by G. R. Cooper
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Also By
Dedication
Prolog
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Epilog
Character Sheet
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The Kings of Edonis
by G.R. Cooper
Copyright © 2016 G.R. Cooper
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.
Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark.
The information in this book is distributed on an “as is” basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor the publisher shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Also By G.R. Cooper
Omegaverse Series:
Shepherd Moon
Shepherd’s Crook
Shepherd’s Cross
To Kelton and John for helping to invent online gaming, and Jonathan for dragging my ass into it.
Prolog
Duncan Sheriden looked down at the smartphone-like object in his hand. He pressed his thumb to the center of the screen, to a graphical button labeled with his name, that depressed with a click. He watched as the seconds passed, as a circle of light grew around his thumb. As the circle completed, Duncan’s name grayed out on the screen and the button disappeared.
Duncan tossed the now useless device across the room, where it landed, silently, on the couch within his apartment on the space station that orbited Kepler 22B within the Omegaverse. He had been playing the virtual reality game for six months, through a career seemingly touched by fate. He had found amazing weapons and gathered untold riches - he had purchased a top of the line merchant ship and begun a successful trade mission with the aliens of the Canis Arcturus on Eta Bootis - but most of all, he had found an abandoned space station and claimed it as his own. It had seemed his luck was endless.
Then he found out that it wasn’t luck, after all, that had propelled him forward.
It was a test. A test that he had apparently passed.
He reached down to pet his dog and then started walking, toward the door.
“C’mon Bear,” he said, speaking to the large Bernese Mountain dog. His friend and business partner within the Omegaverse - Phani Mutha from Pune, India - had begun a lucrative in-game pet store, selling AI dogs, cats and lambs that he had created to the tens of millions of players within the virtual world based game. Duncan and the dog had hit it off from the first instant that they’d met, and he was often shocked by how real both the dog and his feelings toward it felt. He reached down and scratched behind Bear’s ear and the dog stretched out, with a little sigh of contentment.
Duncan looked back to the device that he’d thrown onto the couch. With that simple press of a button, he had severed his consciousness from his physical body. The body, the only vessel his mind had known since birth would now, he was told, log out of the Omegaverse, go into Duncan’s bedroom in Charlottesville Virginia, get into bed and simply die. His mind, his being, would continue on within the virtual world. He wondered if that now meant that he was, in fact, nothing more - and nothing less - than an artificial intelligence.
Where did the “real world” end and where did consciousness reside if it didn’t have a physical host?
That question had plagued him, had kept him awake, for weeks, ever since he had noticed that the little resurrection device had not only contained an entry labeled ‘Duncan’ for himself. It contained an entry for all of his friends that had tried out his new, next generation, virtual helmet; a helmet that provided unparalleled realism and that the Omegaverse Corporation had chosen him to beta test. The difference had been, he admitted, like the difference between playing computer games on a standard, old school, flat-screen monitor and playing it on the first generation VR helmets had been. Night and day.
The new helmet not only gave the visual impression of actually being there in the way that the previous generation’s helmets did, it added immersion for all of the senses. Every sound, smell, touch and taste of the virtual universe was represented. It became like there was no difference, in his mind, between the Omegaverse and his real life.
His friends had agreed when they’d tried it, including Shannon.
Shannon, who had been one of the friends to initially talk him into entering the Omegaverse, and had provided a great deal of guidance, support and love in his early ‘career’, had suddenly died - of a brain aneurysm - shortly after trying out the helmet.
When Duncan had first received the device, and had noticed the entries for all of his friends, he had also seen that they were all grayed out except for one. Except for Shannon.
Without thinking, he had depressed the button and Shannon had been reborn into the Omegaverse; confused, overwhelmed and, it turned out, violent towards Duncan. She had knocked him out, leaving him with only an idea, a guess, of where she had gone.
She was only a consciousness, and, it seemed, not wholly herself. Where did she go? Did she need his help?
That was what he was determined to find out.
That was his quest.
He had been given the device out by his in-game, AI assistant. A personality named Clive who, it turned out, was not an artificial intelligence at all. Clive had left a series of bread crumbs that Duncan had followed through the Omegaverse until it led to Clive’s home within a fantasy based realm. A realm, it turned out, where Clive was the king.
And much more than the king.
As Duncan and Clive stood on the balcony of his tower, within the center of a great walled city, Clive had explained to Duncan how he was an anthropologist - and that he was studying humans. Studying them in preparation for making first contact between his species and Homo sapiens. It was Clive that had manufactured his incredible string of good luck. Clive had been searching for someone, someone whose way of thinking made them a candidate to be the first human to learn the truth behind the Omegaverse. Someone suited to be the initial contact between the human race and the alien species conducting the tests. Duncan still didn’t know what that meant or what the implications of the choice were.
