The Dreaming Stars

by Tim Pratt

  “You admire them.” Shall’s voice was flat.

  Sebastien shrugged again. “I’d rather say… they impress me. They should impress you too. They’re impressive.”

  “I’ll start those scans, Callie.” The war-drone stomped away, perhaps more noisily than necessity dictated.

  “I don’t think Shall likes you very much,” Callie said.

  “Why should he be any different than the rest of you?” He sighed. “I really can help you here, you know.”

  “You’d better, if you want a ride back to the White Raven.” She went to see how Lantern and Ashok were doing.

  The size of the pod meant it was easily big enough for Sebastien and Callie to both fit inside, but the curvature of the interior meant they inevitably slid together, like lovers sharing an old mattress that sagged in the middle. Callie did her best to avoid entangling with him, and he was decorous about keeping his hands to himself, but the situation was nonetheless very intimate, in a skin-crawling way.

  Ashok fitted a diadem onto Callie’s brow, with delicate wires running from her crown to the headset meant for Sebastien: his connection would be subsidiary to her own. They would share a sensorium, and be able to communicate, but she would be the one with agency and control over their avatar in the Dream.

  “There are a lot of loose cables in here.” She shoved away one dangling, wrist-thick cord that was digging into her shoulder.

  “Feeding tubes and waste evacuation tubes, and a few cables for senses you don’t possess,” Ashok said. “We decided being able to sense radiation would just make you nervous and disoriented.”

  “Huh. It’s fake radiation in there anyway, right?”

  “Sure, but depending on the rules of the simulation, fake radiation might make your avatar throw up and lose its hair and stuff. Just like in a battle sim – you bleed, you ooze, your bones break, whatever. What happens in the Dream won’t hurt your actual body, of course, though sometimes there’s phantom pain from imaginary injuries, because brains are weird.”

  “The things people do for entertainment,” Callie said. “Don’t fry my brain, please. I’d like to survive long enough to suffer phantom radiation poisoning for years to come.”

  Ashok fitted Sebastien’s headset. “No brains will fry. I’ve got enough failsafes in place here that the worst thing that will happen is nothing at all. You ready to go?”

  Callie took a deep breath, almost said yes, then said, “Wait. How do I get out when I’m done?”

  “You exit the Dream just like you exit the Hypnos – look up and to the left, and you should see a glowing door. Just nod your head toward the luminous rectangle, and poof, you’re out.”

  “I didn’t have that option when I was in the Hypnos,” Sebastien said.

  “Nope,” Ashok said. “You didn’t have any controls at all in your sensorium – therapeutic settings were enabled, on account of how you’re a war criminal.”

  “I was an aspiring war criminal at best. I never successfully war-crimed. Unlike your dear friend Lantern, who helped murder fifty thousand people on Meditreme Station. How many people did I murder? Oh, that’s right: zero people.”

  “And yet she’s my friend and you’re not,” Ashok said. “Ethics sure are complicated, huh?”

  Callie snorted.

  “Here we go!” Ashok said. “It’s Dreaming Day!”

  Chapter 25

  One day, when Kalea Machedo woke from her troubled life, she found herself transformed into an immense monstrosity.

  Her body was wrong – wrong in every particular. She opened her eyes – there were four of them, taking in far more than one hundred and eighty degrees of vision – and recoiled from the wormlike roots dangling down from the filthy ceiling, brushing against her face. She swatted at the roots, and she had too many arms. The flesh on those arms felt loose but leathery, wrinkled and wattled, and her hands had far too many thumbs, and claws that sprang out and retracted as she gasped for breath. The air was hot and fetid and smelled like the bottom of a compost heap. She crouched – she had lower limbs, too, four of them, with too many knees on each one. In the course of trying to sort out the complexity of her new legs, she fell over.

  She crashed into a pile of filth that squirmed away from her and fled through a ragged hole in the wall, into some outer brightness – was her bed made of vermin? Was she underground in some kind of garbage cavern? She wriggled and writhed and tried to stand, but a mind that had spent decades piloting a body with bilateral symmetry, two arms, and two legs wasn’t equal to the task.

