Game Over

by Andrew Klavan

  “Traveler?” said the techie Chuck.

  Lawrence Dial and Professor Jameson sat side by side, working their keyboards relentlessly. At Chuck’s call, Dial blinked through the code reflected on the lenses of his glasses. As if he had been wakened from a dream, he turned hazily to the tech. Molly could see his mind was still distracted.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” said Chuck. “Look at this.”

  The Traveler looked at Chuck’s screen, and Molly looked too. The view of the Realm had changed. There were simple, pixilated images of streets and buildings, but it was all unfocused, unclear. A shifting patch of blackness was moving over the image, obscuring different sections at different times.

  And where were the figures of Rick and Favian? Where had they gone?

  “What’s happening?” she heard herself say . . . but neither Chuck nor the Traveler answered her. They were bending their heads together as they stared at the screen. “What is that on the screen, that black patch?”

  The Traveler shook his head. “I don’t know what it is.”

  “Me either,” said Chuck. “And look here.”

  Using the computer mouse, he moved the image. There was an even darker black patch moving off to one side.

  “It doesn’t look like a program exactly,” he said.

  “No,” said the Traveler. “It’s almost like an organic structure. It seems to be generating the mist that’s blocking the image elsewhere.”

  “Yes,” said Chuck. “The mist seems to emanate from there.”

  “He’s protecting the interface,” the Traveler murmured. “And anything he might have hiding in there.”

  Molly couldn’t stand the way they were talking, as if it were all some kind of interesting experiment, as if Rick’s life were not in danger.

  “Where’s Rick?” she said. “Why can’t I see his figure anymore? Where is he?”

  The Traveler looked at her over his shoulder as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Don’t worry,” he told her.

  “Why not?”

  The Traveler blinked. “Well, because it won’t help, for one thing.” He turned back to look at the screen. “Rick is heading into this mist. Whatever’s there, he’s going to have to face it.” He glanced at her again. “That’s what he went in for, Molly. That’s what we sent him to do.”

  Molly stared at him, amazed. “You sound so calm about it! He’s your son.”

  The Traveler gave her a small smile. “Actually, I already know who he is.”

  “Yes, but . . .,” Molly started to say. But what could she say? The Traveler was right. This was what they had sent Rick into the Realm to do. She hated that they sounded so calm about it all. But what good would it do to sound excited or panicked?

  “We’re just going to have to wait and see what—” the Traveler began to tell her.

  But before he could finish, Molly’s father, Professor Jameson, let out a gasp. He leaned away from his own monitor and his big body went back against his swivel chair. It was as if something on the screen had struck him. He continued staring at the numbers on the screen in front of him.

  “Dad? What’s the matter? What’s happening?” Molly asked him.

  The Traveler rolled his chair up behind Jameson so he could look past his shoulder at his computer.

  “Look at that!” Professor Jameson said to him. “I . . . I can’t believe it!”

  The Traveler could only look on in shocked silence.

  The streets of the Golden City were empty. Even the dead were gone. Rick and Favian moved slowly along the pavement through the ever-thickening mist. Rick gleamed in his silver armor. Favian flashed a shimmering blue.

  Rick’s eyes kept moving as he looked all around him. Weird place, this Golden City, he kept thinking. It didn’t seem real and yet it didn’t seem totally a dream either. It wasn’t like some fairy kingdom in a video game exactly. It was more like something you half remembered. A place you’d been to that you couldn’t quite recall. It was meant to be beautiful, Rick could see that. And parts of it were beautiful. There were buildings that looked like some sort of great cake, with towers and onion-shaped domes and golden facades lit by sourceless rays of light. There were great open squares with towers and statues that seemed to stretch almost to the edge of the horizon. There were wonderful bridges flanked with lacy stone balustrades and presided over by statues of winged lions. And yet as beautiful as these places were, they—and everything here—looked solemn and sad, spiritless and hollow. Empty shells under a yellow sky that had darkened to a color like amber as the day wore on.

