Gathering Strength

by Aaron Jay

  ArchE presented two red pills for us to take.

  “He will need to see these,” Pulling said presenting something sealed in what looked like crystal to ArchE along with a data stick. ArchE took the stick and the crystal doodad with his impossibly deft hands. In turn, Pulling took her pill with hands that seemed to have a slight tremor to them. Nerves. I took my pill.

  If it wasn’t for the fact that ArchE was now absent, I wouldn’t have thought anything had changed after taking the red pill. The parlor was for company. There he abided by the convention of having a smooth and undetectable transition into the socially virtual. He himself thought we should always be very aware of whether we were in reality or not, but this one room that he would likely never see again in his life was a nod to social norms.

  “Come on. Let’s go see him,” I said to Pulling.

  Leading her across the hall, we stepped into my father’s office. His office was just as it always had been. A large desk, a giant globe in one corner and an even larger man who looked like my father if his features were symmetrical and his mass hadn’t been transformed into blubber. My father didn’t stand or offer to shake GM Pulling’s hand. He gave her a minuscule nod and gestured to the yellow seat in front of the desk. I pulled a chair from against the window nearer to Pulling.

  “You wished to see me?” my father asked.

  “Yes, I did. I well… it’s hard to just say it out loud,” she began.

  “Truths unuttered don’t go away or disappear just because one lacks the courage or wit to articulate them,” he stated.

  “Yes. Of course. Pardon me,” she said.

  My father looked at me. He isn’t a patient man to begin with. I knew that Pulling had better start unloading or my father was apt to log out of the conversation and the room. I gave her shoulder a small pat to reassure her and she cleared her throat and began again.

  “I have reason to believe that there has been an incursion. Possibly more than one.”

  “Indeed, why are you telling me? Surely the vaunted White Tower should be handling such a dire circumstance,” he said using the GMs’ nickname for both their headquarters and organization.

  “They don’t believe it is an incursion.”

  My father huffed.

  “I am no admirer of the White Tower. Yet, even with my critical view of them I believe they are competent to discern an incursion.”

  “They… I was told by a friend unofficially that there are considerations they are keeping in mind. They insist that there is no incursion. I don’t really know what the tower thinks. I am low in the ranks and the higher-ups think I may be… unreliable?” she said, her shoulders slumping. This admission cost her something. “I can’t tell if this is their actual technical conclusion or a fiction to make handling the situation less costly. Officially there has been no incursion.”

  “Perhaps we should approach this from the other end. Why do you believe there has been an incursion? Most of the time the dissolved corpses, zombified people, and other unspeakable horrors don’t leave much room for interpretation,” he said.

  “For most incursions, yes. But there was that other kind, wasn’t there?” she said nervously.

  My father stilled. He and I carefully did not look at each other for fear that the other might say something, anything about my mother, his wife.

  “There was only ever one of those and that matter was handled. I believe permanently,” he said.

  “Yes, of course. Look, let me just tell you what I know.”

  “I wish you would.”

  She nodded her head and began.

  “The people who come to public pods, well, there is almost always something off about them. I mean except at roll ups or other times like that where you necessarily need a GM and a public pod. Everyone else is there because they are trying to get away from somebody or something, or somebody or something wants to get them away. Maybe they have lost more nano than they can afford to make the game work well in their home setup. Maybe they are doing something they don’t want anyone who has access to their pod to know about. Maybe they were pathetic at playing the Game and are desperate. Something.”

  She looked at me. I had just left a public pod.

  “What? You think I’m going to get offended?” I said. “I agree.”

  She turned back to my father.

  “There was a regular at my old station before I was reassigned. James Eggbert. He seemed like a nice enough old guy. He had obviously been a grinder for a long time. By his age he should have had time to earn a decent enough home setup. But, well--lose a few too many crucial fights, make some bad moves in the game or out… We would say hi on his way in or out of the game. Make some small talk. Discuss some of the places in the game we both liked. We had both been to K’veer, Rook Island, The Planes of Telare. For a regular player, never been with the Party or a clan or anything, he had gotten around. He’d worked the fields of Mulgore and the Hills of Sovngarde. He’d been around. Had a nice way about him. I liked him.”

