The Goddess Quest

by Lawrence Ambrose

  "Thanks," she said.

  "You don't usually get dressed up like that."

  "It's a new, fabulous me."

  They had parked in a "scenic turnout" overlooking one of Brandon's favorite places – Lake Berryessa, a few miles outside the peculiarly non-descript mini-city of Winters. Alex wasn't sure why Bran liked it so much. Seemed like a shithole to her, with its scraggly trees, piss-christened trails, and the kind of people who christened trails with piss. But Brandon liked the area near the dam, where a spillway funneled excess water into the creek below. For some reason, he claimed, it made him feel better about his life. Maybe, she thought, because Lake Berryessa sucked?

  "But how do you get the drink ingredients when the government's destroyed them?" Bran spoke up. "That's the fifteen million dollar question."

  "The ingredients aren't that esoteric," said Alex. "Might take a little research, but I shouldn't have any trouble locating them."

  "You're sure about the exact proportions?"

  "Four drops of cinnamon essential oil. Tablespoon coconut sugar, organic. A half-cup of juiced orange, blackberries, and beets, all organic, I would assume. Stir and serve with ice."

  "I think I'd barf if I drank that."

  "I'm more used to that crap than you are. Though I doubt it would matter if I heaved."

  "One sip would do it?"

  "I'd guess just a sip, but I plan on draining the glass."

  Brandon leaned over the railing, frowning down at the whirlpool-like spillway. Alex thought she spotted a fish slipping down its side, riding a thin stream of water. Bran frowned.

  "What?" she asked.

  "I don't know. I was just thinking..." He gave an uneasy shrug. "When you make that drink...everything will change."

  "Everything?"

  "The Parallel Worlds. Your life." He coughed into one hand. "Mine. You know, because we're friends."

  "Yeah, I know. I've been thinking the same thing. But I read somewhere – maybe Chicken Noodle Soup for the Soul? – that change is good."

  "I would never trust a book with a title like that."

  Alex laughed. A muscle car rumbled up and stopped next to Bran's van. Three scruffy men, maybe early-twenties, scrambled out and slouched against the railing. One dude crumpled a beer can and tossed a can toward the lake. It bounced off a boulder and rattled down the cliff into the canyon.

  "Asshole," Alex muttered.

  The three men turned as one to face them, eyes travelling up and down Alex's body, their faces growing scornful as they noted Brandon sitting painfully poker-faced in his wheelchair.

  "What did you just say?" asked a skinny guy with a cocky smile and a half-assed goatee.

  Alex raised her voice. "I said asshole."

  Bran grunted a warning at her side. "Alex..."

  "That's not very polite," said the dude. The others straightened up and moved to his side, their menacing expressions seconding the sentiment. "Maybe you should apologize?"

  "You're right. I'm sorry I didn't say 'fucking douchebag.' Asshole lacks gravitas."

  The three men stepped toward her. Alex moved away from Brandon, creating a safe space between them, her right hand snaking around her right hip. She felt powerful, like a cougar tensing its haunches – or a cobra coiling to strike. More powerful than she could ever remember feeling in the Real.

  She could see it unfold: they kept approaching, the nine rising smoothly in her hand. Pop, pop, pop! Compact, bloody holes sprouting in their knees. Their terrified screams of pain. Dropping to the asphalt, hugging themselves into fetal positions. Crying for their mommies. She smiled.

  The men stopped. Two of them exchanged puzzled, wary looks. One of them took a step back. They could sense the danger. She could see it in their eyes.

  "Whatever, bitch," the half-assed bearded dude mumbled, backing off.

  Straining to appear in no hurry, when their stumbling footsteps revealed they were, the men scuttled back into the car and screeched off with smoking tires.

  "Fuck," whispered Brandon. "What the hell were you thinking?"

  "I was thinking I didn't want to be fucked with."

  She turned back to him. Brandon's eyes riveted to her right hip.

  "What do you have under that shirt?"

  "I thought you'd already discovered that."

