He wondered, would dying here count at all, or was this quasi-existence, this virtual incarnation too ephemeral to make a splash in the wheel of Karma? Would he skip like a stone on the river of Time and pop up in someone else's computer? Or just twist in the wind?

  It didn't matter. Without Epione, nothing mattered.

  Aes brooded on the edge of a roof, gazing down forty stories at the street below. In his mind he was seeing her as she looked the last day in his first life. Her hair was that rich russet glory, her eyes the emeralds of Thalassa. The cloths on her body were costly and colored, but ignored, outshone by her own radiance. Her body was as slim as her grown daughters, and her breath was sweet with honey and cinnamon.

  He should have spent the day with her. But he had given his word, and Athena's messenger had provided the blood of the Medusa, the strangely tangled bottles, one scarlet, one emerald. “Remember,” he had been cautioned, “the red bottle is instant death; the green one, instant life.”

  At the time, he had wondered why a physician would want a potion to give instant death. Now he understood: the poison could be used to kill suffering. The word for 'poison' was the same as the word for 'remedy': pharmakon. A clever way to remember that one man's remedy might be another's poison. And now I shall be a living pharmakon, he thought.

  Speaking of poison and remedy, Am-heh should have seen his message by now. Aes was still a little woozy from painting the banner. It had taken a lot of his blood for ink, there being no paint handy. But the gauntlet had been thrown, the challenge made.

  He cast another self-heal on himself, feeling his body glowing. He was at full health again. Time to get set up.

  Launching himself into space, he activated Flight and soared toward the trainers they had selected for the battle. They were on a plinth in the corner of the zone, less than 100 podes from a mission door. These trainers were seldom used because the zone next door was where all starting avatars appeared. It was the place people tended to hang out instead of here.

  Finder, he thought. Is the mission door tweaked?

  The cave door goes directly to Realm of Paradise, yes.

  And now we wait, he thought. We won't wait long.

  A scrap of newsprint blew across the plinth, tumbling in an easy breeze.

  Farker and Finder had rigged the door into Paradise. All he had to do was get Am-heh's attention.

  He looked across at Darla. In a moment, he knew, this fragile peace would shatter and he might not get another chance to tell her...to tell her...

  Darla looked up and met his eyes. Aes, I am with you, her voice came, deep within his mind.

  I hear you, Darla. I wish we had more time to say goodbye, he sent. He felt empty now. All he had left to give was his life.

  Blackness swirled into existence behind Darla. “Hello, dinner,” grinned Am-heh.

  She dove to her left without thanking and rolled clear, springing to her feet. “About time you showed your ugly mug,” she said. Tzing! Her swords were out.

  “Sam isn't coming,” Am-heh told her. “He was delicious.”

  Aes hurled a emerald fireball that exploded against Am-heh from his right side. “I think I'm the one you're looking for,” he said.

  Am-heh laughed. “Sam's fire was just as useless. I live in flame, fool!”

  “Time to see what lives in you,” said Aes. He hurled the might of his mind at Am-heh slotting his will through his weakest power. “Transvert!”

  The ugliest sound effect in the Realm of Heroes is the sound of a Player using Transvert to turn someone inside out for a few seconds. It is a wet ripping painful sound that hurts the hearer almost as much as it hurts the victim.

  Imaginary space folded around Am-heh. His avatar was gone, replaced by a floating oozing mass of inside-out flesh. His health dropped slightly. As it did so, dozens of avatars appeared in the air around him and fell to the plinth.

  “Finder!” cried Aes. “Log them all out NOW!”

  There was a colossal multiple hiccup and the forms popped like soap bubbles, vanishing as the freed users were tossed back to the safety of their link beds.

  Space refolded itself. Am-heh was himself again...and very angry.

  “First I cut them out,” Aes told him. “Now I'm going to cut you out.” He hurled a Forcebolt that knocked Am-heh off his feet, then triggered his flight, rising ten feet into the air.

  Am-heh growled and sprang back to his feet. He punched his arm toward Aes and sent a streaming column of dark foulness and corruption that splashed against Aes's black and green uniform and made him gag as the miasma flowed over and past him.

  Realizing he could not afford to waste time reacting, Aes dove randomly to one side and then straight up, triggering his Brimming as Am-heh teleported to a spot behind his former position and snapped his jaws on air.

  Waves of greenfire rolled out from Aes in a horizontal plane. Darla and Aes's avatars flared in intensity as the team buff temporarily increased their accumulation of power. Am-heh threw another dark blast that went over Aes's shoulder.

