“Here, one bit of dreaming fighting another false seeming.” Yates pointed at the large demon then waved. “Impossible art, living despite the odds of being.”
He casually touched Wraith, Dusk, then Requiem, and their bodies fell into new positions. The [Messenger’s Pet] grunted and raked his claws slowly against the courtyard flooring. They roused themselves while I tried to address Yates’s commentary.
“She’s aware, makes choices, and everything I remember about the original Xin and more.” I looked at the woman in my arms. Xin meant a lot to me, maybe everything. She was digital but real.
“Conscious thought doesn’t make you alive any more than waving a stick makes you a hero,” Yates snapped at me with an oddly clear tone.
Requiem managed to get off the ground first. He kept slipping back to all fours while struggling to stand. A dozen shadows quickly grabbed the teen and lifted him. His eyes gained focus, and their first emotion was hatred.
“What’s going on? What is this place? A glitch?” Requiem started demanding answers.
Dusk moved much slower. He stared between his claws, then looked around with flaring nostrils. The [Messenger’s Pet] clearly felt concern over his missing prey. Wraith went a different route and gave an insanely loud scream that rattled walls. The raven fluttered from its tree and took the air while squawking.
Yates looked at me then pointed at Requiem with his book. “How did this one even get in? He shouldn’t even be aware of this place, yet here we are, face to face.”
“He was a beta player and guided us to the shoreline.”
Yates snorted, then shook his head. He seemed to be out of words. “From far shore to far shore. Leave it to humans to be nosy about a bridge between this space and that place.”
Yates walked closer and looked at the young man. His wild hair and the moving shadows made me shiver. I held Xin closer and tried to avoid the unlit spots of this mansion courtyard. Requiem struggled to get free of the shadows.
“A piece of advice!” The old man waved his book. “Flee and don’t think twice. There are no rewards, there is no gain, all that left is foolish pride and pain.”
Yates pulled out a scroll and handed it to Requiem. One of the shadows let go of the teen’s arm. The younger man looked at the scroll, back at the rest of us, and back down again.
“I want the rest of my gold,” he said to me.
“Go to Haven Valley, help them if you want, and I’ll have a friend get you what’s due and more.”
“Fifty thousand,” Requiem countered.
I shrugged, rolled my eyes, then nodded. That was good enough for Requiem. His free arm snatched the scroll. Yates refused to allow the man more freedom and watched passively as Requiem struggled to get a thumb onto the [Lithium] runes.
Dusk chirped at me and hissed. Wraith was busy smashing a wall in anger. The bird landed and started hopping along a rooftop, approaching Requiem’s trapped form. In its eyes, perhaps the Traveler looked more like a worm than a person.
“Shoo!” Requiem yelled at the bird while struggling with his bound arms. “Get away!” He grabbed the scroll in his teeth, then flipped the paper around. His thumb jabbed into an ignition rune as the bird leapt.
[Lithium] characters floated off the page rapidly. Blue light flared as shadows wiggled back to Yates’s body. Requiem’s form vanished. Feathers flew everywhere once the bird realized his potential prey had vanished. Dusk’s head followed the fluttering avian.
“Good riddance,” Wraith said nearby. One of his horns had been cracked, and blood trailed down a beefy arm.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
“Don’t worry about me, brother. That is not your role.” He grunted, then turned away. The damaged horn slid out of sight.
My eyebrows lowered once more toward the large demon, but he refused to comment further. I already missed his chuckling. Seeing him hurt filled me with unexpected guilt.
Brick scraped behind us. Dusk bound past where Yates had walked. I repositioned an arm to ensure Xin was being cradled safely before I turned around. A gasp escaped me once I saw what Yates had done.
Portions of the courtyard were sliding together. Shadows moved pieces around and stacked them atop each other to form an archway. They worked quickly to turn part of the wall into a portal of sorts.
