Gathering Strength

by Aaron Jay

  “What happened to James Eggbert?” I asked at the mention of side effects.

  “James Eggbert. Yes. I won’t pretend that my experiments haven’t ever gone awry. James was a tragedy, but I learn from my mistakes. I have progressed from my early work. Some people with a neurology that makes them naturally prone to certain mental health issues were affected. I feel terrible about that. But your neurology is safe. Uniquely safe. What happened to Eggbert won’t happen to you.”

  “So that is it? To make an omelet you have to crack some Eggberts?”

  She smiled sadly, as if indulging my gallows humor because she had lost the moral authority to correct anyone else’s view on her failure.

  “The GMs approved my work. Eggbert and others volunteered. I had no idea that would happen to him and there was no way to predict it. And as I said, you are uniquely safe.”

  “What? Why?”

  “You have been in one of my pods for weeks now. I have studied you intensively. I think I understand what Hardcore Mode does. Your father truly is a genius. What happened to Eggbert won’t happen to you.”

  “You can’t know for sure.”

  She looked at me like I was an idiot. I found that look oddly comforting. My father deployed it regularly. And when he did, he was never wrong.

  “I am trying to save humanity. Some risks must be taken. You are willing to risk your freedom to show that there is a better way. We are the same, you and I. We are aligned. You may or may not agree with my solution. I may or may not agree with yours, but we both know the Party is failing us. We all must try, mustn’t we? As you learn of what I am doing you will see the value of my approach. Your father once worked with me.

  “He did?”

  “Oh, most of us old dinosaurs who are still around knew each other in the bad old days. Brady, Tasha… In any event, I support your bet and what you are trying to prove. The Party will strangle the whole human race to death with their pettiness and false security. I want us to transcend our problems, not unlike you. The question is, are you still willing to take the risks necessary to succeed?”

  It was a good pitch. She complimented me and herself together. Made us the same. If I wanted to believe those good things about myself, I’d have to accept the good things she said of herself. Using my vanity against me. Asking if I was willing to take the necessary risks. Yes, it was a masterful bit of persuasion.

  Some of you are going to say that I was stupid. That I was foolish. All I can say is that she offered help. Something my father was unable to do. I didn’t have any other options and frankly even this one came from out of nowhere. What was the chance there was another nano-engineer genius who could and would save me? This was a chance. That was all I had been wanting since I decided to play the game. Everyone is a fool at times and usually with less reason.

  I said, “Alright. I’m on board.”

  She smiled and dipped her hand deeper into the pool. A look of concentration and anticipation crossed her features.

  Looking down into the pool, I saw that there were flashes of copper somethings shining below. Her pale arm kept exploring the pool, tracking these flashes which moved to avoid her grasp. The pool began to churn and froth. Whatever was in the pool was writhing and wriggling. Whatever was in the pool was agitated. I expected to see her blood color the water in a moment. But after a final lunge, her arm came up with something cupped in its closed fist.

  Standing, she opened her hand, revealing a tiny lizard. It was a coppery metallic orange. Cheeks or gills puffed air fast in the way that small animals respire to a quicker beat than larger ones. Its eyes held intelligence. It wasn’t human intelligence, but it wasn’t the blankness of a dumb animal.

  “Come here,” Lilith said to me.

  Here it was. The moment of no return. I had risked my life over and over again in the Game. This was a risk in real life. Did I think that Lilith knew her business? Yes. Did I have other options? No. I had to do something, and this was something. That kind of thinking hardly ever works out, but people fall for it. I was people.

  She rose smoothly until she stood taller than me. Her perfect, pale features held the look of a craftsman at their work. She placed her free hand on the side of my head.

  “Eye, ear, or mouth?” she asked.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Never mind,” she responded and then brought the hand holding the lizard to the ear on the other side of my face. I felt something smoothly slipping almost like water or oil into my ear. Before I knew it, she was shaking a few drops of water from her hand back into the pool.

  “It should take quickly. Good luck, Miles. I hope you succeed in your battle against the Party. They deserve to have their cozy little situation disrupted. I think you may be the man to do it.”

  Somehow Mr. Ruod had appeared just behind me.

  “Wonderful!” he exclaimed.

  He bowed to Lilith and led me out of the garden.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Once ejected from Lilith’s garden, Mr. Ruod brought me to the elevator. This time I wasn’t taken to the parking garage, subway or anywhere else I’d been in the Pitts. We wandered to another strand of the Pitts web under the city.

  Ruod explained that Lilith’s support comped me a private pod and Cappa membership level pricing. It took a while and a few turns through all sorts of underground spaces filled with pods till we came to my private space.

  It was a legacy from our old fear of the Armageddon that didn’t do us in, nuclear war. We were in the basement of what must have been a government building from long before the Armageddon that actually did do us in. Maybe it was a school. There was a faded sign noting that this was a nuclear bomb shelter.

  Back before the unpleasantness that killed most of us off and brought us the Game, the Party and all the rest, many people had always been sure that the end of the world was right around the corner. Y2K, super volcanoes, global cooling, global warming, asteroids, Mayan prophesies. The world was always set to end. Mostly though, they thought it was going to be nuclear Armageddon that did us in.

