by Domino Finn
As I struggled to take the next step, a dagger swiped at my foot. I jumped. My grip on the mountain slipped but my other hand found purchase. Unfortunately, the dagger caught me with the next attempt. It bit into my ankle, making it go fuzzy.
Injury!
Your ankle is injured. You cannot put weight on it until it is fixed.
Damn these special damage conditions. Here I was, hanging off a cliff face one handed, legs swinging wildly in the air, and now I wouldn't even be able to climb anymore. I cursed my decision not to stand and fight the pagans face-to-face. At least that would've been a warrior's death.
The goblin closest to me chuckled and climbed a step closer. I tried to kick him away but remember: injured ankle.
Galloping hooves pounded against the mountainside. Bandit came charging right at me, some kind of oversized mountain goat from hell. Her legs deftly strode on the near vertical surface, looking more impossible than impressive. The girl was set to run right past my reach. I grunted and heaved myself up, stretching my free hand.
I caught her offered horn and took off like a Matterhorn bobsled. We sped away, level with the goblins but at a speed they couldn't dream of matching. My boots scraped the rock in a desperate water-ski maneuver while I hung on for dear life.
"Back," I said. "Back."
Bandit nodded. She slowed and turned, allowing me to adjust my position. I hooked an arm over her back and drew my spear. She lowered her head and rushed right back at those goblin tough guys.
They scrambled in terror.
There wasn't time to get away. The same limits that had favored their chase now doomed them. The goblins were even nice enough to line up for me. In a single charge, I lanced them off the mountainside. I watched them descend in satisfaction. I also watched my reputation with the pagans continue to plummet.
Pagan Reputation -125
The number was too far gone to matter anymore. Kinda hard to top being targeted for assassination. At this point I was basically a Wild West outlaw, trading up wanted posters and proudly brandishing the reward amount like some kind of high score. Screw 280. My notoriety was 405 now.
Bandit slowed and I put my spear away. The bongo nudged me with her head. She wanted me to jump on.
"I'm such an idiot," I said, noting the scuffs on my boot soles.
I pulled myself onto Bandit's back. Her large frame easily supported my weight, even on the cliffside. She wasn't just a pet anymore but a mount. Even better, she was loyal and useful in a pinch. I patted Bandit's neck and she lightly traipsed up the mountain.
With my new ride, the climb continued without incident. Instead of focusing on not falling to my death, I could appreciate the view. Bandit cantered to the peak and I watched Stronghold from a distance. The walled city was tiny from this angle, but still imposing. Always imposing. Everything out here was wild and dangerous, twisted and ready to kill you. The city's stone and mortar was a line in the sand. A mark of safety for the residents of Haven. A beacon for the dead, the newly living. Hell, it was practically Heaven. And it was very likely I'd be spending the rest of my life there.
So why was I so uneasy about the whole place?
We crested the mountain. The summit was a scraggly peak of jagged edges, a wall in itself circling a flat platform. Two giant stone hands were built into the ground, fingers wide, seemingly guarding a small obelisk between them. I dismounted in careful awe. I'd found something important here. Quiet boot steps took me closer to the center of the summit. Bandit nervously waited by the edge.
A flicker in the display broke my immersion in the game. One second I was walking through a fully realized fantasy world, the next the graphics were sputtering in an overworked simulation. Refresh lines crackled over the obelisk, lagging images with pixelated edges. It was a brief hiccup. A glitch in the Matrix. Then the graphical artifacts were gone.
Now perched atop the obelisk like a bird was a man in a black cloak adorned with shimmering silver runes.
"Commendably done," he declared, his voice light as a feather.
0240 Black & White
I pivoted my spear toward the intruder squatting atop the five-foot stone structure. He was at ease, arms crossed over a horizontal staff that rested on his knees. The obelisk was plain, worn rock. The man was much the same. Average height. Average weight. The elaborate silver runes the only flair on his conventional black cloak. The low hood covering his face kept him amply mysterious.
His staff vanished as he returned it to his inventory. He didn't appear to be a threat. Over the course of seconds, I came to realize that I was the intruder here.
"What is it about their ilk you so despise?" he finally asked.
I watched him carefully, wary of betraying too much information. "The pagans?"
His black hood nodded once.
My first thought was that he might be a pagan himself, but the bottom half of his face revealed him as human. It was the only part of his skin that was exposed. A sharp chin. Tight lips. Everything else was covered up. Black pants. Black boots. Black gloves.
I planted the butt of my spear in the ground. "Besides the fact that they're trying to kill me?"
The stranger's voice was soft and calm, without a whiff of aggression. "Can you blame them?" His head swiveled to the horizon. Stronghold's battlements. "It's easy to admire the walled city from a distance. If you're a pagan, it's also easy to despise it."
I tried to examine his info but got nothing. No name. No level or class. An NPC maybe. I immediately suspected he was related to my quest.
"The pagans have no reason to hate the residents of Stronghold," I said.
"Don't they?"
I frowned. I couldn't tell if he wanted me to volunteer information or do something. I opened my menu and pulled up my quest.
