by Sam Ferguson
“Six, actually, if we are only counting the ones that are more than memories in prep-school and college textbooks.” Another voice from behind him caused him to jump even higher than when Meredith had unexpectedly arrived on the scene.
“I thought you might say as much, Brian, which is why I already invited your swarthy friend here,” Meredith stepped to the side and turned to partially indicate the virtual text wall behind her. Another polygonal mesh character came up beside Brian’s and waved to him.
“Hey Augustin,” Brian greeted, relieved to have his friend there to shoulder the burden of sparring with Meredith.
Augustin stepped forward, using a hollow mesh finger to follow the lines of symbols paired with parts of speech below. “It’s interesting how there is a repeating pattern of emphatic particles every couple of lines. It reminds me of a traditional invocation to the spirits that might be used in a ceremony meant to realign a sacred site with cosmic order. It is an ancient belief of the Machi that all humans have the agency in restoring cosmic and social order and defeating the forces of chaos through ritual and sacrifice. What if this is an invocation to the forces of order?”
“What would that invocation sound like if it followed the indicated pattern?” Meredith asked. “Use the oldest dialect you have the command of, and just speak it aloud. The computer is listening now and will determine whether it can apply any of those sounds to the bank of symbols to produce a logical possible transliteration.”
Augustin began chanting loudly. Though Augustin was clearly over-enunciating so the computer would catch every sound, Brian wasn’t familiar enough with the ancient dialect to know where one word ended and the next began. There was a root here and there that was familiar, so that he could recognize that words such as “great,”
“heavens,” “order,” and “spirit” were being used. It only took a couple of minutes after Augustin had fallen silent for the computer to replace the majority of the words indicating parts of speech with words that looked similar to those Augustin had been speaking.
“Marvelous!” Augustin exclaimed. “Can your computer access the grammar reference I created for that dialect dated from August 2038? Is it sophisticated enough to use that as a base for extrapolating the rest of the missing words?”
“Is it sophisticated enough?” Meredith sounded incredulous of the question and downright annoyed. Rolling her eyes, she interfaced with a keyboard that appeared on the virtual wall at her touch. Another two minutes of waiting resulted in a fully rendered text with a line of English translation inserted below each line of ancient dialect.
Oh, may it look upon this world with the wisdom of its eye
Give order and structure to the chaos it finds
Oh, may it remove from this world the seeds of chaos
Give peace and security through regulation
“Can you believe this?” Augustin’s mesh avatar grabbed Brian and lifted him into the air in an embrace. He began striding about excitedly, “A written language, a real written language! Look at the transliteration here,” he stepped up to the wall and ran his finger along the lines of dialect above the English. “It is different from even the oldest dialect I know. I assume the computer made some assumptions for the vowels and tense markers?” He turned to Meredith for confirmation.
“Naturally,” she shrugged.
“These strings of symbols are different from anything I have seen come out of either Brian’s or Barry’s sites. Is this text from the chamber the professor uncovered?”
“Yes, it is. If you’d like to see translations for Brian’s carvings, the computer should be able to supply those now that we have created the rosetta stone for this language.” She interfaced again with the control panel on the wall, and the text was immediately replaced with each of the carvings that had been discovered with the machi and a string of text below each.
Brian’s heart began to race. He had committed each carving to memory and had hypothesized the meaning of each a hundred times. Now, like magic, here was an interpretation for the find that would probably define his career. His eyes darted over each translation. An idea occurred to him. Turning around, he gathered up each of the virtual carvings from the ground and from the hands of the digital machi, then knelt on the ground and began arranging them in a specific order. He glanced back to the screen a couple of times, changing the order once or twice as he went. Augustin’s avatar sat next to him, monitoring his progress silently.
“The idea occurred to me at some point shortly after unearthing La Dama, but I discarded it without a context for a correct array. What if these were meant to lie together like the bamboo slips in an ancient Chinese text? See the grooves along the tops and bottoms of each carving? They look like ornamentation, but what if this is where strips of fiber had been tied to each to knit them together into a sort of page of text, or a collapsible stone book?” He looked at Meredith, whose face showed she was watching him just as intently as he imagined Augustin was. She inputted a few commands through her virtual terminal and woven plant fibers appeared, tying the newly arranged carvings together in the order he had placed them in.
Brian slid his arms under the mat of carved stones and hefted it onto his bent legs. It was long enough to cover his whole lap and twice as wide as his shoulders. “Can you rearrange the text to follow this order: top to bottom, left to right?” he ran his finger down each column of carvings moving from left to right. When the text had been rearranged, he turned his eyes to the wall.
The eye gives order
Oh, give heed
The champion of the eye
Stands with strength
He had read only a few lines when the text suddenly disappeared
Diagnostic complete. 142 reports created. 12 issues resolved.
“Looks like that’s it for now, boys,” Meredith abruptly returned the wall to its curved shape that completed the back end of the ruka.
“Wait, what?” both Brian and Augustin cried in dismay. Brian replaced the digital carvings on the ground and stood up quickly.
