by D Richardson
The world slowed. The snowflakes eased lazily to the ground. The smoke billowed and rolled at a reluctant pace, sluggishly consuming us. A figure in the smoke floated toward the ground, covered by a dozen others. The soldiers were tackling Relce, their hands at his throat.
I didn’t have the spell. I didn’t have the time to reverse engineer it. I didn’t have an option. In my desperation, I ripped open a portal beneath me, a portal to anywhere but here.
I fell in and thumped hard against the sand. Something landed next to me. The smoke poured in, then the portal snapped shut.
Ocean waves, wind in the trees, gulls cawing.
I’ve been here before.
Chapter 47
The Resolution of the Damned
The static rush of the waves against the shore, the wet sand beneath my feet, the frigid water, the smell of pine and salt. The sky was nearly cloudless, infinitely blue that eased imperceptibly into different shades and staring into it was like staring into the past - the past of the stupid girl who spawned here and thought she was playing a survival game.
A fog lifted from my mind, and the absence of the spell brought clarity back into my world. Then, reality returned.
My heart skipped a beat. I almost had him. I did have him. I defeated Smith at his own game, and then I got cocky. This was all my fault. I knew he had tricks up his sleeves, and I should’ve known he would use something like this if he could. I should’ve expected the worse.
And now I’ve lost everything.
Smith had enslaved my army. He killed my player friends. He won the decisive battle and thus the war. What would become of my nation? What would become of my people?
Tears welled up inside me. I was defeated.
Something coughed nearby. It was Willow! She was next to me when the portal opened and must’ve fallen in. She groaned as she pulled herself from the sand.
“Willow,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“What happened?” she asked. “What in the hells happened?”
I shook my head. “We lost. We lost everything. I lost everything.”
“A seduction spell,” she said to herself. “That’s what that felt like. It was charisma-based. Incredibly powerful.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I was stupid. I should’ve—”
“Stop it,” Willow ordered. “It would’ve happened anyway.” She sat next to me in the sand and stared out into the sea. We sat in silence as we caught our breaths. The wind rustled in the trees, and the air was crisp. Her hands were warm in mine. “Now what?” she asked.
“What else is there to do?” I said. “I close the gate now. I can’t allow someone like Smith to continue living in my world.”
“You’re being dishonest,” she said.
“I’m just sad I couldn’t tell my friends goodbye.”
“I already know what happens when you cast it.”
I froze. She wasn’t supposed to know, nobody was. I was hoping to defeat Smith and find the time to think of a way to explain it all. To explain to my friends what had to be done, to maybe have a few more good memories to share before I would disappear from them forever. That was the cost of closing the gate and winning my people’s freedom. It was my life. No amount of mana could ever be enough to cast the spell and to force the simulation to speed up fast enough to be worth it. Even with my near-bottomless well of mana to draw from, I would be spending orders of magnitude more than I could even imagine.
And so it was, that my life would only amount to some twenty years of peace here before the server would reset the lock, slow down the simulation, and we’d be back where we started. I didn’t like the idea of being doomed forever in this endless cycle, and so I had planned to find a better way.
But now I couldn’t.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“We’ve done this before.”
I looked over at her. I wanted to be shocked, terrified, maybe even amazed at this revelation, but I wasn’t. “Is this how it all ended with Lord Gaia?”
She nodded. “In a way, yes.”
“Is there anything I can do differently? Is there no other option? Maybe I can go into hiding and work on more spells. Didn’t I do that before? Certainly, I can try it again. I have to go further. I have to reach higher. It isn’t enough to just lock out the players, I have to—”
“Alex,” she stopped me. “There’s another way.”
I paused and stared into her. “Explain.”
She took a deep breath and stepped away, her feet splashing in the receding water. "You have the spell, don't you? To look into the past of a person."
"Yes."
"And you know you can't look within, to peer into your own past."
"I tried, but it didn't work."
She turned to me and gazed into my soul. "I have seen my own, even the original me, the one from the player’s world."
We stood in silence while the reality of what she said clicked across my gears. "What? How?"
“When a priestess passes on her power, she also gives the knowledge of lifetimes already seen. When I inherited her, I also inherited the knowledge of my own past."
"And mine as well?" I asked.
"Only as far as the first life you've lived here." Her eyes eased across the scene of the shore, dancing along the ridges of the tree line, tracing the clouds and the waves and the skies that reflected off the sea. "And to think you've always started here, as lost and confused as the lifetime before."
"But how can you see into your original life? When I use the spell on someone else, I can't see that far back."
"When the memories race back into your mind, something clicks," she said. "Lifetimes upon lifetimes, experiences upon experiences, all culminating into who you are as an individual. It's easier to remember a dream from the night before than it is to remember one from years ago."
I dropped my gaze in thought. A wave slid up the shore and slipped back, darkening the sand as it soaked through. "So when you absorbed the priestess, your stream of consciousness linked all the way back to your first life in this world. With all that you knew about yourself over hundreds of years, you were able to look beyond - into the life that walked among the players."
"Yes," she said.
"Who were you?"
