Mogworld

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  “What of our world, master?” said Barry, as he circled my body.

  “Well, not much more I can do to fix Mogworld, is there,” droned Si-Mon petulantly. “The mighty Si-Mon is thinking it’s time to salvage what I can and move on to greater things. At least I’ve still got you.”

  “Me, my lord?”

  “Yes, Barry, I’ve decided to bring you with me,” said Si-Mon magnanimously. “You will ascend to a new world.”

  The vicar’s eyes lit up, and he clasped his hands together as his heart swelled with gratitude. “Can it be true?” he asked, choking up. “I will finally be allowed to walk among the gods?”

  Si-Mon hesitated at length, the same way Dub always did when there was something he didn’t want to tell me. “Not exactly. Not walk, anyway. You can’t go in your current body. You’ll take on other forms when I bring you to other . . . other worlds. You’ll have to get on top of some special jobs for your mighty God when you get there.”

  “I am ready, my LORD.”

  “Then we’ll get going as soon as you’re finished here.”

  I was struggling to get up onto my one remaining elbow when a sheet of white fire swept across my body, neatly severing my arm and cleaving through my torso.

  I pulled myself forward with my chin and shoulders. Everything from my sternum upwards came with me, leaving behind half a torso attached to a leg, a spreading puddle of black goo, and a few trailing wobbly bits that belonged inside my ribcage.

  Something flipped me onto my back, and Barry appeared overhead. He put his hands on his hips and clicked his tongue. “Last living thing in an empty world,” he sighed, extending his hand once more. “And you’re not even alive.”

  The blast hit me like a six-ton boulder. I died instantly, and for the last time.

  SEVEN

  I hung in the air above what remained of my body: a steaming patch of dust and slime, splattered against the rock like vomit on the pavement outside a treacle shop. Barry admired his handiwork for a second, then turned to his master.

  “Right, here’s the first thing you can do for your God,” said Si-Mon. “I’m going to move you into something called an ‘intra-net,’ all right? It’s like a really small boring little world. Si-Mon needs you to track down everything to do with ‘payroll’ and ‘security clearance.’ Got all that?”

  “For my LORD, I will seek any bounty.”

  “Right on.”

  A shaft of light extended down to Barry. The vicar held out his arms and began to rise, along with the little entourage of Deleters that were still sticking out of his upper back.

  So that’s it, I thought. Barry’s going to ascend into Si-Mon’s world and help him take over that one, too. About a minute from now, I’m going to come back to life and spend eternity as a two-dimensional stain on the rocks.

  I looked down, and saw something stark and white peering at me from my scorched remains. It was one of my eyeballs, gazing up at me like the concentrated essence of a mistreated puppy dog. It was slightly deflated but unmistakeable: the weird-looking octopus eye that Meryl had given me.

  And then, something seemed to click inside my head, and I felt a great and furious energy flooding me, all the way down to the tips of my ghostly fingers.

  A roar came out of me like a belch of volcanic gas rising from the bottom of an ocean. The Deleters inside Barry all turned to look at me, startled.

  I ran forward and flung myself at him. The part of me that was still coherent expected to phase harmlessly through and was thoroughly humbled when my arms fastened soundly around his waist.

  His Deleters certainly felt my touch. They all began to simultaneously shriek in agony as the first few corrupted bug-Deleters invaded their bodies, causing Barry to clap his hands over his ears.

  I tightened my grip as he continued to ascend. The world flickered out around us, and then we were hurtling at insane speeds along a black tunnel ringed by row upon row of shining queues of Deleters. I bared my teeth, shifted my grip to his lapels and hauled myself up until we were face-to-face.

  “Get off!” he yelled, his voice reverberating oddly. I nutted him in the face as hard as I could. A couple of my tiny Deleters jumped off me onto his nose, and he shrieked like a schoolgirl with a caterpillar down her dress.

  Images rattled across my vision as we plowed through the Deleter universe: meaningless Deleter correspondence, bright colors, and a curiously large number of pictures depicting naked women. That was closer to what I’d always imagined the heavens to be like, but none of them seemed to be enjoying themselves, so I wasn’t sure. While I was distracted, Barry brought his fist down on my astral head, which afforded him nothing but an armful of corrupted Deleters.

  I climbed higher, and grabbed for one of the Deleter heads poking out of his shoulder. My hand closed around it; it was like squeezing a bag of marshmallows wrapped in silk. With an incredibly satisfying ripping sound, I tore the Deleter from his body and cast its limp remains into the darkness.

  Already I could feel myself being dragged back towards the puddle of my own body. I wrapped my legs around Barry’s chest to resist the pull, then sunk my teeth into another Deleter’s face and shook it out of him like a rabid dog.

  My own Deleters were all over him now, and he finally realized that repeatedly punching me was only helping them multiply faster. He tried slapping the swarms away, but only served to spread them to other parts of his body, and more were still pouring out of me at an alarming rate.

  Then Barry stiffened. He began shaking uncontrollably, the same way the corrupted Deleters had. His limbs and chest were swelling and bubbling. Shafts of white light were bursting out of him, like a water bed springing leaks.

