Limitless

by John Gold

  Akashi felt like a bucket of slop had just been dumped on him and called water.

  “You mean to tell me that they’re going to force Sagie out of the big game? That’s not just making a new character; that’s blocking him completely. And after everything he’s done? Whose fault is it what happened? Sorry for the expression, but they’re trying to screw us.”

  “And that’s exactly why they’re offering us such generous compensation. You know very well that the life of one person is far less valuable than the interests of an entire civilization.”

  Akashi sighed heavily. Yet another tough decision.

  “Yes, I understand. We accept the council of keepers’ offer.”

  “They’re letting you send him one message. It can’t contain any information about this conversation, and it needs to be written on paper. You have exactly one hour. As soon as you step into any of the worlds, the message will be delivered directly to Sagie via the keepers’ channels.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Leon was sitting in his apartment in one of the Venusian colonies. The window opened out onto the aerocar parking lot, where dozens of people were carrying large containers full of personal belongings out of the building rented by the Golden Hand clan.

  Merlen Ruzh walked into the room holding two cups of hot chocolate, a rare delicacy even for the colonies.

  “Cheer up, my friend. Your mission is complete!”

  Leon continued watching the people walking out of the building, his gaze filled with melancholy.

  “Merlen, look at them. They followed a god, not a man; money, not a mission. I don’t blame them; it’s just tough to admit how many people around me really believed in what we were doing.”

  “Just think how many people you were able to help by changing the way they look at the world. How many of the people leaving inherited your ideas?”

  Leon thought about what his friend said, someone who had been his faithful helper and shadow for fourteen years.

  “A month before the Project Chrysalis beta test, a guy who said he piloted a flight between Venus and the Moon came to see me. He said he’d brought the first people to Lunar and was able to record their conversations using his onboard systems. And he sold me those recordings, apparently not imagining who else might be willing to buy something so valuable. The people in them talked about how Project Chrysalis could give players special abilities that would begin to manifest themselves once they went through the interworldly portal on Tanatos. But the ones who became gods and drew people under their banner in the game would be able to get them sooner. The conversation lasted around six hours, diving into all kinds of statistics and examples. You know, Merlen, I can remember everything word for word. No, they weren’t lying; they were just describing the way things really work from a different angle. I became a god and convinced people to follow me. I leveled them up, gave them items and buffs, and I did it all to ensure that prosperity would be forthcoming. How many people do you know who could send a child to Hell in order to receive divine strength? How many of them could show in deed the faith they have in their idea and the path they’ve chosen? I don’t regret what I did to Sagie and his family. My goal all these years has been for humanity to flourish, pick itself up from the bottom, and move up to another world. The Golden Hand clan has been operating autonomously for three months now, ever since I sold the remains of my company. It’s going to be the path I spent so long building. Anyone can join it to go straight through from Level 1 to Level 10000, and I even have backups in place in case the people in charge leave. Income, defense, the politics of the alliance, plans for technical development over the next five years—I’ve made provisions for everything I possibly can. I even had a backup plan in the eventuality that I lost my company and divine status. But I’m still disappointed by how few people see me as successful.”

  Merlen laughed as he sipped his hot chocolate.

  “Is there anyone closer than good friends? Isn’t their opinion what matters most? I believe in you, as your best friend, and so does Nate.”

  “Rebecca doesn’t believe in me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Leon sighed heavily. This was the incident that was causing the discomfort in his soul.

  “She abandoned our son and left. As soon as she jumped into the portal, something happened to her that she wouldn’t tell me about. Her personal shuttle went into orbit and disappeared less than an hour later. All its beacons and tracking systems are offline. She turned her back on the privileges and money she enjoyed, our child, and me. All I got was a note on our bed telling me not to wait for her or look for her. Everything between us is over, she said. She doesn’t even want money.” For the first time, Leon smiled. “Merlen, are you sure she’s your daughter?”

  “Absolutely. Only a smart woman would abandon a loser like you! You’re only what, one of the fifty wealthiest humans alive?”

  The pair laughed. Women were women, but both Merlen and Leon were married to their work. Rebecca leaving meant little short of nothing to them.

  “Another nine losers like me bought that Lunar pilot’s story. And you wouldn’t believe the coincidence: we’re all rich, successful, and good at managing people. Do you realize what that means, my friend?”

  “It was all planned from the very beginning.”

  Once again, the pair laughed happily in the empty room. There were no regrets or doubts, just a job to do and a mission to accomplish.

  An invitation arrived in the mail: From Lunar, to the first prohuman organization.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The official Project Chrysalis site automatically created an account for every player. It was where you were supposed to post your news, show live feeds people could watch, and make deals, a spot where Lunar acted as a guarantor in exchange for a small percentage of the proceeds.