  My father grunted, perhaps also remembering some of those places. Goddamned Maya and Jude were likely off enjoying the best that the Game had to offer. Meanwhile, I was stuck in the ass-end of Quartzite.

  “And then?” my father asked.

  “And then he started to… to change,” she replied.

  “Change how?”

  “He started playing more hours. He started playing more, I don’t know, hungry? When I first met him, he would tell me some of the best places he had found to harvest or places that had good loot. The kind of hard-to-find little tricks you only know by spending a lot of time nosing around an area. Valuable. Not worth a ton but valuable for regular players. He was always happy to tell me where to find some of those. He was proud that he had found those spots and it was worth more to him to brag a bit to me than to horde it for himself. That’s it. He had pride. Wanted to show me that he may be using a public pod but he was a good player.”

  “Then what? You say he became… hungry?” my father prompted her.

  “Yes. He started seeming furtive. Greedy. He might say hello, but it wasn’t the same. He got angry when I asked him how his latest playing session had gone. Asked me why I thought it was any of my business. He acted like I was after his secrets. I swear, I’d never even used the information he had given me before.”

  “People change, GM Pulling. Not often for the better. But for the worse? You say you weren’t close with the man.”

  “Close? That depends on how you look at it. We had never been to each other’s homes. We weren’t family. But I saw him a few times every shift I had at my old public pod station for years. We weren’t close but I knew him. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, indeed I think I do. Before the troubles people had neighbors, someone who delivered their mail, people who sold them food. People they saw regularly for years even if they--as you put it--were never intimate enough to visit each other’s homes. Technology had been eating away at such bonds between us even before all that led to the Game. The fraying of such bonds was no small part of how the troubles came to us all. You are lucky. You had a vestige of what we used to call community. Please continue.”

  She took a breath.

  “Yes, he was part of my… my community. I was part of his. And then he changed. He seemed angry. More aggressive. I… I’m a young woman.”

  “Manifestly. And?”

  “Well, I’m used to every man noticing that I am a young woman. Although you don’t seem to,” she noted in surprise. I laughed and she blushed after she realized what she had just said. My father waived it away.

  “I’ve managed to put such idiocies behind me. Or maybe my idiocies have put such things behind me. Please, continue.”

  “Right. Well, most men notice. Not typically in an awkward way. Just that it is noted. I think that this was part of why James liked to brag a little about the places he’d found.”

  GM Pulling reddened once again, her embarrassment at such bragging derailing
her again for a moment. My father sighed.

  “It is a function of the species. Men have always liked to show off a bit for a young and attractive woman. A useful instinct that women have used to make men invent most things of use and kill most things that needed killing for millions of years. Go on.”

  “Huh,” she replied, “Well, the way he looked at me changed. A little admiration and interest kept in check is fine. Flattering and sometimes useful, as you say. I’m not weak or scared. I can handle men and keep my interactions with them on my terms. You all aren’t, well, present company excluded, all that bright most of the time. Sweet. Useful. But not often bright.”

  At first I wondered if I was “present company.” I was certainly present. Thinking about it some more I decided I probably wasn’t. From her perspective I was likely sweet and had been useful. Bright? I had been jumping from one hot mess to another since she met me. Even from my perspective I don’t know if I could claim to be very smart.

  “He began looking at me differently. Creepy and hungry,” she continued. “He was aggressive in other ways too. He became rude and abusive to the male GMs. He got into a fight with Arneson.”

  “That shouldn’t count against him,” I chimed in.

  She flicked me a look and decided not to bother responding. She was here for my father not to drag up old drama between me and Arneson.