Duncan had been floored to learn that the Omegaverse was nothing more than a tool being used by several alien civilizations for the study of mankind. In fact, at least two of the alien species that he’d fought against for control of the various star systems or negotiated trade agreements with - the Canis Arcturus, known as the Werewolves, and the Arn - were not AI at all, but sentient alien beings in their own right. As he stared down into the medieval city below, Clive had explained that Duncan was in a unique position; that while nearly a hundred million humans had played within the Omegaverse, only one knew the real truth. Dunc
an.
He explained that humans could not only be studied within the Omegaverse, they could be resurrected within it. Could and had. Tens of thousands of humans had played underneath their virtual reality helmets long enough that a full recording of their consciousness could be recreated, and they had been born again within the realm below after they had died on Earth. They knew that they had died within the outer world, but they didn’t know anything about the true nature of the world or its purpose.
Shannon, however, was a different case. Duncan learned that each person who was revived within the game world was only given that opportunity if enough of their consciousness had been recorded to ensure that it really was them, completely. Clive would not have, he said, allowed her to be brought back given the amount of her that had been recorded - there was no way to be sure that it was really her, all of her, and that the risk for something like a psychotic break was too great.
Coupled with the fact that she had been brought back to life cold, without any of the preparation or orientation that Clive’s people had developed over several millennia through multiple sentient species, left Shannon in a precarious position; her mental state could not be predicted, and Clive claimed that he had no way of determining it. She was, he concluded, somewhere within the realm below. Possibly in trouble, likely unable to cope with this new reality that had been thrust upon her with no warning or instruction whatsoever.
As he contemplated the new world, he was also told that this new, to him, part of the Omegaverse functioned differently from the rest in one fundamental way - the time scale of the world was that of thought. Each instant on Earth, or in the outer Omegaverse, was days or weeks within the new realm. Each second that Shannon had in that world left Duncan that much further behind in this one.
So, in addition to needing to find Shannon; to determine if she needed his help; to determine if her initial hostility carried over to the present - he had to hurry, to enter that realm. Every second he delayed was an incalculably greater period of time that Shannon had to get further away within the world, to grow in her powers and, maybe, her hatred and resentment for Duncan. But first, he had needed to sever himself from his terrestrial body, to enable his consciousness to be able to enter Clive’s realm.
Duncan looked from the couch to the doorway of his little apartment. He didn’t know when he would see this place again. He didn’t know how long it would take him to find Shannon. There was, he admitted to himself, quite a lot that he didn’t know. Quite a lot. He didn’t really know how going from a science-fiction based game universe into a fantasy RPG universe would effect his decisions. He assumed that meant that he would have to start at the beginning, at the bottom, and work his way up into the knowledge and skills required to succeed in this new world, to learn anew everything he needed to get by in this new corner of the Omegaverse.
It was time to start learning.
“C’mon Bear,” he repeated, then began walking toward the door.
Chapter 1
Duncan Sheriden reached down to his left side and began to scratch behind Bear’s ears. The dog, nearly waist high and a hundred kilograms, large even for a Bernese Mountain Dog, moved into and nuzzled against Duncan’s left hip. A fresh breeze, warm and carrying the fecund smells of the distant valley floor, flowed over them as they stood near the top of a single peak in the seemingly infinite mountain chain that stretched to their north and south.
He turned from the westward vista and looked to the east. He could just make out the sound of the pounding surf at the base of the range where it bordered the expanse of a grey-green ocean that stretched to the horizon.
Boats dotted the surface, coming and going from a point to his north. The city - he didn’t know the name - that he’d viewed from Clive’s office seemed to have been built through the mountain chain, or at least had a twin on the opposite, seaward, side. The great half-circular wall that enclosed the western side of the city from the valley beyond was matched by a like wall that rose out of the ocean in the east. It seemed, from Duncan’s vantage, to enclose a vast harbor works.
Duncan, followed closely by Bear, moved to the eastern escarpment and looked down to the harbor. He fought down his ingrained unease with heights and examined more closely the part of the city below. It was built into the living rock of the mountain, and only extended into the enclosed harbor through a vast interlocking network of piers and docks. Figures, ant-like below, moved to and from the docked boats, their shadows stark and long in the morning sunshine.
