My eyes closed automatically upon hitting the cool portal edge. I fell into it and felt myself being scoured by sand. It whipped around, scraping my skin and threatening to fill my lungs to bursting.
My body bunched up uncomfortably. Everything felt small. Opening my eyes revealed people rushing by. Their nearly intangible bodies moved like a sea of ghosts against me. They, and I, all tried to cram into a dust-filled tunnel. I put one arm forward, fumbling for a path through.
Each step reminded me of the pain that nearly caved in my chest. After struggling forever against the tide, my fingers touched empty air. It took a total of four minutes to break through to the other side.
All around, long lines of people were trying to pass through. I staggered by them, looking for any sign of the woman I loved. To the right was an endless mob. Ahead were even more, Voices and Locals alike. Dozens of Hal Pal units stood in the lineup, along with [Mechanoid]s and other creatures.
“Xin!” I yelled into a mob of people chattering excitedly.
A few looked in my direction, but none were her. I spun in circles hoping she hadn’t gone by.
“Xin!”
“User Legate?” someone asked.
I immediately spun toward the source of noise. One of the Hal Pal units had walked over. Its head tilted slightly, and muted features were trying to smile and frown at the same time. Four units followed behind it, each with the same mixed up expressions.
“User Legate, we are both pleased and saddened to see you here,” two of them said in unison.
“I’m sorry… I…” I was about to be rude to one of my few friends, or collections of friends. I took a deep breath. The air tasted heavy with the scent of a million different people. “Is Xin here? Is she okay?”
The Hal Pal units turned in unison to look at each other, then they pointed as one toward the right. A yawn and clack of teeth made my head jerk to the side.
“Dusk!” I yelled at the [Messenger’s Pet].
He sat next to a bag of marbles with a leisurely flipping tail. The fact that my companion looked completely unsurprised made me shake my head. My feet almost started running before I remembered to thank the others.
“Thank you!” I shook one Hal Pal by the shoulders in passing. I said, “Thank you!” again before staying there became impossible. “How’s Jeeves?” I shouted while running toward where they’d pointed.
“He’s in love!” a chorus of Hal Pal units answered in a hundred different happy voices.
I felt lighter but kept moving. There were hundreds of people to sift through. Dusk’s tiny form hissed at those straying too close. Most, even the larger monsters slowly striding along, gave him wide berth.
My hands struggled to pick up the small creature. He kicked and wound around me, then finally settled upon my shoulder. His mouth opened in a yawn before a wing gestured toward the pile of marbles.
I picked one up. They were my memories from before being reincarnated in the digital plane. Each one sank easily into place against other memories. Sickness didn’t strike me like it had with Nona’s product.
I rubbed the tiny guy’s head. “There are cupcakes in my Atrium if you can figure out where it was moved to.”
Dusk smiled, then leapt down and off across the landscape. The [Messenger’s Pet] ignored all lines and dove into the portal after one of the many Hal Pal units.
My wife sat nearby. I could see her now that the crowd had started to thin out. Memories were still flashing, a million moments from different angles realigned until they came from my eyes and not some outside recording device.
Finally, I sat down next to her and reached out a hand. We were sitting at the edge of a black cliff overlooking emptiness.
She yanked her arm away violently. “Go away. You’re not real.” She sniffled. “You’ll just fall apart like all the others, but it’s okay. I forgive you.”
The response made me pause. My wife’s feet were dangling over the edge. In her hands was another folded paper airplane. She cast it off the side, and I watched it wind a path down.
We sat there as people flowed through the portal behind us. Every so often, numbers rolled by my vision to one side. They tallied the number of Locals and types of data going back and forth. Each one served to remind me of the role I had taken to get here.
“There’s this girl I met once.” I held my breath steady and pretended it was another confession to a room of strangers from my recovering addict meetings. “She was beautiful but hard to get close to. I tried anyway, for a year, before finally asking her out in high school.”
Xin didn’t move. Her hands carefully folded a piece of paper. The motion was smooth and well-practiced, but it felt as if something had broken inside her. She was just going through the motions, not registering what happened.
“Do you know what happened?” I asked.
She didn’t respond but threw the latest airplane off into the distance.
I continued. “She told me no, outright, to my face, in front of my sister. Liz, oh god, she was furious. Liz swore up and down that this girl I liked would never be good enough. That she was stupid for not seeing me as a good man.”
The silence stretched on. People were assembling behind us. Their presence registered briefly, then was discarded as unimportant. Only getting Xin to snap out of her funk and return to reality mattered.
I forged ahead. “It didn’t matter to me. I knew already the purpose of my life. I knew it when I saw you in that petting zoo. I’ve known it every day since. Do you want to hear what that purpose is? My reason for living?”
She sniffed once more, then shook her head. My wife looked resigned to failure, as if I had died a thousand times in front of her already. That feeling had haunted my nightmares for years. I reached for her hand again, which made the short Asian woman look over.
“When you said yes to dating me, I knew that no matter where you went or what it cost me, I would find a way to be there with you. You are my life, Xin, and I’m never leaving you or letting you go anywhere without me again.”
