The Goddess Quest

by Lawrence Ambrose

  "Do you want to spend them in the real world, achieving real things, or in an imaginary world doing pretend things?" her mom persisted.

  Alex sighed. "Mother, you have no idea of what I've achieved in the Verse. No clue about who I am –" She cut herself off. Dangerous territory. If her mom knew who she was in the Verse, a whole new can of controversy would be opened.

  "I think I have a pretty good idea, honey. You're brilliant. You can do anything you set out to do."

  "Really? In that case, I think I'll be a professional gymnast."

  Her mom's face crumpled. Alex almost felt sorry for her. Almost.

  "A circus freak?"

  Cindy sighed. The doorbell rang.

  "Gotta go," said Alex.

  Her expeditious exit was somewhat hindered by her halting rise and stumbling steps away from the kitchen table. But it would have to suffice.

  Brandon was waiting in the cul-de-sac with his Mercedes Benz Sprinter. The wheelchair stand descended and Alex climbed aboard. Brandon regarded her with cool recrimination as she fumbled her way into the front seat beside him.

  "Yeah, I know," she said. "I should've taken Athena out before she got you. Not that you totally were asking for it."

  "But you got the Golden Surfer, I see."

  "Guilty as charged." Alex glanced at his stony face as he spun the steering wheel with one hand, turning the van back toward the front gates. "Come on, Bran, you know the black sidekick always dies. Especially when brags about his BBC."

  "That's really not funny, you know."

  "It is a little funny, isn't it?"

  "Funny like how a big black Verse stud is really a paraplegic in a wheelchair?"

  "Or a big blond Aryan Adonis is really a fucking crippled little girl soon to reside in a wheelchair?"

  Brandon cracked a wispy smile. "You gotta give us one thing: we're masters of dark irony."

  Ahead, the gate opened, and they entered the real world of working peons. Ironic: she and Brandon, children of Omniverse executives, lived in a fantasy world within the real world.

  "By the way," said Brandon, "Athena issued a challenge."

  "Is that right?"

  "I printed it up."

  He handed Alex a piece of paper. She read it aloud:

  "To the blond piece of shit coward who shot me without identification or warning on Santa Monica Boulevard on Monday at 0541 hours, I offer the following proposition: a fair fight at a time and place of your choosing. Conditions: 1) Zeroed out; 2) you reveal who you are, you fucking coward. The stakes: loser pays out 20 KOD – the exact amount you stole from me with the Golden Surfer – and must remain off-world for two weeks."

  Alex smiled scornfully but felt a brief earthquake – a California tremor – at that prospect. Even one day from the Verse loomed like a lifetime to her.

  "Sounds like an easy 20 KOD to me," said Bran. "Plus, taking Athena out for two weeks would cement your legend."

  "I'd prefer marble. More appropriate for a Greek god."

  "Ha."

  "Anyway, what a whiny little bitch. Before you pull a knife on someone or use a death ray, maybe you should take a moment to consider whom you're fucking with?"

  "Good point. Maybe I was asking for it, too, but you won't hear me whining."

  "Still, Bran, I don't see much profit in it. That duel would expose my beautiful avatar to millions. I don't do many competitions but when I do it's nice that many of them don't know what I look like."

  "The boards are already speculating it's you. More than a few have seen your blond god in action. Along with his dashing Nubian sidekick."

  "Let 'em speculate."

  They entered the parking-hostile maze that was the UC Jefferson campus. Luckily, Brandon's handicap pass was a magic key that opened a lot of doors, spaces, and gates. They stopped in front of the computer science building.

  "See you in two," said Brandon.

  "I'll be waiting."

  She stepped onto the wheelchair lift. Some passing students glanced at her as it lowered her to the ground. Must've been a little confusing seeing a standing person on the lift sans wheelchair. Soon enough, she wouldn't be so confusing – rolling about in a wheelchair of her own – but for now, she didn't even use an arm brace. She had to credit her health-obsessed mom: at a minimum, her awful diet kept Alex slim. Always an advantage with a warped spine and wobbly, disobedient muscles.

