That had been Thaddeus’s fate. An unfamiliar twinge of guilt pricked at me, which didn’t make a lot of sense, because I definitely wasn’t going to blame myself for what had happened to him. He should have rethought his rather confrontational approach to danger around the time his arms were being torn off—
I stumbled. Crawling with one arm paralyzed and one foot missing had proved too difficult. I lost my balance, fell forward and heard my stump knock loudly upon the partition wall.
I lay on the ground, trying to keep perfectly still. Silently, my face buried in carpet, I began to pray. Dub-us, I thought, as clearly as I could. If I’m doing all the legwork the least you can do is pull a few strings on your end. Please make it so that he didn’t hear that.
A second passed.
Another second passed.
The third one was interrupted by the partition wall above me bursting outwards in a singing white fireball, followed by a brief shower of wooden fragments and body parts. I flattened myself down as well as I could and wriggled out of the way. Dub-us’s claim to One True God status was starting to look as shaky as Si-Mon’s.
Barry was sending out more magic bolts haphazardly, snarling in frustration with each one. He’d lost me again. I scuttled around a corner, and saw the door barely yards away. Unfortunately all the furniture and partitions around it had already been destroyed, so getting to it would mean stepping out into plain view.
I edged forward and peeked out from around a sizzling waste paper basket. Barry was facing the other way, indiscriminately blasting his way through former pirates and Yawnbore residents. I carefully pulled myself onto my feet, not taking my eyes off him. I had to make my move now and hope he didn’t turn around.
I began to tip-toe my way across to the door. Ten yards to cover. Then, eight. Seven. Don’t let him turn around. Dub-us, this is your chance to redeem yourself. Plenty of desks over there I could be hiding behind, Barry, no need to turn around. Four yards. Don’t turn around. Don’t turn around. Don’t turn around, you bastard. Don’t . . .
It was probably the “bastard” that jinxed it. He turned around.
I froze, a full yard from the door. His magic-spurting hand slowly came forward again, with the cold, callous deliberation of a hunter aiming his crossbow at a startled deer.
I raised my arm, instinctually responding to his long-distance high-five. Both our lips moved rapidly, framing the magic words of our respective trades. I screwed my eyes shut.
I heard the sound of magic crackling through the air, and I waited for the prickly hot sensation that would be the last thing I felt before my nervous system was reduced to a smear on the nearby wall. When I realized I was still in one piece, I opened one eye.
A very bewildered bunny rabbit was levitating in the center of the room, paw still outstretched in a vague casting gesture.
SIX
My body was getting more and more damaged, but I could still move quickly when I had to. It seemed like one moment I was at the door with my hand around the knob, and the next I was on the other side, pinning it shut with my back.
The room beyond was perfectly spherical, and I was standing on a narrow bridge about half-way up it, terminating in a circular platform in the dead center. The curved walls were the source of the glow I’d seen from outside. They were divided into a grid, and each illuminated square displayed a region of the world, viewed from above. I recognized Lolede City, its tired populace shuffling through their daily lives, indifferent to the oppression of Barry’s zealots; the people of Applewheat eagerly pillaging each other; the rubble and sand that remained of Yawnbore dotted with new signs promising the future construction of a spa and religious retreat. There was a view of two circular step pyramids side by side that I think were in Anarecsia. It was like a digest of civilization for some cosmic voyeur. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I’d found Dub’s machine.
I’d been in the room for a full second, now, and the time I had bought was ticking away fast. Behind me, I heard the ominous sound of a rabbit adorably pawing the other side of the door.
The machine itself was disappointingly small. It looked vaguely like magitechnology, but none I’d ever seen. It was a small, rectangular black window, floating a few feet off the ground, attached by a thin wire to some kind of flimsy console. It seemed to be emitting the loud, continuous rattling sound I’d been hearing since I arrived. The screen was displaying a single word in glowing white letters.
COMMAND?