Unveil the Pagans
Quest Type: Epic
Reward: Unknown
You've discovered pagans encroaching on Stronghold and found orders to secure the roads leading to the city. Uncover the source and reason for this activity.
"Do you know anything about their movements?" I asked carefully. "Securing the roads?"
His gaze returned to me, lips a sly smile. "I see all," he said. "As it seems do you. You recovered the outer mandate."
I was afraid to nod.
He shrugged his hands as if it didn't matter. "Good faith, then." I wasn't sure what he meant but let him keep talking. "The boggarts are holy people among their kind. Sages, you could say. They have seen visions. Rumblings in Stronghold. That is all I can say."
Quest Update: Unveil the Pagans
Quest Type: Epic
Reward: Unknown
The boggarts are the source of the outer mandate. Their end goal remains to be discovered.
1000 XP awarded
"You see?" he asked. "Good faith."
"Thanks," I said, "but I can't help thinking you know more."
"Oh, I know much more. I know of plagues and blights, famines and floods." His long cloak fluttered in the breeze. The silver runes reflected sunlight. "But faith only gets you so far."
I waited for him to expound on his apocryphal words, but that was all he had to say again. Cryptic, clipped.
The NPCs in Haven. A little overwrought.
I kept my tone firm but respectful. "I mean about the pagans."
His lips tightened. A frown, maybe. The stranger's answer was light and rhythmic. Unassuming, like his appearance. "Have you ever considered the value of numbers? Their ability to manipulate? The number of zeroes on a check. A level, a score—a negative faction rep."
He was referring to my pagan notoriety. "I mean, yeah. Obviously. It's just part of the game."
"Game," he said with a bit of gruff. "Hmm."
I looked around the rocky summit. Bandit watched from the outskirts. The platform was flat rock, devoid of any decoration save for the giant stone hands sculpted to shield the obelisk, a squat pillar of stone. What was its purpose?
"This is a holy place," he said,
reading my thoughts. "Only the gifted tread here."
I smiled sarcastically. "My mother always said I was special."
"You are, Talon."
I tensed. My name was plainly emblazoned above my head for all to see. It was stupid to be taken aback, but I was anyway. It's like you're stocking shelves at Target and a customer glances at your name tag and starts throwing your name around casually, feigning the familiarity of a long friendship. It's unnerving.
"What do you know of me?" I asked.
"I see all. I know all."
"Try me."
He angled his head slightly. "I know you were a developer at the very company that created this world."
I tried to hide the worry in my face. He was talking about me. About Tad Lonnerman. How'd he know who I was?
"Who are you?" I asked.
He smiled. "I was waiting for that question."
"And?"
He pointed above his head. This time when I looked, static crinkled. Letters flashed into place, pixelated and discolored. The digits rolled like a slot machine until they settled on the name [Luc1f3r].
I stared warily. "As in..."
"The very same, Talon. Do you see? We're both special."
Some kind of Heaven this was. But I visualized the themes of the game. The Roman setting. Wild pagans. Angelic protectors. Was programming in the devil really so strange?
"You're the source of the outer mandate order," I concluded.
"No. I told you true. It was the boggarts. Your quest update confirmed as much."
"But you had something to do with it. Behind the scenes."
"I watch, Talon. I survive."
"That's not all you do."
Lucifer shrugged. "I sympathize with their ilk. They were the natural order of this land. The humans moved in and nearly swept them off the continent. Cities built. Walls. They cut down forests and drained rivers. Bent the land to their own will and treated every other living thing as either game or pest. So yes, I see the evil in man. I see it because it exists. If it didn't, neither would I."
I trembled at his words, soft-spoken though they were. This wasn't the devil, I told myself. It was just a programmed approximation of him. Artificial intelligence. Artificial.
"Now who are the lost children?" he posited. "What is left of the errant?" Lucifer released a long sigh and admired Stronghold from a distance. "All cities fall, Talon. Even the afterlife isn't forever."
More introspective babble. I considered simply moving on. At this point I was pretty sure he wasn't going to hurt me. Though that got me wondering why he was here at all. I had a hard time believing the freaking devil was just a quest checkpoint. My curiosity got the better of me.
"What do you want from me?" I asked.
"Just that you consider an alternate perspective." He crossed his arms over his knees. "You and I are not entirely different."
I crossed my arms too. Then realized the irony of mimicking his posture, however defiant.
"Some people," he started, "when you tell them a rule, all they see is the intended effect. Two plus two equals four. They never consider how malleable numbers can be. The world is a paved street with painted lines. The vast majority of travelers don't stray from it. They do the right thing, the good thing, and blindly follow the path laid out for them. A simple path, for simple people."
Lucifer hopped off the obelisk. It was only five feet high, an unimpressive feat, but his boots hit the dirt so lightly he might have only taken a step. It was a graceful, fluid motion. Understated.
"Then there are the gifted ones," he noted. "People like you and me, we see the painted lines as a challenge to cross. We encounter walls and yearn for the other side. We view rules as mere technicalities to work around. That's the ultimate life hack. Don't fight the system. Profit within it."
