Civilization- Barbarians

by Tim Underwood

  A horizontal axe strike from behind missed Marcus as he ducked, and it thunked instead into the neck of the warrior he had just killed.

  This was like a beautifully choreographed brutal action movie scene.

  Marcus kicked backwards, his foot wrapped in a hide sandal crushing the genitals of the warrior behind him, and he then leapt up, and thunked his new axe into the sternum of the next man, as he grabbed this new victim’s spear and stabbed it through the intestines of another barbarian warrior.

  In less than thirty seconds all of the barbarians were butchered with their own weapons.

  The last standing warrior fled — though the man whose genitals Marcus had crushed was still alive also. As he did so, Marcus took a captured axe, and hurled it at the back of his head, swirling around and around.

  Thunk, right through in the head, and the fight was over.

  Injured enemy clutched his groin.

  Marcus bent over one of the bodies and casually picked up an axe. He walked up to the injured enemy, and pulled back the axe to pound the weapon through the man’s head.

  My perspective did not allow me to see the fear or the terror, but I heard babbling whimpers which I were translated as, Panicked begging for life.

  Vomit did not come up in my mouth. But I wanted it to. I tried to communicate to Marcus, Take him prisoner. Take him prisoner.

  The sharp weapon came higher up. And it began to descend.

  These people who you protect, they are people just like you. This is no game. But if so, then also, the people who I kill, they too must be people as well.

  Was it true? Was Marcus a thinking human, like me? Or like I had been before I became a disembodied ghost in a machine?

  The micro seconds ticked past as the axe descended towards this weeping man, with deep scars ritually carved into his forehead and cheeks, with several weapons still upon his body. He wore a cloak of furs, and one of his hands rose millimeter by millimeter, to helplessly try to block the descending far faster axe haft from stabbing him through the eyes. His other hand still gripped his bruised balls.

  And with a terror of being party to the murder of a defeated prisoner, I, with all of my focus desperately commanded Marcus to take him prisoner.

  Marcus stepped back so that the weapon whistled by the man’s forehead instead of into his eyes.

  He then looked, as if he knew exactly where my camera’s point of view started from. He looked right into where I looked at him from, and he bared his teeth and snarled.

  Marcus threw the axe to the side. It clattered against a granite outcrop before it bounced onto a patch of soft grass. He pulled his head back and roared like an angry lion.

  He grabbed the barbarian warrior by the throat, lifted him up high in the air, and I could see that the barbarian was a slight young man, probably not yet twenty, with sparse whiskers. Marcus stripped off the man’s fur hangings, his loincloth, and each leather strap belting another axe or a crude flint knife to the barbarian with his free hand while holding the man hanging in the air by his throat and jaws.

  Then with a disgusted, effortless gesture Marcus tossed the now nude barbarian to the ground, in a softer patch covered by three foot tall grasses.

  Marcus looked at the crowd of elves and in his clipped sharp voice said something. After a moment the translation came to me, more detailed than normal. “Our kind, merciful” — I could hear the angry snarl in the voice — “new guiding spirit orders this murderer be spared for some purpose beyond my ken. Guard him. And bind him. And don’t give him a chance to escape and bring more of them upon us.”

  A new asshole popup popped up:

  Your reputation with Marcus has dropped

  So, you ordered someone to do something. They didn’t like it. It was so easy to flex those godlike muscles of ordering people around with just your will. But something went wrong. Oh no! They really didn’t like it. And now they don’t trust your rules and rulings. Maybe they actively dislike you now. They’ll perhaps be sluggish when they do their jobs, or stop worshipping you, and the flow of sweet, sweet, addictive as cocaine spiritual energy from them will dry up. Every individual who knows about you has an opinion of you, and you can see what that opinion is for all of your people — their private thoughts are their own, but apparently not their opinions.

  You get to be the thought police, cool, huh?

  Things you do, military success, building things that a group wants, listening to their advice, etc — you know the score. Everything you do might affect the opinion different people have of you. If they trust you and support you, good, but if they decide that they dislike you, that isn’t good.

  If they hate you enough, they may stop following orders, or even defect or rebel.

  And it looks like you’ve started down the path of having your one powerful warrior dislike you. Clever chessmaster strategy. What next, Oh Great Cuddles?

  Chapter Six

  I was not going to watch a helpless man murdered by a group I controlled. This was a matter of basic right and wrong, or at least basic official modern Western ethics.

  I admit, I have read plenty of novels and stories where the heroes killed the prisoners, and were still portrayed as doing the right thing. And I certainly could imagine reasons for why we would need to kill a helpless prisoner.

  I could even imagine such cases where killing a helpless prisoner who had not planned to literally eat my people would be justified.

  However now was not a time when I had no choice.

  Marcus tied the young barbarian’s hands together with leather belt straps taken from the corpses, and then he dragged him by an impromptu rope towards the center of the tent settlement that my people had established.

  I looked at the barbarian’s character sheet.

  Most of the information was blurred out as not available, however there were some interesting bits.

  Age: 19

  Human Barbarian

  Morale: Terrified.