  I barely noticed. I kept hitting him and hitting him until we’d gone as far as the tether to my body would allow. I snapped back, detaching from Barry, and all I could do was watch him rocket away into the darkness. I screamed in rage again, an angry dog denied its chew toy.

  Soon, he was a disappearing pinprick of light in the distant darkness. Then he expanded, exploding with a brilliant radiance into a thousand white streamers that rained down upon the void. Then everything was pulling away from me at speed, streaking into oblivion, and I came back to life.

  —

  My vision was confused and blurry. I couldn’t hear at all. I tried to open my mouth to call out, but my mouth wasn’t there. Neither were any of my limbs.

  I tried to move. No response. All I could determine was that my body was a lot less body-shaped than I remembered. It seemed unusually two-dimensional. Puddle-like.

  No, I thought. No, this isn’t fair.

  Only one of my eyes was functioning. I focussed it as well as I could, but it was half-flattened and leaking goo. All I had was a blurry view from a puddle in the middle of an empty wasteland.

  No. NO. This wasn’t the end. It couldn’t be. The universe had played a lot of mean tricks on me but this was crossing the line. Dub, you can’t leave me like this. We had a DEAL. I was PROMISED. You PROMISED it would END. YOU CAN’T LEAVE ME LIKE THIS. YOU SAID YOU WOULD DELETE ME OH GOD PLEASE COME BACK DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE M—

  From: “Brian Garret”

 

  To: All Staff

  Subject: Simon

  When I founded Loincloth it was with the intention to create, not just a great environment for game development, but also a family unit for the greatest talent in the industry. In that respect, as I’m sure you’re all aware, I’ve always liked you all to consider me as a father figure, like the alpha male in a grou
p of lions.

  And as alpha male, it sometimes falls to me to make harsh decisions for the good of everyone, like driving out difficult elements and killing the cubs of any lion who challenges my leadership. And as I’m sure will come as a surprise to you all, I’ve regretfully decided to let Simon Townshend go. I’ve been hearing reports for some time from various individuals of the difficulty Simon’s been having fitting in, but at the time dismissed them as the usual new-job nerves.

  The final straw came when IT informed me that the virus that crashed the entire network last week had been uploaded from Simon’s terminal. For reasons best known to himself he created a virus that forced the main Mogworld server to catastrophically reboot, then transferred the virus to the company intranet. This act also brought to light a number of extremely worrying other actions on his part, including the hacking of security protocols in brazen defiance of his employee agreement.

  So it’s with a heavy heart that I am forced to drive him out of the pride and kill his cubs. I’m sure we all wish him luck in getting over whatever bizarre emotional problems caused him to take these actions.

  Regards,

  Brian Garret

  CEO, Loincloth Entertainment

  —E DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DELETE ME DEL—

  “Sorry sorry sorry,” said Dub. “It took me a while to log back in. It’s okay, I’ve locked you out of your body, now. You won’t go back to it anymore.”

  I looked down sadly at the mess I had become, a lonely island of reddish-black in a featureless ocean of gray stone. “You used me.”

  “Sorry. How many times am I going to have to say sorry? It had to be done. The world was messed up beyond repair. Even without Simon’s influence, the whole no-dying thing was making everyone act weird.”

  “You’re not even the slightest bit regretful, are you?” I wasn’t even angry. Just disappointed, like a schoolteacher admonishing a child for pulling the legs off insects. “Messing around with people’s lives. Forcing them to become something they didn’t want to be, for . . . for fun. For a game.”

  “But don’t you see? We didn’t know.” The total lack of sorrow or any other emotion in his voice made my fists clench involuntarily. “We had no idea you were self-aware.”

  “How could you not know?”

  He paused for so long before he spoke that I wondered if he’d gone away again. “Imagine, like, a toymaker. They make a doll that looks like a person, but they want to make it as realistic as possible. So they put in a metal skeleton exactly like a human one. Then they put in a bunch of leather muscles. They give it rubber organs so it can eat and drink and breathe. They give it fake eyes and a voice that says things like ‘hello’ when it sees someone come in the room. Then they keep adding more and more bits and things for it to say until it looks and acts exactly the same as it would if it were self-aware. Then it actually does become self-aware, somehow. How’s the toymaker supposed to know?”

  I rubbed my astral temple. “Even so,” I said. “You knew I was self-aware when you sent me to make the world blow up. And now they’re all gone. You made me kill the entire world because . . . because it wasn’t working out for you anymore?”

  “It’s not really blowing up the world, it’s more like going back in time to before—”

  “Well, WHATEVER!” I barked, finally raising my voice.

  The sun hung a little lower in the sky, like the head of a sorrowful dog. “Look. I’m really, really, really sorry about everything. We would never have done any of this if we’d known you were self-aware. I promise we’ll never do it again.”

  “You can’t do it again anyway. Everyone’s dead. Or not born yet, or whatever.”

  Another pause, not as long this time. “Well, yeah, but still.”