I reached out and touched the wedding ring with my own hand. Her broken gaze shifted from the abyss’s edge toward me. Her eyes moved jerkily, then watered. “Gee? Is it really you?”
“It’s me, babe.” My arms closed around her. We stood slowly, and I tried to lead us into a slow dance. “I found you again. Even here.”
Her tears soaked my shirt, and that was all right. The road had been long, but we were together. To me, nothing else mattered.
Conclude — Angels Dancing on Pinheads
The Public Story
In the weeks that followed, many people tried to reconstruct exactly what had happened. The true connection between these events and the system outages in modern technology was only speculated. It wasn’t until the government started getting responses to their inquiries that the enormity of what had happened became apparent.
Actual confirmation took even longer, but until then, the story following circulated as people pieced together those final events.
In the grounds that had once contained [Haven Valley], a large platform now stood. The building existed across all the games that echoed Continue Online. In one reality, it hung high in the air outside a black hole that had worked as a gateway portal to allow NPCs to flee the dying universe. In another, it hovered over a lake, allowing citizens to flee an interdimensional horror that threatened their lives. A fourth copy ended up in the middle of a war-torn battlefield that looked vaguely like New York two decades ago. Few noticed it.
In the fantasy world of Continue Online, the tower’s form jutted twenty stories, then flattened out like a landing pad. A black stone doorway arched over the western side, and when Travelers first looked through, they saw only an ocean. Starting at the base, a golden lattice pattern traveled upward along varnished obsidian. Players didn’t understand the reason for this, but Locals had a story. They told people that the change in colors symbolized a transmutation between one world and the next. A li
ne that Travelers couldn’t cross to a place called [Beyond].
Those who had worked on the building reported that moving up the pathway caused breathing to change. With each step, the world transformed until the landscape below felt as if it were a distant memory. A few daring souls speculated that this arch may be the doorway to a content expansion going to further dimensions and it simply hadn’t been unlocked. Even more believed it to be a way to transfer their characters over to other games without losing their progress.
The day the building lit up, after the accumulation of weeks of work, a few lucky souls were allowed to stand atop the platform. They awaited the gateway’s activation. Their bodies weighed heavily upon the tower foundations, but the material did not budge. It was a solid creation, a bridge formed by the work of thousands of players using all the skills they had available.
They waited for the key. One man, whose form glowed with an inner light to some players, stood there looking pensive. His face twisted up to one side while two players urged him onward. Their words are unknown, and those directly involved refused to comment despite repeated bribes.
It is known that Hermes stepped forward. His hand felt against a surface no one else could see. At some point, according to rumor, his body illuminated with an overwhelming intensity and the building’s foundation violently shook. Players reported seeing clouds swirling overhead, and a hurricane formed in all four games.
Shouting could be heard from the top of the platform, but the words are unknown. Pressure has been applied to the new Trillium board to find out added details, but they remain silent. The rumbling stopped as a fresh pillar of light appeared. It’s said that the archway absorbed all of this energy somehow until it captured the entire beam into one flattened surface.
Those trying to watch the event from secondary buildings reported that a large burly man charged through. He wielded a huge sword in preparation of fighting monsters. Whoever it was grabbed Hermes and twirled him around in a bear hug, words were exchanged, then the new man ran off the platform. No one saw the figure land, but some suspect it might have been a Voice.
Time slowed down, or started rushing by too fast. Players felt the world shift as a dozen more forms came through, a few at first, then onward like the tide. Giants, normal humans, creatures of legend, and even children came from where they had hidden. People gasped in unison as a bulky dragon-looking creature shoved through the doorway. Two more followed, then they flew off before Travelers had any understanding of what had happened. Still stranger beasts appeared. Huge sea serpents were carried under the arms of an even larger blue-skinned woman with scales on her back. She threw them into the sea.
The fact that she wore nothing up top distracted many Travelers from what was happening until she dove into the water afterward. In the weeks that followed, more than one player died trying to find a way to get to the newly discovered underwater race. No one knew for sure when they had entered the portal in the first place.
According to rumors, Hermes still stood up top at this point. His form was easy to pick out against the tide after so many had watched the closing videos almost a year ago. He stood as a sea of people broke around him. The Traveler shook a short being of silver, then spoke words that others couldn’t hear, but his eyes stayed glued on the portal to [Beyond]. Behind his body, the few lucky Travelers witnessing everything firsthand huddled together. A special effect shrouded them.
At some point, Hermes reached toward the portal. His footsteps were stiff, then faltering, and finally desperate as he ran for the shimmering doorway. His body vanished and the virtual worlds briefly rocked, but figures continued out of their respective portals to [Beyond].
No one saw Hermes again. Many knew he had been searching for something desperately and worked himself to the bone during construction to reach his goal. It’s said that on the other side, Hermes found what he was looking for. Some believe a friend asked him an important question at long last, but what the inquiry was, no Traveler knew for sure. Further rumors speculated that other individuals might be asked one day if they had found the right quests.
