by Deck Davis
“If you ever go in,” said Eddie when he saw me looking at the Thirsty Rat, “try Mulgoon’s Blue Moon. It’s the best beer in the world.”
Arin and Eddie led me away from the elder’s house and a little further up the hill. Eddie seemed to have taken it upon himself to be my tour guide. “Not every house is connected to the mainnet,” he told me, as we passed a few stone buildings. “Wolfy and Arin rigged a connection, and he managed to wangle a few subnets from a trader passing through, but we’re working on hooking up the town.”
Above me, the ramshackle prot-layer buzzed and crackled. I could see that its arc wasn’t perfect; this prot-layer wasn’t made from one curved piece of refined perma-gel, but instead had been patched together sheet by sheet, like a quilt stitched by a grandmother.
“What about your firmware?” I asked. “The Commission states each team has to have access to a mainnet, with the processor firmware completely up to date.”
Eddie turned and pointed down the hill. “See the Thirsty Rat? Look just to the right, and you’ll see our VBR center. It ain’t much, but it’s somethin’.”
I followed Arin to the peak of the hill. Here, there was one final building. This had a domed roof, which made it look like a space observatory. It looked lonely standing at the top with nothing around it. In the center of the domed roof, there was a copper weather vane which spun under the faint gusts that the prot-layer allowed to slither under its protection.
“Here we are,” said Arin. “Eddie, Harry, cool your feet here a second.”
Arin approached a set of giant iron doors. They looked like they’d been forged to withstand a bomb. Come to think of it, this domed-roof building seemed like it was built from sturdier stuff than the other houses and shops on Perlshaw’s slope. Given how antiquated it looked, I was surprised when Arin held his wrist against a metal protrusion from the door which was shaped like a lion’s head, a green light flashed over the lion, and the door creaked open. Arin slipped inside and let the doors shut behind him, leaving Eddie and me alone.
Standing outside the iron doors, I looked down on the slope of Perlshaw. The windows of various houses were lit by an amber hue, though I couldn’t tell if it was from real open hearths or if it was an artificial effect. A few drunks stumbled out of the Thirsty Rat, laughing and jeering in a good-natured way.
Eddie moved in closer to me. His shock of red hair seemed even brighter than the lights in the houses’ windows. “Can I talk to ya a sec?” he said.
“Sure.”
“It’s a little difficult.”
“Go on…”
“I know you’re new to the team and all,” said Eddie, “but you’ve been around the block, ain’t ya? VBR-wise, I mean. Wolfy, Glora, and me watched a few of your battles, back when you were a storm knight.”
“The glory days,” I said, sarcastically.
“C’mon man, they really were. Some of the plays you guys made…I could never think of that stuff.”
“I’ve been around VBRs since I was small,” I said. “You pick things up after a while. Watching other teams’ feeds is the most useful, too.”
“Don’t you find that stuff a little…boring?” said Eddie. “I prefer getting my sword out to learning tactics.”
“My older brother Bill used to say, ‘if you don’t have time to watch a fight feed and learn from it, you don’t have time to fight.”
Eddie pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. I smelled the sour aroma as he breathed it in. The end of his cigarette glared orange, matching his hair.
“That’s the thing. They chose me to be captain of Team Perlshaw ‘cos I’m loud. Outgoing. A big mouth SOB, Wolfy calls me. And I was happy to do it, for a while. But man, the pressure…”
“Being a leader isn’t easy. You’ll come around to it.”
“That’s the thing,” said Eddie. “I’m not so headstrong that I don’t know my limitations. I’m decent with a sword. No denying that. But leading? Tactics? Ain’t my thing.”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
He took another puff of his cigarette and blew out a plume of smoke. It slowly drifted up toward the prot-layer, where vents would suck it away.
“I talked to the guys. Wolfy and Glora both agreed, too. So…”
“So….?” I said.
Eddie looked at me. “We want you to be captain,” he said.