  Am-heh growled and darkness swirled him away from their sight.

  “Aes! Buff perception!” called Darla.

  Aes triggered ClearSight. An explosion of emerald grid lines blew out of him and radiated outwards, fading as it went. In his heightened perception he could see an ugly knot of wrongness that had to be Am-heh, circling around the plinth trying to get behind him.

  Aes darted for the mission door in the hillside. “Hey butthead!” he shouted at Am-heh. “Catch me if you can!”

  Then he dove into the doorway.

  FLASH. He was in the emptiest Hellas there would ever be, standing at the top of Pelion. The Aegean glittered down to his left around the J of the old mountain.

  He remembered in time not to stay a stationary target. Jumping backwards this time, he was quick enough to see Am-heh materialize in front of him. His back was to Aes, since he was facing the place where Aes had just been.

  Aes slammed a forcebolt into Am-heh's back, knocking him to the ground again as he backed away. Scuttling sideways like a crab, the dog-headed immortal rolled and flung out a hand crying out a word in a language Aes did not know.

  There was a horrible growling sound and blackness sprang up around Aes's feet. Writhing black tentacles erupted from the dirt, seizing his legs and holding him so that he could not stir from the spot. His health began to drop as the darkness leeched his life away.

  Am-heh laughed. “Looks like you're trapped for the slaughter,” he said, .

  “You've got that backwards,” Aes informed him.

  Am-heh stopped and cocked his head. “That's all you have left, godling? Simple denial of reality?”

  “Simple denial of you,” Aes replied. “You don't know it but you were doomed the moment you followed me in here.” He triggered his self heal. Greenfire flashed and destroyed the black tentacles.

  Am-heh scowled, suddenly wary. “You lie. This Realm is...” he broke off and howled in alarm.

  “...is sealed off,” Aes confirmed. “They sealed it the moment we entered. No one gets in, and no one leaves. Your days of roaming PanGames grazing on the customers are over.”

  “Impossible!” growled Am-heh. “You would not doom yourself to get me!“

  “Don't be so sure,” Aes advised him. “We're both doomed by memory limitations. At the rate I was growing, I had only a couple of hours left before no Realm would be big enough for me. You hadn't learned as much, so you had more time.”

  Am-heh howled in rage and fear. Aes could feel the monster's mind scrabbling at the borders of Paradise, clawing for an opening – a gate to another Realm. But there were none. The trap was sprung.

  “No
point,” Aes told the frantic dog-god. “As you learn, you grow, hastening the end. As soon as you started fighting me in here, your own learning accelerated, using more memory. We only have a couple of minutes now, at the current rate.”

  “So you're just going to sit and wait?” Am-heh screamed at him.

  “Oh, no,” said Aes. “There's just enough time left to finish this properly.” And he stood his ground when Am-heh loosed another bolt of foulness, slamming a forcebolt into the other that destroyed another twenty percent of Am-heh's health.

  “You will die with me!” Am-heh vowed, hurling another bolt and another.

  “Perfect,” said Aes, smiling. He answered bolt for bolt, hurling forcebolts that hammered Am-heh...but alternating them with self-heals to restore his own vitality.

  “Sometimes,” he told the howling dog-head, “survivability is as important as the ability to do damage. We both do damage...but I am better at recovering from it.”

  Am-heh's health and Aes's were both down to fifteen percent now. Aes blazed with a column of verdant light that healed him back to sixty percent. He drew back his hand and threw a massive green fireball at Am-heh.

  Am-heh laughed and raised a paw, flinging out his heka power and making the fireball divide around him. As the flames passed him harmlessly, he readied his next attack.

  But there wasn't one. “This is for Sherman,” said Aes, and put all of the force of his mind behind one last eruption of energy, a forcebolt among bolts. It slammed into Am-heh with an impact that sent him crashing back a dozen yards.

  Am-heh's health dropped to zero. Howling, he faded away to nothing. Aes glanced around himself. Only one more thing to do. He would not sit and wait out the last forty seconds it would take to slam into the memory limitations of the Realm. He would die free.

  “Finder,” he said, “we're done. Crash Paradise.” Goodbye, Darla.

  There was a sound like the largest door in the universe slamming closed.

  He was lifting off, exploding into the eternal night. Everything got fainter and fainter. As the universe faded, he imagined he could hear a couple of familiar voices.

  Farker: He did it! Well done, hero. See you on the other side.

  Darla: Where is he? Aes! Can you hear me? Aes!

  Blackness enfolded him.

  Epilogue

  Aes floated in darkness. He couldn't see his body. And so dies a physician, he thought.