  He rolled closer, a fierce scowl forming. "Jeez, A! You're carrying, aren't you? You went and goddamn did it! You bought a gun!"

  "Maybe I'm just happy to see you?"

  "I can't believe it. I can't believe you did it!"

  "Is it so hard to believe?"

  "I know you can be a little over-the-top sometimes, but not fucking self-destructive. Those guns got to be illegal. No way did you have time to buy them otherwise."

  "Please don't get your panties in a bunch. It's not appealing on a macho black dude."

  Brandon slammed his forearm down on the arm of his wheelchair, startling Alex into taking a step back.

  "This is not a goddamn joke, Alexandra." He only called her that when he was truly pissed. "Remember what I said about you being a gunslinger in the Verse? About being conditioned in VR to respond with violence? That's why it wasn't a good idea for you to arm yourself here?"

  "I vaguely remember you running on about that."

  "You were itching to blow those guys away, weren't you? You wanted them to come at us, to give you the excuse. Right?"

  Alex turned from him to scowl down at the lake. She hated it when he was right about her – and the rightness was unflattering.

  "It's not about the law or how much California hates the Second Amendment, A," Bran continued. "It's about you. You're powerful in the Verse, an elite kicker of asses, and we both know part of you longs to be that way in the Real."

  "Gosh, maybe you should trade your computer science major for a psychology degree?"

  "I'm serious, A. Please get rid of that gun – bury it somewhere, drop it in a garbage dumpster, melt it down – before you do something you'll live to regret."

  "You can take my gun from my deadly, prying fingers."

  "I believe it's 'pry my gun from my cold, dead fingers.'"

  "Either way."

  "Alex, I'm begging you."

  "Really? Will you fall to the ground and prostrate yourself before me?"

  "If that's what it takes. And thanks for not asking me to prostate myself."

  They both cracked smiles. Alex's smile drifted away as she resumed contemplating the lake.

  "There's something I haven't told you," she said softly. "I didn't want to worry you about it. But I received a threatening email from Henna Flowers/Dr. Lawsone."

  "Jesus. What did she say?"

  "Just that she knows where I live and my time remaining alive is short. As if I didn't already know that."

  "Man." Bran was shaking his head. "When she said she was coming after you in the Real, I figured it was a bluff. But this is serious, A. This is seriously serious."

  "Hence this." Alex patted her hip.

  "What kind of gun is it, anyway?"

  "Glock 19. One of the better conceal-carry handguns. Do you want to see?"

  She lifted the hem of her blouse. Brandon stared, mesmerized, for a long moment before turning his head away with a frustrated hiss.

  "I also have this."

  Alex gripped her belt buckle under her blouse and whipped out the gleaming, four-inch knife. Brandon ducked back in his chair.

  "Cool, huh?"

  "Dude, you have gone completely over the deep end."

  Alex snapped the knife back into place, her smirk slipping.

  "This isn't a Verse game, Alex," Brandon growled. "This isn't a pretend-fight in the Hollywood Bowl. You told me you think she's killed people here – real people – right?"

  "That's my gut feeling."

  "All the more reason to bring the police into this."

  "What could they do, Brandon? Put me under 24-hour guard for the rest of my life? I have no evidence that someone's plotting aga
inst me. I don't even know who she is. The police wouldn't do shit."

  "She's gotta be a doctor in the Real, or she couldn't be certified to work in a Verse hospital."

  "That's the assumption. I'm also assuming the Gamemasters pointed me to her for a reason. I think they may want her stopped – in the Real. Official policy is not to interfere in real-life, but maybe they sometimes make exceptions."

  "Possible." Brandon scratched his head. "Though I'm sure the GM didn't have a real-life showdown between you and this psychopath in mind. Wendell Martin knows – they all know – about your condition. They would never put even a normal person at risk, not to mention someone with Friedreich's ataxia. And they sure as hell would never approve of you trying to be a gunslinger in the Real."

  "Safe to say. Also, safe to say that if they did steer me toward this psychopath in the PUSA then they didn't seriously consider the possibility of that reaching into real life."