  My father always said that it wasn’t the means that were scary but the motives. The apocalypse that we should fear is the one inside ourselves. Nukes were just a tool. A super scary, powerful tool. But just a tool. Nukes showed that we were willing to kill ourselves off because we just flat out couldn’t live on the same planet together. But the nukes were only the means.

  It would have surprised all those people marching around with signs saying, “No Nukes,” that we would be nearly wiped out by weaponized entertainment. We amused ourselves to death. Electronic Arts turned out to be more dangerous than Los Alamos National Laboratories. Oppenheimer had nothing on Zuckerberg.

  This room combined both apocalyptic aesthetics. A pod, sleek and modern, and also the self-inflicted labor prison we made to survive our doom, was sitting in the center of a room that was designed to save people from the blast of a nuclear device or its radiation. I’m sure my father could wax eloquent about the metaphor I was standing in. As he never leaves his home, it didn’t matter.

  The floor was tiled with some sort of stone in two colors. A muddy brown and a dingy cream. The walls had the remains of a dull green paint that had to been chosen because dirt wouldn’t show, back before cleaning was something left to machines. A ladder led up through a narrow tunnel up to what I assumed was the surface.

  “Where does that let out?” I asked Ruod.

  “Oh, nowhere you want to go. The Pitts are so popular that we have actually expanded out past the footprint of the city above. Isn’t that wonderful! So, if you somehow managed to get that unsealed, you would be out past the edge of the city. The wild AI and nano is up there above us.”

  That seemed like another apt metaphor. Our civilization was like an iceberg. Larger beneath the surface than what showed on the top.

  I grunted to show that I had heard Ruod. He gave me some warm goodbyes, making sure I knew how to find my way back to this bunker that was now my room
and wishing me a good session. The last thing he said to me was that I shouldn’t only play the Game but should partake of all the rest the Pitts had to offer. He really thought I was doing something wrong and wasting my life by not engaging in some old-fashioned carnal dissipation.

  Inside the pod, the temptations tempted me. The adverts and sample images pulsed and drew my gaze. An endless stream of pleasure and amusement beckoned. Some small voice in my ear whispered that since I had already succumbed to Lilith, why not indulge? I had allowed myself to be infected by her so why not take the pleasures if I had paid the price? Whatever dangers Lilith offered, I had already swallowed. Willingly. I shook my head. I took her offer in order to play the Game not for any of this.

  The music of stale bread

  Jagged views of earthy mildew funk

  The piquant taste of cracking snapping branches

  My senses reconnected correctly and I was back in the game. Whatever else, I was back in the game and--if Lilith had been straight with me--I could beat the Gathering Quest and the Party … or at least Maya Eastman.

  Nothing left to do but start out. My loping pace ate distance as I worked my way up and down this side of the valley. Seedlings of all sorts abounded: wishbine bush, devil’s lettuce, blue eyed grass, ponderosa pine, kingcup cactus.

  There were new monsters. I came across a pack of rabid agouti. Small and vicious little rat-like bastards that tried to swarm me. Each one was easy to take down and none of them did much damage, but there were so many and they never stood still for even a moment. I mostly ended up writhing around on the ground trying to crush them underneath me. Remus would have found that fight hysterical.

  A mantled howler nearly took me down, its howl causing a paralyzing fear. Monsters that had a crowd control ability were deadly for players trying to solo. With a group, it was likely that someone would be out of range or be able to resist the effect and defend the rest. As a solo player I was defenseless. The Howler paralyzed me with “fear.” Have you ever had a nightmare where a monster is going to devour you while you cannot move? If the Howler hadn’t literally tried to eat my hand--the one holding my spell ring--I would have wiped right there. Instead I blew the back of its skull off when I triggered magic missile.

  I was especially glad when I ran across another bunch of grey wall jumper spiders. I checked my exp from those and saw that the amount I got per encounter was slowly ticking downward as Lilith’s implant was settling in. Good. It was working like Lilith had said it would.

  By the late afternoon my exp counter was down to a crawl that I knew was slower than my pace on the Gathering Quest. Lilith had been straight with me at least this far. I closed my status windows with a growing feeling of confidence. If anyone but me had been around to see me, they might have seen a hungry grin paint itself on my face.

  That is when I ran into the prairie dog colony.

  There was an open area nearly a thousand yards across that was dotted with holes and hummocks spaced all across it. Most of the dry, brown grass that was the common ground cover around here had been cleared. The skeletons of varied creatures dotted the landscape. Some were quite large. I was concerned that mine might join them.

  All along the perimeter around the clearing, rodentlike mammals stood sentinel on their hind legs. I stood on my hind legs watching them back. I was a mammal too. We had even more things in common. They were clearly working together to keep the colony safe, just like people do. I could have done with less of the commonality. For instance, they held weapons and wore armor just like me. Sure, they were cute and it was neat to see how humanlike they were, but man is the all-time great apex predator. The more like humanity they were, the more apex they must be.