  The streets were empty everywhere. It looked to Rick as if there had been a catastrophe and everyone had been evacuated or killed. This also struck him as sad. In fact, the whole place just seemed to pulse with melancholy.

  Rick stopped, feeling the heaviness of the atmosphere inside him. Favian stopped, too, hovering in the air.

  “It’s like a ghost town,” Rick said.

  “I know,” said Favian. “I hate it here. I’ve been stuck here I don’t know how long. But there’s nowhere else to go. All the rest of the Realm is blackness. We thought it was bad before when we had the Blue Wood and the Scarlet Plain to wander through. But now . . . stuck here . . . dying slowly . . . I sure hope your dad can make that portal.”

  “He will, don’t worry,” Rick murmured, but he was barely paying attention to Favian’s anxieties. He was trying to figure out which way to go.

  They had come to a crossroads. Up ahead was a long street of ornate concrete buildings lit by enchanting green and golden lights. It went on a long way and seemed to narrow in the distance to a vanishing point. To his left was a canal, a passageway flooded with silver water. Small boats lined the quays under more buildings with pastel colors. To his right, a wide-open square with a huge building in the center of it: another one of those fancy buildings with onion domes of various shapes and colors.

  The mist blew around Rick’s and Favian’s legs as they turned in one direction and the next, trying to make up their minds. It dissipated and thinned over the square, and stayed about the same on the street of buildings. To Rick, it seemed to grow thicker over the mercurial water of the canal.

  “This way then,” he said.

  He headed off, and Favian followed.

  They moved along the canal on a rolling sidewalk bordered by a low stone balustrade. With every step they took, the mist seemed to grow thicker before them, the buildings and colored lights growing dim and distant. A chill crept over Rick. He could feel it even with the silver armor coating his skin.

  Even Favian, creature of light that he was, felt it. “It’s chilly, huh.”

  “Yeah. The whole place feels kind of chilly and sad.”

  “And spooky.”

  “Yeah, and spooky.”

  “You’re almost there.”

  Another voice. Both Rick and Favian looked around, startled.

  “Don’t stop now.”

  It was Mariel. Her words echoed all around them through the empty air.

  “The water!” said Favian.

  That was it. Rick looked toward the canal. He moved closer to the balustrade and peered over into the silver flow. The darkening amber sky was reflected and refracted on the moving metallic surface. Half a dozen colors seemed to shift and blend and separate in the depths of the current.

  But she was there. Mariel. Rick could see her: a sort of suggestion of a shape moving with the movement of the water.

  “Look to where the mist thickens up ahead,” her voice said to him, speaking it seemed from all around him. “Be ready, Rick.”

  He nodded. “I’m ready,” he said. Which was sort of a lie. He wasn’t ready at all. How could he be ready? He didn’t even know what he was going to face. But really, it didn’t matter whether he was ready or not. He wasn’t turning back for anything. So in that sense, anyway, he was ready enough.

  Rick and Favian continued to walk along the canal. They could feel
Mariel flowing along in the canal to their left.

  “It’s good to have you here,” Rick said to her. It was. He felt stronger, safer, with Mariel nearby.

  “I can only go with you as far as the graveyard,” Mariel said, “not beyond. The fog cloud blocks the flow of water—and light. There’s a stream that goes around the graveyard and gets closer to the interface, but I’m running out of strength . . .”

  Rick didn’t answer. He could hear the weakness in Mariel’s voice. She was beginning to sound old.

  As if to give her some encouragement, Favian piped up, “Rick’s dad is going to make portals to get us out of here!”

  Rick didn’t say anything. And for a moment, Mariel didn’t say anything either.

  But then she did. She said, “Is that true, Rick?”

  Before he could answer, Favian broke in like an excited child. “Yeah, if anyone can do it, Rick’s dad can. He’s like a genius or something. Right, Rick?”