Before I could say anything, the iron doors clanked open. Arin stood in the gaping doorway. The room behind him was almost dark, save for a flickering torch fastened to a wall that gave out waves of amber light, illuminating a cobblestone floor. The elder spread his hands out in a flourish. He’d found a robe from somewhere while he was in the domed building. Wearing it made him look like a wizard. I couldn’t help thinking it was for dramatical effect.
“You may enter,” he said, in his deepest, most wizard-like voice.
Eddie rolled his eyes. “He always does this,” he said.
Inside the domed-room was nothing except a stone floor. In the center of it, there was an open doorway cut into the stone, with steps that seemed to lead deeper into the building.
“This way,” said Arin, as he began walking down the steps. As I watched his legs disappear, then his waist, then his head, it looked like the stone floor was eating him. The staircase led down, down, and down again, taking twists and turns. It was leading us into the heart of the hill, Arin told me, as our boots echoed on the flooring. It began to feel cold. I zipped up my coat. I wished I’d worn my gel-lined fleece, one that would warm up if I commanded it to.
After walking down so many rough-cut, foot-worn steps that I thought I’d journeyed into the center of the earth, I saw Arin stop. Truth be told, I was glad. I might have been a VBR veteran capable of taking down a serpent, but, in real life, I had the slightly-toned, slightly-flabby body of your average mid-twenties guy, one who drank a little too much, ate a little too much, and exercised much too little.
Ahead of us was nothing but darkness. A wide expanse of it so black it was hard to know if it had a beginning or an end. A faint draft reached me, and with it came an acrid smell, one that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. I didn’t know why, but when I thought of the smell, the first thing that came to mind was age. Time.
“This is his favorite bit,” said Eddie from behind me. “Always the same…”
Arin stepped ahead a few paces, into the darkness. I could just about make out the vague outline of his shoulders, and his extravagant wizard robe where it met the floor. I expected him to walk on and light a few torches or something. Or maybe he’d pull a candle out of his pocket and illuminate the shadows with it. It would have been in keeping with the old-fashioned feel of the place.
Instead, he clapped his hands together. “Let there be light!” he shouted, with the pronunciation of the last ‘t’ meeting in perfect harmony with the noise of his clap. Lights fizzed to life, bright yellow, red and orange. They came on like the roar of a flame, but were soundless and gave off no heat. The light swirled and filled the room as if it were the beginning of creation giving birth to the universe. Then it settled, and I saw that the light was produced from rows of perfectly drawn perma-gel way up high on the ceiling.
“He had Wolfy make the effect,” said Eddie, leaning toward me. “Wolfy was studying to be a gel-tech engineer before his dad got sick. He couldn’t afford college after that. Still, he learned a few tricks, and Arin never gets tired of it.”
Eddie carried on talking, but his words were quickly lost on me. I couldn’t take my eyes off the room ahead of me. It was a cavern. We were deep in the heart of the hill, it seemed, or maybe even under the hill and even deeper into the ground, and we stood in a wide-open space. Overhead, on the stone roof that looked like it had been leveled out, were the strips of perma-gel that lit the room. The cavern was filled with rows upon rows of shelves, so many that it seemed to stretch back endlessly. How long would it take me to cross the room, to walk past all the shelves? A day? A week? I couldn’t have
told you, because, as far as I could see, there were never-ending shelves. Each shelf was different, as though they’d been scavenged over the years. Some were basic wooden shelves, others made from plastic, while a few were ornamental shelves made from curved metals that shone when the gel-light hit them. The shelves weren’t even the most impressive thing. There were books crammed in tightly on every shelf, thousands of them, or hundreds of thousands. Hell, there could have even been a million.
“Two million six hundred and forty-two thousand and seventy-eight,” said Arin, his voice echoing up into the cavern roof. I briefly wondered if he could read minds.
