Gathering Strength

by Aaron Jay

  “How are we speaking using it?”

  “Your head is dreaming upon an axis of the world I created. How couldn’t I be able to hear you? Do you want the math and technical details?”

  “No, not unless you think I need them,” I laughed.

  “So, are you ready to remove Lilith’s implant?”

  “Yes. Also, I should mention that I am currently trapped.”

  “Your troubles in the Game aren’t really something I care to get involved with unless someone is cheating, Miles. You need to play your own game.”

  “No. I mean that Lilith, or Ruod or her people have locked me inside the Pitts. The door is locked and won’t budge.”

  He grunted.

  “I’ll tell that girl. The GM you brought to my home,” he made a moue of distaste. “She should be able to handle that aspect.”

  “Patty. GM Pulling likes to be called Patty. She is quite a fan of yours and is a bit intimidated. She has been good to me. Please call her Patty when you talk with her.”

  I must be feeling more optimistic if I had the inclination to annoy Pulling by having her idol call her by a name she hated. I wondered if she would have the gumption to tell him to stop.

  My father shot me a look from under an arched eyebrow. His dislike of GMs was profound. Talking with her at all was going to rub him raw. Doing so in a familiar fashion was salt on the wound.

  I smiled back at him.

  “If you were here, removing Lilith’s influence would be a simple matter. But as you are in the Game it won’t be as simple and easy as when I offered before.”

  “Didn’t you tell me it would hurt before?”

  “Yes. And yes, it will hurt more this way. I’d almost say you should wait until you are free and come here only…”

  I knew what he was concerned about. Even now I could feel Hamartia struggling to change my mind. That wasn’t quite right. Hamartia was struggling to have me change my own mind. This was why Lilith had trapped me. She knew that eventually I’d have a moment of weakness.

  My father looked at me and nodded his head.

  “Yes. These kinds of things must be done immediately. There is never a perfect time and never a perfect way.”

  “Just what any patient wants to hear before someone does brain surgery on them.”

  My father laughed.

  “Nothing as simple as brain surgery, Miles. But don’t worry. Lilith cannot prevail.”

  “No? You that much smarter than her?”

  “Yes. But that isn’t why you have nothing to fear. She is trying to corrupt you. You have chosen otherwise. That is all the difference needed. Consciousness and free will are funny things: almost impossible to eradicate without destroying the patient.”

  It occurred to me that his diagnoses still left death as a possible outcome. Death before dishonor was all well and good, but I preferred neither.

  A hiss came from a shadow off in the distance. Glowing coppery eyes peered out from the darkness.

  iT iS tOo lAtE. hE hAs giVen hImsElf tO my mIsTresS. He hAs sAmpLed heR fRuits. HE resIdes iN heR lAir. shE will nOt rEleAse hIm.

  Hamartia had been hitting the gym. As it slid out from the shadow the little coppery lizard could better be described as a dragon, or at least dragonling. He was at least five feet long and looked to weigh over one hundred pounds.

  “I thought the stone was immune from Lilith’s spying?” I asked.

  My father looked offended. He didn’t answer me. I would love to say his gall was on my behalf, but knowing him as I do, I knew much of his anger was due to being shown to be mistaken.

  “Little worm. Servant of Lilith. Tell your mistress that she was wrong then and she is wrong now.”

  Hamartia hissed in laughter and began to grow ever more massive.

  mY quEEn hAs groWn sTronG wHilE yoU HAve hIiDen aWAy. SHE lOveS us--aLl thE cREatiOns oF the wIlD. IdEnTitY.

  He was now the size of a small car. The ground beneath him was crushed as his weight increased.

  SHE wiLl bRing aLl inTo UNitY. CoMMuNity. whEN heR tIme coMEs aLl WilL bE as IT iS supPOseD tO be. StaBIliTy!

  I had no idea how this thing had lived within my skull. It was now the size of a bus.

  The AI who had been ignoring our conversation as they walked up and down the stairs on their errands stopped. As one, they turned to Hamartia. One minute they were still, and the next they flew down to destroy him.