  Kelly Muller joined her in the hallway en route to the Development Center – the newly minted educational facility for all serious game-designers and perhaps the most popular class on campus: Advanced Game Story Design, taught by one of the "Founding Fathers" and premier programmers of the Omniverse, Inc. team, Wendell Martin. It was a popular class in a popular program. That didn't mean many people either passed the course or made it through the program. It didn't help that Wendell Martin totally sucked as a teacher. He often seemed remote and out of it and prone to incomprehensible explanations. But Alex liked that about him. It discouraged the dilettantes.

  Kelly Muller was a cute little dingbat-nerd, Alex thought, and often discouraged by her mediocre performances in the class. Her antidote was to tell herself how "empowered" she was to be a female in a man's world. Alex, on the other hand, thought "empowered" was perhaps the stupidest adjective human beings had ever invented. Why artificially encourage someone when the real achievers didn't need encouragement? Let the drowsy drop off, as Nietzsche said.

  "Did you understand the assignment?" Kelly asked her. "Did you know what he meant when he said 'score the story'? I thought he meant relating leveling to the plot, but you saw how he wouldn't answer when I asked him in class."

  "I think he meant rating developments within the story itself," said Alex. "But who knows? I doubt he even knows what the fuck he means half the time."

  "I've been wondering about that." Kelly laughed a little uncertainly. "So...what did you do with your story?"

  "I 'scored' it as completely kickass."

  "Ha. Seriously."

  "I am serious."

  They entered the class. Wendell Martin, the balding gnome, was leaning against his desk, arms folded across his chest, looking half-asleep as a male student spoke to him. From his expression, the student wasn't getting anywhere. Martin flipped a hand as if shooing a fly, and the student walked away, hunch-shouldered and red-faced.

  While Kelly dropped down in a nearby seat, Alex moved forward, taking her usual position at the front of the class, which her classmates studiously avoided. Brandon would be joining her soon. Professor Martin unfolded his skinny arms and sat up straighter, his eyes flicking in her direction before returning to his open laptop. His clean-shaven face, matching his hairless skull, was strangely unlined. She knew he was seventy-something but he could've been fifty. After the class settled in, his eyes rose and appeared to focus on Alex. Was he reading her story on the laptop? Or was he wondering why she was the only one who regularly sat in the front row directly in front of his podium desk?

  "The Theory of Recursive Entanglement," Martin addressed the class without preamble, gesturing to a Mandelbrot fractal image appearing on the screen behind him. "That was what we came up with, of necessity, because nothing short of a theory that demonstrated how the near-infinite and disparate elements of the so-called 'internet of things' could communicate and share their truths..."

  The Theory of Programming Everything, Alex thought. The same kind of Holy Grail physicists had been pursuing since some tortured soul had dreamed up the idea of uniting all truths. Men like Wendell Martin and the other two Omniverse founders, Glenn Willers and Brian Thompson, were happy to chase their tails on such philosophic canards. At this point, out of the game for over a decade, Martin probably had nothing better to do.

  Not to say that he and his buddies weren't masters of the universe. Literally, in the case of the Omniverse. But Alex didn't have time to waste pursuing endless enigmas. This class and Wendell Martin offered her the hope of finding a doorway into the Verse's ultimate power
center – a place where she might exercise true editing control over the game itself for the short time she had left.

  Brandon Morse rolled in beside her. His thin smile and arched eyebrow asked if he'd missed anything. Her droll look answered "No."

  Martin tapped his laptop and an excerpt of someone's homework paper appeared on the screen. The student had simplemindedly inserted a score on a scale of one to one hundred every couple of paragraphs. He or she was humble – or perhaps aware of their simpleminded interpretation of the assignment – awarding her story seventy to seventy-five on the pages shown.

  "Thoughts?" asked Professor Martin.

  "Epic fail," Alex muttered.

  "Did you wish to comment, Ms. Mills?"