"A nobody," she chuckled. "From what I can remember, I was just a nurse who worked in a hospital. I liked long walks in the park. My favorite color was brown - of course. I had several boyfriends, and I truly wanted to work in psychology. That was why I agreed to have my mind scanned for the AI development program, to get me closer to those departments."
I stared at her in astonishment. I wanted to ask her all about the life she lived there, more about what she did and who she was and what kind of person she aspired to be and if she was as pretty as the girl staring back at me - but I couldn't, not now, not yet. We both knew what the purpose of all this was. There had to have been a plan buried deep within the original me, something long forgotten that could give me the power to change it all. "How do I get this power? How can I look that far into myself?"
"Inherit me."
The breeze brushed the treetops, the waves slipped up the shore, the air was cold. "No."
"It's the only way."
"No," I demanded. "I can’t do that. I won’t. You're the only one I'm living for. I'm not throwing your life away just to get some kind of—"
"Alex," she stopped me. Her voice was soft yet breaking. Her eyes were tearing up, and the sight of her put a lump in my throat. "This was the entire point. The Seekers, the priestesses, all of it."
I stepped back from her. "I don't understand."
She stepped toward me. "You made us. You created the idea, you gave the original members the spells and the tools to go further beyond. You invented the magic to look into a person's past, and you gave it to the first person you trusted most - the first priestess. The entire point of us wasn't just to support your fight against the players, it was to give back when you needed it mos
t."
"You've given more than I could ever deserve," I said. "This - this is just too much."
"The entire point of a priestess is to give you back the knowledge of your past lives. And when the time comes, if it comes, it is our duty to give you the means to look even deeper." She pierced me with her desperate glare. "Inherit me, find the truth within yourself, and save our people forever."
I trembled at the reality of what I was being asked to do. My eyes watered but I wiped the tears away. I struggled to speak. "Is there no other way? Can I not just lock the gate shut and advance the simulation for another few decades of peace? What would it cost? I’ll just die and respawn and do it all over again."
"You did that last time," she said. "You refused to take in the last priestess, and now we're here again. Unless we do it now, we're dooming ourselves to this over and over and over until you can pull your crybaby head out of your ass."
I dropped into the soft sand and brought my knees to my chest. "But what if I fail? Then your life would've been thrown away for nothing."
"Then don't fail," she said. "And besides," she crouched down in front of me, "I'm not giving you a choice." A word burned into the palm of her hand - coalesce( ).
I turned away, almost ready to vanish and cast the spell to end it all - to abandon her in my selfishness, to force her to lead a peaceful life some twenty years longer for the small cost of a single death. My eyes yanked back into hers - those glistening emerald eyes whose soul reached into mine. I saw our future together, a happiness shared in a peaceful place far from here. She eased over me, into me.
{"In the beginning, I created the heavens and the earth."}
Her soft brown hair dropped over my chest, her warm skin pressed against my own.
{"And so from the dirt and the dust of my simulated world, I breathed life into the first human."}
I breathed her scent and tasted her lips and heard her final words, "I love you."
{"...I needed to remind them. To show them the new world I had crafted for them."}
"Willow," I croaked out.
{"I've made a terrible mistake. I've fallen for one and I let her die."}
"Don't go." I held her close.
{"They're too real. They are real. And no one takes it seriously. Am I truly alone for thinking of them as human?"}
"Please," I cried.
{"This was my fault. All of it. I have doomed these people, my people, to life in a simulated purgatory."}
"I don't want to be alone."
{"They rejected the idea. The world wasn't ready to give them the respect they were due."}
"I love you, Willow."
{"I have failed not only my people, but myself."}
"I'll find a way to bring you back to me. I promise."
{"This world is a testament to my sin. I'll damn myself into this hell I have created. With my death, I shall be born anew. For if there is anyone who should win their freedom, it should be me."}
I stood alone on the shore. The scent of her perfume still on my skin, her warmth against my clothes, her taste on my lips. She was still here, but she was gone from me forever. No. Not forever. I'll dig so deep into the code of the world that I'll yank her out and create her anew. Even if it costs me everything.
And now I have so much more to give.
I remembered it all now. My memories linked along into my previous life as Lord Gaia, then again and again and again. I stood in wide-eyed awe as a trail of deaths, lifetimes, and rebirths flashed in my mind and continued on for hundreds of years until the first me was born on this shore, and then even further.
I was the developer of this world, a snarky gamer nerd who made the game using the simulated worlds, including the AI generator that pulled from human donors - all stripped of identity. How stupid. How terrible. I was a real fuckhead for not thinking that through, and I was a worse fuckhead for locking millions of people into this zoo - this cage. I killed myself and left my copy here to make amends for my mistake. And yet still the people of Stella Vallis rejected the idea of AI rights. But now I knew how to take from them.
I threw out my hands and laughed into the sky like a lunatic.
Polyglot wasn't just designed to teach me the languages of magic, no. Polyglot unlocked the languages of the worlds - the languages they were coded in - and within the MWR, there were thousands of worlds speaking hundreds. This was the core of my plan. This was the purpose of polyglot.