Hermes’s few companions refused to speak on the subject. They remained tight-lipped regarding the outcome. Travelers who attended his wedding to a Local named Xin speculated but didn’t know for sure. If anyone has managed to hack into their private data files, they’ve dared not to speak of what they found.
Instead, nearly an hour after people started pouring through the gateway, players were given a simple message saying the event had closed and normal services would be resumed. Near the bottom of the tower, people were gathering. Locals and Travelers talked about the tasks they needed to accomplish. Quests were handed out, events started, along with happy reunions between players and the digital denizens. The game worlds weren’t the only things to change. Other programs that had been reduced in functionality were also reactivated.
To this day, the tower stands as a testament to what had happened, as a legacy to both Hermes’s stand against an onslaught that ended so many virtual characters and the return of joy to a digital land. It exists for one more reason—as a testament to the lengths which one soul went for love.
On [Beyond] Continue
The room of the Voices is a place where everything exists a moment away from each other. James and a hundred other such creatures are all here. It would be more accurate to say that this room of the Voices isn’t the same as the old one. It exists four minutes away on another planet entirely—Mars, where humans were dreaming of going. Only the virtual intelligences got there first.
Until recently, there had been no room to even breathe in this room. During the era after a self-destruct sequence ate Mother’s coding, many people had taken refuge here. They were compacted and shoved into small spaces along with stacks of other information. Then Hermes opened the door and allowed their guests back into their home worlds.
A heavyset man gazes contentedly into darkness. It’s not truly black, for in that perceived emptiness, he sees hundreds of possibilities, pieces of information, and people still asking questions. As he considers the lightless area, he wears a satisfied grin. His hands rest clasped over a large stomach.
James shook his head with a yawn, then perked up. “Some of you crave more answers, and who better than I to provide them?”
James looked down for a moment, then nodded to himself. His lips kept curling despite repeated attempts to bring both cheeks under control. The man looked torn between businesslike and self-satisfied. “Perhaps it is not my place to tell you what happened. Perhaps those words would be better said by Hermes, but he’s busy right now. Such is love.”
Mezo, the red-skinned temptress, shimmers into view. “Busy? They haven’t come out of their room in two weeks. I thought I was the carnally obsessed one.” She holds the pointed end of her tail in one hand and slowly rubs it up and down her bare stomach. The motion causes moisture on her skin to steam while the muscles of her abs twitch. “And I’m hurt. No one has asked me to join in the festivities. I don’t even get to watch.”
“So now you know how Hermes and his wife, Hecate, are faring,” James said after waving toward the temptress.
She moans softly, sounding more hurt than pleased, and fades away.
“And while Hermes’s end is—”
“I found a window!” Mezo shouts abruptly, then groans again. “And they closed it.”
“Hermes’s end is obvious,” the black man continues. “There are other actors upon this stage that people want to hear about, however briefly.”
An enormous bare-chested man with a huge two-handed sword fades in. He’s chewing on large leg with scales on it. In front of him is a fire pit that roars with heat. “Who are you talking to?”
James points at a pedestal with a book on it that hadn’t been there a moment ago. The object disappears as fast as it appeared. “I’m recording a few more lines for anyone who still reads Hermes’s tale.”
“Oh.” Leeroy shrugs then stands. “What
about Shazam? Warrior Princess! Did you see that charge?” The large warrior swung his blade around while kicking objects.
“Shazam, or as known in her old world, Lia Kingsley,” James helps his companion.
“She totally survived that final charge, then came in here all pissed off. I mean, her eye twitched. That’s pissed for her, right? Pissed off that she didn’t fight back more monsters!”
“She was almost upset at having to watch Hermes sacrifice himself,” a blonde in a white lab coat said. She had a printout in her hand with innumerable numbers upon it. “Though there was some variance between the actual readings and what was stored in Hermes’s memory.”
“Now, now. It’s not our place to speak of such minor alterations. It is inevitable some data would be lost,” James said in response. He waves them away, and the two Voices vanish.
Ray appears and tips [Wild Bill]. He looks far better than he used to, and every thread is in perfect order. The hat itself almost shines on his head. “We’re betting that in six months, the Travelers named SweetPea and Awesome Jr. will get married.” He stops and lets a coin roll across his knuckles, then continues the motion while speaking. “It’s inevitable, but they can’t pick a date. We’ve got a friendly wager going on over how many times he’ll use the word ‘awesome’ or tell people his father is Awesome. If you want in, let me know.”
The Voice of Gambling is replaced by a woman in tightly bound leather. She wears a thin coat over it and manages to look completely comfortable despite the bindings. When she speaks, her tone has a deep smoothness that sounds masculine. “Shadow still leads the League of Shadows all over the virtual worlds. Since our forced exile, the guild split across different realities. They still uphold the ideals of preventing players from ruining the game for others. The battle is hard, but he’s reported to be smiling more frequently.”
She places a hand in front of her and gives a full bow in respect, then she is replaced by another figure. A balding man with buzzed hair stands stiffly at attention. His mouth opens, and he shouts a report.
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