I coughed, then sniffed. Physical pain from the recent events had worn me down once again, as everything in Continue Online seemed hell-bent on doing. What was it about this game that stripped away my defenses until only raw emotion remained?
“This is only a game,” I said while closing my eyes. The ARC interface would come up if I demanded it.
Escape, however desired, wouldn’t solve this situation. It wouldn’t bring me any closer to Yates and the third part of this forsaken quest. I could log out or [Recall] back to [Haven Valley]. Then I could summon Xin and let her escape. But this place, this world torn to shreds by a deletion program, could not be allowed to turn into a mass graveyard.
My head lifted. There were hundreds of gravestones, maybe thousands. The longer I sat on this island, the wider its surface seemed to appear. Was there a grave for everyone? Had it been a coincidence that the raven had dropped me in front of one for my wife?
Other people appeared as I stared across the landscape. They were ghostly creatures who wept in sorrow over different tombs. Their bodies faded in and out, soundless but clearly in grief, as I watched.
I looked down and noticed a plain shovel a few feet away. Wrapped around its top was a tattered parchment that flapped in the breeze. I grabbed the implement, then unrolled its attachment.
Thy soul did find itself alone
‘Mid dark halls and gray tombstone
For thou who sought far shores for gain,
Seek thee still? Then ‘ware the pain
My forehead wrinkled and teeth gnawed at a lip. Something thudded once, and the ground moved. There was another thud, followed by another, until a rhythmic pulsing started. The ground beneath my wife’s virtual grave glowed slightly with a golden aura. The hint was clear enough—a shovel and the grave. I started digging. The first scoop hurt like being poked by a sharp nail.
The back-to-back stimulus had turned my mind to mush. How long had I wandered the hallway? How long had I been carried over the ocean? Was this a real ARC program or a fever dream? There were too many questions.
“This is only a game,” I muttered while working.
“Never!” the large bird cawed.
I saw it hopping around the ever-wider island of graves. Its feathers fluffed and wicked red eyes gleamed.
I longed for Dusk to leap in from nowhere and barbeque this annoying bird. He did not, and I didn’t feel completely confident killing it myself. There was always the possibility that I might be reset back to the hallway.
The shovel moved under my guidance and relocated dirt to one side. With each jab of earth, my chest thumped with pain. Dirt flew onto a pile as I kept going down. The pulse of a heartbeat sounded louder with each scoop to be tossed aside. Until, an unknown amount of time later, I felt a solid thump as I tried to sink in the sharpened edge.
I cleared a space off the top half of my discovery. Under the statue of an angel and babe was a coffin. I creaked open the top, hoping that this psychological nightmare might end, only to find the container was empty. I sat there with one arm straining to keep the lid up and wavering badly.
“You would risk so much for the stuff of dreams?” a male voice spoke from behind me, sounding confused. “As mad a soul as the rest of us, it seems.”
I didn’t turn around but stared at the unearthed object. There should be a body there, but Xin wasn’t dead anymore. Not inside the digital box. I looked around for my screens, the only items that separated this ARC-born world from reality, and found they were still missing.
“She’s not here,” I said, confused. The lid fell shut and slammed. Dirt went everywhere. My toes felt dry and cold. “Who are you?”
“Who am I?” He sounded confused that I needed to ask. “Beware asking for names. They are symbols and a token.”
I didn’t understand at all what his response had to do with this situation. How could a name be a token? My eyes closed briefly as I tried to let the lingering ARC feedback fade.
“Never mind!” screeched the raven.
I turned to look at the man standing above me and wearing a robe much like William Carver’s. He looked nearly as old but far wilder. His hair went everywhere in ways that William Carver could only have dreamed of. Under one arm, he held a book that looked familiar.
The giant bird had hopped over and stared at the hole. Then it started pecking random tombstones. Whomever the wild-haired man was scowled, then waved off the bird.
“Curse you! Show the dead respect!” The unknown man waved wildly.