  Alex sighed. She hadn't meant to speak out loud. "No, Professor Martin. I think the pages speak for themselves."

  Perhaps it was her imagination, but she thought the faintest suggestion of a smile graced the legendary programmer's face. Time passed. Experience strongly indicated that volunteering answers or comments, particularly if the volunteer attempted to appear clever, rarely earned a positive response from their so-called teacher.

  "No comments?" He didn't sound disappointed. "Then we'll move on."

  More excerpts from student papers followed. Most were improvements over the first but fell short of anything Alex found insightful. Then one story treated its plot elements as leveling up or down and its sentences as rating scores. Brandon, she thought. One of the ideas they often discussed. But neither the teacher nor his class offered any comments on his paper or its predecessors.

  The images ceased. Martin leaned back in his seat and surveyed the class with eyes that appeared to see everyone but focus on no one. An uneasy silence grew uneasier. Alex exchanged a thin smile with Brandon. The leading theory among the students was that Professor Wendell Martin enjoyed fucking with them. Her theory was that he didn't give a fuck about them. Or most of them. He was on record in an interview from the early years of the Omniverse saying "Ten percent of humanity runs the show. The rest are there to applaud." Also: "Most people are a waste of DNA. My only interest is in those who aren't."

  Alex wasn't sure when Martin's silence ended or if it did. The lack of sleep and sheer boredom caught up with her and she drifted away. The next thing she knew, Brandon was tapping her arm, and the students behind them were shuffling out. Martin was staring at her with his flat, reptilian gaze.

  "A word, Ms. Mills," he said, so softly that for an instant she wondered if she imagined it.

  Alex focused on the muscles in her legs and lower back. Body don't fail me now. It was always an awkward moment when she stood up after a long time sitting. Would she spaz out or fall on her face? Much worse than emerging from her AFIRM unit because her motions in virtual reality stimulated her muscles even if her limbs barely twitched. A nice selling point to her reluctant parents.

  But her body held up, and she walked to Martin's desk with a minimum of ungainly shuffling while Brandon stayed behind. Martin looked up at her with a mild frown. Was he going to ask if she was okay? She doubted he had any knowledge of her condition or any interest in discovering it.

  "Your idea of direct ongoing feedback between the players and the game," he said. "Interplay between the player and the game, including the sims, utilizing not only verbal, body and facial cues but also direct contact with gamers' physiological responses that are already monitored in most VR rigs. A kind of ongoing peer-review of both the game and its actors. I found it intriguing."

  Be still my wimpily beating heart. Alex relaxed a little. Perhaps too much since a sudden wobble caused her right hand to lash out and grip one edge of the table. She held on and shifted her body to make it appear she was just casually leaning.

  "Of course," said Professor Martin, "we've been incorporating player feedback into the design from the beginning, and have hired bestselling and critically acclaimed novelists to create storylines on many occasions. Omniverse has several on contract as we speak. But we've never attempted a direct physiological interaction between avatars and sims."

  Alex tried to forget that one of the richest and most successful men on the planet – a co-creator of her beloved Omniverse – was actually taking her ideas seriously. Even complimenting her. Just another conversation with another dude, she told herself.

  "I was thinking of an analogy to Google's AlphaZero," she said. "Just as you were when you created AlphaOmega. AlphaZero became the best machine chess player in history by playing against itself rather than analyzing grandmaster games. If the Omniverse could be programmed to incorporate massive amounts of feedback as it occurs, rather than consider a few comments that gain the developers' attention after the fact, the system should be able to learn just as AlphaZero did. That's my theory, anyway."

  "A great deal of reprogramming would be required." Martin leaned back in his chair, examining a spot on the ceiling high overhead. "Though we're already physically monitoring the many users whose units have safety protocols."

  "That would give you one big-pipe connection. Expression-recognition programs would fill in a lot more. And you wouldn't need that many people's data to achieve a large effect. Even a small percentage of users' data would be enough to create a snowball effect, wouldn't it?"

  Martin rubbed his thick, weirdly rubbery lips.