  Rick walked alongside the canal in silence. The mist twisted and roiled and grew thicker around him. He could feel his friends waiting for his answer.

  “Mariel,” he said, “what do you remember? What do you remember about before you came here? About RL?”

  In the silence that followed, he shivered at the cold. The silver armor rippled on his flesh, almost as if it were imitating the rippling movement of Mariel in the water, as if she were as close to him as his own skin.

  “I can’t remember very much at all,” Mariel said then. “Hardly anything. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can hear people laughing—laughing and talking like friends. I must have had friends, I guess. And I know the grass is not supposed to be red, but green. And the sky should be blue not yellow. I don’t know why I know those things, but I do. It must be something I remember. And I think . . .,” she began and then her voice seemed to sink back into the mist.

  “What?” said Rick.

  “I think someone must have loved me,” said Mariel. “A man. There are times, when it’s very quiet, when I’m all alone . . . there are times when I can feel his lips against my lips . . .”

  Rick listened to her intently. He was wondering: How could she know these things? How could she remember anything, if she was just a program, just a code? They must have been some other person’s memories, or fragments of many people’s memories, held within the connectome generated by the black box.

  There was a sound of distant thunder, a soft, ominous rumble very far away. Mariel’s voice broke off.

  “Here we are,” she said then.

  Rick stopped and looked around him. The mist had grown very thick while he was listening to her. It was almost a fog now. It shifted and parted and came together on every side of him. Peering through it, Rick saw an opening off to his right. Down a narrow lane, there was an iron gate. Beyond the iron gate, there was a field. As the mist shifted, Rick saw statues and stones and small towers and a large building beyond them. It was a graveyard, almost hidden in the dense and shifting mist.

  The sight of the cemetery chilled him, but it was what he saw beyond the graves that made him quail.

  It was off in the middle distance, not that far. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before, nothing in Real Life, anyway. Beyond the graveyard, the sky seemed to just . . . go out. Like a candle flame when you blow on it. Like a lightbulb when you throw the switch. The whole world beyond the graveyard seemed to just . . . go out. And in its place, there was a wall of burgeoning, shifting, solid cloud boiling and churning like some great wizard’s potion. Now and then, light flashed from inside the heart of the miasma: lightning. And in the moment after came that low grumble of thunder.

  “What . . . what’s that?” said Favian. His voice trembled.

  “Guess that’s the fog cloud Mariel was talking about,” said Rick—and he could hear that his own voice wasn’t all that steady either.

  “You have to pass through the cloud to reach the interface,” said Mariel. With every word she spoke, more of her strength and energy seemed to drain away.

  Rick and Favian stood staring across the misty graveyard at that boiling wall of solid atmosphere. As the thunder subsided, another sound replaced it. A low, rhythmic boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Very soft. Very far away. But all the same, Rick could feel the pavement quake underneath his feet every time the sound reached him. He felt himself shrink inside his armor, fear pulling him into himself.

  It was the sound of footsteps. Something pacing back and forth. Something huge.

  Rick’s confidence left him all at once. It was like water dropping out of a bucket when the bottom gives way. Suddenly, he knew with absolute certainty: He was going to die in there. He was going to walk into that cloud and meet whatever was pacing inside it, waiting for him, and he was never going to come back. The best he could hope for was that God would let him destroy the interface before the monster overcame him. That he could stop the attack on his country—on RL—before he lost his life.

  Taking a long and shuddering breath, he turned away from the spectacle of the lightning-laced wall of cloud. He turned back to the canal. He realized he had no choice anymore. He had to tell Mariel the truth. He couldn’t walk into that cloud—he couldn’t die—and leave her to believe that he would somehow save her. The truth might break her heart. It might make her hate him. But he had to tell her. He couldn’t die with the lie on his head.

  He moved close to the balustrade and looked over the stone rail into the silver water. He felt Favian at his shoulder, hovering nearby, curious.