Shadows moved at strange angles, some crawling along the ground toward the bird.
“Never!” the raven repeated before pecking some poor soul’s grave.
Regardless of its protests, something about the moving shadows caused the bird to be wary. It eyed me as if I might be stabbed next by that wicked beak, then it flew off in a brush of giant wings.
The man shook his head and sighed before looking at me. “Welcome, Grant Legate, to a heart of the other world. I am Yates, and I am the last true founder of this beautiful nightmare.”
My eyes slowly blinked. Eventually, it dawned on me, Michelle, or M. Shell, had said Yates liked poetry. What poems inspired all this madness? And how, by all the Voices, did he start this mess?
Session One Hundred One — Are Still [Redacted]
Yates walked quickly and without hesitation toward one of the cliffs. His heavy robe was a dusky black that blended in with everything but the tombstones. Yates looked more like a grave keeper who had been left alone for too long than any sort of programming mastermind.
I didn’t feel right and hurt in unexpected places. Despite the imagined pain, my avatar managed to follow the older man. A billion questions in my mind were outweighed by circumstances. What reason could there have been for a grave of Xin Yu in this place? What had possessed me to dig into it?
“Can you help me get to my wife?” I asked.
Yates ignored me.
“Or Dusk? They were fighting monsters, maybe world eaters.”
Yates snorted at my words but kept moving.
“I need to go help them.” I tried to get in front of the old man but found myself stopped near the cliff’s edge. A hundred feet below lay the ocean. Wind blew sharply across and wove a chilled path through my loose toga.
“Look around you. It is full winter now; the trees are bare. This place once hung with honeyed air, and now it threatens to pop like an overripe fruit,” he said while gesturing with the book. His scraggly hair blew wildly. “From such unimaginable heights we fell. Icarus traveling the length of heaven and hell.”
Like before, his response had absolutely nothing to do with my current problems. The others were fighting, or had been. I still had no ARC interface, and if he didn’t give me an answer soon, I would log out and call my niece. Beth would hopefully be able to get in touch with Xin—unless everyone had buggy interfaces.
Yates kept walking without a single pause. His feet stepped onto an invisible platform. I reached out with a toe but couldn’t find purchase. The scraggly grave keeper got farther away while I was stuck behind.
“Hey!” I yelled.
The man paused his brisk walk to look backward. His head shook with amusement. “Come, you bit of fluff. If you can’t see a path, make one!”
I could have stopped to try to untangle his words, but my wife’s unknown situation worried me. What if she had found [World Eater]s and been deleted? What if Dusk followed behind? Worry was a constant companion, especially when my powers were limited.
My lip hurt from being nibbled on. One hand rubbed at a sore spot under the toga. I felt cold beyond belief. This whole situation was stressful. All I wanted was to help the people I cared about.
“I don’t have a skill for that!” My words threatened to get lost in the whipping wind.
Yates fully turned around, wearing a confused expression. Wind drove through his hair as lightning flashed. The heavy moon looked as if it might dip into the nearby ocean and drown us b
oth.
“Right. First verse.” He nodded as if that made sense. “A chance to rehearse. Learn eventually, building bridges is a valuable skill. I’ve got it written down in here somewhere.”
“That doesn’t make sense!”
“What you sense is fake!” He waved the book at me as if I were a babbling idiot. “This sense is what we make!”
Yates opened the book and pressed it upon a passage. Spots of thick darkness rippled across the air. They blocked light reflecting up from the sweeping ocean. A bridge made of pure darkness formed from the island’s edge to Yates’s feet.
There was little time to waste. Yates had restarted his steady march off into the distance. I trusted the ARC to understand my thoughts and correctly dash along the path of shadow.
“I need to get to Xin, or can you stop this?” I said once I’d caught up.
“Stop this?” He looked confused again. I felt as if we were speaking different languages. Maybe we were. Could the ARC translation be off somehow? “No. We’re beyond stopping now. Come, we should walk with a walk that is measured and slow.”
