Coders

by Thomas K. Carpenter

"I've been shot." It was almost a question. She hardly believed it was real. She'd been shot countless times in LifeGame, but the pain was only on the surface. This one went bone deep.

  Blood leaked out of a wound. Gabby tried to stop it with her hand, but it went right past her fingers.

  Gabby was sitting up with the automatic in her lap when her friends ran to her side. Mouse was holding the wound closed on her shoulder. The bullet had gone right through.

  A huge, dark shape rolled out from the distant wall. As Unthar rolled, Gabby could see he had a backpack on, the one she'd thrown over the edge.

  Her friends were focused on her, keeping her from bleeding out, so they didn’t see him. Gabby raised her gun, aiming from the hip, as dots started forming before her eyes. She pulled the trigger and heard gunfire echo around her like a symphony of percussion.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Gabby barely remembered the escape to the flight platform, but she did remember the explosion. They were only a few floors away when the building shook like a giant had punched it.

  "Unthar."

  "He's dead," a voice replied, "you shot him."

  Gabby tried to tell them not to put her on the hovership. That the Queen would only send her to the Delvers. That she'd never intended for them to be rewarded for their win.

  When the hovership tilted to turn, Gabby could see the war beneath her. White fog blanketed the city below. Armored carriers and tanks moved through the streets, unleashed by the destruction of the tower.

  Other hoverships filled the sky, speeding north to subdue other parts of the GSA. The Queen had won and Gabby had let it happen.

  Gabby tried to remove the wires from her arm, but she was too weak and before long they had her strapped down. Unfamiliar faces faded in and out of consciousness. She didn't see her friends and wondered if they'd even been taken on the hovership.

  Eventually, a white coated woman with severe lines around her mouth and a widow's peak of jet black hair, injected the tube going into her arm. The rest of the flight faded to blackness.

  She awoke in an unfamiliar bed. The hospital walls were blinding white. Sensors had been strapped to her body, fist-sized white boxes like blood-sucking beetles. A host of tubes ran into various pouches of fluid, including one half-filled with blood. The starkness of the crimson compared to the purity of the white surrounding it only reminded Gabby of the Queen.

  When her nose itched, Gabby moved her arm only to find it bound by a tether. Then a tiny motor in her bed whined and slack in the line allowed her to scratch her nose with a fingernail.

  The length of the nail startled her. She'd been out for days at minimum. Once she was done scratching, the motor retracted the tether. A humane solution to being confined to bed.

  The nail on her pinky finger was black, dead. Another contrast to the whiteness of the room. When Gabby thought about sunglasses, the brightness dimmed, and she knew then the Queen's program had been reloaded. Not that she had any doubt. The only good thing about Damon's program was that it'd cleared out Cassius'.

  Which only reminded her that the GSA had lost. Cassius was probably marching to the Queen's drumbeat now.

  The door faded out and a man and a woman entered. Gabby recognized the severe woman from the hovership ride. The woman hadn't bothered to hide her wrinkles under a skin, a good trait for a physician, but a doctor could just as easily be a torturer, and then those lines around her mouth had a whole different meaning.

  The man was her assistant by the deferential way he stood back a pace. Eager, thoughtful eyes on a calm face. A good bedside manner, she assumed, by his pleasant demeanor.

  "Where are my friends?"

  The doctor ignored her comment and touched the boxes strapped to her body.

  "You're improving better than expected. Quite a difference from when they carried you onto the hovership." The woman's gaze flickered up from the boxes, a slight curl to the edge of her lips. She expected a compliment.

  "I don't care about me. I just want to know about my friends? Are they alright?"

  The doctor snapped out a response. "It's clear you don't care about your body. Do you know how long we operated on you? We spared no expense. Feel lucky your problems were fixable, unlike your friend."

  Her eyes widened. She'd gone too far.

  "Michael? Is he okay? Is he in the hospital? Can I see him?"

  The severe doctor turned toward her assistant. "Yes, we have to go. Why didn't you say so earlier?"