I took a closer look at the console. It was rectangular and almost completely covered in buttons. Most of them were labeled with numbers or letters of the alphabet, while the rest bore strange symbols that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. I pressed one of the lettered buttons, and the same letter appeared on the screen below the first word. All right, this seemed self-explanatory.
“Delete me,” I spelled out. It took an achingly long time, because for some reason the gods had laid out the letter-buttons in some stupid, unintuitive order that had nothing to do with any alphabet I knew.
I waited for a response, but none came. I started rapidly pushing buttons at random, painfully aware that Barry’s bunnymorph wouldn’t last much longer, and eventually provoked a reaction from the machine.
FILE NOT FOUND: ‘me’
I looked fearfully back at the door when I heard furniture crashing again. Barry had changed back. He would be disoriented from the transformation, so he probably hadn’t guessed I was in here yet. But it was only a matter of time, and there couldn’t have been much left to destroy out there.
I tried another tack. “Who are you,” I wrote.
SYNTAX ERROR: UNKNOWN COMMAND: ‘Who’
This was going nowhere. I had no idea who was on the other end of this screen, but there was no getting through to them this way. What had Dub said? I had to spread the corruption from inside myself to the machine. The same way I’d spread it to Drylda when I was . . .
“Dead,” I recalled. “I have to be dead for it to work.”
I looked around. I could hear holy magic being cast very close to the door, and the occasional solid object being hurled against the wall. I considered throwing myself off the bridge, but the fall might not have been deep enough to kill me, and there was no way back up.
I glanced desperately around before my gaze returned to the door. I jogged on the spot for a moment, psyching myself up, then bowed my head and ran at full pelt into the doorknob.
Now I had a big dent in the top of my head and the room appeared to be mounted on a giant malfunctioning merry-go-round. Dying had always been a lot easier when I’d had a convenient necromancer’s tower, or obliging psychopath. I got up, narrowly avoided falling off the walkway, then staggered forward again for another go.
Barry must have kicked the door open a split-second before I hit it. There was a sound like splintering wood mingled with the sound of a boot stamping on a bowl of cornflakes, and I died.
—
My body went one way and my soul another. I looked down at my increasingly damaged body hanging precariously off the walkway. Then I turned back to the machine, and my astral jaw dropped.
The room was suddenly a lot more crowded, and not just because of the addition of Barry. Tiny deleters were pouring steadily from the top of the screen machine, expanding rapidly into full size as they emerged. With mindless professionalism each split off in turn and flew smartly into one of the glowing windows, heading off to deliver unwanted resurrections like a flock of poorly-briefed storks.
The dead world was still flickering back and forth between the normal gray and the disquieting green-lines-on-black. In the former, the machine looked like a screen and a panel of lettered buttons. But in the other, it was a hovering sphere of white light, like the cue ball from God’s billiard table.
I heard a chittering sound, and looked down at my hands. The unwholesome-looking tiny Deleters that crawled in the hundreds over my astral form were getting excited. They fought each other to clim
b to the very outlying tips of my fingers and reach out their little insectile limbs towards the machine.
As I floated towards the center of the chamber, a few of the busy Deleters brushed past me, unconcerned. Some of my little companions took the opportunity to leap off me onto one of them. I watched in horror as the tiny Deleters reproduced madly, spreading themselves over their infected cousin as it twitched and shuddered in voiceless agony. I almost pitied the thing. And it made me wonder what, exactly, I was preparing to unleash.
I reached my hand towards the screen, but something stopped it. A few of the Deleters in the room had stopped to watch me, and the astral energies of resurrection were tugging at my limbs. Barry was in the middle of nudging my body off the walkway.
Gritting my teeth, I summoned all the strength I had, hurled myself against the Deleters’ inexorable pull, and saw my astral hand pass through the machine. Only for a moment, but long enough for my bug-Deleters to jump off and start breeding. The screen went blank, then began to flash the word ERROR over and over again before coughing out one last handful of twitching, crippled Deleters like a glob of tuberculotic phlegm.