  Brandon scratched his head and made dubious grunting sounds. "Maybe you should mention this to Professor Martin. He ought to know this person's threatened you as a result of what happened in the quest."

  Alex considered that for a few long moments. "You know what, B? I might just do that."

  ALEX'S AVATAR alarm started dinging and flashing about the time the birds started their damn chirping in the early morning. She hadn't got much sleep as it was, spending much of the night plotting her next moves – with both Goddess Quest II and the sociopath-doctor – and had been looking forward to sleeping in a bit.

  The night table clock read 5 AM – three hours before the end of the game's private installment. Alex's eyes opened wider. That was interesting. That could mean something. She hopped out of bed, not even bothering to empty her bladder, going straight for the AFIRM, strapping herself in and lowering the REM induction helmet onto her buzzing, disheveled little head.

  She reunited with her avatar sitting on the edge of the memory foam bed. A glass filled with bluish-amber liquid perched on the closed toilet lid near the opposite wall. Alex didn't have more than two or three seconds to access her memories – her avatar had been in sleep mode so had missed the drink's arrival – before Secretary Learner's mellifluous voice issued from the surrounding darkness.

  "Good morning," she said. "We came to a decision, though ultimately it was mine to make. We decided to fulfill your request."

  "That's...Sweet Hemlock."

  "Correct."

  "You're certain you have the ingredients and portions right?"

  "All I can tell you is that it was carefully composed by our own chemistry department according to Sam Macintyre's recipe. Which has now been permanently deleted from our system, by the way. Our chemists each added one ingredient at a time in isolation, without any knowledge of the other ingredients, for security's sake. Only the President and I saw the full recipe, and frankly, I'm not sure I remember it."

  "You decided to take me seriously."

  "I wasn't inclined to during our last meeting, despite your persuasiveness – and the fact that our lie detectors claimed you were telling the truth. But it was your conversation with President Ventura that ultimately persuaded me – not of your version of reality but that this is the best gamble. It's all down to you, Mr. Milner."

  "Did the President recommend doing this?"

  "No. He was quite adamant about having no recommendations whatsoever and leaving the decision completely to me."

  Alex's soaring relief and triumph hit an unexpected snag – a sudden tug from a mysterious gravity. It took her a moment to recognize the gravity's source: fear. She remembered Brandon's words: "Everything will change." Well, no shit. Everything always changed.

  She pushed to her feet. Her avatar's 3x-powered legs felt strangely underpowered as she crossed the floor to the drink. She lifted the drink and peered into its murky depths. They'd added ice, and the glass was cold. A sweet scent, tangy and weirdly primal, like water from some ancient, exotic ocean from which all life had sprung.

  Alex had never believed that life could flash before your eyes seconds before death, but she had no better description for what happened next: a kaleidoscope of images burst in her head, illuminating a fragmentary future like jagged shards of broken stained glass. She stared at her vision in disbelief. Is that real, or am I just being a pussy?

  "Second thoughts, Mr. Milner?" asked the DARE Secretary.

  More like second and third. Alex raised the glass to her lips, breathing in the indelicate bouquet. To a new beginning.

  "Not anymore," she replied to the Secretary, lowering the drink from her lips and pouring it into the nearby sink.

  Chapter 22

  "ONLY YOU," BRANDON SAID, "would throw away a chance to freaking rule the biggest VR world in existence."

  They were driving into campus an hour before Brandon's class with Wendell Martin. Alex was not scheduled to resume the class until the fall quarter, but the Founding Father had asked to see her in his office. Probably wants to chew out my ass just like Brandon. But he'd saved her having to ask to speak to him about the Evil Doctor.

  "You were the one who said it could change everything," Alex said. "Implying not in a good way."

  "Jeez, don't lay this on me, A. I never said you should turn it down! Now someone else is going to claim the throne. Probably some power-freak like Taylor White or whatever his real name is."

  "I would've taken it if I thought there was any possibility of anyone else solving it, Bran. I don't see any possibility."

