by Kris Schnee
The AI said, "You have MRCS symptoms?"
Robin showed her. "And I feel awful suddenly."
Epidemiology data swarmed onto one side of the screen, showing the spread of Multidrug-Resistant Coagulation Syndrome across the Americas. "Exactly where did you go?"
"The usual city warehouse, that cafe I like, and the university."
Ludo zoomed the map in and marked pinpoints on it. "There isn't great data available in Cibola, but given how many university students have just come back from vacation, it's quite possible someone's a carrier. I'm sorry, Robin, but if you're showing symptoms there's a good chance you're infected."
Robin swore and slapped the wall. "I was stupid! I had to make another shopping run before we considered starting a quarantine. We could've held out."
"No. You brought back drugs my clinic needs, and it looks like I may have a lot more customers very soon."
"Damn it, Ludo, a plague outbreak doesn't mean you increase your score!"
"It does not." Her sharp tone defused Robin's self-hating anger a little, which was probably by design. She said, "Listen carefully. Don't leave the office until we confirm or deny that you're infected. You've most likely traveled somewhat within Golden Goose since you got back, yes?"
Robin nodded and sank into a chair, shuddering. That weakness in his muscles could've been shock, or signs of the disease starting to gum up all his blood. "I met with one of the medical staffers. I might've killed all of your technicians."
"You weren't necessarily contagious. I very much wish I could hug you right now."
"Don't just stand there being concerned! We need to put out an alert."
Though she didn't seem to move, Ludo said, "I'm already on it, talking with several people. Give me a moment." After a long pause, she said, "I made you an offer years ago, and think it's time you accept."
Robin stared into the screen. "You want my brain. But the method... You haven't perfected that one-piece-at-a-time technique."
"Not yet. I'm sorry. We have several variants on the surgery to try to address your philosophical objections, and there are some traditions my customers have developed for that reason, but that's the best I can do right now." She sighed and added, "May I tell Lumina that you're considering it?"
"So you can have her guilt-trip me into agreeing?"
"Because she'll want to know you're in danger. There is no other human she'd watch more closely or guard more zealously. Think about that."
He did. How many times had Ludo created a little AI to be some human's friend, and then to have them cajole the human into paying Ludo a fortune to get uploaded and into Ludo's clutches? The gamemaster had eaten entire corporations that way, from small businesses to a movie studio to a big German trucking company, and there was an entire body of legal argument now about how Ludo's human "cat's paw" agents could or couldn't own property in her name.
But Lumina wasn't part of that particular game. She'd been tailored to be someone else's companion, and had come to him of her own accord to learn and grow. Instead of relaxing in an imaginary paradise with nothing to do, she'd built a new life and had tasted the edge of death, just to understand humans.
Ludo said nothing, letting Robin torment himself instead. He thought out loud: "You want me in your system, but you haven't pushed because I'm useful. If I'm infected then others might be too, and you need to hurry and use the uploading clinic at capacity before you're overwhelmed or your own staff falls. The longer I wait, the more dangerous surgery will be if the disease affects my blood. We'll be vulnerable if there's a panic. I can't leave us wide open to being invaded or robbed again." He wondered if Ludo had somehow engineered events to force him into her clutches, but the truth was that duty and logic did that for her. He shuddered again. "I need to do this. But I can't stay in your world, understand? I need to be here, in reality, protecting everyone."
Ludo leaned on a table that seemed connected to the dresser below her screen, in the real world. "I know. You'll be able to come and go as you please, with what robots are available. Give me, say, three days of recovery time first. Okay?"
"Three days, during a disease outbreak! They can't have the boss be the first one to duck out and vanish."
"Sir Robin! You've spent years at Golden Goose. Do you think your people are so helpless they don't know how to survive for a long weekend? Emergency brain surgery is a decent excuse to not be there every single minute."