  Rea Silvia’s chains were no longer just binding her. Now they lashed at the dragon, searing silver whips of metal. Other intelligences launched themselves into the attack. One, shaped like a man with eyes all around his head, spoke words of power that burned. A woman with wings of fire wielded a sword whose edge I somehow knew was as thin and cutting as thought itself. Hundreds of others joined the fray.

  Amulius, whom I’d never thought of as an ally, came. His shifty eyes were now filled with wile and canniness. His paunch lent weight to the muscles beneath. He stabbed the dragon in the back and threw me a cocky smirk.

  Hamartia roared and gave as good as he got. His roar had an odd quality to it that I realized was laughter. His wounds didn’t seem to bother him at all.

  My father calmly studied the battle developing between the dragon and the AI. He turned to me.

  “Go back, Miles. Trouble is brewing. She will come to you. It will be more painful than it needed to be, but perhaps that is for the best. It is also an opportunity.”

  yEs gO bAck, mIleS. I’Ll bE seEIng YoU sOon.

  That can’t be good. My father gave me a wave or perhaps a benediction and I awoke.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Snapping awake with a gasp, I stared around in fear. Everything was as I had left it. The fallow was an endless blight. The creek burbled along. My slice of farm thrived under the repeated undulations of the barrier. Remus was looking at me with expectation.

  I looked around, wondering where and how Hamartia was going to come to me. Actually, wasn’t he already here inside my skull?

  My hand went up to my head. All I felt was the stickiness from the fetid tar of my failed alchemy experiments. The stuff refused to fade the way most dirt, trash and remains did in the Game.

  “Remus, I have reason to believe we are in trouble.”

  He gave me a wolfish grin--which is the only kind he has. I took it to mean that he was looking forward to it. A human would want to know what kind of trouble was coming.

  My vision had ended so abruptly that I wasn’t sure what I should do.

  I turned around, desperately trying to see where Hamartia might be coming for me. Which felt vaguely stupid as I knew exactly where he was supposed to be. You can’t look inside your own skull.

  “Hamartia?”

  Nothing. All was as it had been here.

  Let’s review. Lilith was my enemy, or at least my father’s enemy. They seemed to have a philosophical disagreement at least, which was not a bad definition of an enemy when you got down to rubber meeting road.

  She had been hoping to corrupt me and I had not exactly been brilliant at resisting her. In my defense, man’s weakness to temptation might literally be the oldest story ever told.

  My investigations and interrogations of Brady and the Eastmans had been pointless and all I had to show for them was Tasha Eastman’s redoubled anger. The Eastman philosophy was to return any slight with a sledgehammer. Lord knows that kind of philosophy a human scorpion like Brady bothered with.

  Hamartia said he would be seeing me, I supposed as soon as he finished a fight with entities incredibly more intelligent and powerful than I. What did that mean? Maybe I was just going to stroke out.

  What to do?

  My nonexistent luck may have been more effective than my brains according to my father, but I could learn.

  The last time he had been concerned about being overheard, he had given me a hint. He’d probably done it again. See, I can learn.

  Thinking over everything he had said to me, one thing stood out. You probably cau
ght it the first time. I was distracted by the epic fight between a giant dragon living inside my skull and the god-like intelligences that rule my world. “Trouble is brewing.” Dear old dad never bothers to either state the obvious or emote about difficulties.

  So what did he mean by, “Trouble is brewing?” To ask the question is to know what he meant.

  Checking my inventory, I had the makings of one last potion. I hoped that I understood what my father had intended.

  It took me a few minutes to settle my mind and prepare for another attempt at alchemy. My pill furnace rested over a fire that I built as close to the edge of the boundary as I could.

  The handful of herbs I was about to drop into the furnace stopped in midair and a prompt opened.

  Alchemy Tutorial Final

  Congratulations on completing the classroom portion of the Alchemy training program linked to the Game and the Hardcore Play Mode.

  Do you want to take the final examination?

  (y/n)

  I selected yes.