He looked back up to the star, musing that at least the sun seemed to rise in the east on this planet - unless his assumptions had skewed his sense of direction. Maybe he was looking at the rising sun in the west, which put the city to his south. He shook off that thought - it really didn’t matter as long as everyone used the same reference point, and, he assumed, that since the populace of this realm were originally from Earth, they would all use the standard cardinal point references.
Duncan sighed, which Bear echoed, and began walking toward the city. He had a lot to learn, even after a very information filled morning.
Duncan had entered this realm - he still didn’t know what to call it - earlier in the morning. After leaving his apartment in the Kepler 22 space station, he had responded “Clive’s office” when asked by the automatic transporter for his destination. In response, it had dropped him into a nondescript room, much like the one on the space station that he used to trade with the Canis Arcturus, the Werewolves.
It was a simple, windowless, white cube of a room dominated, in the center, by a lone screen standing on a plinth. Unlike the Werewolf station, however, the screen did not display a merchant’s dream of virtual objects for sale. It showed what, Duncan assumed, was a standard role playing game character sheet.
The sheet was pre-populated with Duncan’s current character name. Wulfgar. He left it alone. It displayed the caveat that once the character sheet was generated and the player entered the world, he would be unable to change the name, or any of the characteristics he chose for that matter, without completely exiting the world and beginning over.
In any case, he would be unable to leave the world without losing all progress. Any character advancement would be nullified once he passed back into the Omegaverse at large. That answered one of his initial questions. He would not be able to leave his personal quest in order to check on the status of his friends in the outer game world.
He didn’t really worry about that. His quest - to find his friend Shannon and help her, if she needed it - was the most important thing on his mind. Otherwise, he felt absolutely no pressure to do anything at all. It was liberating, he thought. He had, for the first time in his life, no feeling of pressing obligations. He could do anything and go anywhere in the universe. His old life was over. His new life was hours old, and his new life was, as far as he knew, literally limitless.
He couldn’t die. He wouldn’t end, unless he decided to - and he couldn’t, at this point, foresee any conditions where he would want to end his existence. He had an infinite amount of time and space with which to define and redefine, as he saw fit, his entire life. If he got tired of one thing or place, all he had to do was find something else and stay there for as long as it interested or amused him. He was almost glad to have the structure of the game world laid out in front of him. If gave him some sort of hook, a beginning, on determining the beginning of his post-life time.
Post life? He shrugged off that description. Post organic? Neo sentient? He couldn’t even come up with a simple title for his new life. It was all too much to wrap his brain around. He shook off the bewilderment and looked back to the screen.
Wulfgar. He would have to start thinking of himself like that. He needed to subsume his previous existence, to become what he was pretending to be in this new world.
“Hey Bear,” he laughed, “you go ahead and start calling me Wulfgar, OK?”
The dog looked up at him, cocked his head and lolled his tongue. Wulfgar
took that as acceptance and reached down to scratch the dog.
“OK, that’s the name taken care of,” he continued reading down the list of the character sheet. He scanned the entries.
Strength. Pretty self explanatory. That would effect how much he could carry and it would provide a modifier to how much physical damage he could both take and inflict.
Intelligence. That would determine both his ability to learn and effectiveness of any magic he was to try, as well his facility with new skills - any skills he used would get an experience point boost based on his intelligence. That didn’t make much sense to Wulfgar, but he assumed that would be the case for much of this new world at first.
Agility. Bonuses to both speed and his ability to hit. A highly agile person, he read, would have the advantage in an otherwise even fight - their hits would land first, disrupting the attack of their opponent. It would also provide bonuses to purely physical activities, like climbing or moving stealthily.
Personality. That effected the way that non-player characters interacted with the player.
“Why don’t they just call it ‘charisma’ like everyone else?” muttered Wulfgar. He had no interest in NPCs, at least as far as he knew.
Fortune. In other words, luck. That seemed to be the most nebulous, and thus least interesting, aspect to Wulfgar. All it seemed to indicate was a boost in the amount or quality of loot he would find. Wulfgar wasn’t in this world for loot, he was here for a singular purpose. Besides, if this place was anything like any game he was familiar with, a profusion of loot would eventually follow - whether quickly or long term, and he was in this for as long as necessary.
So, he had five attributes to choose from and twenty-five points to distribute. The most he could put into any one attribute initially was ten. He could spread, evenly, his points between every attribute and be a perfectly average, he assumed, five points across the board. He began to feel a little pressure in this decision - if he chose poorly, he’d have to give up any progress he’d made in order to ‘re-roll’ the character and reset the stats. He tried to imagine problems that he was going to overcome.