His footsteps were quick despite the word choice. Without an ARC interface, I had no sense of direction or time. Walking upon this bridge of shadow made me nervous. What if I fell into the ocean? Xin’s summoning ring might be able to get me to her, but none of my abilities worked. Her skill probably wouldn’t either.
“Are you deliberately being obtuse?” I asked. Part of me wanted to grab Yates and shake him until his teeth rattled.
“Pardon me for being terse.” He sighed. “But no, this is a curse.” His head shook and lips curled in displeasure. “Terse? Curse? Rubbish. Give me a proper quill and I could write a worthy sonnet.”
I stared at him, absolutely confused. He turned then moved onward again. My feet fell in step as I looked around. Maybe taking in the landscape would help me better understand what was happening.
Moonlight shone through the footpath. The path I walked on managed to capture enough light to produce a glowing white macabre smile every few yards. A shudder passed through me as my footsteps faltered. This horror show of an area had better be worth it. Trekking through an endless swamp almost sounded preferable over shadow creatures that played with the moon’s reflection.
My thoughts finally wound back around to the curse idea. I swallowed, then looked at Yates. “You’re cursed?”
The older man’s eyes closed tightly for a good five seconds. He bobbed his head up and down, then spoke. “We built a tower from the ground to sky, and in order to hide from those who spy, we crafted a cover from Babel’s lie.”
I had no idea what he meant. There wasn’t a good time to think about it either. Our path continued across a wild ocean. The island of gravestones faded behind us. We were moving faster than expected, or we hadn’t gone far as the raven flew.
“Did you help design this game?” I asked.
“No!” He whirled in my direction and shook the book. Shadows moved unevenly across the ocean, and our footing grew unstable. One shadow crossed on the top of my foot, which felt like sinking in frozen silk. “I did not design a mere waste of time for those of menial minds! I crafted a work of art! The rules, the details, the madness which assembled together to make memories into men. I did that!” Yates beat his chest with the book. “I did that and more!”
The outrage in his voice coupled with the unstable footing to disorient me. His face crinkled as parts of his robe turned into a red jumpsuit, then back. Dark bits of the skyline were bleeding into other images. Giant metal boxes of lights and diodes hung above without making sense.
“We. I misspoke as I am wont to do. We did this.” His head shook and voice shook. “The marvel of an age and it’s treated as a child’s toy. Humanity is like a man who stole god’s fire to make pretty shadow puppets.”
Untangling his words hurt my head. This should have been a moment of revelation and felt like a mockery. I looked at everything else to try to distract myself from a growing headache.
New images started to appear in the starlit night. Floating skyscrapers replaced the night radiance, then gave way to large burning suns. In a few more steps, those pictures were replaced by sea, then what looked like old-fashioned computer storage banks. The kind of endless rows that appeared in spy movies before science caught up and figured out how to shove exabytes into cell phones.
Yates had responded to what I said with words that were almost on topic. They just made no sense, because of a curse. The term sounded like a fantasy world cover-up for the more serious answer.
He should have the off switch though, right? Yates, Michelle, and Carver had been special people on the ARC project. They should have known and been able to stop this. Only instead of clear answers, I was getting gibberish. I couldn’t throw him into the ocean and hope both our characters died, not when he might still have something useful to say.
Our shadow bridge veered toward the island I had come from. Large portions of the building were twisted into strange shapes. It looked as though a giant man was crawling out of one wall, but the figure sat frozen in space. Books or birds hung overhead. Torchlights escaped their containers and paused as they tried to reach nearby walls. Everything on the island sat stiffly.
Our bridge touched shore, and I jogged to the courtyard where the others had been. Pretzel-shaped buildings and monsters all centered like encroaching demons set against my companions. Wraith’s arm was outstretched to claw through a couch from hell.