  “Mariel,” he said.

  And her voice surrounded him—and the warmth and strength of her presence was as close to him as the armor was close to his skin. “What is it, Rick?”

  “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “What?” said Molly. “What is it?”

  The Traveler and her father—and now Chuck the tech guy, too—were gathered around Professor Jameson’s computer, staring at the code rolling down the screen. They were all staring openmouthed as if they were looking at . . . well, who knew what? Molly had no clue what they were seeing. It made her want to scream with frustration.

  “What is it?” she said again. “Is it Rick? Is he all right? Is something wrong?”

  In answer—if you could call it an answer—Rick’s father and her father turned to look at each other silently. Chuck the tech guy turned to look at her. But none of them spoke.

  “Daddy!” Molly cried out finally. “Tell me what’s happening!”

  Professor Jameson cleared his throat as if he were about to give a lecture.

  “We’re trying to isolate the code variation that keeps damaged avatars stuck inside the Realm,” he told her.

  “Yeah, yeah, I get that,” Molly said impatiently, though she had only the vaguest idea what it meant.

  “To do that . . .,” her father continued slowly, glancing at her only every other word as if he found it difficult to meet her eyes. “To do that, we were going to compare the code for Mariel’s connectome with the code for Fabian Child’s avatar. That way we could find the similarities in damage. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. No. Sort of. I don’t know. Why?” said Molly. “What’s it mean? Why is everyone so excited?”

  “As I was studying Mariel’s connectome, the patterns began to seem familiar to me,” her father continued.

  “Familiar? Those numbers? What—”

  Professor Jameson cut his daughter off. “You remember how you and Rick helped us out by coming in and letting us borrow your brain waves for our experiments in brain-computer interfaces?”

  “Uh, yeah, sure, you hooked up some wires to our heads and—” Molly stopped talking abruptly as some inkling of what her father might be telling her began to filter into her mind. “You mean . . .?”

  It was the Traveler who started speaking now. “When Mars acted on his own and sent these first MindWarriors into the Realm without my knowledge, he used our research to build the avatars for Fabian and for Sergeant Po
sner. To try and limit the risk, he sent in one warrior who wasn’t human, who was just a connectome, a collection of downloaded code. He used our research materials to accomplish that. And he chose the most complete connectome we made, the one that was nearly human because we were so familiar with the subject we were downloading that we could fill in the gaps ourselves.”

  Molly turned from the Traveler’s mild gaze and stared back at her father. The large, shambling Professor Jameson finally looked directly at her.

  “He chose your connectome, Molly,” he said. “He used the download of your mind to build a MindWarrior.”

  “My . . .,” was all Molly could say. Her mouth had turned as dry as ashes.

  “He used the download of your mind to create Mariel,” Professor Jameson told his daughter.

  “You mean . . . You mean I’m Mariel?” she asked softly.

  “No, no, no, of course not. You’re not Mariel,” her father said. “But to all intents and purposes, Mariel is you.”

  Half a world away, Kurodar felt his power nearing its very peak. The Battle Station was completely under his control and was steadily charging, almost ready to fire. He could feel the efforts of the people in the American government trying to hack their way into it, to wrest it away from him, but he flicked their efforts off like so many flies with the merest effort of his mind. They could not touch him.

  Meanwhile, in the Realm, what was left of the Realm, the Golden City, he sensed his nemesis, Rick Dial, moving toward the interface. This made him glad. The boy had defeated him twice, but Kurodar was certain it would not, and could not, happen again. The King of the Dead, the last defender of his territory, was virtually indestructible. It was a thing from the very core of his own mind, automatically drawing on the power of his imagination so that any damage Dial managed to inflict on it would be almost immediately repaired. What’s more, it could do more than attack. It could create on its own, so that as often as Dial launched himself against it, he would find himself facing a full complement of reinforcements, a legion of destruction.