  Suffering some dysmorphia, are we? Sebastien said in her mind. It’s strange, but… this body feels right to me. I never realized before that I was uncomfortable because I didn’t have enough limbs. Would you like to cede control to me, just for a moment, so I can get you upright?

  That was possible, she knew – she could let him pilot the body… but then he’d have to choose to relinquish control for her to take it back. Fuck you.

  I don’t know, captain. You seem more fucked than I am. I’m just along for the ride.

  Damn it. Ashok played sims all the time where he took the form of tentacled undersea monsters wrestling with sea serpents, or giant spiders competing to see who could capture and mummify the most hairy-footed humanoids in butt-silk, or literal multi-headed dragons breathing acid, lightning, fire, ice, and poison gas across rampaging undead armies. Callie, of course, never played Hypnos games like that – a gap in her experience she’d never expected to have ramifications in her actual life. But here she was.

  Callie concentrated. Left front leg, left back leg, right front leg, right back leg. Upper left torso limb, lower left, upper right, lower right. There seemed to be a tail back there too. Forget that for now. She had a kind of bandolier across her chest – or thorax, or whatever – full of small glass vials, and what looked like a garden fork stuck through a loop on her “belt.” She had another object strapped to her back, a long metal pole about the size and length of a broom handle, and she wrestled that off and used it to lever herself onto her myriad overcomplicated barbed feet.

  Nicely done, Sebastien said, and didn’t even sound ironic about it.

  Callie looked at the pole in her… say hands, for convenience. Was it a tool for helping herself up from falls? No. It was a weapon. The pole had an absurdly barbed shiny black head on one end, and a hook on the other. She put it back over her shoulder and some kind of smart clamps on her thorax harness grabbed hold of the pole and held it in place, the hook and head retracting as it did. “Why do I have weapons?” she said, but the words that came out were guttural and inhuman.

  Oh, my, Sebastien said. That’s an Axiom language you just spoke. There were lots of recordings on the other station, enough for me to figure out how their phonemes matched up to the written alphabet, anyway. He sighed in her mind. Obviously I’m glad I’m not a psychopathic megalomaniac any more, but it was nice being hyperintelligent. I’ve always been pretty smart, but really – I used to be a mountain, and now I am an anthill.

  My heart bleeds for you, Callie thought. How am I speaking Axiomatic?

  There’s more computing power in this station than exists in the rest of the galaxy, probably, Sebastien said. What’s a little universal translation for a system like that? We were talking in the hub, and the system might have monitored our comms before that, or even scanned the White Raven’s data banks. For creatures like the Axiom, such things are trivial. Look on the bright side. Now we can ask, “So where’s the off switch for the gatherers?” and they’ll understand us.

  “Elegant plan,” she said, trying out her new voice. It was horrible – wet and meaty and harsh. “But back to my question: why did I spawn in with weapons?”

  Perhaps there are dangerous things here. Though I suspect you’re the dangerous thing. Just as, once upon a time, I wouldn’t leave the house without my wallet and phone and keys, what self-respecting Axiom would leave their den without a torture implement or two?

  “
I guess we should explore.” She wondered what she looked like – some kind of immense insect? A centaur topped with a mantis body? What was her head like? She felt around her face with her two nearest hands and found it rough, spiny, chitinous, and horned. The mouth was a horror of mandibles and serrated edges and rows of teeth. Was this nightmare body what the Axiom looked like in their original forms? There was no reason to assume the avatar was based on anything real – it could be an imaginary form that only existed in the simulation, like Ashok’s dragons and monsters from the deep.

  Callie took a few tentative practice steps around the interior of the stinking cavern, getting used to her new body. She’d always been physically adroit, and soon she felt comfortable enough to crawl out of the hole. She wriggled through the gap, and emerged into a forest under a blank white sky. The trees here were large and twisted, the bark and branches black and gray, hanging with moss – except the moss looked wet, like kelp, and some of it was animate, writhing like snakes. There was no sign of habitation, of anything built at all, or of any creatures, like herself or otherwise. She turned and looked back, and confirmed she’d crawled out from a den in the roots of a tree. “Why are we here?”