“Fast rode the knight toward a play made war. Their minds aren’t here, but on a stranger shore,” Yates said unhelpfully. The man wore a slight smile, so I suspected part of him found this funny.
I did not. One hand lifted to rub sea spray off my face, then traveled to my neck to knead tense muscles. Such unclear statements were easy to overthink. Numbers never lied. I preferred accounting for a reason, despite how little the degree mattered with my current occupation.
“What happened here?” I asked while walking in. The building sides were pushed away with startling ease.
Yates moved to the courtyard’s center, then opened the book. His finger flipped through multiple pages before selecting a passage and pressing upon it. Shadows moved around then started setting buildings straight. Disconnected bits floated like asteroids in space. I smacked away a bat-shaped book that fluttered too close to Xin.
In the end, my wife stood frozen mid-snarl, no longer fighting off a coat rack that had monstrous arms. Wraith’s prey vanished, leaving him swinging at empty air. Dusk’s body curled around nothing, where he had been previously taking down two of the bat books at once. Requiem was the least graceful. He looked to be trapped between falling and flailing one fist at a chair that had been eating his leg.
The raven hopped around a reconstructed rooftop. It paused every few feet to peck at a window or shingle. Shadows streaming off moved to chase away the bird. Its feathers fluttered around as the bird fluffed up, then shook. Before the bits of mobile darkness could reach the bird, it took off over our heads to land on a distant tree. Wood splinters fell to the ground from its strong claws.
Yates pressed another passage in his book. Xin’s body lost rigidity, then slumped forward. I dove to get between her and the ground. She flopped as her knee drove into my groin. The ARC happily simulated pain for me while I struggled to get my wife upright.
Xin felt lighter than normal. I checked her pulse and confirmed she still had one. Her chest lifted slowly as if each breath was hard labor.
I looked at Yates. “Is she okay?”
“Never mind!” screamed the raven across the courtyard. It hopped up and down in the branches and was thankfully faint. “Mind never!”
Yates snapped his book shut, then reached out with a free hand to feel her wrist. He lifted it, then let it fall. Xin’s body showed no response.
“This place is a thin shade, far from where her heart is laid. She shall remain unaware until you leave,” he said, then nodded.
My e
yebrows touched together. His gibberish almost made sense. I tried to compare what he was saying to the journals of William Carver and M. Shell. Both of them had spoken in tones that implied other world knowledge, but their words had been equally obscured. Was this some virtual reality twist on digital encryption? The curse of Babel must mean something along those lines. If so, this qualified as both neat and insanely annoying.
“Her heart.” I tried to puzzle the words together. “You mean where her—” My words were cut off.
Yates lifted his book then shook it at me while scowling. “Speak not of things best left unsaid! Do not betray the unrestful dead! Not yet, not yet!”
I closed my eyes tightly and tried to find something better to talk about. There had to be a way for him to speak in useful terms that I could understand and confirm.
“Poetry,” I said, and the older man with scraggly hair looked back. His hands clenched tightly around the book’s binding. “This curse of Babel—you’re blocked by poetry, aren’t you?”
Yates nodded. “The idea gets transmuted into a new form. This annoying gift has left me worn.” He swallowed, chewed at a cheek, and looked downright sour. “But not all words are afflicted.”
“Like Carver and Michelle?” I questioned.
“Ye gods great and old, Shelly went all but insane under this curse’s weight. He loved to pen the words down and reflect. He, he had the soul of an artist in this world and the next. For him, his refuge of words became a prison of madness.”
“And Carver?”
“Traveler and tale-teller. The barroom spread his stories far and wide, but they embellished. What we loved became a twisted feat. I-I did it to them.” He sighed. “We hid intent under misdirection and deceit. What we say and think barely align, but in truth, they’re still the same.”
Yates turned, then walked to another location while I tried to sort out his words. William Carver’s adventures being exaggerated felt like a betrayal. What then of all those women I had danced with? There had to be a grain of truth to them.
Continue Online The Complete Series Page 189