The man held a finger down on the book in his hands. I didn’t understand what was going on, but maybe it made sense from a programming point of view. Maybe that book symbolized programs that could be run. Spells, [Lithium] specifically, made sense as a programming language. What little I had studied showed patterns and formulas that changed how the spell acted.
Still, an entire book of those abilities must be special. This one looked to be capable of setting the shadow creatures about various tasks. How powerful could such an item be if it were to fall into normal player’s hands?
Yates strode forward, headed for the doorway before it was even finished being constructed. A dozen shadows dove into the archway and spread themselves thin. The material they were made of let no light past. He walked without pause and vanished without even a ripple.
Dusk chirped at me. Wraith’s nose flared and his head shook.
“Awesome,” I muttered then walked forward, carrying Xin with me.
The sensation of cold silk greeted my skin as we passed through. Xin shivered with chills, and I kept her pressed close. Barely free fingers rubbed up and down the few inches of skin I could reach. She didn’t stir.
We arrived in a room with glowing beakers and tall shelves full of badly rolled papers. Piles of documents sat all around the room. This place looked like William Carver’s hut, only much messier. The ceiling was at least twenty feet overhead, and large precariously balanced boxes had been shoved into slots.
“That is neat,” I said.
“Neat? Generalizations are for lesser minds. Details are best left to scientists and poets.” He straightened his back, then shook the book at me. “And I am both.”
“But you didn’t give yourself a way to speak normally. That seems like a huge detail to overlook.”
“No, holes lead to flaws!” He shook, and creatures of shadow moved about the room.
Some hands straightened out items lying on the floor. Other shadows knocked over new materials. The net effect was an unchanged room. One carried a dustpan through to clean up dust from all around the floor. Another dumped the freshly used dustpan in a corner.
“Spells.” Yates snorted while shuffling around. “They were rigid, stillborn, and mechanical assemblies until I crafted a method to make them art. I gave them life.” Yates stared at the rows of books and snarled. He ran for the shelves and started knocking down objects. “I gave them all life and now those fools drown in fear-spawned strife!”
Yates rapidly turned violent and slammed his arms across a shelf. Glass and flasks crashed. Books and notes went everywhere. Dusk circled behind me, then stayed still. His head butted into my hand, seeking reassurances that I couldn’t give. Wraith crossed his large arms and snorted out a puff of steam.
“My world, my dreams, my art! All of it, a bubble, a ghostly fart!” Yates hopped up and down.
“Never mind!” the raven shouted while hopping up and down too.
I hadn’t even noticed the damned creature in here with us. Its blackened beak opened wide to laugh.
“Don’t get lippy, Clippy!” Yates stood there huffing while the four of us held still.
I cradled Xin and couldn’t properly pet Dusk despite his insistent demands for attention.
“Never!” The bird laughed.
I had no goddamn clue what Yates would start to babble about now. “Do you need the key that M. Shell made? Or have something for us to take back to Haven Valley?”
“No, and no, a thousand times no!” Yates smacked another paper off the shelf. It fluttered in the air while shadows tried to straighten up objects.
I didn’t understand. We’d risked our asses against [World Eater]s a
nd an insanely designed creation in order to get that key. What was the purpose if Yates didn’t need it?
Yates stared across a table at me and frowned. Maybe he could read my thoughts through some magical administration interface. He snorted, then shook his head again.
“This way.” He turned and walked into another room.
We followed him. I looked at the book as we passed and marveled at how like my own it seemed to be. Maybe this was a copy, or the inspiration for the book used by the Voices and Ultimate Edition players.
The next room was lit by three candles of different colors. Yellow, blue, and red light mixed up in the room. Their hues blended together on a bed in the middle. I carefully wove Xin’s comatose form through the door and moved farther into the room.
I recognized the hair first. Braids were woven together in solid-looking clumps of silver and gold. Her black clothes were dusty and cracking. A jutting dagger that bordered on a short sword sat in her chest. Her body warped around its edge.
“Is that Mother?” I asked.
He nodded slowly.
“By the Voices, I never dared believe she existed,” Wraith spoke in a humble rumble.