As he said that, the edges of his cloak pixelated and blurred before coming back to focus. Another glitch. I thought I was starting to get it.
"Sounds a lot like cheating," I said.
"There's that insinuation again."
"Which one?"
"That this is a game." Lucifer leaned into me. "Is that what this is to you? A board game? A downloadable app? Are the constraints placed upon you just random rules of balance, something that can be flicked on and off at will? Or is this your life now?"
I didn't know what to say. His words did sort of make sense.
"Maybe their rules are just collars around your neck."
I swallowed. "You're not an NPC, are you? You're a player. You somehow hacked your name, and who knows what else."
Lucifer smiled. "You and me, Talon, the algorithms whisper to us. You have a programmer's mind. You understand the logic of game systems. Their power and their flaws. You even wrote some of the code that was applied to Haven."
"I never worked on this ga—this world."
"No, but your studio was bought out. Your assets absorbed. You worked on genetic learning, did you not?"
"How do you know that?"
Lucifer, excited now, fell beside me and waved gloved hands as he spoke. "Genetic algorithms are a thing of beauty. Survival of the fittest. The Theory of Evolution boiled down to a programming directive."
My face hardened. I knew what he was going on about, and I agreed. While not exactly cutting edge, genetic algorithms were a heavy part of my R&D. Say you need a task accomplished, like decrypting a message. You write code to sort it out and then take several variations of that module and have them compete. Which one performs best? You take the strongest, the fittest, and shuffle their DNA together. You create babies, new modules with slightly different variables. You run the benchmarks again and make more babies. Generation after generation—eventually you have perfectly evolved code that does exactly what you need.
"The difference with your work," said Lucifer in admiration, "is that the branching is user generated. Progress through player input. Yes, that creates a bottleneck in the cycle. Yes, it's much slower. Imperfect evolution. But what you lose in cold efficiency you gain in intelligent design. You create a system governed not by the system, but by the players." Lucifer slowly waved his hands across the landscape. "You create Haven."
I stared at the horizon in wide-eyed wonder. The Kablammy devs had integrated my experimental code into the simulation. I wasn't sure if I was proud or scared. Not that my work was bad or flawed. I stood behind the concept. But it was research and development stuff. Unready for prime time.
And Lucifer was right. Even though I hadn't been working on a massively multiplayer online engine, what better place for the players to affect the simulation, slowly and over time? Using my principles, Haven could be a forever changing simulation, modernizing with its inhabitants. A living, breathing world.
"This is how your genetic learning has been implemented," he said. "Take your skill tree. That's a module of code with an expected result. You can choose to utilize that skill as everyone else does. Safe. Effective. Within the painted lines. Or you can apply your skill to a slightly different problem set. Attempt to achieve an unintentional result. The simulation detects this attempt and, if it's within an acceptable functional deviation, allows it."
He raised a finger in caution. "Now, that doesn't mean the new skill will be better than the old one. Your baby might be a fish who can't breathe water. A genetic dead end. But that very possibility means everybody's skills will be slightly different. Even the same classes, the same trees. The result is that enterprising players will grow using their own ingenuity."
Lucifer clapped me on the shoulder. "And you already have."
I strained to recall doing something like that. "I don't remember branching any skills."
"But you have. Without even realizing it. When you defeated that assassin on the mountainside, you activated dash in midair. Even I haven't seen that before. It certainly isn't part of the stock package."
Holy shit. Adaptable skills.
Lucifer wasn't talking about inventing skills out of thin air. Obviou
sly programming needs to exist for the execution of a module. So skills aren't new, exactly, just remixed. Rebooted. New usage out of old rules.
I recalled, as a kid, playing Street Fighter II on the Super Nintendo. We slotted a Game Genie in there to tweak features. It wasn't a magic chip but it could hack the game data. Patch it over with different values to achieve slightly different behaviors. There was a Street Fighter code to jump and use special moves in the air. You could throw a fireball or a dragon punch and keep jumping higher in the sky, making matches very different than how the developers had originally envisioned.
And I had just done something similar with my dash.
"And skills are only the most obvious application," said Lucifer. "Mounts exist in Haven, of course. So do vanity pets that you can parade around town. But you won't find anything in your game guide about adopting wild animals."
Bandit canted her head. She was an anomaly, then. Not a normal game feature. According to Lucifer, my actions, my will, had somehow caused the mutation in the game code. That was his way of saying I was an outlier. Like him.
And maybe I was.
"You still haven't told me what you want," I said firmly.
He knew his words had sway. He knew I was on the hook. "I merely ask that you open your eyes. That your ideology remains as flexible as your skill with the simulation. That you consider that the pagans may not be your true enemy."
I twisted my lips. I wasn't an idiot. I could put two and two together. This player styled himself Lucifer. Stronghold was full of saints and angels.
"You're the head of the Fallen, aren't you? The raid on the Pantheon. The battle with the angels. Your people did that."
"They're all dead," admitted Lucifer. "It's just me that's left. Unless you were to join me." He raised his head and the hood folded away, giving me my best glimpse of his face in shadow. Plain. Unremarkable. "Will you be my apostle, Talon?"