  The assistant looked bewildered. Then he coughed. "Yes, we have to go."

  They disappeared as quickly as they'd come and Gabby was left alone with no more information that she had before. Now it was worse. Feel lucky your problems were fixable, unlike your friend.

  Gabby replayed the memory in her head, listening for the inflection, trying to decide what it meant. Was Michael dead? Or was he just in the hospital being worked on? This was worse than torture.

  She tried yanking on the tether, but the cord was tight. She imagined her nose itching again and when it gave her slack, she wrapped the extra cord around the bed rail so it would pull itself to pieces when it retracted.

  The needle in her arm came out smoothly, though it squirted clear liquid across the room. She reached for the second needle, the one attached to the crimson bag, when a projection of a nurse appeared.

  "Patient Gabriella. Please desist in your efforts. The staff is only here to help you." The vacant voice was clearly a semi-AI agent, but real nurses and security wouldn't be far behind if she couldn't get out soon.

  Her fingers couldn't quite reach the second needle. The little box on her shoulder began to vibrate and a warmth penetrated her chest. A lightness filled her until she couldn't remember why she was trying to remove the needle. She pawed at her arm until falling back into a drug induced sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  When Gabby awoke, the wires and tubes and boxes were gone. She wore a simple black outfit. Something she might have worn beneath her skins in high school. Comfortable and tight enough not to interfere with the fashion she wanted to portray, nor immodest enough in case someone peered beneath the illusion.

  An interface appeared and out of habit Gabby immediately set to investigating it before blowing out an angry breath and dismissing the whole thing. She wanted freedom, not fashion.

  The door surprisingly let her pass. Waiting outside was the pleasant faced assistant. A little nametag that read 'Art' hovered on his chest. The hallway was empty of guards. Only a few nurses chatted at the nearby station.

  "Are you well? Feeling buffed?" The LifeGame words were foreign to his tongue, but clearly he'd been researching her to make an impression.

  She thought briefly of fleeing, but saw his fear that she would reflected in his eyes, so she decided not to. Guards wouldn't be far behind and they could disable her through the sense-web. Her current freedom was a pretense only.

  "Sorry. No, I'm not feeling buffed. A little debuffed, in fact, but if you could tell me about my friends, that could change." She said the words hopefully, but the disappointment in his eyes told her enough. Art couldn't tell her anything. He hadn't been approved. For all his pleasantries he was a puppet like her.

  "Would you like to change? I provided the undergarments common to LifeGamers."

  Gabby didn’t care, but his eagerness softened her resistance. "Do you have a suggestion? I'm not sure what occasion I'm dressing for?"

  His eyes alighted with an inner fire. "For the Crimson Queen, of course."

  "Right." Gabby tried not to look too disappointed. She was hoping for her friends, especially Michael. "Could you pick something for me?"

  "I know just the thing." He waved his hands and sparks erupted. A mirror appeared in the middle of the hospital hallway.

  Art clasped his hands and watched her closely. She'd been transformed into someone she almost didn’t recognize. It was a mixture of her favorite fashions from high school without appearing immature and adding flavors fro
m the last year.

  The silken black with white flowers wrap was an homage to a kimono while staying functional. Her hair radiated platinum with a tasteful dark streak forming a swirl in her tied up hair. A crimson lotus flower rested at the base of the hair knot on her head.

  The hilt of a saber stuck out over her shoulder. Gabby reached up to touch the hilt only to grimace from her injuries.

  "Is your shoulder still debuffed?" asked Art, a little less awkwardly this time.

  "I guess so." Gabby smiled for him and he returned it. She touched his arm. "Thank you for the outfit. I look totally twinked."

  "Wonderful!" Art visibly cataloged the new word for later. "I thought it brought out your eyes."

  Art led her to the roof to a hovership, chatting at mach speed, peppering LifeGame idioms into his speech. Gabby responded enough to let him know he was saying them correctly, but she was too busy watching the city they were flying over. Gabby recognized the capitol, except it seemed more real this time.