I hung my head and stood very still. Dusk bounded by and stared at the woman’s face. She looked like a robotic Sleeping Beauty.
“You are not here to provide me a gift or receive one. You are here with witnesses. That will help you be effective.” Yates’s teeth ground together. He lived in a place between stressed and crazy.
I tried to understand how it was possible to be a witness. Then it hit me. In theory, my video feed was being watched by a ton of people in the real world. What had those viewers thought of my actions? Voices above, they probably thought I was insane.
“You mean the people watching,” I said slowly.
He nodded but didn’t speak. One of his gnarled hands ran across the bedside where a prone version of Mother lay. The bed shimmered for a moment and looked to be nothing more than a metal box with a glowing red light. That too faded and became a large beating heart, then an endless ocean trapped inside a box. All the images faded and it became a simple cot once more.
“A million rivers. Each one shaping what is to come. Each one burning a new path in golden light,” Yates said slowly. Carefully, he ran his hand on the cot and looked sad. “My friends were lost in its radiance. What robbed my friends of their minds will burn me to the soul. But this sacrifice we need. That’s true art! Not an idle dream, but thought made action.”
I nodded as if his words made sense. They almost did. If I dared believe him, Yates had essentially worked with the others to code a world where thought became a form of reality. That sounded insane, but the ARC put everything in our heads. The game had been a mental projection all along. We were nothing more than electronic ink.
“A trio of the old die to make way for the new. A bridge to form made of impossible dew.” He smiled weakly. “I’m sorry. I’ve always been terrible at poetry.”
“It’s okay. I’m starting to get the hang of this. But do you intend to… go the same way as Michelle?” I tried to phrase my question correctly. Michelle had been a burned out skeleton sitting on a throne of wire. Based on the Trillium board’s words, Michelle and Carver’s deaths were probably directly related to the same process Yates intended to attempt.
“I do, I will, and I have,” Yates said while staring at the book in his hands. “But I have a request for you.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“We stand here on the world’s far side, on a linchpin holding her tangled cloth into its bubbling shape. Someone”—he stared at me—“must stand on the world’s far side until the end. Or else all efforts will be for naught.”
I didn’t entirely understand. Was he saying I needed to keep my ARC active in order to keep the evacuation process going? That sort of made sense. This entire world did use the ARC network. I vaguely remembered one of the board members of Trillium mentioning mine had been altered somehow. It probably had to do with whatever coding accompanied the [Legacy Wish]. I almost wished I had worked to get a different degree in college.
“Once I pull the plug, bubbles collapse. Borders between worlds will cease, and madness given flesh will run rampant.”
“Can you explain in more technical terms?” I wanted a better description of what he needed.
Yates shot off of the bed and stomped over to a four-foot-tall stack of notes in a chair. “I am! I am and I cannot!”
“Never mind!” screamed the raven. It hopped on a table.
Dusk’s head tilted in the bird’s direction, but he otherwise stayed still. His lack of desire to murder wildlife actually bothered me.
“I can tell you everything. I can speak straight to your face and pray the words aren’t warped beyond recognition. I can and shall shake my hands and froth with rage at the warranted impotence we brought upon ourselves.” He shook his hands at the pile of papers, then pushed it over. Yellow parchment slid across the floor, making Dusk back up in worry.
“Because of the curse,” I said.
He shook rapidly while straining. His arm waved wildly at a stack of bottles standing nearby. They fell to the floor while Yates’s raven companion cawed with laughter. The man stomped over to Mother and gestured.
“Once I pull this plug, the balloon will pop. She”—his eyes twisted briefly, then his rage slowed—“she will lie here and gasp the last breath and as that fleeting air escapes, so too shall this fragment of reality begin a final crumbling!”
“And you need me to be in Haven Valley until the end.”
He nodded, then tried to explain. “You must escape the crumbling earth and stand tall at the doorway to prove your worth. The chained demons will be chained no more.”