  In the fourteen years that had passed since the moment Project Chrysalis was launched, almost everyone had made at least one post. But there was a page that had appeared in searches more than a billion times over the previous twenty-four hours, and it was completely blank. Sagie, the legend, the player whose very existence had always been questioned, had a page that didn’t feature so much as a single picture from his real life. Even the screenshots pulled from the net had been systematically deleted over the previous few years. The player profile was blank. It had no avatar even. In its place, there was a black male profile with a question mark.

  However, the first post in all that time suddenly appeared in the news feed.

  Good afternoon, dear reader. I’ll tell you right up front that this post was written a day prior to being posted automatically. I have most likely deleted my account to enjoy some peace and the comforts of home.

  I planned this post a few years back when I recognized certain truths. Still, I was never able to draw the general conclusions I wanted, and so I waited for the idea to mature and clarify itself. Here we go.

  I’ve been able to meet some incredible people. I’ve seen love between two girls. I’ve seen someone devote their life to someone else’s happiness—he’s only happy when she is. I met someone who had never felt a single emotion. Have you ever taken the time to appreciate having two eyes, the ability to walk, your parents? Or the way your mother feeds you and the attention you get from your father? I’m an orphan, and Project Chrysalis gave me both a family and the love of two parents. Today, I’m going to bring them back to life. Just imagine that you lost everything and found yourself completely alone in the world. It hurts, you’re afraid, and nobody reaches out a hand to help you. Value what you have. Be happy you have it.

  I didn’t have a childhood, loving parents, or friends, though I got them all in Project Chrysalis. It was experience, a sequence of events filled with emotions that changed my life forever. And I hope you will be daring enough to follow your happiness to the end of the world.

  The players who checked Sagie’s blog couldn’t figure out if they’d mixed up the page they were on or if
they’d been completely wrong about the kind of person he was. How could someone who had slaughtered half of Tanatos talk about happiness, family, and love? Wasn’t he rich enough to make his own? Lunar officially confirmed that the account hadn’t been hacked and that the post had been written by Sagie. Some readers had met him personally during their travels across Tanatos, and they said he was just a normal guy who didn’t trust anyone and was far from the monster the media made him out to be. The message gave rise to a wave of questions about who Sagie really was. A community was formed, and one of the commenters gave it a name: Limitless Sagie. Nobody noticed that Sagie himself never responded to a single comment or question.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Twenty-four hours after the battle for the portal on Tanatos, a global message went out saying that the portal would be moved to Ferengar, to the valley where the old dwarf capital used to be. The continent itself had warmed significantly. Grass, trees, and cliffs appeared as the ice melted, while the mammoths and their demon drivers were replaced by black battle elephants and tribes of dark-skinned pigmies. The players still didn’t get to see most of the continent, however, due to the fact that the stationary portal started working. The official opening date was moved back a week, and it was finally time.

  A crowd of players stretched out a kilometer in every direction. Mages levitated, while artifactors hovered on flying boards that had become the world’s most popular form of transportation over the previous two months. Nobody could breathe, nobody could get any closer, and the air above the portal itself was restricted space nobody could fly in. The air tingled with anticipation as the meeting with twenty-four groups of representatives from the alliance of civilizations grew closer.

  Three people materialized atop of the portal cube: Akashi, Krash, and Miguel. The trio was responsible for representing humankind on that momentous occasion.

  Akashi asked a rhetorical question the Lunarites had been asked a million times.

  “What is Project Chrysalis? Where did a game like this get such a terrible name? Well, it’s because the game doesn’t have a name we can understand. The elder races call the entire network of worlds the Talzeur galaxy in honor of the only first-order world. But why Project Chrysalis instead of Talzeur? The name came from entomology. All caterpillars have a stage where they enter a cocoon, only to emerge from it as a winged insect. That cocoon is called a chrysalis. For us, Project Chrysalis is a cocoon in which all of humanity goes from crawling as a caterpillar to flying off as a butterfly to our meeting with the other intelligent races in the universe. That’s why this world is called humankind’s chrysalis. On the other side of this portal, there is another world called Papilio, or the world of the butterfly.

  “But let’s look back a little ways to the moment all this began. Two hundred and ten years ago, at the end of the second millennium, a theory was put forward about the existence of wormholes in our solar system that lead to other solar systems in the galaxy. It was postulated that one of them was not far from Earth and moving along with the planet. One Japanese investor who believed in the potential shown by the space industry, decided to put a team of astronauts together and fly to where that wormhole was hypothesized to be, all financed by him. Neither radar nor any other detection system could see it. But as soon as their space ship neared where they thought it would be, it appeared, a stable passageway to another star system. One of the astronauts decided to leave the ship, fly through, find out what was on the other side, and report back. The ship itself couldn’t fit through the wormhole, which was only big enough for a person, and so it was all up to him. Halfway through, the passageway turned into a thick gray fog before taking a snake-like form. That creature wrapped itself around his suit, kicking him back out on the side of the space ship when it failed to find anything organic. In other worlds, the astronaut saw for himself that the fog was both intelligent and following a kind of logic. It watched as he headed back to his ship. No sooner had he gotten back on board than the wormhole slammed shut, marking the end of humankind’s first contact with the alien Eru race.