  “So, this James started looking at you as if you were a piece of meat to be eaten rather than a flower to be admired. He got into fights. It sounds as if he was becoming less a man and more a brute,” my father said, trying to get Pulling back to her story.

  “Yes. I did a good number of the scheduled maintenance checks on the pods. I started to notice irregularities on the pods he used. The baselines for interacting with players’ limbic systems were pegged to the high end of normal. I had to reset them almost weekly.”

  Up till now my father had been vaguely listening but at the mention of pods--pods he had helped design--generating irregularities, he was now totally focused. I doubt anyone who didn’t know him as well as I did could tell but Pulling had his complete focus.

  “Indeed. That is irregular. What did the White Tower say?”

  “The readings were still in the normal range, weren’t they? They said that across enough pods and enough weeks some irregularities were bound to cluster together. It was just an epiphenomenon of random chance.”

  My father grunted and leaned back.

  “Possible,” he said after a moment.

  “That’s what I thought too until James died.”

  “Tragic. But you had mentioned an incursion.”

  “James Dallas Eggbert was killed by breaching the barrier.”

  Silence fell for a moment.

  “That is impossible,” I couldn’t help blurting out.

  “Not impossible,” my father huffed. “Merely extremely difficult. I could do it if I set my mind to it. Of course, a locksmith should be able to pick a lock he himself built. Was James Eggbert a cryptoanalyst or nano-engineer of any sort?”

  “No. Also, when I say he breached the barrier I should say that… parts of him breached the barrier. He was found plastered against the barrier with large parts of his body ruptured and missing. It looked like… it looked like something had sucked large chunks of his body out of… himself and out to the wild nano beyond.”

  “Indeed. Do you have recordings of the site?”

  ArchE entered from the hallway and handed over some manila file folders. He must have been waiting to hand over the data that Pulling had brought with her. ArchE also carefully placed a crystal box on a corner of the desk as far away as possible from my father while still being in reach. My father opened the files while glancing at the crystal box. His eyes flicked from the box’s placement to ArchE.

  “Be careful with that, Numitor,” ArchE said tersely and then went to his chair across the room with no further explanation.

  After an almost imperceptible pause my father decided to ignore the box for a moment. He started looking at the records in the file.

  “Gruesome. You did an admirable job describing such an odd and disturbing death scene,” my father complimented. I stood and looked over my father’s shoulder and wished I hadn’t. It looked like something had sucked the brains and various other bits out of a man like someone sucking the head and meat out of a crawfish. Thank goodness I had just spent weeks becoming ever more desensitized to gore by hacking up humanoid creatures by the dozen. Otherwise I’d likely have thrown up.

  The file contained an image of James Eggbert. He looked like a salty old guy. Pale like most of us are these days but somehow weathered anyway. He had a faint bristle of a beard and similarly short hair on his head. He was smiling a wry grin. An old grinder who was still sharp enough to play the Game.

  My father continued to peruse the files. He then began tapping on the desk idly. In reality, when my father thinks deeply he has a number of ticks. He often repeatedly jerks one of his hands up next to his ear. This can be accompanied by atonal nonsense sounds. It was dead annoying to try to read a book or anything like that near him when I was a child and he was immersed in some problem. His tics were distracting as hell. Numitor Boone was certainly an odd duck. Yet, why would anyone expect a brain capable of his feats of genius not to have its odd necessities? Luckily, here in VR, such unconscious instincts were translated into some idle finger tapping. Tap tap tap.

  “Yet, nothing from beyond the barrier breached to our side,” he finally said, mostly to himself.

  “You are sure?” Pulling asked.

  “If your files are accurate, yes.”

  She relaxed slightly.

  “What is this?” My father made a small wave of his fat hand in the direction of the crystal box.

  “I decided to check the last pod James had ever used. I found it there, Mr. Boone.”

  “And the nano did not assimilate this? Obviously not. Dangerous indeed. Sealing the item in diamond was a judicious idea, GM Pulling. Insufficient for some eventualities but the best you could do for transporting such a possibly dangerous item without attaching a large power source to your containment protocols.”