Barry froze when all the windows on the walls simultaneously whited out. His head snapped around in time to see the screen fill with a storm of punctuation marks. All the Deleters that remained in the room were convulsing madly, including the ones growing out of Barry’s back.
“Oh, you little . . .” he began.
I couldn’t resist the pull any longer. I was yanked off my astral feet just as my body slid off the walkway and onto, then into, one of the flashing windows. Barry, frantically pressing the lettered buttons, either caused the following explosion or failed to prevent it.
Then I came back to life.
—
I returned to my body just in time to land heavily on something hard, roll down an incline and come to rest sprawled on my back.
I was in the real world again. The windows in that spherical chamber had apparently been some kind of magical teleport. The sky was a healthy blue and the morning sun shone down on me with oblivious good cheer. But sooner or later I was going to have to sit up and spoil it all by finding out where the hell I was.
I sat up.
I was in the middle of a featureless plain of smooth, unweathered rock, rising and dipping in perfectly curved hills and valleys. There weren’t even any cracks or jagged edges to liven the place up. Nothing but a desert of lifeless stone, contoured like a collection of upturned bowls covered by a sheet.
I took a moment to survey the damage from my landing. My left arm had been paralyzed for a while, but now I couldn’t persuade the fingers of my right arm to move, either, nor my right leg. A few sections of my skull shifted whenever I moved my head, making me see marvelous colors. If I was going to be stuck in this body much longer, I was definitely going to have to look into a long-term repair solution when I got back to civilization.
But in what direction did civilization lie? I dragged myself to the top of a shallow knoll but saw only the same wasteland stretching to the horizon in all directions. Where the hell was I? I ran through the possibilities, and none of them seemed to fit. There weren’t enough sheep for it to be Garethy, nor enough wayside inns for Lolede. Anarecsia was covered in jungle. And you’d never find a clear, smokeless blue sky in the Malevolands.
“Oh,” boomed the sun. “You’re still here.”
I spun around, which was a mistake, because I lost my balance and rolled back down the slope. “Whuh?” I said.
“Sorry. I guess it’s because you were in the debugging suite when the server crashed.”
“Dub?” The voice was virtually identical to Si-Mon’s. “What happened?”
“You did it,” he said. His voice seemed to be coming from the entire sky. “You crashed the server. There was a hard reset and Si-Mon’s encryptions were removed. I’ve got my admin status back.”
It was definitely Dub’s brand of thoughtless gobbledygook language. “What?!”
“Oh, sorry.” A pause. “Your corruption spread to the very building blocks of the world. The key to Si-Mon’s control was erased, and my holy power is restored.”
“Where am I?”
Another long pause. “You wanted to get deleted now, right?”
“Just tell me where I am!”
Wherever his actual physical body was I felt certain that his godly foot was awkwardly stirring some heavenly dirt. “You’re. You’re in Lolede. The middle of Lolede City, actually.”
I took a good, long, look around before replying. “Where is everything?”
“Okay. Don’t get mad. The thing is, Simon did a lot of damage and I didn’t think I’d be able to fix much of it straight away. So in order to remove all the stuff he did we had to remove a few other things too.”
My eyes narrowed. “How many other things?”
“Well. Everything. Except you.” A lingering pause ensued. “Probably everything. There might still be some things left, haven’t checked yet. Looks like everything. Let me know if you see anyone.”
“Everyone’s gone except me?” I said. I wondered if there was a word that meant “ironic, but in the most hysterically brutal and unfair way.” “Can you bring them back?”
“No. Sorry. No. What we’ve done is basically turn the clock back to the beginning of time. This is the rock layer before we added water and life and all the other bits, so we could start getting the actual gameplay together.”
A cold and terrible realization washed over me like an acidic tidal wave. “We?”
“Well,” began the sun. “Oh shit brub.” Then it vanished.
“So now you know,” said Barry.
I spun around, losing my footing again and falling on my arse. He had materialized about twenty feet away, above a neighboring hillock, still floating and still crackling with magic and indignation.