  Maybe this is the starting area of the Dream. Or the starting area of one realm. There’s so much processing power, this could just be one planet in a vast galaxy of simulated worlds. We have no idea.

  How the hell do we find the control switch then? If there was a whole imaginary galaxy of possibilities, where should she begin?

  We won’t find it by standing here, Sebastien said.

  Callie grumbled in her monstrous voice and clumped onward, following a slope toward a ridge, where she could at least get a look at the terrain. The air was sticky and warm, but did that mean her body was just colder than the one she was used to? She smelled burning, and a distant rotting stench. A thin tendril of smoke marred the sky off to the right, so she angled that way, because she had to go somewhere.

  She crested the ridge, and looked down on a battle.

  There were creatures like herself down there, hundreds of them, locked in a melee with monsters of a different sort, though of roughly equal size. The enemies were more oversized millipede than centaur-scorpion, and both races were wearing armor, much of it ostentatiously spined and spiked and barbed – Callie felt suddenly terribly exposed in just her bandolier.

  The creatures hacked at one another with weapons like her barbed pole, as well as oddly curved swords, and whips that crackled with electricity. The millipede-things seemed capable of spitting venom, and the centaur-scorpions whipped their barbed tails around. Callie sank low onto her segmented belly and watched, trying to make sense of what she saw. “Are those the Axiom? Is this, what, a war simulation?”

  No, there are too many down there. I don’t think any of them are the Axiom – I think they’re all simulations.

  Like the sea monsters Ashok fought, she thought.

  Sebastien went on, It could be like those games where you deploy armies, fight for resources, try to build nations. The fighters may be individually controlled, but I suspect they were just dispatched with some goal – engage the enemy, win this territory, that sort of thing.

  A centaur-scorpion pinned a millipede right behind its head with a spear, transfixing the monster to the ground. The attack seemed to paralyze the millipede, but not kill it, and the assailant drew a black crystal machete then began to methodically cut its victim apart, starting at the tail, hacking through one body segment at a time. The centaur-scorpion made a horrible high-pitched keening noise as it butchered its prey, kicking away the severed chunks in sprays of thick black blood.

  Callie wanted to vomit, but this body seemed incapable of that. Instead, experimentally, she tried to laugh, quietly – and it was a softer version of the horrible noise the killer was making.

  The thing down there was hacking apart a defenseless enemy, and laughing about it. They’re just simulations, she thought. Not players, just part of the environment, like the monsters Ashok kills in his fantasy games – he can slaughter space orcs all day, but it’s not like they’re real. That’s just… pretend pain down there.

  Oh, no, I think they’re really suffering, Sebastien said. I’d be shocked if they weren’t. Why would the Axiom bother with this otherwise? Torturing creatures that don’t have interior lives – well, that sort of thing makes an emotional impact on humans. There are humans who weep when fictional characters die, because their empathy is so susceptible to manipulation. But that sort of thing doesn’t work on the Axiom – they wouldn’t derive any satisfaction from hurting something that only acted like it felt pain. If they’re tormenting someone, they want that person to truly suffer. I think the Dream is so powerful that it can create simulations who possess sentience, or even consciousness, at least of a rudimentary sort – the creatures fighting down there believe themselves to be real, and can experience pain, and fear, and probably hope, since hope dashed is a very satisfying torment. Isn’t that fascinating? In this place, the Axiom truly are as gods.

  Why? Callie asked. What’s the point? Are they modeling some kind of assault on a planet we don’t know about? Testing out a battle plan against another civilization, in another galaxy? Or…

  Then she saw something that baffled her – a centaur-scorpion chopped down one of its own kind, to save a millipede, and then the two waded into battle again side-by-side. She’d assumed this was a battle between different species, but was there some other organizing principle at play?