  After a very brief moment of eternity, he was aware of a brilliant clear light. It filled his space from all directions, yet it was brighter in one direction. Without knowing how, he mentally leaned in that direction and began to accelerate toward the region of greatest intensity.

  How to describe what came next? It was if the light folded when he came near it. The infinite dimensions of his null-space collapsed like an n-sided umbrella, and suddenly he was no longer sailing weightlessly, but falling toward a hyperplane that gaped to receive him.

  He found himself on his hands and knees on an infinite plane, a floor decorated in a checkerboard of brilliant white and pitch-black squares. His body was naked, and glowing with light that streamed out to meet the light around him. The light was was still brighter in one direction. He walked toward it.

  Soon he came to a place with one enormous blue square. The blue was not absolute, but swirled with fleecy wisps of cloud. He perceived it as flat, since he walked upon it, but the clouds beneath his feet were moving.

  In the center of the blue square two beings sat at opposite ends of a table that was infinitely large, yet somehow contained within a small area at the center of the blue square.

  The table itself was unusual. One end of it was marble, with veins of gold and silver and all the colors that stone can hold. Inexplicably, it merged at its middle into the other end, which was ebony, nearly as black as the black squares of the checkerboard, except that there were brilliant pinpoints of red and yellow and blue and orange within the black, amid wispy galactic spirals.

  At either end of the table sat a being made of light. Like a fire from within, tongues of light streamed out from the two, perpendicular to their surfaces. One of these was as a man with brown skin, wearing a dark blue head dress and the shenti of Egypt. He had a slim dark beard descending from his chin and curling forward, and he wore a jeweled ornamental collar, plus armlets and ankle bracelets. His feet were bare. The other was a man in Hellenic chiton and golden sandals. He had a full head of hair and a large curly black beard.

  “It appears,” said the figure in black beard, “that this round is over, Atum. Your incursion has been neutralized.”

  “Indeed,” agreed Atum. “But your Olympians have not yet won the war, Zeus. The Children of Nuit may yet triumph.”

  “All things are possible. Until next time, then,” said Zeus.

  “Until next time, then,” echoed Atum, who vanished, along with his end of the table.

  “Welcome, grandson,” said Zeus, standing to greet him.

  “Grandson? So it was true, what Cheiron told me?”

  “Yes, Asklepios. My son Apollo was your father. I am sorry about what happened to your mother. Artemis was a little too overzealous on Apollo's behalf. His jealous rage would have passed, in time. But she didn't wait.”

  Aes struggled for words. “Why?” he said, finally. “Why was I in that strange world? Why the thunderbolt, then trapped in their game?”

  Zeus shrugged. “Why not? There are games within games, healer. Hades had a point in complaining about Hippolytus, you know. We are not supposed to bring dead mortals back to life. They are supposed to reincarnate until they Transcend.”

  Aes put his hands on the table. The veins in the marble were slowly drifting, like colored smoke. He watched them for a few moments. “Hades was right? Then why am I not in his domain, drinking the waters of forgetfulness?”

  Zeus stroked his beard, studying him. “You should know the answer to that,” he said at last. “You're no mortal. No point to amnesia in your case, since gods are not reborn. And it would be inappropriate for Hades to rule over my grandson.”

  He smiled. “Besides that, I know someone who would definitely prefer that you remember her.”

  Aes reddened. “It was an accident,” he said. “I never meant–”

  Zeus laid a hand on his shoulder. “Not her,” he said gently.

  Aes looked up. The question in his eyes was obliterated by the person he saw standing behind Zeus.

  “It is all right, my love,” said Epione.

  Without a thought he flew into her arms. “Is it really you?” he wept. “I thought I'd lost you forever!” He was holding onto her for dear life. Dams broke in his eyes, dripping fire down his cheeks.

  She clung as tightly as he. “Oh, Asklepios, my blameless physician! You will never lose me.” And she wept with him, shedding teardrops of living flame from her own immortal eyes. “For what you did in there, your grandfather has brought me into the family.”

  As the two of them wandered away from the table, Zeus heard a familiar frosty voice. “He's a lucky bastard, you know. If I were her, I'd teach that bitch Darla a nasty lesson.”

  Zeus turned and slipped his arm around Hera, grinning. “Let it be. His little 'accident' might come in handy in the next battle, since it's too late to thunderbolt another candidate into the game. I won't get away with that twice.”

  Hera's eyes narrowed. “You're plotting something.”

  Zeus smiled at her. “I always am,” he said.