“Tell me something,” he continued. His voice was calm but the rest of him was shaking. “Was Si-Mon’s vision of the world so terrible? Was it so abhorrent you couldn’t even bring yourself to raise your objections in a mature, civil fashion—you just had to run off and smash it all to bits? What are you, five years old?”
“I didn’t know this would happen!”
He snorted. “Then you were played for an idiot. But that’s what they do, isn’t it? That’s what they’ve been doing to us since the beginning of time. LORD Si-Mon told me. This is the Truth that I was trying to make people like you understand. The LORD was the only one of their kind with the decency to tell us.”
I was still half lying on the ground in a position of total vulnerability, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. “Tell us what?”
“How much do you think you know about it all? Really? About the Infusion and the angels and the Syndrome? That fifteen years ago these all-powerful celestial beings descended from on high, stopped anyone from dying, and started possessing adventurers on a twisted whim? Is that what you think?”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes, it’s true, but it’s only half of the Truth. I believe your friend just gave you a rather large clue as to the other half.”
The horrible thought I’d had earlier appeared in the back of my throat. I laboriously spat it out. “They created us.”
“Precisely.” He was pacing back and forth at around eye level as he spoke. “They created us, our planet, everything in it and the entire history of our species so that they could one day use it for their entertainment. All our evolution has been guided from the very beginning towards making our world perfect for adventuring. That’s it. That’s the meaning of our existence.” His sickly grin didn’t seem to have anything to do with his regretful eyes. “Incidental characters in someone else’s quest, that’s all we’ve ever been.”
It was all true. I knew that instantly. It was like I’d spent my whole life being followed around by a man making obscene gestures behind my back, and now I’d finally turned around and caught him with his tongue out and his
middle fingers up.
“Oh,” I said.
Barry scowled. “I used to spend hours pondering the meaning of life. I had so many theories. Until Si-Mon gave away the twist ending. After that, I had nothing left. The only thing left to do was start telling the Truth to everyone else.”
“You bastard,” I said, without passion.
He hung his head. “Yes. I’m the bastard. I’m the villain. But I couldn’t be the hero, could I?” He glanced around at the empty landscape. “It was better than nothing.”
I was too lost in thought to see him waggling his fingers. A holy blast sent me into a ragged backflip, throwing me onto my face. I slowly and laboriously lifted my head to see that my left arm was missing, along with a football-sized chunk of attached torso.
“There you are, Barry,” came the voice of Si-Mon, as I struggled to wriggle away from the vicar. “Your God has been looking for you.”
“My LORD,” said Barry, falling to his knees in mid-air. “It’s gone, my LORD. Everything. Except this . . . creature.”
“What did he do to the build? The debug logs don’t make any sense.”
“I regret that I have failed You, O Si-Mon,” went Barry, averting his eyes and clasping his hands. “He inflicted his corrosive essence before I could stop him.”
“Smooth move, dipshit,” said Si-Mon to my motionless form. “Dub put you up to this, right? This is exactly the sort of thing he’d do, the big baby. I’ve locked him out again. You’re at the mercy of Si-Mon’s judgement now.”
“Just delete me,” I whispered. “Please.”
“Hardly seems to matter, now, does it?” said Si-Mon, as Barry glanced at him hopefully. “There’s nothing left for you to corrupt.”
“Does that mean I may deal with him as I see fit, my LORD?” he simpered.
“You may, my faithful servant.”
Instantly I was pulled off the ground by invisible puppet strings until I was dangling from my head with my remaining limbs splayed out. Barry put his head on one side and considered me, like an artist debating what size brush to employ. I felt the stitches and tendons in my hip strain against the invisible force for a brief moment, then my right leg was torn from its socket with a sickening meaty squelch. Barry threw it away like a chicken bone and slammed the rest of me back into the ground. A little part of my mind was trying to make me move, to resist, but what the hell did it think I could do? Run away? To where?
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