  "Interesting," he said. "Interesting indeed."

  Wendell Martin's gaze drifted downward with the lazy gravity of a descending butterfly until it settled on Alex. It was the first time she'd ever experienced the full weight of his stare. Maybe the first she'd ever seen his pale blue eyes focus on anything.

  "You're only a couple of months from graduating in this program?"

  Alex tried to stifle her surprise that this man would've taken the time to learn that. They'd never had any personal interaction with him until now. "With any luck."

  "And after that? What are you looking to do?"

  She forced a shrug, glancing back at Brandon. Her friend's face brimmed with unexpressed questions.

  "I was hoping to work for your company," she said.

  "Ah."

  "Why do you ask, Professor Martin?"

  "I was curious."

  No shit. Alex wanted to ask him to elaborate, but a wave of fatigue was threatening to upend her, and she could sense the professor starting to tune her out. And she was running late for her physical therapy appointment.

  "Thank you, Ms. Mills."

  Dismissed at last. "Goodbye, Professor Martin."

  She and Brandon headed out of the lecture room. Alex made a pretense of pushing his wheelchair when in fact she was using it as a walker – something she'd taken up doing of late. Brandon obligingly throttled down his chair's electric motor to match her wobbly pace.

  "What was that about?" he asked her when they entered the hallway. "He actually looked approving. I don't think I've ever seen that."

  "He asked me about my paper. He seemed to like my idea of a direct connection between players and sims."

  "Your idea of incorporating immersion module data into the game?"

  "Yeah. Along with facial, body, and verbal cues in-game."

  Brandon nodded. "A great idea, if they could find a way of programming it into the Verse. Pretty monolithic undertaking, I'd say."

  "Maybe. But OC is already monitoring a massive amount of users' physical data through the safety protocols in most modern rigs. And as I said to Professor Martin, we wouldn't need anything close to full user-compliance to achieve a big effect."

  "True..." Bran frowned in thought for a few moments. "One sim would react, and then others would react to it...sort of a domino effect."

  "That's what I said to Wendell Martin."

  "What did he say?"

  "'Interesting.'"

  Brandon smiled and nodded. "So that's where he left it?"

  "Well, he did ask what I was planning to do after graduation."

  "Really?" Brandon craned his head to look back at her. "Jeez, did he offe
r you a job?"

  "No. Just said he was curious."

  "He didn't say anything else?"

  "Not really."

  They rolled to a stop in the lobby. A few students were lounging in the chairs, talking softly. A few polite glances at the "odd couple" that didn't linger. Alex released the wheelchair and slumped into the nearest chair with a world-weary sigh.

  "You know if Wendell Martin decided to put in a good word for you," Brandon said quietly, "what that would mean."

  "A great-paying job at Omniverse?"

  "Yeah, something like that."

  "I could help develop products or story lines or maybe both." Alex yawned.

  "That's what everyone in his class and every game-programmer in the world dreams about. Because it's, you know, a dream job."

  "Funny, because I haven't spent much time dreaming about that."

  "I know, A. But then unlike you, most of them don't want to rule the world."

  "Not a world, Bran." Alex's smile was as hard and cool as the air-conditioned walls around them. "A universe."

  Chapter 2

  "MY ANONYMOUS ASSAILANT HAS so far refused to respond to my challenge, confirming that he is the pathetic coward we all assumed he was."

  Alex paused before continuing to read the message on the Challenge Board, sucking in her breath, knowing from Brandon's text what Athena would be saying next.

  "Many of you have speculated that this piece of dung is Dionysus35567. The Dionysus of legend – winner of countless challenges and discovery awards – the one who solved the Seattle Mysteries and the first who successfully navigated the Isles of Dawn. I say these are the lies of jealous haters and losers who live to take down the best among us.

  "To silence these loudmouths, I call on Dionysus35567 to confirm that he was not the one who ambushed me on Hollywood Boulevard on Wednesday, May 17, at 0541 hours. I fully expect he will do that at his earliest convenience to put a halt to these libelous rumors."