by Tim Pratt
“It’s possible,” Stephen said, and she nodded sadly. They both knew possible and likely were a long distance apart.
The airlock opened, and three people floated through. “Jabar.” Q went to him with arms open, and after a moment’s hesitation, he embraced her, the contact making them spin a half-circle in the air. Jabar was a lean man with a shaved head, skin dark brown and gleaming, face all sharp planes and angles. The other two were younger, but looked related – the cousins, probably.
“Q! You’re really out here looking for my dad?” Jabar said.
“In a fancy ship flown by specialists, sent by Almajara, no less,” she said. “I told you. After all we’ve been through, bringing Owain to life, building our world, you couldn’t trust me?”
He hung his head. “I’m sorry. I just… needed to do something. Waiting was killing me.” He looked at Stephen, eyes hungry. “Are you the captain? Have you found anything yet? Any sign of the missing surveyors?”
“I’m the XO,” Stephen said. “The captain is off in our shuttle, investigating some unusual readings on the far side of the belt, while we search around here. We haven’t found anything yet – no ships, and no people, but also no wreckage.”
“You’re the one who’s part of the church?” Jabar said.
“I am,” Stephen said.
“I’m glad. You know how important this is – how important community is. How we’re all part of a whole. We can go on when we lose someone, but we’re diminished. We are better whole. Thank you, for looking. It makes me feel better, knowing there’s a person of faith out here, someone who thinks of my father as a person and part of the mind of God, and not just a number on a balance sheet.” Jabar moved toward Stephen and opened his arms. “Is it all right?”
Stephen drifted into the man’s embrace, and his cousins came in and hugged too, and Q as well. They stood silently, and they shared fellowship, and Stephen wished desperately that he could do more to help. But even this, even sharing his warmth and his presence with these people, his people – even that much mattered. Giving comfort wasn’t nothing. Sometimes it was the only thing.
“Come on, J,” Q said, breaking the embrace. “Let’s get you and your friends settled. We’ll get you back home soon, but we want to finish our investigations out here first.”
“Of course,” he said. “Keep looking. Can I do anything? I want to help.”
“We’ll let you know.” Stephen watched Q lead them away – Elena was setting up a room for them, and she’d soon have them basking in her warmth, too, he had no doubt.
He missed warmth. He hadn’t realized how cold he’d become.
“They seem nice,” Shall said.
“Don’t they?” Stephen said. “Can we give their ship a little nudge, send it spinning a bit, so the swarm doesn’t eat it? The poor man has lost enough.”
“I’ll dispatch a couple of repair drones to tow it out of the projected path,” Shall said.
“Thank you, Shall. After that… get us out of the way, too, and open a bridge back to Callie as soon as you can. Do you think she’ll kill me for abandoning my post? Or will she understand?”
“She’ll understand,” Shall said. “Which doesn’t mean she won’t also kill you.”
Chapter 30
“The ship wasn’t eaten,” Shall said, before Callie could even suggest the horrifying possibility. “The first thing I did was scan for energy signatures, and it looks like they left under their own power, through a bridge.”
“Why the hell would they do that?” Callie scowled. “They must have had a good reason. Stephen isn’t the sort to go joy-riding. Maybe there was a medical emergency and they had to get back to Owain, or the terror drones woke up again, or something. We just have to trust that they’ll come back as soon as they can. We don’t know when they left, so go check the door every half hour, Ashok, would you?”
“It doesn’t even cross your mind that they’ve abandoned us here to die?” Sebastien said. “That they realized this endeavor is futile, and decided to save themselves?”
Ashok actually laughed. “Sebastien. You are, just… you’re the worst. Stephen wouldn’t do that. Shall – the other Shall, still on the ship – wouldn’t do that. Janice might think about it, but Drake wouldn’t even do that much. And Elena. Come on. Elena?”
Sebastien nodded. “I’ll grant you Elena. The others I can’t speak to, but… you’re right. She’d die before she abandoned someone she cared about.”
“That’s the only reason you’re here right now,” Callie said.
“Yes. Consider me reassured. It would be nice if they’d left us a message, though.”
“That, I agree with,” Callie sighed. “All right. The plan hasn’t changed. There’s just some… extra background terror now. Let’s eat, and then we’ll go back into the Dream, and we’ll win this game.”
Callie floated in a sphere of liquid at the center of her royal battle cruiser, the feeds from every likely theater of the tournament projected on screens on all sides. “Is everything in place?”
We’re ready, Shall said.
“Then let’s do it.” Callie opened the communication channel shared by the players, and spoke ritual words that essentially meant, “I now declare the tournament open,” though there were more insults, threats, and bravado to pretty it up.
There was some strategic advantage to being the one to start a tournament. You were able to move your forces into place and declare war at the precise moment of your choosing, and there was a chance to catch the other players on their back feet (or tentacles, or whatever).
Of course, there were spies everywhere, and it was hard to mobilize forces on a galactic scale without someone noticing and preparing their own contingency plans. Callie, Shall, and Sebastien had set up lots of feints and false trails, and made it look like they were going to strike hard at the ruler, when in fact they were going after the one who came in number two in the last tournament, a player who’d declared their loyalty to the ruler early on because they knew that, despite impressive ground forces, they were vulnerable to orbital attacks.