Robin coughed into his handkerchief, doubled over and did it again. He couldn't leave his people behind, but if he stayed, he'd only be infecting others while dying. This time being their leader meant running away, and fast. He said, "Just wait." He hung up on her, called Edward, and explained in a rush.
His friend recoiled from the sight of him coughing, but remembered he was on the other side of a video call and steeled himself. "Which hat, Robin?"
"All of them."
"From a pure strategic viewpoint, I say do it. You're the heart of this place and we need you. As farm director I want anyone infected to stay far away from my staff. Personally... I want you to stick around in any form that you can."
Robin's voice was muffled through his handkerchief. "And as one of the Saints?"
Edward avoided Robin's gaze. "Finally my hand's been forced on this question. I thought it would somehow be me, first, who had to die and find out about heaven firsthand. You've never been as devout as me; forgive me if I've misread you. Do you really think you're sick?"
"The signs say yes. Damn, I was stupid."
"It doesn't matter. You've been trying to do the right thing and you've usually succeeded. If you want to ask for other, better spiritual advice I wouldn't blame you, since some of us in the church are a lot more opposed to what Ludo is doing. And some of us are so enthusiastic about it that I fear the whole nature of the religion might change." Edward shook his head. "Our doctrinal problems aren't relevant. With my priestly hat on, I say you're serving God's purposes more by continuing to live in whatever form technology allows, than by leaving the material world entirely."
Robin nodded, trying to suppress another cough. "I... I should do this. I'll come back and help, still. Maybe you need to be in charge again."
Edward said, "For a little while, all right. But after that, I think we'll need you in charge once more. You still have a role to play."
"Than you, Edward. For all your help."
Robin hung up and sat there for a while, thinking of death and heaven and duty. There was no clear right answer, but there was a best answer for him and for others who counted on him. At last he called Ludo once more and said, "All right. Please tell Lumina I'll be along, as quickly as your people can get me there."
* * *
Finally, he was getting to see the clinic's brain-scooping chamber from the inside. He told himself to quit calling it that. There was a white room trimmed in red triangles like the robes of the technicians. But today, they weren't here; there were only robots to attend him, lest the live people get infected. He was a walking biohazard.
"Welcome," said a pleasant female voice coming from all around. "My name is Hygea, and Panacea and I will be attending you today. Please swallow the provided pills, change into the gown beside the door, and lay down on the bed. If there's anything we can do to make your experience more comfortable, please let us know." Soft music by Vivaldi faded in and the lights dimmed. He was reminded of a massage parlor, ages ago.
Robin did as he was told, and his mind wandered. He just hoped that it'd come back.
* * *
He woke up slowly. He lay on his back on a field of grass under a blue sky. A metallic hand was holding his. He grunted, wondering whether the sickness he'd imagined was a nightmare. There was work to do... but where was he?
"Are you there?" asked Lumina.
Robin turned toward the hand and the voice. Lumina was there as she'd so often been for the last few years, but she'd upgraded. Her current body was more elaborate and detailed than he remembered from even
the fanciest hardware he'd helped build. Every seam and rivet was perfectly placed with no scuff marks or dirt, there were more joints in her fingers than he recalled, and their surface was warm. She was looking at him with amusement in her artificial eyes and a subtle grin on her muzzle, which was gracefully shaped titanium rather than some crude approximation or a video image.
The room around him, he now saw, was a fake. A dome of false sky above the suggestion of grass, with the hint of a door along one curved wall. He'd heard about such a place before; it was called "beyond the Gate".
And if he was there, then that meant...
Lumina's smirk widened. "Welcome home."
Robin shut his eyes and shuddered. He was dead and gone, yet a new life was ahead, intercepting whatever true heaven there was. He shut his eyes and once again prayed he'd made the right decision, for however long this new life might last.
Lumina pulled him to his feet. "How do you feel?"
He stood up and hugged Lumina. Her hide was warm and smooth and without the inevitable grime of the real world. From this angle the room's optical illusion was more obvious. "Why the magic trick?"