  Condition: Wounded.

  Traits: Barbarian background, Eunuch, Clever.

  Really! Eunuch?

  My mind went back to when Marcus kicked him. The image replayed for me, seeming to take up a different view than the viewfield in front of me. This time it played at real speed, even though at the time I had experienced time at 1/8th speed. The leather wrapped foot snapping back. The heel striking our prisoner’s crotch.

  Yeah. No surprise here. The poor kid was not going to be having any more kids after that.

  Fucking hell.

  I now remembered to speed my subjective time back to a one for one correspondence so I’d stop using extra spiritual energy. Slowing time to a quarter was alone using almost 10% of the spiritual energy being produced each hour. During the two minutes he’d used my power, Marcus had burned through about an hour worth of production also, and infusing my commands with spiritual energy to make them be listened to had used another hour worth of production up.

  Fortunately the total use was just a few percent of my stored power, but in a serious fight, if I boosted all of the elves so they could fight better, it would drain all of what I had stored right now, or even the whole maximum storage very quickly.

  Now that there were no draws on it, the spiritual energy number slowly went back up.

  Perhaps I was just being a slave to the system, but right now I was very happy about how it went up at twice the normal speed because of my devotion trait.

  I studied the barbarian again as he was dragged towards the hilltop clearing where the settlement was mostly camped.

  His eyes were filled with pain and they flickered in every direction. He warily watched Marcus. He looked at the elves who followed them as though they were of no importance. Several of the elves were now properly armed for the Stone Age, holding flint axes stolen from the killed barbarians, or awkwardly carrying the long spears, whose poles were blackened from where they were fire hardened after the bark was stripped off. Clearly the elves found the spears too heavy for the
ir slim frames to manage easily.

  It was clear in my mind what I wanted at this moment as I poked around the naked barbarian’s status bar. I wanted to recruit him through good treatment. He was not a fraction of the warrior that Marcus was, but he was much, much more dangerous than the hippie five foot tall elves.

  Or a slave… the thought whispered in my mind. He could be used for slave labor, and working on the many, many tasks that my elves were not suitable for. The set up screen promised that they would hate building things. He could be forced to dig foundations and build stone walls for me.

  No.

  This was another one of those moral matters that were settled by my culture and civilization. Amzlat had told me that these were thinking people like myself. Even more firmly embedded in my moral framework, in the taboos of my society, than not killing unarmed prisoners, was not keeping slaves.

  Never okay.

  When you played Civilization, it was simply an abstraction. You picked the slavery civic, and then you could whip the city and you got thirty hammers, lost one pop, and had one extra unhappy population for ten turns. Of course I used slavery when I played the game. I liked to regenerate my maps when playing, back when I could play easily because I had both arms, until I got a high food bonus starting location. I could then build all of the early buildings really fast, or whip out an army to axe rush a nearby civilization.

  I freely confess it: I was that kind of player.

  The point of playing video games is to have fun, not to be manly. If I wanted to be hard and manly, I would have worked out until I had muscles like Marcus. Except I’d never seen anyone with muscles like Marcus. Not even in movies or when I watched an Olympic weight lifting competition. Those arms literally were thicker than my legs had been.

  After I put on weight following my explosion.

  Enslaving this young barbarian would not be an abstraction from reality. This was not simply changing a single ultimately meaningless digital value. This would be actual slavery.

  No.

  Whenever the time came to make that choice, I would choose free citizens.

  I still wanted to recruit the young barbarian warrior.

  He was dragged by Marcus to the edge of the clearing the tent town was built on. Marcus tied him to a tree with the leather strips and left him there with several of the bigger and more muscular young elvish men as guards. That means he was guarded by boys five and a half feet tall, who while they did not look like they were begging to be dunked in a toilet by a jock, they did look like they would not mind the experience very much.

  Hippie elves.

  Marcus stalked to the tent where my gem was, and a new popup appeared.

  This one was one of the sarcastic popups:

  Your First Council Meeting

  Oh Exalted Cuddles, Your minister of defense, Marcus, has called a council meeting to give advice to you, the guiding spirit.

  Most of these guys worship you. Except for the one who can actually fight.

  He no longer likes you.

  There is no fixed number of council members, and you can call them in any particular group and arrangement. As time goes on, and you discover other civilizations, unlock further lines of technical production, more leaders whose advice you must take will develop, and you can choose, much like a CEO in a company, along which lines you will organize your people — will the leaders be divided by functional lines, like they currently are, or by regional lines, or by shrugging and guessing?

  Note: Meetings that are too large and long suck for everyone involved. Morale starts dropping the longer your council is in meeting, after twenty-five minutes, and of course they aren’t doing anything useful while they are yakking at each other. But at least this time you are the boss, and you can really ignore them and go off and do something else while they talk.

  I didn’t ignore the meetings, of course.

  Not this time anyway.

  Eventually I discovered I could reduce my use of spiritual energy a little bit if I let subjective time run twice as fast it normally did, and even later I discovered a trick to let me understand what they were saying if it ran at an extremely fast speed, four or even eight times real time, by applying spiritual energy to supplement my auditory processing system, so meetings did not take me very much time.

