That is, she supposes, a thing you do with castles.
flash
The cold comes from outside as well as in. There is a wind, and the wind lifts Marie’s hair, chills her lobes where the earrings dangle. It’s an impressive effect, and the more she thinks about it, the more impressed she becomes.
It’s all a magic trick. All an illusion.
Knowing that doesn’t make the sleight of hand less convincing.
flash
There is no one else in the chamber.
It’s only the wind, one part of her brain temporizes. It’s only the simulation, offers another.
What she heard wasn’t the wind. It was the unresonant thump of something heavy being thrown against something hard, and then the subsequent thump of something falling to the floor.
She is making up her mind not to turn.
She is turning.
flash
It happens with painstaking slowness. Time-lapse in reverse, the register of a high-speed camera played at a normal frame rate.
There’s that thump. Then another. Separated by long seconds, it seems, but somehow Marie is still turning.
Her gaze tracks across the wall, the doorway, the steps. The dim light does not flicker. There is no sense of a presence. No sense of anyone observing her. She sees the wall, an unlit sconce, a table with a single chair set up as a desk.
The sounds. The sounds?
There is a bed, some medievally uncomfortable-looking construction of ropes and planks and hay and blankets that the clothes moths have been in. Marie’s breath comes out in a cloud, tattered by the cold draft from the window. No matter how dire they look, she thinks of appropriating these covers and wrapping them around herself. The designers have probably forgotten to make blankets warm, too.
People had used to get chilblains, hadn’t they? Inflamed toes and fingers, swollen from chronic chill. The designers had probably remembered chilblains, if they had forgotten about blankets. They seemed to have one-degree minds.
Maybe the torture of unrelenting cold was a nod to authenticity, if this was supposed to be a historical setting and not just a historic site. But what had made the sounds?
When she takes the step forward, it is half-unwittingly. First one, then the next one. It’s because of the inadequate light. She can’t see into the corner the thumps came from. The bed blocks her vision.
When she is closer, when she can see what lies there, it’s the opposite of her glimpse of the staring sockets and nares of the woman descending the nonexistent stair in the great hall. Instead of adrenaline cresting on surprise and horror, what Marie is left with is a bright edgy teetering wash of fight-or-flight, and nowhere to go with it. It feels like stepping up in the dark onto a step that isn’t there, and falling the six inches before her foot—safely, securely—hits the landing floor.
Because there’s nothing in the corner. Nothing dangerous, anyway. Nothing except a pair of old books tossed carelessly, one lying open half atop the other.
Old books. Bound in leather. The words of the open one handwritten in an ornate, indecipherable calligraphy. Marie glimpses the bright colors of an illumination further along, where the pages are riffled.
Books like that were valuable when they were made, and they would be even more valuable now. If it is now, in the simulation. And not then.
These are treasures. No one would leave them tossed in a damp corner with the straw and the mouse droppings.
flash
Marie steps forward. She reaches out, thinking—not really thinking, just reacting—to secure the precious antiques. She stares so intently in the wrong direction that she only notices the third book when it thumps into the wall above the other two and tumbles into the pile with a wounded-bird flutter.
The next thing to come flying is the iron bookend, and this time she is watching as it lifts off the desktop as if hefted by invisible hands.
She ducks, and the bookend sails past her and crashes into the stone, leaving a powdery scar. It falls to the floor with a clatter.
This time, Marie doesn’t run.
This time, what Marie feels is unreasoning fury.
flash
She grabs the edge of the bedstead, meaning to flip the whole thing over, and grunts in surprise. It might not be real, but it’s as good as immovable. She gets it up a centimeter, maybe, counting the stretch in her own tendons. The resistance, the strain in her body, feels real. She might as well be trying to uproot a tree.
“You can’t expect me to just wander around looking at dead people!” she yells at the cold, whispering air.
She grunts again, this time in effort—straining, emitting ugly noises. She lets go of the frame again as abruptly as she grabbed it. There’s a muffled thud, and a rattle through the floor.
Nothing answers. The cold wind ruffles the crackling pages of the open book.
Even the virtual poltergeist is still.
Marie kicks the edge of the bedstead, just to be doing something. It sure hurts like solid oak. When she is done hopping and cussing, however, she feels perversely better.