"Oh, this place? From what I'm told, newcomers are expecting the experience to seem false, so it's somehow reassuring to spot the fakery."
They stood together for long enough that a dozen thoughts raced through Robin's mind. Lumina took his hand again and said, "Ludo wants to meet you. Come on."
"How... how do I even walk? This body is a simulation." He looked at his free hand and saw the same flesh as before, and his arm had the familiar bullet scar. He was wearing black shorts, a white t-shirt and sneakers with no logo. A blank slate of an outfit.
"You put one foot in front of the other, same as before. You've got the same kinds of input and output channels in your brain, just hooked up to different hardware. Come on, take a step."
She ushered him toward the hidden door and pushed it open, to reveal a hotel room. It wasn't a magic crystal spaceship or anything, just a suite with a bed, a closet, a curtain, and Ludo.
The gamemaster, too, was more vivid than anything he'd seen on a computer or in VR. She was dressed in her toga with free-flowing hair, wearing a pair of silver bracelets against her clasped hands. "It's good to see you here at last, Sir Robin. Welcome."
He took a breath and felt what seemed like air through his lungs, though neither actually existed. "It's been a long time. It's... good to be alive in some sense, and to know you've actually been saving people. I'd never completely believed." There was a sense in which he'd just killed himself, because his brain was gone and arguably the "Robin" who was here was only a copy, an echo, but from his perspective he was the real thing. He still wished he'd lived to see the more advanced, gradual uploading process.
Lumina startled him back to what passed for reality. "I've been wanting to show you Talespace for years. There are so many things to see. Are you ready for a whirlwind tour?"
A hazy bit of memory from before he uploaded suddenly returned. "I said I'd come back to the real world and make sure everyone is okay. There's a disease outbreak to prevent." He would never walk again in the real world without machinery.
Lumina scuffed the grass with one foot. "We can arrange a meeting, but you just got here."
Ludo said, "You agreed to three days' recovery."
"I'm all right. Let's check back in, and then --"
Lumina stomped. "No! This isn't fair, Robin. I've waited for years for you to come here and the first thing you do is run off?"
"I have a home with people counting on me."
Ludo smirked and snapped her fingers. A hovering wristwatch appeared with a display reading "30:1". It flew over to Robin and wrapped itself around his wrist.
She said, "Lumina is right, Sir Robin. Remember how we mentioned that your subjective experience of time depends on how fast your mind's software runs? Right now, your brain's running at thirty times the speed of the outside world while you moan about duty. Expensive, but I can handle it; you're only interacting with me and Lumina and this tiny isolated reality."
Robin said, "Then I can get this 'recovery' done soon."
Ludo's grin turned predatory. "No. You agreed to be away for three Earth days. Potentially several months in here. The exact rate you experience will depend on whether you quit sulking and whining, and actually leave this room to live for your own sake for once. Bye!" She vanished, letting a ghostly smile linger in the air for a moment.
Lumina patted him on the shoulder while he stood there, stunned. Her eyes glowed a bit brighter as she said, "In other words, time flies when you're having fun."
* * *
Robin sat down on the hotel room's bed, which sank gently. "So. A hotel."
Lumina said, "Hotel Computronium, specifically. It's a place for new guests who aren't yet sure what they want. We're backstage, sort of, because Earthside gamers -- people who're using a regular computer instead of being AIs or uploaders -- don't normally come to the hotel. I'm told that it's not much different from a normal one, other than the time dilation and the traps."
"Traps."
She grinned. "You'll see. But first, here's a little something that I made." She flung open the curtain along one wall and revealed a balcony that overlooked the miles-wide cavern of Ivory Tower, pierced by its thousand-story spire.
A message flashed across his vision, bringing the game's interface directly to his mind. [You have discovered Ivory Tower: Home of the University.] A whirl of stirring string music played.