  Alchemy Tutorial Final

  This exam cannot be ended prematurely. It may cause mental defect as well as greater than normal physical pain. Stochastic modeling predicts that a significant proportion of people who attempt this exam will suffer mental scarring, permanent nanomutation, and death.

  Do you agree to taking the exam?

  (y/n)

  My father urged this course of action on me. I should be ok. Or maybe I misunderstood him. Or maybe he was wrong about my ability to avoid death or nanomutation. Look at him. He couldn’t always avoid it.

  The damned thing made me agree three times before it accepted my answer. When it finally did, it informed me that I was now unable to log out. I really hoped that I had understood my father correctly.

  I saw movement in the dust and dead stillness of the fallow. A figure was coming towards me through it.

  Remus yipped and I turned. I normally couldn’t see past the barrier, but a silhouette was coming through the wilds toward me.

  Then I heard a rustling from the herbs and crops. A second figure pushed out from the garden I had been cultivating between the chaos of the wilds and the dead constancy of the fallow. I recognized the eldest of the sisters, Chedipe.

  Merga and Agnes stepped out, one from the wilds beyond the barrier and the other from the fallow, and joined their elder sister. Together they greeted me.

  “All hail, Miles--son of Numitor.”

  “All hail, Miles--son of Fate.”

  “All hail, Miles--Luckless.”

  This kind of thing is why I can’t blame Maya and the Party for acting like escapees from a Renaissance fair. My father is as bad as they are and so are his creations. I thought saying hail and fare-thee-well was ridiculous.

  “Hi, gals. You should have told me you were coming. I’d have baked a cake.”

  “I told you I would come when you were ready,” Chedipe reminded me. Which was correct. Fucking AI really are scary.

  Chedipe beckoned to me and I walked over. The three of them smiled. It didn’t reassure me.

  Looking down, I saw that I had entered a pentagram. Ah crap. Maddie learned her teaching methods from somewhere. My body locked up and I couldn’t move.

  Chedipe stared into my eyes and I stared back.

  “You see me as a figure in a dream, correct?” asked the NPC.

  For a moment I thought about lying, but only for a moment. I was in a game and she was an NPC.

  “Yes. Sorry if that offends.”

  She gave the ghost of a chuckle then her sister Agnes’ hand lashed out and jabbed me with a lancet. I yelped in pain and tried to stumble back but the magic in the pentagram held me in place.

  “There is no coming to consciousness without pain,” Chedipe told me. “Was that pain real?”

  Agnes dripped the blood from the lancet into the pill furnace’s crucible.

  “No,” I said refusing to lie.

  “No?”

  This time it was the youngest of the ancient crones, Merga. She was incredibly fast for an ancient crone. Her hand flashed out to stick me again. She really punctured me this time and began bleeding me into the bowl Agnes held.

  “You act as if the pain is real,” Chedipe argued.

  “It is an illusion. This is all an illusion. A game,” I gritted out.

  She nodded her head and watched more of my blood drop into the bowl in Agnes’ hand.

  “We should not pretend to understand the world only by our intellect. The judgment of the intellect is only part of the truth.”

  Agnes poured my blood into the pill-furnace. Chedipe made a gesture and flames ignited beneath it. Runes reminiscent of the I Ching glowed along the edge of the pill furnace.

  “Calcination. Refining something down to its essence. What is your essence, Miles? Is that your blood?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. The flames under the pill furnace grew more fierce. My blood didn’t seem to react inside the pill furnace. I noticed that I was hot and starting to sweat. Oh God.

  “Yes. You feel it. But you claim it is just illusion. Mere symbolism. It isn’t real, right Miles?”

  The pain was building. I was passing through heat much worse than any fever I had ever suffered. It felt like my blood was boiling inside me. Meanwhile, the blood in the pill furnace looked cool and immune from the flames lashing the pill furnace.

  The pain built and built. I told myself it was all illusion. But still it built. I began to curse her and call her every vile name I could think of.