“Did you see that? One hundred and forty-two reports! That means there are a hundred and forty-two new issues that hadn’t been identified before arriving here with you people. I can’t tell if it’s helping having y’all play, or if your team is somehow creating new problems. I need to take a look at these so things don’t get more out of hand. If we reach a critical failure, I won’t be finishing any of these renderings for you. All my time will be spent analyzing the game program. Is that what you would prefer?” Meredith was striding away from them toward the start point where Brian had spawned upon entering this mesh frame world.
Brian nearly exploded, but Augustin put a hand on his chest, stopping him in his tracks. He gestured with an ephemeral hand to his non-existent lips and then responded for the both of them. “Of course not, Meredith. Thank you for all you are doing. You’ve worked miracles here already. Please let us know how we can help you.” He took Brian’s upper arm in his hand and started walking toward the start point as well.
Brian allowed himself to be dragged along, trying to get control of his anger and disappointment. It was maddening to be teased with answers to something so important to him, just to have it abruptly snatched away. He was aware of his feet moving along, though he had no sense of Augustin’s virtual hand on his limp arm or the pressure it would take to move his weight along in real life. He let his head loll to the side and wished he could convey his annoyance with a facial expression at least, but given the simple oval feature that served as Augustin’s head, he figured his avatar was similarly non-emotive.
Looking to the side as he was, his eye caught another level of virtual world that he hadn’t previously noticed. It looked like a double chamber. The second was enormous, with an alcove lying some twenty feet away from a carved platform. More than that, it appeared that almost the whole rendering was fully painted in, with only a small portion of it represented by the laser grid lines that made up most of his dig
site.
“Hey! Look at that, would ya!” he exclaimed as he pulled his arm out of Augustin’s grip and pointed toward the two chambers out in the distance. Augustin turned around and let out an exclamation of surprise.
“Boys, there is no time. Come log out now through the portal, or I’ll evict you with a forced shut down. You won’t appreciate the headache,” Meredith warned.
“Meredith, just a few minutes. I simply must see!” Augustin was jogging toward the chamber now, Brian close on his heels.
“You’ve got ten seconds,” Meredith called out. “Ten… nine…”
“Seriously, we won’t be long, just give us a minute!” Brian yelled over his shoulder, picking up the pace.
“Eight… seven… six…”
“Meredith, you can’t be serious, we aren’t children!” Truth be told, Brian felt exactly like a child. The image of him throwing himself to the ground in a full temper tantrum flashed across his mind, and he wondered for a moment whether it might have an effect on her.
“Five… four… oh, this is just stupid.”
Brian’s vision suddenly went black, and a ringing in his ears overtook his senses. A moment later, pressure in the blood vessels just above his eye sockets caused flashes of light to explode across his consciousness. He snatched the VR headset off and pressed his palms into his temples. Opening his eyes showed him only blurry patches of color swimming in front of him. He could vaguely discern that he was in his ruka, but the pain in his head was overwhelming.
“Oof, she wasn’t kidding,” he mumbled aloud to himself. “What happened to three-two-one? I hate that woman,” he moaned as he flopped onto his side and stuffed a pillow over his head.
“We have a new objective, team,” Professor Rojas announced grandly. “With Augustin’s assistance, Meredith made a major breakthrough for us today. We have confirmed that we have uncovered an ancient writing system, and we now have the cipher necessary to decode it.” Applause and whooping erupted all around. Brian’s head was still a little achy, even after four hours of lying still with a pillow over his eyes to block out any light, so while he clapped along with the rest, his enthusiasm was somewhat tempered. “We owe her a lot, and there will be plenty of time to read through and analyze, but for the time being we need to help her track down the root causes of some of the bugs that have been turning up in the game. Meredith, why don’t you fill us in,”
“I’m not the sort to overstate things,” Meredith nodded her thanks to the professor for the floor. “Let me assure you that I am not indulging in hyperbole when I say that my cooperation in your project is in jeopardy. If we can’t resolve some of these game errors, I’ll be forced to apply my energies full time to a line-by-line analysis of code from the ground up. I assume you’re all savvy enough, highly educated as you are, to grasp that this will be a months’ long endeavor. I also know you are all abundantly aware of the time constraint we’re operating under here in Chile. Please apply your urgency in your research to the job I’m tasking you all with now.
“Y’all have reported several significant issues—broken save points, respawn issues, garbled dialogue—and my diagnostic scans have turned up a heaping pile more. Previous testing done in our development facility never encountered difficulties like this. I’m counting on you to get out there and uncover patterns, and possibly a source point or two for the difficulties. Think of it as a multi-pronged anthropological study in virgin territory.”
“Even I will be applying myself to some exploration,” Professor Rojas put in. “You wouldn’t want the old man to out-adventure you.” He laughed, and the others joined in appreciatively.
“What about Barry, where is he? Shouldn’t he be made aware of the developments?” Chris pointed out, voicing what Brian had been thinking since the moment the professor had kicked the meeting off without waiting for Barry to show up.