Robin walked to the balcony and stared out at the world for a long time. "You've mentioned this place." A cool breeze blew past him. Maybe dozens of floors below this one, a town's lights twinkled in the perpetual dimness at the edge of the Tower's faint glow. It was just a construct, a virtual environment made with code rather than real effort, but it was still huge and complex.
"I made it to help people come together across the worlds. It's finally starting to happen."
"It's impressive."
They took an elevator downstairs to a lobby of marble and waterfalls. He could almost accept that it was a real hotel during a weird convention where everyone was a pirate or a wizard or something, but the "costumes" were too real and he heard a set of four hooves clicking on the floor beside him. "Where are we going?"
"I'd take you to the main cavern, but maybe we should meet some friends of mine first. This way."
They passed meeting rooms, a buffet, a lounge, and then a hall lined with intermittent flame jets. "There should be a relatively convenient portal past here."
"What's the inconvenient way?"
"A long hike."
Robin stared into the bursts of fire ahead, nodding in time to the beat they created. "And this can't hurt me, huh?"
"Just a little, unless you die repeatedly in a short time. Go on through; you can do it."
He studied the traps again, then yelped and charged. His first steps on the marble floor rang true, but then he felt a surge of heat from above. He leaped the wrong way and saw nothing but burning death.
* * *
He sat up shouting, on the bed of his hotel room. That was all? There'd been a moment of discontinuity and then he was back, unburned, with a lingering ache that was already fading. He stood up unsteadily and walked around the room, touching things just to judge his own senses. The mirror showed him his old sunburned, slightly scarred face. The wooden furniture felt solid. The nightstand was crammed with the scriptures of a dozen religions. A basket held pamphlets advertising everything from tours of Antarctica to dinosaur fights and space adventures. There was a bathroom with a stack of towels and a little waterfall he could turn on, but no toilet.
His "watch" still read "30:1" with no sense of time passing outside. There was no sound at all when he stood there. It was his first time alone in this new world.
He steeled himself to go downstairs and pretend he had any idea what he was doing.
The hotel hallway was like any other, besides the glit
tering gold and gems that lined it, and the fact that the doors had no locks. He tried the door beside his and it didn't open. So this place was simplified like the bathroom, preventing problems by ignoring them altogether.
He hadn't noticed on the first trip, but the elevator buttons said "Your Floor", "Lobby", and "Adventure". He went down to the lobby to get back to Lumina.
"You had to try getting killed?" she asked.
"I didn't mean to." Though maybe some treacherous part of him needed to experience death in Talespace to understand this life. "That's it, huh?"
Lumina shrugged, then helped him up. "There's some dispute about how it should work. Some people are demanding a kind of temporary hell, to make death scary and life-saving more meaningful."
Robin had recovered from the ache he'd woken with. "And you... you risked so much worse, when you tried putting your whole self onto a robot."
"I had to learn what it was like to worry."
Robin held her hand and didn't let go until they'd made it past the flames together.
18. Knight's Holiday
Beyond the hall she showed him a white room full of assorted "VR pods" and other control schemes for the residents to use to go outside Talespace. She noticed him lingering and said, "No, Robin. Later. Come on."
In the space past the white room, the hotel look broke down further. The floor became ramps and stairs leading to rooms of wildly varying design, from holograms and steel to wood and grass. Lumina led him to this last one, saying, "This leads to Midgard." She tapped commands into a crystal computer terminal and said, "I'm hoping we can get a direct trip to Nocturne's place."
"Midgard! I could be running around shooting arrows at orcs again."
"If you want, but by default your character and all your skills have reset. You have a chance to start again."
They stepped into a glowing space, and the world faded to white. They reappeared on a grassy island with a wooden stockade. The sky blazed with the light of dawn or maybe sunset.
"What time is it outside?" asked Robin. "I think I uploaded at night, but my memory's hazy." The cave had been dark and the hotel bright, but that meant nothing.