  "The smartest competitors in the world plus an indefinite time to solve it?" Brandon snorted skeptically. "The odds are someone will get it."

  "Multiply zero infinitely and you still get zero. And it won't be an indefinite time. People will fail over and over again and get tired of it. The Silver Chalice has been unsolved for more than a decade and you don't even hear about anyone trying anymore."

  Bran made another skeptical noise, more subdued, like a half-silent fart. They rolled into a handicap parking space in front of the computer science building.

  "You never received your elimination notice," said Brandon. "That has to mean you're still officially in the contest."

  "Yeah. Logically, not drinking wouldn't eliminate you. Not something I spent much time thinking through since I didn't plan on continuing."

  "You could always win the awards and auction some of them off if having so much power bothers you."

  "I'm not sure I'd be able to do that once I had them."

  Brandon grumbled a curse under his breath. "Anyway, I bet that's what Professor Martin wants to talk about. What your intentions are."

  "We'll know soon enough."

  Alex left Bran in the cafeteria. The hallway to Wendell Martin's office stretched before her. She hadn't been getting enough exercise lately and her legs felt leaden. Or maybe that was just apprehension. She had succeeded – mostly – in stopping herself from speculating about the purpose of this visit since Professor Martin had called that morning. Naturally, he'd provided no clue about that purpose. Just murmured that he'd "like to have a chat." Uh-huh.

  She knocked on his door. A distracted voice asked her to enter. Wendell Martin sat hunched behind his desk, one finger to his rubbery, oversized lips, his eyes travelling between two open laptops, an open book, and some printed pages. He glanced up at Alex as if he'd forgotten about their meeting. Was it an act to impress with his professorial absentmindedness? Alex doubted it.

  "Miss Mills," he said. "Thank you for stopping by." He waved to the chair facing him, already occupied by a short stack of books. "Just put those on the floor. Please take a seat."

  Alex picked up the books. Kant, Wittgenstein, Popper. She set them aside and settled down facing him.

  "How are you feeling?" he asked.

  "Okay. Maybe questioning my sanity a bit."

  "You made a very interesting decision."

  "That's one way to describe it."

  "Is it a decision you might consider changing?"

 
Alex thought for a long moment. "Uh, no."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes."

  "May I ask your reasons for your decision?"

  "Well..." Alex shifted a bit in her chair. "I guess my basic thought is that someone having that level of power would upset the balance in the Verse. I like it the way it is."

  "Do you believe we didn't consider how those powers might impact that world?"

  "I'm sure you did. But I'm not sure I would like whatever effects you think would happen or that you might not be mistaken about them."

  "What do you suspect would happen? Surely, you believe you could restrain yourself if your powers caused an issue? Or do you fear the corruption of power?"

  "I thought that at first. Now, I don't think it's about that."

  Wendell Martin spread his well-manicured hands apart as if this represented a quandary. "Then what do you think it is about?"

  "You know what Mark Twain said about heaven?"

  "That, if popular conceptions are correct, it might be hellishly boring?"

  "Right. It's like you spend all your life struggling to accomplish something...and then in paradise the struggle stops. You sit around playing Bingo or shuffleboard for the rest of eternity. There's nothing else left to do."

  "No more struggling to achieve."

  "No more challenges. No more purpose."

  "Going to a Mark Twain heaven and playing bingo. That's how you see winning this quest, Alex?"

  Alex couldn't recall him ever calling her by her first name before. She shook off the near-creepy sense that not only was her teacher seeing her clearly – he might just be seeing her too clearly.

  "In a nutshell," she mumbled. "That and not being sure if I'd upset the balance of power, that I'd destroy what makes the Verse special."

  "What do you think makes it special?"

  Alex shrugged. "I don't know. It has an innocence...like America in the fifties or something. Better, really, because there are no wars, no military-industrial-complex, no attempts to rule the world. But because of this contest..."

  "Yes?"

  "The government killed an innocent man."

  "You think that's the first time that happened on the Parallel Earth?"