  Between the cleared grass and the sentries, the prairie dog colony had a well-defined perimeter. Sneaking into the colony without dealing with the sentries looked impossible. This was one of those situations where a partner or party would really come in handy. But despite the risk, all I could focus on was all those weapons and armor. The Gathering Quest would value worked tools much more than meat or skin. And it was all so conveniently brought together in one location if I could crack this nut.

  Patience is a skill worth deploying as long as what you are waiting for has value. Well beyond their aggro zone, I settled in for a bit of a wait and to observe. Chewed on some spider leg/rib as I waited to see if there was a pattern, movement or opening I could exploit.

  Every once in a while, a new prairie dog would pop up from under the ground. He would get situated and start the whole bobbing up and down and looking in all directions thing they all engaged in for a bit until eventually one of the old guard would head down. At no point did any of them break task. There was never a moment when there was less than a full complement of guards who were one hundred percent on the job. It was creepy. They never interacted with each other or scratched themselves or any of the, well, human things people would do at the same tasks.

  Patience is typically rewarded. Sitting in that spot for long enough got me a floor-show. It was a doozy.

  On the far side of the perimeter, an iguana wandered out and through the cleared area just outside the colony. The nearest sentry was now aware - but didn’t move, there was just a slight increase in the pace of its bobbing posture. Bit by bit, the iguana moved closer to the perimeter. The nearest sentries focused on the iguana. It was subtle, but they were clearly set for the giant reptile. Still, none of them moved an inch from their posts. I could tell exactly when the iguana tripped the defensive line because they all moved at exactly the same time. They moved as one.

  One dog came in from the flank and grabbed its attention. Two more then came in from the iguana’s blind side. They gave high-pitched screes clearly communicating something. Something I found interesting was that the whole guard pattern shifted and filled in with new guards immediately popping up from holes as far from the iguana as possible. The whole bunch of them moved as soon as the iguana took that last fateful step. The guards all shifted in a complex pattern until a full complement of sentries was posted. They did it in such a way that I couldn’t predict who was going to replace whom and it didn’t seem to leave a hole to exploit while they shifted. Those prairie dogs were on the job.

  By the time I looked back to the iguana, not only was the thing dead but they had almost finished stripping it of all its meat and skin and whatever bones they found useful. Efficient little killers. These bastards would make quicker work of the Gathering Quest than us humans.

  I backed away from the colony. The thought of all that loot in one place made an itch I really wanted to scratch. Somehow, I resisted the greedy urge to join the other skeletons marking the prairie dogs’ control of the territory.

  The rest of the day was spent grinding along, but I couldn’t stop thinking of that colony. I found myself filled with a vague blood lust for the critters I had left behind, which I found vaguely disturbing. Why did I care so much about it? Why was I taking it so personally? I shook off the thoughts that kept floating into my mind and tried to focus on the tasks at hand.

  Vague anger and frustration made my sword bite harder and more fiercely. When I took a wound, I felt it less and was able to power through. My fighting and gathering pace was picking up. The anger was making itself useful to me. I even gave a try to casting a spell during combat when I came upon a black tailed jack rabbit. Rabbits were so much lower level than me at this point that I thought it was worth a try. The damned thing still managed to break my chant, but I got closer than I ever had before. My vengeance tasted delicious after I cooked it.

  My skills were ratcheting up at a decent clip. I was able to find and harvest more seedlings. Older and more mature plants came now and again. Other skills like mining also started building up as I grabbed agates, garnets, chunks of petrified wood, now and again some turquoise, jasper or peridot.

  The quest was going well but still, I couldn’t relax. No matter how fast I was grinding I felt like I should be going faster. I w
orried I’d make mistakes moving so quickly, but I was also hyper focused. My appetite was growing bigger and bigger.

  What exactly was Lilith’s implant doing? I knew someone who could tell me, but I convinced myself that I had to keep grinding instead of going to my father. One of the subtler forms of avoidance and procrastination is to focus on something productive. Clean your room instead of facing what might be a burgeoning addiction.

  The Gathering Quest was much more important than the details of Lilith’s implant. My big genius idea for dealing with the prairie dog colony came when I found a licorice seedling. Nature and its beauties inspire us.

  It took me a while, but I retraced my steps to where I had found the mature licorice plant and more importantly the Tarrasquito I had killed. Over a week had passed. It turned out to be enough time to let the beast respawn. It had found a young sarsaparilla tree to tend. I smiled. This was going to be interesting.

  *** ***

  Many things depend on how you look at them. The last time I went after the Tarrasquito the damned thing seemed like Pepe Le Peu. It just wouldn’t stop following me. Of course, that was when I was running, afraid for my life. Maybe that colored how I saw things. Fear of death will do that.

  Getting its attention had been simple the first time. Now the damned thing seemed like a lazy boulder I could barely get moving. I would attack it and it would run after me for a bit and then give up and trundle back to its sasparilla. Where was my implacable foe who would run me down to the ends of the earth? I couldn’t tell if the Tarrasquito’s personality had changed or if I had.

  Despite my best efforts, I kept losing aggro on it. If it was too far behind me when it lost interest, I had the damnedest time getting back in range to get it going after me again. If I got too close, well, it would eat me.