Callie launched those orbital attacks now, dropping rocks from space down gravity wells, and devastating infrastructure on key logistics and resupply worlds.
Didn’t you tell Ashok not to kill a single simulated soldier on a battlefield, because you respected their consciousness and their inner lives? Sebastien said. And now you blithely massacre billions.
“At some point you have to choose the real over the unreal,” Callie said. “These simulations live in a nightmare world of endless conflict and torment. I’ll end all their suffering soon enough, when we shut down the swarm and delete the Dream.”
Still, they believe themselves to be alive – as alive as you or I. It’s interesting that you consider me the criminal, when I never took a single life.
“Is it interesting?” Callie said. “I’d find it even more interesting if you shut the fuck up.”
Reports poured in from all over the galaxy. Her infiltrating parasitic flukes had activated seconds after she declared the tournament open, and decapitated the militaries of two-thirds of the other players. That forced many Axiom players to stop focusing on the big picture and step in to deal with tactical decisions personally, in every individual theater of war, turning their attention to tasks they’d long since delegated to simulations of great military minds.
Every planet that had significant bodies of water near populated areas had been seeded with leviathan eggs, now full-grown and activated, and amphibious kaiju were wrecking all the coastal capitals and archipelagoes and lakeside resorts and river shipping hubs.
Callie’s interstellar game was good, too: she’d poured tons of resources into finishing her spacefaring monsters, and they were playing merry hell with supply lines and destroying wormhole bridges and space stations all over the sprawl of empire, devouring radiation and growing larger and more destructive with every reactor they blew up.
Ten other players
reached out to her, impressed by the ferocity of her opening gambits, and offered to ally themselves with her. She accepted them all – Sebastien and Shall had accurately predicted ninety percent of the offers, so she even had plans for how they should deploy their forces, to shore up places where her own resources were thin.
After two days without rest, swimming in a tank full of stimulants, they were gaining momentum, and had added three more vassals to their team. Her people were doing coordinated attacks now, pincering in around the ruler’s faction, and knocking out key strategic targets, all with losses within acceptable parameters.
“We’re doing this!” she shouted, devouring a dozen eel-slugs in celebration.
Things were going so well, until they weren’t.
On the third day, one of her vassals betrayed her, attacking an allied force from the rear and destroying a whole fleet. That was fine – they’d expected some disloyalty, Axiom being Axiom, and Callie blew up the traitor’s lead ship as a show of her displeasure. The player wouldn’t die – they couldn’t – but they’d have an unpleasant time drifting in the void until they could be rescued by allies from the other team.
Callie set her contingency plan in motion… but the contingency plan failed when the planet she’d intended to take over as a beachhead for the next stage of her invasion was simply gone.
They blew it up, Shall said. The whole planet.
Sebastien said, I’m scanning now, and it looks like they destroyed… all our next targets for conquest.
Callie was stunned. “They blew up their own planets? But… there were factories, soldiers, all sorts of resources…”
But you were poised to take them, Sebastien said. The Axiom would much rather destroy something precious to them than allow someone else to have it.
“How did they know what we had planned?”
You had to share some information with your vassals, Sebastien said. They probably pooled their knowledge, and then simply extrapolated your next moves. The Axiom are very good at this.
Callie was exhausted, and more than a little demoralized. “Crap. I thought we had this. But we’re playing checkers, and they’re playing chess. OK. Let’s implement our fallback plans–”
No, Sebastien said. We’re playing hit-ourselves-in-the-head-with-a-rock, and they’re playing Go. Our fallback plans have fallen apart, too. We just lost our home base. The ruler led a full assault on our royal planet, and took over the leviathan factories… which means control of the leviathans. Air, sea, and space. It appears an agent of the ruler promised our servants freedom if they cooperated, and our servants took the deal.
That hurt. Callie had been trying, in her way, to make life better for the people of that world, but a few days of kindness (interrupted, she had to admit, by frequently yelling at them to leave her alone) couldn’t counteract millennia of oppression.
The ruler executed the servants, of course, Sebastien said. Killed the entire species, actually. Eradicated them from the simulation. The Axiom does love genocide.
Those poor little seahorse-things. She hoped they hadn’t suffered, but she knew better than to ask. “What do we do now?” Callie said.
I’m not sure, Shall said.
I am, Sebastien said. We lose.
They dropped in the rankings swiftly as all their vassals abandoned them, rushing to join with the ruler’s faction while she was still accepting turncoats. Callie reluctantly opened a channel to offer surrender and support to the ruler, so she wouldn’t come in last – there were a handful of unaligned players who would then fall beneath her in the ranking.
But the ruler wouldn’t even acknowledge the communication, and soon all the other players had pledged as vassals to the ruler, or to the ruler’s closest lieutenants. The tournament was over. Callie hadn’t won. She hadn’t even placed. She’d come in last.