  He slid the box in front of him. For such fat hands, they were capable of graceful delicacy. I knew we were just watching a VR stand-in for my father accessing another VR that attached to his lab. He opened the box and placed the item inside onto a handkerchief he spread across the green desk blotter. It was small and orange. It iridesced slightly, the light shimmering across the pattern covering it. It was a small scale from some sort of animal. A fish or lizard or snake. He brought a jeweler’s loupe to bear on the item and moved the scale this way and that with a pair of tweezers. Who knows what diagnostic tools he used in reality. He relaxed his face and the loupe dropped from before his eye, disappearing before it hit the desktop. He put the small orange scale back in its diamond case.

  “Just this side of illegal. Just this side of feral,” he pronounced.

  “What is it?” Pulling asked.

  “A sub-processing unit from a larger nano construct. It pushes the boundaries of what the Game and our protections allow. Suggestive. An inspired piece of craftsmanship,” he said.

  “What does it do?” Pulling asked.

  “Without more to examine I couldn’t say what she designed it to accomplish.”

  “She? You know who made this?”

  “Yes. It is obvious. Lilith. Which you already knew, Ms. Pulling. I do not appreciate being gulled.”

  At my father’s accusation I stood from my chair and moved to one side of the desk, putting myself between my father and the GM. I made sure it was the opposite side from ArchE. Honestly, I doubted that this was the precursor to some sort of virtual hack or attack. But in any event I wasn’t stupid enough to be anywhere between ArchE and a possible target. Since starting to play the Game, even my trust issues had started developing trust issues.

  “Mr. Boone, what makes you…” she began.

  “Pf
ooey! I am not a simpleton. The Tower is familiar with her work. Also, as much as I believe they are corrupt to a civilizationally suicidal level, I don’t think the GMs have fallen to the point where this item wouldn’t have been found and analyzed. What is your game, Ms. Pulling?” my father growled.

  She sagged back into her seat.

  “My game is exactly what it looks like, Numitor Boone. I want you to help me figure out what happened to James Eggbert.”

  “You knew who had designed this item before you ever crossed my threshold. You could go and ask her. Why bother me with this?” he said.

  “I didn’t know who designed this. I expect it makes sense that the Tower knows. I am not the Tower. We all wear this uniform, but I don’t know everything the Tower knows.”

  “So you are, what? Freelancing?”

  “My bosses had all the information you have. They told me to drop the matter. Frankly, I am not really sure whether I was reassigned from my old post because of Arneson’s attempt to sabotage your son or because of this.”

  “Large institutions hardly ever behave out of a single clear set of motivations. No reason it couldn’t be both. Miles, sit down. I do not believe Ms. Pulling is about to attack and my defenses should be adequate beyond your abilities to support.”

  I sat down and Pulling continued. “Yes. Officially the Tower has asked and received answers it is fine with. But not everyone inside the GMs is fine with the way things are being run. Some of us want to do our jobs the right way. We want reform. I represent a faction of the Tower who wants to clean things up. At least a bit.”

  “Possibly admirable, if true, though naive and doomed to failure.”

  “Not completely naive. We know what we are up against. But this case is different. You are right. Bribery. Corruption. Fighting those won’t make enough waves to change a damned thing. But an incursion? Experimenting with banned nano? Covering that up? If there is one thing that could rouse the people to righteous anger it is this.”

  “And so you want to pull me into your political games? No! You say with a straight face, ‘rouse the people to righteous anger,’ and claim you aren’t naive? You are either too naive for words or cynical enough that in either event I’d be mad to work with you. On the off chance that you are just stupid and naïve, let me tell you that if you want to make the world a better place you have to do it yourself. Rousing up ‘the people’ just leads to mobs, and all mobs are good for is hysteria, blood and fire. The average intelligence of a group of people goes down the more people join it. I’ll ask you to leave.”