  Sebastien said, It’s a bit hard to follow the action, I know. Here, look up and to the right.

  Why?

  Can’t you just do as I… fine. Because there are controls there. Options we can toggle on and off. How do I know more about using the Hypnos interface than you do? I was born five hundred years ago!

  I have better things to do than play pretend. She looked up and to the right – and a series of glyphs she couldn’t read appeared, glowing in different colors. What do those say?

  The automatic translation doesn’t work in that direction, hmm? Interesting. All right, look hard at that squiggly green one and maybe blink one of your eyes – there we go.

  A visual overlay appeared on the battlefield below. That augmented reality was the first thing that had broken the illusion that this experience was entirely real. Now small dots floated over each of the creatures on the churned, smoking mud of the battlefield, living and dead, though the dead had a black circle around their dots. Roughly half the dots were red, and the other half were blue.

  Sebastian started to laugh, and kept laughing.

  What’s so funny? What’s it mean?

  They’re teams, Sebastien said. Elder Trogidae thought the Axiom in the Dream were running simulations of brutalist utopias in here, or conducting experiments too dangerous or resource-intensive to attempt in the real world. But they’re not. Captain, they’re not in here trying to transcend heat death – or at least, that’s not all they’re doing. They’re playing a game, and it should not surprise you to discover that Axiom games are violent ones.

  That is some bullshit, Callie thought. Then: Wait, what color am I? She craned her head back. A green dot floated above her. Is that… am I neutral?

  The Axiom don’t believe in neutral, captain. If I had to guess, I’d say that dot means “unaffiliated,” and thus, fair game for anyone to slaughter. Here, look right again. There may be a legend or some kind, or a help file.

  She did as he asked, focused on the glyph he indicated, and watched as the sky filled with fast-scrolling black letters. Mmm, I see, he said.

  Just then, a centaur-scorpion pointed its spear in her direction, and began hustling up the hillside.

  “Oh, shit.” Callie looked up and to the left, and there was the door, glowing and white, a brighter rectangle against the pale sky.

  You don’t need to run, Sebastien said. I was wrong about the dot. It means you’re a… player, for want of a better word. Someone real. If you were a
player affiliated with either faction, there would be a ring around your dot in the corresponding hue, but there’s not, and that means you’re a high-value target, so they’ll all try to kill you. Lots of points or prestige or rep or whatever, for killing a player.

  Then I do need to run!

  You can’t die here, Sebastien said patiently.

  I can feel pain, though! The enemy was still charging toward her, but his claws and barbed feet were having trouble getting traction on the steep, muddy slope. Unless there’s a way to turn off pain responses, like there is in the Hypnos?

  A way to turn off pain? Now that wouldn’t be very Axiomatic. You have more options at your disposal than these simulated peons, though, captain – you’re a better class of bug-monster. I looked at the specs, and the basic weapons you started with are vastly superior to anything the cannon fodder down there gets. Point your spear-thing at our friend.

  Callie obeyed, and the barbed head and the hook sprang out. Now what?

  There should be a button on the pole.

  Her lower right hand felt an irregularity, and she pressed it.

  Without fanfare – no beam of light, no booming sound, no puff of smoke – the centaur-scorpion’s head exploded, and its body fell down. None of the other battling creatures noticed – one more death on this battlefield barely rated attention. Callie slunk lower and crawled down the far side of the hill, away from the battle.

  She examined the spear. There was another button, near the base of the staff. What’s that one do?

  Oh, it would have exploded the head of your enemy… and all his, mmm, affinity-mates? They can form squads, and gain collective bonuses, but those advantages are counterbalanced by vulnerabilities to certain weapons. You could have wiped out a hundred of them at once, tilted the battle decisively, and made yourself an enemy and… well, another enemy, of the players controlling those armies. Obviously the Axiom in charge of the routed army would be angry at you, but I’m sure the leader of the winners would be, too, since it would appear they needed help from a mysterious benefactor, and any sign of weakness is… not a good thing in this culture. I think you’ve escaped notice for now, though.