  “But still what?!”

  “But still. Live and learn, right?”

  I sighed. “Forget it. Just delete me. Get it over with.”

  “Oh yeah. I figured you’d be wanting that now. Ready?”

  “Yes.” The green aura burst into life around me, and panic seized me. “No! I mean no! Wait!”

  The aura went away. “Well?”

  “The first time I died. Properly died. I felt myself ascending to heaven. I saw a wonderful golden place of love and acceptance. So I just want to know. If you delete me, will I go back there?”

  “No,” said Dub, after a sheepish pause. “We didn’t create a heaven.”

  I frowned. “So what did I see?”

  “I dunno. I heard somewhere you can have weird hallucinations when your brain’s dying. Sure it wasn’t one of those?”

  I bowed my head and sighed. “So there’s no afterlife.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  A lengthy silence followed. There wasn’t even any wind to whistle across the hills.

  I looked up. “Thank god for that.”

  EPILOGUE

  doublebill: man I just had to do the hardest thng ever

  doublebill: I had no idae deleting a file could be so heart-braking

  sunderwonder: christ have you read brians email

  sunderwonder: he thinks hes a lion now or something

  doublebill: I am never gona have conversatoins with files I might have to delete again

  sunderwonder: personally im just glad that dickhead is gone

  sunderwonder: never thought dickhead would be a big enough dickhead to totally dick up the build tho

  sunderwonder: trust me to take vacation just when the fun starts

  doublebill: are you even listning to me

  sunderwonder: yeah yeah the npcs became self aware

  doublebill: they knew we were controling them and everythnig

  doublebill: they were trying to figuer out how to stop us

  sunderwonder: yup that’s a pretty textbook defnition of self-awareness

  sunderwonder: what do you want me to do

  doublebill: I think we need to go back to source nd totaly retool the gameplay with all this in mind

  sunderwonder: ok that can be your job

  sunderwonder: i’m going to sit here and eat these chips

  sunderwonder: so you deleted the undead guy yeah

  doublebill: his name was jim and I feel realy bad about it

  sunderwonder: aw

  sunderwonder: don’t cry there’ll be other files

  sunderwonder: anyway wasn’t it what he wanted?

  doublebill: he died thinking he destroeyd his entire world

  sunderwonder: ah

  sunderwonder: so

  sunderwonder: I take it you didnt tell him about the backups

  doublebill: I wasn’t sure how to phrase it so hed understand

  doublebill: anyway that version of him was still goig to be deleted, it wouldn’t have ment anything

  sunderwonder: oh stop moping

  sunderwonder: you give much thought to spiritual matters?

  doublebill: I dont drink

  sunderwonder: you ever h

  sunderwonder: was that a joke

  doublebill: maybe?

  sunderwonder: okay

  sunderwonder: you ever heard the quantum suicide theory

  doublebill: uh

  sunderwonder: it states that a conscious mind can’t be destroyed

  sunderwonder: only moved around to some other world

  sunderwonder: so maybe a part of him will live on

  sunderwonder: in theory

  sunderwonder: this is me humoring you

  doublebill: in that case

  doublebill: I want to do him a favur for the next build

  doublebill: sort of a thank you present

  sunderwonder: do whatever the hell you want

  sunderwonder: as long as it doesn’t take too long

  doublebill: okay I need to think on this

  sunderwonder: what did I just say


  —

  The last of the worn stone steps, the highest point of the dusty beast-haunted mountain trail, clattered ’neath my sandaled foot. Fifty white-robed zealots, thin of build and pale of flesh, reacted with a chorus of astonished shrieks.

  “You!” cried the age-tarnished High Priest, frozen with his sacrificial dagger still glittering in his gnarled hand. “How did you escape from the—”

  With a single heave of my thunderous shoulders, the enchanted sword Killbastard, forged from the dark metals of the mystic East, swept cleanly through his rangy neck. His well-used vocal chords continued to flex and quiver in the act of shaping rhetoric before his body faltered.

  The acolytes panicked at the fall of their infernal master. Some ran, driven to hysterics at the mere sight of my oiled mass. Some came forward, ceremonial knives poised to slash, and fell one by one to Killbastard’s ferocious bite. The blooded flash of its relentless blade sent steady ripples through my leathery muscles.

  Soon, none remained to challenge me. I planted my hewn thighs firmly at the corpse-riddled foot of the forsaken altar, and with two powerful flexes of my chiseled biceps, Killbastard split the chains that bound the flame-coiffed Princess Meryl to the slab. Her pale-skinned form sat upright, causing her jeweled bikini to jangle musically about her alabaster skin, and she stretched her stiffening muscles, pushing out her glorious bosoms in a manner most pleasing to my hungry gaze. She flung her wispy arms around my formidable chestnut-hued torso, staining her glittering outfit with chest oil.

  “O Jim the Mighty!” she cooed. “I never doubted for a moment that you would come!”

  “’Twas a pleasure, matched only by the glory of victory against the . . .” I tailed off, then glanced around, confused. “Does something strike you as off?”