“The first thing people ask when they come down here,” said Eddie, “Is ‘How many books are there?’”
“We add more when we get them, of course,” said Arin, approaching the stack nearest to us, “but they are rarer and rarer these days. There is almost every book imaginable within this cavern. Each shelf is packed up tight with knowledge. The value of them is tremendous—not in bits, mind you. Books haven’t been worth much for years. But as for the words inside them...”
I approached the first shelf. I’d seen paper books before, but never this many. I looked at a few of the spines on the first shelf and read their titles, scanning across Moby Dick, A Brief History of Time, and To Kill a Mockingbird. I hadn’t read any of them.
“They’re not in order?” I said.
Arin shook his head. “With so many, it would be a lifetime’s work to arrange them in a system. The best we can do is protect them.”
“Protect them from what?”
“The elements. Mildew, rain, rot, moisture.”
“The government,” said Eddie.
Arin shot Eddie a look that said, ‘shut up.’
“So, you need to win bits from the VBR for this?” I asked.
Eddie nodded. “Think of this place as the last lingering trace of a forgotten era, where the swirling tides of knowledge can rest,” he said.
I looked at him strangely. That didn’t sound like the sort of thing Eddie would say.
Arin nodded. “Indeed, Mr. Hazzard. I couldn’t have said it better myself. And since that is exactly how I described it, and you have stolen my quote, I guess I did say it better myself.”
Arin then faced me. He had a solemn look in his eye. His face wrinkled seem to stretch out, to darken. “This is a piece of history, Harry,” he said. “In a world where it’s gel this gel that, people reading digital text of the backs of their hands, their skin slick with conductive glop, with blue hues cast on our faces so much it’s like a change in skin color…it’s nice to have something of the old world. I’m not saying we should do away with prot-layers and gel-tech—it has saved too many lines for me to dismiss it so easily—but the past shouldn’t be dismissed, either.”
“This is the largest collection of real books in existence,” said Eddie.
I nodded. It was hard to know what to say.
“While some people might scoff at what we’re doing here,” said Arin, “we carry on anyway. It’s our own little way of guarding the past. Protecting it. Keeping a little piece of the old world and storing it down here where it’ll last for centuries.”
I looked around and saw the thousands of books of all shapes and sizes, some thick, others thin, with a plethora of different-colored spines. Some were sharp and straight, others a little tatty. Then, it hit me. The acrid smell that had hit me when I first walked down the staircase. I couldn’t place it at first, but now I knew what it was. It was the smell of the old books, the particular stench of paper that had weathered the ages. Bill’s horror books used to smell the same way.
When I took in the enormity of the cave, I felt like I could understand. This was something worth protecting, and not just because there was knowledge here that you couldn’t download from the mainnet. After all, nearly every book in existence had been uploaded by now. This place was worth protecting because there was one question that you needed to ask: If every paper book in the world was suddenly destroyed, would it have a positive net gain for the planet or a negative one? To me, it would be a negative. Sure, the world would keep spinning. The sun would keep burning down onto prot layers, trees and vegetation would continue converting carbon dioxide to oxygen. Yet, if a collection like this were destroyed forever, it’d be a net negative. Something would be lost.
“Okay,” I said. “I think I get it. So, what do you need the bits for?”
“Lots of stuff,” said Eddie. “Security, weather-proofing... We need to make the walls safer and make sure they don’t cave in. We need to seal the roof so that the water doesn’t find its way down here if there’s ever a bad thunderstorm up top.”
Elder Arin looked at me. He gave me the strongest stare that I’d ever seen. It was as though it wasn’t just his eyes looking back at me, but his entire being. Everything in his head, each little brain synapse and tendril that made Arin who he was, was fixing me a look of steel.
“Me, you, and everything and everyone you’ve ever known will be gone someday, Harry. The best thing you can do is try and outrun the wave of death long enough to leave something lasting behind. For me, for many of the Perlshaw folks, this collection is just that.”