Callie lost control of her vessel. A face, of sorts, loomed up on all sides of her tank, filling the screens. It was closer to a preying mantis’s head than anything else, but more geometric, and made of shiny metal – like an abstract sculpture of a mantis, made into a gleaming cyborg. Words, full of buzzing and wretched harmonics, filled the room.
She’s gloating, Sebastien said. There are insults, too, but mostly it’s gloating.
I’ve got a handle on the translation now, Shall said. Let’s mute them, and I’ll translate in real-time.
The buzzing stopped, replaced by Shall’s voice, sometimes halting as he wrestled with a translation, his tone never matching the content of the words. “Has your pod malfunctioned?” the ruler said. “Do you have, ah, brain rot – dementia? You wasted everything on this gambit, and for what? You offended me with the transparency of your attacks. You were duped by my vassals – why would you believe their overtures and promises? We attempted to trick you, and you fell for the first layers of the stratagem, when we’d planned such complex betrayals to come later – effort wasted on the assumption that you had some deeper plan. We have never seen such a pathetic, amateurish showing. You were never an inspired player, but you were always competent. After this, no one will even accept you as a vassal. You will be the suffering slime for centuries.”
“OK, I get it,” Callie said. “I made a big play, and it didn’t work. I lost. You won. Let’s move on with our lives.”
“Such impertinence.” The metal face was blank. “You will learn respect, of course. How long has it been, since you were the suffering slime? Almost a hundred million years, isn’t it, and then only for one cycle? You always were good at floating along in the middle, following the safe path, avoiding the depths. That’s why your boldness surprised us. I confess, I thought you must have some deep strategy in mind, because your actions were so incomprehensible, and I didn’t imagine you could be as stupid as you seemed to be. But turns out–”
“Yes, OK, I’m bad at the game, I get it.” Callie despaired over the failure of her plan, but her pride was also banged up pretty bad. She was reckoned a solid tactician by her peers in the security services, and while she probably shouldn’t feel bad about being bested by hyperintelligent alien monsters with billions of years of subjective life experience… she did.
“Do not speak to me as an equal! Show proper deference, or your torments will be greater even than those usually inflicted on the slime. You will have ample time to think about your idiocy. We have talked, the other players, and we won’t declare another tournament for at least a thousand years. Enjoy your time in the muck, ah, I’m going to assume that’s some kind of vile expletive.”
The screens went black. “Sorry about that, Callie,” Shall said. “I moderated some of the nastier language, while still trying to give you the gist.”
He made her sound practically polite, Sebastien said.
So what now? Shall thought. Some of the pods have less formidable defenses than others. Do we try to crack one open, and hook ourselves into another player’s avatar? Hope we hit the leader?
“I was thinking…” Callie began, and then stopped talking, because she left her immense tentacled body, and she was in another body, and then she couldn’t talk, because she was screaming. Sebastien was screaming, too. Callie couldn’t even process the source or nature of the pain: there was blood in her eyes, she had no eyes, she was on fire, she was drowning, there was acid in her guts, she was buried alive, she was being chewed up in a great mouth, her limbs were being wrenched from their sockets, she was being shocked, she was being vivisected.
She tried to make the door open, to leave the simulation, but there was no looking up and to the left – she couldn’t look anywhere, because she couldn’t even understand what body she was in, and with Sebastien’s screaming, and her own, she couldn’t concentrate.
But Shall spoke in her mind, insistently, softly: Go to the place without pain. Focus on the place without pain. Go there. Move away from the pain.
Agonies surrounded her, but there was a part of her… not body, because she didn’t have a body, or she had too many bodies – t
here was a part of her that didn’t hurt. That wasn’t in anguish, at any rate, and everyday pain was relief compared to most of her existence. She tried to focus on that part, to move toward the place of lesser pain. It was difficult. It was like trying to focus intently on the thumb on your left hand, while your right hand was being pounded into mush with a hammer.
Gradually, she focused, and narrowed her attention, and moved in some way that didn’t involve actual movement, and that small space without pain grew larger. She drew that absence of pain – was there any greater pleasure? – around herself like a cloak, and she huddled. Sebastien was still screaming, and she called out to him: Here, come here. His wails slowed, and diminished, and then he was there, with her, in her mind.
“There” was huddled by a small fire in the dark beneath a broken bridge. A river burbled nearby, stinking of toxins, and the air was bitingly cold. The only light came from the fire, and the two moons in the sky, both a long way from full. Callie looked down at her body. She was furry, with two forelimbs, one of them wrapped in a bloody rag where the paw was missing. She had a tail, and a pouch like a marsupial’s, and her snout was long and pointed, and the teeth inside it hurt. The gaps where several teeth were missing hurt, too… but that pain was nothing, nothing at all, compared to the horrors she’d escaped. There was a rushing noise in her ears, the call of distant torments, still there, just… put aside. “What the fuck was that?”
I have more experience with distributed consciousness than you do, Shall said. When they ripped you out of your avatar, they didn’t just put you into another body. They put your mind in many bodies, all at once. Hundreds of thousands, at least. Maybe millions.
The suffering slime, Sebastien said. This is what it means, to lose in a game of utter domination and humiliation. We’ve become the oppressed. We’re the ones who suffer.