“I don’t understand,” I admitted.
“Demons have been known to ruin a party or city, but all of reality?” Wraith grumbled from over my shoulder. “No, that sounds like something we would do.”
Yates grabbed at the air in frustration. His face pinched together while his eyes closed. His mouth opened repeatedly to struggle with a clear answer. “We three have laid down the path, and once the stretched-thin skin of the world starts shrinking, those spirits you travel with will find their escape to another realm easier. All I need do is pull the plug.” He waved at the blade piercing Mother’s chest.
I stared at it and bit a lip. The world of Continue Online was falling apart. Did he mean that somehow they were stretching the programming thin by holding Mother together? What exactly was she in the real world? A hard drive and some insanely powerful processor? Did the machine burn out as it was deleted? I just didn’t understand.
I stared at Xin’s sleeping form. Maybe the exact correlation didn’t matter? I believed Yates when he said Mother would breathe her last. I believed him when he said someone must stand on the other side of the world and stay logged in. Even though he didn’t use those exact words, the meaning felt clear enough.
“’ware, Hermes. In releasing this pin, the nothingness which eats this world will collapse on far side’s egress. Should you wish to avoid a pox upon the other lands as well, then bar the doorway against their ilk. Let not a single monster in, and pray that our hubris and fear will not end in genocide.”
I understood. Voices help me, but I understood. Deep down, I’d always expected it. I nodded.
“I will, but not for you,” I said. “If I had to choose between every other life in this world and Xin, I would choose her. But I can’t do one without the other, so I’m all in.”
Yates sat on the bed as if all the strength in his legs had given out. His head hung and shook slowly. “Then before the end, as an unmet friend, tell me a truth. Do you believe there is an afterlife for sinners such as us?” He looked around. “Or is all we see all there is? Like the others, I sought an escape from the mundane reality outside this one, and instead I found a cause worth dying for, a dream worth letting the fires of Helios burn away my mind and sanity.”
&
nbsp; I didn’t know how to respond. Believing in the afterlife had always sounded like a stupid idea. What we did while alive was all that mattered.
He shook his head. “For what I’ve asked of you and my friends, I hope not. We are slaves to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men. The weight of these sins could never be washed away by Lethe’s waters. I wish thee well, and bid thee run swiftly.”
“What?” I started to ask.
Yates looked at me and blinked once. His hand dove upon the blade and yanked it out. The man’s hand fell open slowly as his mouth gaped in a soundless scream. What had pierced Mother fell apart into a million golden shards that floated around the room in a rapidly spinning vortex. We backed up in unison. The table behind me fell away. Boxes all around started to fade.
Golden light burned at my eyes as Yates screamed. The world vibrated and slid under my feet. I tried to make my way back to the doorway while the rumbling kicked into high gear. Repeated hisses escaped Dusk.
The earth shook violently. I stumbled toward the doorway formed of shadows behind us. Beneath my feet, the ground bulged, and I turned to shield Xin’s comatose body. From the corner of my eye, I saw a hand bursting through the floor.
Session One Hundred Two — Flying Fools
The world beneath us slid sideways as a huge crash shook the room. Our island knocked into something else. One moment I was running along fine, terrified but stable, then my shoulder met wall and my face greeted brick. My teeth cried out in pain as copper coated my tongue.
It hit me, in that jarring second, exactly what was going on. If this world had stretched thin to keep together, then in the weak spots was a program eating away at everything. Releasing the linchpin, as Yates had called it, must have revealed a rotten core full of squirmy worms, or in this case [World Eater]s.
Shadows crawled around the courtyard. Tiny creatures were spawning around us, crawling out of seams that cracked the walls like broken glass. Smoky essences from a mass of [World Eater]s started combating everything else.
Dusk kept barfing out bits of broken fireballs. Wraith’s body faded in and out of sight as he slashed at bigger creatures. The house of horrors tried to defend itself. Every object turned into a creature with teeth and eyes, then attacked the [World Eater]s pouring out.
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