Something about the way he delivered the words chilled me deep beyond my skin and to my bones, where the feeling wrapped around me. I guess I understood what he meant; these books were a legacy of some sort.
I thought about something Rynk had said to be, back in the bar in Sootstein: There’s nothing but a huge, gaping blankness. And the best thing you can do is just swim into it. Fight your fights, let your life ebb away year by year, and then surrender to the ever-lasting nothingness that’s waiting at the end. Elder Arin and Rynk were at odds with one another, here. At the same time, part of what they both said was the same. They both embraced the inevitability of death. It made sense; there was no use hiding from the scythe. But they differed in their message. Arin’s was more optimistic, I guessed. Where Rynk believed you just had to swim into the nothingness of death, Arin believed you could leave something behind and that if you did that, maybe you never truly died.
There was something to Arin’s words—a glimmer of truth—but, man, I wanted to rid myself of the cold feeling in my skin. Time to speed up the conversation.
“And this is why you’ve entered New Eden?”
“Renovating a place like this is a grand undertaking,” answered Arin. “It would cost tens of thousands of bits.”
“We had a town meeting. Those who agreed to entering our team in New Eden pooled some of their bits into starting a VBR team, y’know, buying equipment, runes, that kind of stuff,” said Eddie.
“You’re gambling town funds on the New Eden VBR? Kind of a lot to risk, isn’t it?”
Eddie shrugged. “We feel like it’s worth it.”
Arin let me look around the shelves for a couple of hours. I spent thirty minutes just walking straight on, cutting a path through the giant room, to see if I could see the end. After half an hour’s journey, all I saw were more shelves. It took my breath away to think of how many books were here, protected in this little cave.
Later, as we left the cavern and walked back up the stairs, I felt a weight settle on my shoulders, as though a little goblin had hopped on to hitch a ride. Nothing had really jumped on me, of course. The weight was all mental. It was the thought that Arin and the town of Perlshaw had a passion, and that passion was to protect the great collection buried under the hill beneath them. They needed bits to further ensure its safety, and they’d each staked some of their own bits in the hope that Eddie, Wolfy, Glora and I could somehow place high enough in the New Eden VBR to bring back a decent reward. It was a lot of weight to bear for a guy who never worked out his shoulder muscles. All sorts of things could go wrong. We could parachute into the map and land in a serpent nest or we could be incredibly unluckily and fail to find decent loot items before the first wave hit.
When we reached the top of the stairs and went back out o
nto the hillside, Arin looked at me. He gave a little nod. “Thank you for agreeing to this, Harry. After meeting you, I feel a little more assured. From now on, I will leave you and your team to your preparations.”
With that, he left me and Eddie alone.
I turned to Eddie. “He just said my team, didn’t he?”
Eddie nodded. “I kinda told him you were our new captain.”
“I didn’t agree to that yet,” I said. “I was a captain once, and it didn’t go well.”
“I know. Your last teammates were assholes. And, yeah, maybe I’m a bit of an asshole too…but I’m the right kind of asshole. So’s Wolfy, and Glora. C’mon, Harry. Do it. Doooo it.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be your new captain.”
I stood on the peak of the hill with Eddie long after Arin went home. Soon after, Glora joined us, and then Wolfy. The hulk of a man had a bottle of rensak, which was a liquor with a stronger bite than vodka and the kick of aged whiskey; apparently, it brought around hangovers that could fell an elephant. As the lights in the windows of the Perlshaw houses below us went out one by one, we discussed tactics. We talked about our goals, about the New Eden battle, and about how high we were going to place. For the first time in a while, I felt like I was part of something, part of a team in a way I never had with Wolfhound. I raised a drunken toast to Perlshaw and then drank back a bitter shot of rensak. As the time drained away and the team laughed and joked around me, I made a promise in my head. One way or other, we were going to beat Team Wolfhound in the New Eden VBR.