“I checked his player status before you all arrived. He has been actively logged in at least since the last system sync, five hours ago. Seeing as how the purpose of this meeting is to send you all out full-time, the professor and I already decided to get a hold of him later over your chat system,” Meredith answered.
“Let’s take the next few minutes to do any team or partner planning that we need to be as efficient as possible. I’m no less eager than the lot of you combined to get back to work on our research,” the professor stood, signaling that everyone was free to either leave or engage in side conversation.
Brian hung back for a minute as Chris and Augustin approached Meredith, and Mike evidently was busy looking through his user interface, possibly analyzing the map or checking through his quest log. He wondered how it might affect a player to get caught up in a game glitch or to be stuck in the game in the event of a critical failure. It had been awfully painful to be “forcefully evicted,” as Meredith had put it. Knowing how thoroughly the system had analyzed their brain patterns during their initial login, he could only imagine what sort of lasting effects a true malfunction could have.
“Professor, would you like some leads on quests in and around the city?” Brian overheard Rhonda offering. He glanced around and saw her standing with the professor in the corner, holding a messenger satchel that was stuffed full of something.
That’s odd, he thought. Though he knew very well it was possible to carry dozens, if not hundreds, of things in your inventory and eventually become encumbered, he had never seen someone’s pockets or bag of carrying ever look full. As he stood there puzzling over the detail, he noticed the contents writhe slightly, and observed Rhonda pat it soothingly and begin to shift her weight back and forth the way he had seen new parents do while holding their children in line at the store.
He took a step closer to see if he could figure out what could be in the satchel, when suddenly a blue-fringed, furry ear popped out from under the flap at the back of the bag. For a third time today, he startled noticeably and a slight gasp escaped his lips. Inhabiting a fully rendered avatar this time, the action was noticeable to people around him, and caught Meredith’s attention in particular. She looked at him strangely and then followed his line of sight to Rhonda’s satchel.
“My little man!” Meredith exclaimed loudly and enthusiastically. Now it was everyone else’s turn to jump in the air, startled by the unexpected outburst. Meredith took three sweeping steps across the room and dug her hands, without permission, into Rhonda’s satchel. A writhing ball of black and blue fur accompanied her hands when she extracted them. Meredith was giggling and cooing as she lifted the furry creature to her face and began nuzzling it.
Brian could finally make out the creature that had done the impossible by turning Meredith into a real person. It was a moondust wolf pup. It was licking her face happily and wriggling with pleasure in response to the stream of baby-talk that was bubbling forth from the woman.
“Well done, you,” Meredith said to Rhonda. She placed the pup on the floor and affectionately watched it explore the area, sniffing each of their avatars in a truly life-like manner. “I didn’t peg any of you to be the sort to play carefully enough to discover him. My predictions say that only one in a hundred thousand players will successfully manage to find and tame him. He is the pièce de résistance of my personal contributions to the game.”
“When Mike told me last night that he and Brian had fought off a pair of moondust wolves and described them to me, I figured it couldn’t be a common thing to program a mated pair of any animal with the behaviors he described. It sounded exactly like a set of living creatures.” As Rhonda talked the pup wriggled under the beds and then squirmed out again to take an experimental nibble on a chair leg. “I thought to myself that if enough care had been put into creating the behaviors, there might have been enough to create a den with offspring. I logged in about an hour ago to search the area nearby where the boys encountered the parents.” Rhonda sat down on the ground and the pup came directly to her and crawled into her lap.
“When you say ‘encountered’ and ‘f
ought off,’ what does that mean?” Meredith asked, suddenly stern again as she turned her eyes on Mike and Brian.
“They attacked us, so we defended ourselves. It only took a few fireballs to bring them down,” Mike said.
“But did they, really?” Meredith asked with exasperation in her voice.
“Did they what?” Brian asked, confused.
“Did they actually attack you, or did you initiate the conflict?”
“Well, I… they were snarling, and the male had his hackles raised.” Mike shrugged his shoulders.
“What were you doing just before that? It matters, because only certain behaviors will be correct to the programming,” Meredith clarified.
Brian and Mike looked at each other. Brian wasn’t going to say it, and he tried to communicate as much with his eyes.
“I…” Mike sighed, apparently giving into the inevitable. “I exploded a fire ball to demonstrate something that had happened earlier in the day.”
“You frightened them. You presented a threat right outside their den,” Meredith scolded them, wagging a finger while the other hand sat on her hip. “Those creatures are rare, but not aggressive. Interacting with one in a non-violent way gives you Kyra’s blessing, and may even allow you to follow it to treasure. There are, perhaps, two more out there on all of Prirodha. Rampaging through the game blasting everything that moves across your path isn’t going to be the best way to test the environment,” she exhaled an exasperated breath and rolled her eyes at them.
“It didn’t occur to us their programming would be so interactive. Usually predators respond uniformly within a certain radius in games like this,” Brian replied with an apologetic tone. He wasn’t about to tell her that he had killed another moondust wolf his first night.