  They landed near the steps of Mount Olympus. A hovering white light formed outside the hovership and when Art didn't get out, she knew she was on her own. Gabby hugged him before she got out. The Queen might send her to the Delvers, but she couldn't ignore the courtesy shown to her along the way.

  The light led a different way then she'd come before. It wound through a dark corridor. Goosebumps formed on her arm. The walk was much longer than she expected.

  The way opened into a lush garden. She inhaled the scents of flowers, too numerous to qualify. Gabby ran her fingertips across the magnificent green leaves of a gingko tree. The garden appeared to be on top of a lone mountain, high up in a rocky mountain range with snowcapped peaks. The illusionary view was breathtaking, even though Gabby knew it wasn't real.

  A blush of red appeared amid the green and Gabby knew the Queen approached. Gabby was relieved to see the Queen didn't have a weapon. The reason for the saber had seemed suspect and Gabby had no desire to fight anyone.

  Too tired to kneel, Gabby made a slight bend at the knees. A body-sized nod rather than a kneel. The Queen's eyes carried a heavy weight to them and her lips held back words, but Gabby didn't let her speak.

  "Are my friends okay? I haven't seen them yet and no one will give me word of them."

  The Queen's eyes turned to anger and Gabby steeled herself from flinching, but then she realized the anger wasn't directed at her.

  "I'm sorry," said the Queen, "it wasn't my intention to keep that news from you. Your friends—" The word friend was said with such painful regret that Gabby did a double take. "—are well, though Michael's illness taxes our doctors."

  When Gabby opened her mouth, the Queen held up a staying hand. "I'll let you see them in good time. Even Michael. But that's not why I brought you here."

  Gabby refused to ask the question the Queen wanted her to. Instead she stood as straight and tall as she could, to show she hadn't been bowed.

  The Queen uncharacteristically snorted. She was amused, and chuckled as she shook her head.

  "I can see why the authority figures at Neversoft had such trouble with you."

  "Did Zaela tell you that? Did you torture her for that information?"

  The Queen laughed again. Her eyes filled with such amusement that it temporarily disarmed Gabby.

  "No, she gave it freely. She's talked a lot about you since she came to the Realms."

  "She has?"

  The Queen nodded. Nothing about the visit to the Queen was going as expected.

  "Why am I here?" Gabby blurted out.

  The Queen's lower lip trembled as she looked away into the distance. Gabby had a rush of déjà vu though she couldn't pinpoint what was causing it.

  "So I can ask forgiveness."

  Gabby choked. "Forgiveness?"

  The Crimson Queen turned to her with such need on her face, in her posture, that Gabby was taken aback, but need of what she couldn't tell.

  "Don't you know who I am under this skin? Haven't you figured it out yet? I thought you would have known from the games I chose. I thought it was obvious."

  Gabby shook her head in disbelief as the truth came through like an avalanche.

  "Zaela?"

  The Crimson Queen skin melted away leaving her best friend. Zaela's hands were shaking as she held them out.

  "Will you forgive me?"

  Gabby almost knocked her down as she ran into her arms. "Of course, I will, Z." Gabby couldn't catch her breath. "But why? And how? I don't understand."

  They held each other for a long time and more than once Gabby wondered if this was a lie, too. That the Queen had tricked her, was still playing some game that Gabby couldn't understand. But her gut told her it was Zaela. It smelled like her. It felt like her. Even though it shouldn't be her, under the Queen's skin.

  Eventually Gabby held Zaela at arm's length. "Talk. I can't get this out of my mind that it's still a trick unless you tell me how this happened and why you didn't say anything."

  The girls clasped hands and began walking through the garden. There was a stone path, made meticulously from fitted blocks. Butterflies of every color flitted through the greenery, resting on the soft petals of flowers before returning to the air.

  "It didn't start this way," began Zaela.

  Zaela entered the Realms the same way Gabby had, in a darkness so complete that even thought didn't have substance. Zaela had felt betrayed by the GSA, by LifeGame, and mostly Gabby.