  “After the crew got back to Earth, they were examined carefully and released when nothing was found. Back then, there weren’t many astronauts, so they tended to receive a lot of attention. The one who made contact with the Eru started to change. First, he began eating more, and then his body started to grow. Happily for him, all that happened on the remote island in the Pacific Ocean where he originally came from. He soon grew so large that he couldn’t fit in his own garage, and that’s when he moved to a cave nearby the island that had been considered inaccessible to the locals and their fishing schooners. The only other person who knew what was going on faked his death and then provided whatever help he could. The astronaut’s body kept changing. His skin and skeleton modified, while new organs and cavities appeared. In fact, his skin became harder than the reinforced shell used for space ships. His eyes, his brain, and his entire nervous system started becoming something completely different. His digestive system was unrecognizable and unclassifiable. Living permanently submerged and absorbing all those different micronutrients swelled his weight to a hundred and forty tons over the six months he spent in the cave. His only friend, who stuck with him that whole time, kept track of everything. After a year and a half, the astronaut had become an organic space ship capable of taking a hundred and forty people on board. The friend that stayed by his side was the investor, the one who sent the team to check out the wormhole.

  “That all happened two hundred and ten years ago on Earth. The astronaut who became a space ship understood his own functions more and more with each passing day, learning how to better control himself. Most importantly, he understood why the Eru race had contacted humans and turned him into a space ship. The investor started selling his assets and collecting scientists without letting government structures know what was going on. A year later, they had a team of them to go along with the crew for their new ship. Off they flew once again to the wormhole, knowing full well that they would be met and let through. The gray fog snake palpated the ship and fused with it, taking over control. On the other side of the wormhole, we had our first contact with aliens. No, we didn’t correspond or speak using gestures. They just sent us to the Eru race’s home planet, installed a quantum core in the ship, and forcibly thrust us into Project Chrysalis.

  “Here, in mankind’s base world, all the languages spoken by the other races are translated into the one you know. Our guide was named Tiamat, and he is now the senior officer and judge for Project Chrysalis, tracking the progress mankind makes through the trial. It’s one that will determine whether we are prepared for contact with other races in the universe. As you may have gathered, the trial is complete, and we have been permitted to join society. But let’s go back to what happened with us. Tiamat forced us to go through the same path you took. We also had to unlock the interworldy portal. There were just seven hundred of us, mostly scientists who had never seen video games outside stores. It took us sixty years to complete the conditions and get to Papilio. And only then were we permitted to leave the game and return to Earth. We were named Earth’s envoys, having beaten the first trial, and you beat the second when you unlocked the portal.

  “When the crew returned to Earth, the Third World War, the one for energy resources, was just about to begin. We’d been written off as dead, and the ideas and proposals we returned with were laughed off. The world had changed quite a bit in the sixty years we were gone. We were penniless, and had no friends or family. Everyone wanted to use us, though nobody wanted to work together in the interests of humanity. Believe me, we did everything we could. But instead of working together, thirty people were tortured to death at black sites in an attempt to squeeze new tech out of us.

  “After that incident, the first lunar corporation, Armadillo Industries, was formed to take humanity into space. We represented the interests of a small island country that no longer exists. That enabled us to stay in the shadows, while the country flou
rished. After being kidnapped and tortured, we stopped standing up for Earth. Instead, we created a society within the corporation we had founded and began collecting like-minded people from around the world. Sixty years later, Armadillo Industries declared itself the independent nation of Lunar and showed humanity the path to prosperity.

  “We introduced a new and universal currency that replaced the dollar, euro, yuan, and others with what you now know as credits. Other governments were given the technology to build space ships, stations, and ground colonies, while we gradually cleared Earth of people and the trash they left behind. Every month, we published different discoveries and technologies to make sure that none of the countries had a technological advantage over any other. That dramatically reduced the number of wars and conflicts in the world. The countries in the west disappeared after the introduction of the single currency and the distribution of technology. They could no longer dictate their terms, and their financial and political systems crumbled soon after. Another sixty years went by before humankind was advanced enough to travel between planets and live in virtual reality with virtual capsule cartridges changed only once in a while.

  “And finally, Lunar was able to offer access to Project Chrysalis. Humankind was sufficiently cultured and technologically advanced to go through the second trial and unlock access to the outside world and the game. Of course, there were some aggressor nations who wanted to attack Lunar and win for themselves the technology that was the secret of our success. Those who knew me thought I gained access to Akashi’s information field and pulled tech and other assignments from there. But the truth is much worse: humanity is still one of the least advanced civilizations in the galaxy.