  It also helped that I had access to the morale and boredom meters of each of my people, so I knew without asking when they were bored, and I could will them to end the damned meeting.

  This was particularly good, as I could not ask them to end the meeting.

  The council meeting was like when you asked your high council for advice in Civ, but not quite. You remember in Civ 2 when the different advisors made ridiculous speeches and argued with each other? “Give us more units, sire, and I vow to present your foes in a bloody heap at your feet!”

  Those were good days, I was in elementary school when I played that version. My council now was like that, except they made their speeches to a big glittering rock.

  The leaders of the tribe gathered on the glimmering red carpet they’d probably brought from the sky temple of Artoran and stared at the big gem which they apparently thought was me. I also stared at it. I thought about recentering my camera view so that I could look out from the gem and stare back at them. However, they were in a circle, and my viewfield only let me look in one direction at a time.

  The group included Virtunis, our religious leader and mayor, Numericus, the elf I’d found who did actually like math, Marcus in his burly muscled bulk as the military leader, and a bug-eyed elf named Sapientus, who had a contemplative distant look who had the duty of listening to the whispers of my glorious spirit self, teaching my elves how to do new things un-thought of since they had been thrown from the old world and stripped of their memories of such technologies in the transit.

  That is, my science advisor.

  The discussion in my first council meeting focused on our prisoner.

  Sapientus thought I wanted him to experiment on the prisoner. But he considered that to violate proper research methodologies. New facts were discovered when elves stared at the skies and thought about me. One did not learn via experimentation, but via contemplation. Probably the only reason he didn’t think that the only route to true knowledge was by reading ancient books is that they no longer had an alphabet or the ability to read, as that would be one of those things that would need to be discovered again.

  Virtunis thought I wanted us to ritually eat the cannibal, like the cannibals had wanted to ritually eat us. He quite kindly, and without any rancor in the slightest, explained that it was contrary to their nature as hippie elves to eat the flesh of any thinking beings, and that he hoped I was not excessively offended, but their old lizard god absolutely disclaimed the use of any such rituals to increase his power— and holy shit. I actually could increase my power by ordering my worshippers to eat people.

  How fucking messed up was that?

  A question mark in the upper corner of the screen started blinking, and when I willed it open, I found the help files on cannibalistic rituals. This civilopedia-like entry, without the sarcastic voice the system often greeted me with, explained at length the options and ways that having a brain be eaten — of course the body part that needed to be eaten was the brain — could benefit me.

  I could choose a direct spiritual energy bonus, I could get long-term improvements in the spiritual energy generation capacity of those I fed the brain to (it would wear off at approximately the speed that the proteins incorporated from the eaten person’s brain left the bodies of the eaters), by mixing the brain of the captive with the brain of one of my true worshippers, and having my warriors eat the mixture as a soup, I could then feed them spiritual energy twice as cheaply, and that would be a permanent bonus, because of my sacrificing one of my own people to gain it.

  At this point I closed the help file decisively.

  I really wanted to vomit and feel nausea. Strange to want to feel sick like that
.

  Even though I’d slowed down time so I could quickly read through the worldopedia articles on eating prisoners, by the time I’d recovered enough from my combined horror and disgust to pay attention, Virtunis was finished with his disturbingly kindly refusal.

  Numericus was a timid, easily frightened man, who managed to look like a nerd wearing a pocket protector despite wearing a badly woven wool tunic that was a size too big for him, a tightly twisted loincloth, and a hat that I’m sure he thought was dapper made from a skinned squirrel. He was too frightened by the thought of the cannibal securely tied up with three different sets of leather bindings to be able to do more than stammer.

  Though he also did announce later, in a clear voice that was translated to me by the system, that he had finished, while we were being attacked, the count of all the citizens, all of the tents, and several other matters, and that he had all the data in his head.

  I saw the system had updated those numbers, and I now knew exactly how many of a great many things we had.

  Marcus glared at the crystal and didn’t say anything. But I thought he knew what I wanted to do with the prisoner.

  And here was the problem.

  They were not talking to me, and I could not talk to them. I began to frankly wonder what I was doing here. The whole thing had a surreal, and ridiculous feel.

  I could look at them, I could clearly hear them, but the actual sounds they made were complete gibberish. It was all sky temple worshipper to me. Not English.

  Instead I understood what they said because the system provided a translation for me when I focused on the speaker. The translation came either in text, or spoken in my ears in English as I preferred. But not spoken in the voice of the people out there. It was spoken in a flat artificial voice that was roughly (and only roughly) gender matched.

  This was not so very terrible. You can conduct a conversation through translators.

  No, the problem was that I could not talk to them at all. I could give them the sense of me desiring them to do something. But I could not say anything. This desiring them to do something could be perfectly sophisticated if the system was designed to help me give this particular order, for example gathering together the elves to try fighting, and telling them to pick up weapons, or if I wanted the council members to give me their reports.