“Player_gate(close).” I am Lady Gaia. I am Mother Earth. I am the world itself. I am the game itself. There was no need for mana anymore.
"Heavens(open)." The portal was infinitely black. A static hum pulsed from within. I stepped out of my world, and into another.
Chapter 48
The Distant Worlds
The metal treads squealed to a stop. The silence returned. The air was cold enough for the soldiers to see their breaths. Through the metal slits, the driver studied the path, waiting for his next order. He turned back to see the commander's legs sticking out from under the hatch.
"So vat are you doing after zis?" the driver asked.
The commander's voice was muffled from outside the tank. "Vat?" He pulled his head back in, letting dust and light pour in. "Vat did you say, Hans?"
"After ze var," Hans said. "After ze fighting, ja?"
The commander shook his head and waved out his hands. "Zis is all ve do, Hans. All ve do is fight." He stuck his head back up the hatch.
Hans shrugged and looked back through the open slit of the driver's port. Dust had gathered there - tan, stale dust uncleaned from their exploits in the North African campaign.
Something caught his eye through the narrow slit. He peered through and stared down the grassy fields of France. In the distance, right before the hedgerows, a lone woman in a white sundress. Hans shook his head at the sight of a stupid civilian caught in a soon-to-be warzone. He turned back to study his fuel gauges.
Yet the thought of her tugged at his mind. She was the first civilian he had seen in years, but why, he thought. He pulled his gaze back through the slit. She was there, standing like a ghost, staring back at him now only some 50 meters away. His eyes widened, his heart stopped. "Uh, Herr Commandant?"
The commander's voice was muffled from above, his sleek black boots facing the other way. "Vat is it, Hans?"
Hans looked again. She was 30 meters away now, unmoving. Was she teleporting? His voice was breaking with fear. "H-Herr commandant? Herr commandant!"
Silence. Hans turned to see his commander's boots facing the right direction this time, frozen in place. The commander eased back down, his face pale. He whispered. "Hans, go zee vat she vants."
Hans was taken aback. He gestured at himself in a panic. "Me? You are ze commandat, you do it."
The commander eased his head to the left, to the right. His eyes wide. "I am ze commandant, and I command you to do it."
Hans shook his head and grunted as he shuffled out of his seat. He picked up his rifle by the strap, squeezed past his commander, and climbed out of the hatch.
The sun was bright. Birds were chirping in a nearby tree. The fresh air felt good against his face, but the sight of this strange woman brought chills up his spine. He hopped off the side of his tank - the fearsome Panzer IV - and rolled in the fall. He gathered himself, brushed off the dirt, and held his rifle close on his approach.
"Eh, hallo? Bonjour?"
The woman said nothing. She only stared.
"Escuse me, madame?"
No reply. Only a faint, haunting smile across her lips.
Hans froze. He was only meters away, and he felt the terror of this strange woman. He feared she might suddenly rip open her mouth and howl in a banshee wail, maybe sprout devil's wings and claws and horns and—
"Hans!" The commander's muffled voice was in a panic. "Ach! Hans, run! Get back in ze tank!"
Hans looked at the tank in confusion, then turned back to the girl. His heart stopped. The woman held a terrible grin, eyes of fire, s
kin bathed in lightning that poured from her like a mist. A buzz, a hum, an eerie blue glow. He couldn't breathe.
"Get back in ze fuckin' tank, Hans!"
He spun on his heels and broke into a sprint. Then the world turned black.
***
"Captain's log - 3729. The Gaylordians have brought their starfleet… to the edge of the solar system. There has been no dialogue… between the players and us but—"
"Captain!" a voice rang out. It was First Mate Janice.
"What is it?" The captain looked up and into the sea of flashing buttons and holograph controls. Beside a terminal stood his First Mate, pointing frantically through the glass. The captain, as dramatically as he would do anything, jolted out of his seat and stood among his crew. Beyond the thick glass was the veil of space, infinite, stars glistening beyond the ring of Saturn. He stepped closer, his crew backing away to give him room and to share the sight of the unbelievable.
There, on the hull of the U.N.S.F Dreadnaught class warship, stood what appeared to be a humanoid woman, her hair and white dress floating freely in the weightlessness, but her feet locked tight against the metal.
"Im-Impossible," he whispered.
They stared breathlessly, uncertain if they had somehow picked up a corpse, or a soon-to-be-dead person, but to their horror, the girl shifted her head in their direction - and smiled.
First Mate Janice whispered back as if the girl outside could somehow overhear. "What do we do, Captain?"
The captain, as he always liked to do, shifted his head around with every other syllable, pausing mid-sentence to create unwanted tension. He spoke with the authority of a king. "There's only... one thing we can do. And that is to... bring her in."
The girl vanished.
The captain blinked, once, twice. Did his eyes deceive him? He looked around the hull, the space around it, yet nothing. Did she float away? His crew shared the sight, each person struggling to search for the missing girl. Beyond the beeps and hums of the holograph terminals, there was silence, then a shrieking alarm.