  Zaela dwelled on those betrayals. Feasting on them until they began to fester in her gut. Unlike Gabby, whose time in that space had only lasted less than a day, Zaela had been trapped inside her mind with no indication that she was even alive for over a month.

  During that time, Zaela admitted she thought she'd actually died during Final Raid. That the dragon had killed her upon the altar somehow and that Gabriella, her best friend since always, never came for her.

  A month in the darkness had nearly driven her mad. There'd been a problem at the border. The Southlands and the GSA were working their ways towards war and Zaela and the other losers got stuck in the dispute.

  Zaela described the experience as a forge in which her new identity was hammered. Time had become unhinged in the darkness. No sensory input. Only thoughts without shape slowly feeding back upon themselves like cannibalistic snakes.

  The seed that grew into her eventual hatred was the fight they'd had in the tunnels. To Zaela, Gabby had admitted she'd been manipulating her. Without any other input to deflect her, Zaela replayed that scene a million times, each time seeing other events as reinforcement of that fact.

  Zaela rewrote their friendship in the darkness. Gabby wasn't helping her keep up in LifeGame, but dragging her along so she could push her off the cliff within reach of the goal. A goal that Zaela didn't share, but had been forced to go after.

  And whatever hatred she had developed for Gabby, it was a hundred times that for the GSA. They'd created the system that had allowed Gabby to do that to her. Avony, Administrator Bracket, the Evil Dolls. All of them.

  By the time they finally let her out of the darkness. Zaela was bordering on insanity. Zaela talked about how it took a week just to reteach her how to eat again. Her brain had been rewritten with hate.

  Once she could eat and talk and provide for herself again, the Crimson Queen took her and a few of the others into her Realm. Usually Panner or one of the others of the Pantheon took the newest losers, but her group had been damaged goods. The Queen thought differently and picked them up for a steal.

  The Queen's system tested new members to find what jobs they were best suited for. Zaela was surprised to find herself in an elite group called the Reality Shapers.

  They were the reason the Queen could hold such a large Realm, while the others of the Pantheon held much smaller ones. Keeping track of that many citizens couldn't be done by one person. So the Queen handpicked a select cadre to help manage her empire. Then the Queen only had to keep tabs on her Shapers and let them manage th
e trivial details.

  At the time, Zaela had resisted her role in the Reality Shapers, seeing it as another tool to control, just like the GSA had used LifeGame. But the old Queen broke her resistance, using revenge as the catalyst for the change.

  And once Zaela had started learning how to be a Reality Shaper, she found she was really good at it. Not just good, but the best they'd ever had, rivaling even the Queen.

  Gabby had been letting Zaela talk, but her curiosity got the best of her and she quizzed Zaela about Reality Shaping and how it was done.

  She learned that it was different from what LifeGame did. LifeGame was based on various theories of economics and behavior modification that used incentives to get people to do what the GSA wanted. These were strong, rock-solid incentives, with terrible repercussions for failure, but in the end, the choice to succeed or fail was on the citizen.

  In the Realms, reality was modified to change its citizen's behavior. Zaela used the analogy of a vast hill filled with various terrain. A person could choose to take any path down the slope, but they would tend to pick the easiest path. And she said tend with a smirk toward Gabby and a brief eye roll.

  The job of the Reality Shaper was to manage the terrain. Create the conditions that would end in the desired behavior. The game had been a heavy handed version of that, but it was the same idea.

  Each citizen saw the Realms differently as it was tailored to modify their behavior and Zaela proved so adept the Queen took her as an assistant to help manage the other Shapers.

  Gabby couldn't believe it, despite the evidence of her own experiences. Neural shaping, the art of manipulation in LifeGame, had been one of Gabby's worst subjects and Zaela had been even worse than her. Only Gabby's experiences in Final Raid had given her the proper insight on how to use it.

  The Realms and the GSA differentiated in their approach to manipulation in this way. The GSA wanted their citizens to choose the right way. The Realms took away all other choices until there was really only one left, the one they wanted you to choose.

  The former was all economic theory and behavior science. The later was artistic license and Zaela excelled at art.