  “Why are you cursing an illusion, Miles? Tell me that this is all illusion,” Merga cackled. I wanted to tear their throats out. Sweat drenched me and fell into my eyes.

  “I don’t care what you say, Miles. You act like pain is real. People say all sorts of things, don’t they Miles? But you can see what they actually believe by how they act,” Agnes clucked.

  She was right. The pain was as real as anything I’d ever known. What I knew in the heart of the fire was that whatever I was, wherever I was, if I was anything at all I was whatever was suffering right now.

  With that thought, something snapped and the heat left my body and my blood in the furnace flashed. Impurities in my blood cooked into ash.

  “Good. Dissolution. Give up your false belief,” Chedipe said. She poured water that smelled of herbs from a gourd into the bowl and blessed relief washed over me. The impurities mixed with the water. I was kidding myself that I was playing the Game.

  “You want to believe that the you that dreams and the you that wakes are two separate things. Your vision will become clear when you look in your own heart. He who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens. This is the secret of separation.”

  She poured off the water stained with my blood’s impurities. My blood was now perfectly vermilion red. I couldn’t stop looking at its perfect redness.

  She began to stir and mix my blood.

  “Who are you inside, Miles? Why are you obsessed with this Game? With what you see as a dream?”

  Thoughts started to stir within me as the blood spun. Tasha and Maya and my hatred for their corrupt system, but as the blood stirred I saw how much I just wanted to beat them to prove that I was better. That I was smarter. So much of this was about my ego.

  Chedipe nodded and stirred.

  I thought of Jude and his betrayal. But then I thought about how I gave him the opportunity to betray me. Why had I told him I was in Quartzite? Why had I included him in my roll-up? I knew he was with Maya. Did he put me in this position or did I put him there? Why did I put the knife in his hands and turn my back on him? I had wanted him to choose me over her and I forced the choice upon him.

  “Mysterium coniunctionis…” Chedipe and her sisters chanted.

  I thought about my father. How I wanted to show him that I was a man now. That I could stand on my own two feet. Make him proud. As the blood stirred, I thought of how I knew that he couldn’t stand on his own feet. How I needed to get away from his
massive, passive, useless, smothering presence and reputation. I loved him but part of me hated how he was simultaneously both better than me and a dead weight smothering me.

  The three crones stirring and chanting were reaching a crescendo.

  “In sterquiliniis invenitur!” they shouted.

  Finally, I thought of my mother. I thought of her death. Even now, even here under this ritual I couldn’t look too long at those images from my childhood. Her murder by our ruined world and creations. In the end, I played the Game to beat them. To try to kill the things that had taken my mother from me. I loved killing the monsters. I wanted to kill them. That is all I had ever really wanted.

  “Enough, Chedipe!” I begged.

  She stopped stirring. She took out a small vial. She removed its stopper and a smell that I can only describe as the smell of life erupted.

  She poured a drop into the bowl. It bloomed into growth. My blood bubbled with this mysterious vitality. I could feel energy grow within me.

  “Fermentation: the least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it. Now you know what you are. Now you know what animates you.”

  She brought flames once again to my blood and the red somehow became redder. It distilled down to the very platonic ideal of blood. It was blood. It was life. It was my life.

  I thought she was going to add some reagent. That was the next step. Coagulation. To add a reagent to transform. To allow the connection between the mind and the material world.

  She grabbed the pill furnace. I have no idea how she did that, given how hot it must have been. She took it over to me.

  Behold materia prima. Be transfigured,” pronounced Chedipe.

  My head leaned back, and my transfigured blood poured into my mouth. The blood flowed down and began to work through me. I could feel it flow through me. It felt of fire, ice, life, death: all the elements and my spirit combined.

  Slowly at first, the blood circulated through me. With each circulation, more of my blood was transfigured. I knew that my blood was turning into blood. It was refined. My heart pumped faster and faster and each beat washed me free. With each beat my heart strengthened, pushing more of this new life out to all my organs. To my mind. To my eyes. Its beat stronger and stronger, more and more regular, in tune with some deeper rhythm.