She sighs and shakes her hands out, back under control now. She limps into the corner, one weather eye out for more flying objects. She nudges the bookend aside with her toe, half-expecting it to spring to life, hop into the air, and chase her around the room cackling madly. It weighs kilos and rasps on the stone, but only moves where she moves it, and in general behaves as a heavy metal objet d’clutter should. One by one, she picks the books up and weighs them in her hands.
The top one—the one she saw hit the wall—is closed and seems undamaged. When she opens it, she sees it’s in a foreign language that looks like Latin.
She does not read Latin. She sets the book aside on the coverlet of the unruffled bed. The second book is the one that fell open. It has bent leaves and she takes a moment to smooth those as she turns them.
This book might be in English. It’s hard to say, as the hand-formed letters are minuscule and dense enough to make her understand why people used to speak of going blind from reading. The illuminations are lovely, intense reds and blues delineated with gold foil. She manages not to lick them, despite how much they look like candy.
She sets it beside the equally incomprehensible other.
The third book, though. Or perhaps she ought to consider it the first book, as it was thrown before the others.
The cover boards of the third book are bent at one corner. And the contents startle her, because while it too is written rather than printed, the lines within are in an old-fashioned but firm and legible hand.
The volume itself is small and dark, the paper crisp, smooth, and thin. Marie runs a thumb along the page edges, which are stained with ink and from much handling. It’s too dim in the room to read, but her brief and cursory investigation suggests that the book contains a curated mishmash of private thoughts, quotations, fascinating facts, and bits of poetry. The ink isn’t a true black, but a brownish-black with fades and gradations of colors. Even in the cold the book has a faintly tannic scent.
A commonplace book. That was the term people used to use.
It’s too dark in here to read some ancient scribbles. Marie sets the book on the bed.
flash
She’s on the second of two steps up to the door when she hears the flutter, the rushing noise, and the object strikes her sharply right in the center of the back. It doesn’t hurt so much as stun her. Her breath whistles out. She catches that same spot on the doorframe to keep from falling out of the room as she used earlier to keep herself from falling in, and turns around again.
A book is tumbling to the floor behind her. There’s another rush of air. Her hand comes up reflexively, and the small dark book smacks into it. She catches it without tearing it; she’s not sure how.
She looks down and frowns.
“I guess I’m supposed to take this with me?”
Nothing else flies at her head, but she waits an extra moment to be sure. “All ri
ght then.”
She’s about to turn away when uncharacteristic caution stops her. “Thank you,” she says.
She has the sense of a sigh behind her as she climbs out of the room.
Then she’s back in the narrow corridor with the flickering lamplight. She thinks about stopping to read here, but it’s cold, so cold. She could go back to the great hall—
As if anybody could read with that eyeless face staring down at them. She needs to get outside.
Great, she thinks. How do I get outside?
She’s going to have to nerve herself to get past the ghost somehow.
Marie weighs the book in her hand, feeling like Those Meddling Kids. This is a clue if she ever saw one.
There might be something in here to help her solve this puzzle, to guide her out of this hellish escape room she’s been sentenced to.
flash
Dammit, I don’t deserve this punishment.
She didn’t do anything the rate this level of time-wasting. Hell, she didn’t do anything that everyone wasn’t doing, in some fashion or other, though most of them are bigger hypocrites about it than she is.
And now she’s stalling, because she’s standing in front of the door that opens onto the great hall, and she doesn’t want to open it. Anxiety twists through her body. The ghost is out there.
The ghost isn’t real.
The ghost terrifies her.
She stops. Frozen, with her hand on the doorknob that is not really there. Her other hand cups the book. She’s aware of the wrinkled feeling of the cloth over the bent coverboard against her palm.
What is the purpose of this? She is here for a reason, after all. Not just her own reason. Her own reason to be here is that this is the hoop she has to jump through to avoid being unemployed. She’s been, more or less, sentenced to it. They called it training. They also made it plain it wasn’t optional.
But she is also here for a purpose. Not just metaphorically speaking.
She is supposed to learn something.
If she can figure out what she’s supposed to learn, and fake her way through it, she’ll be off the hook.
What do ghosts want?
Ghosts are … trying to finish some unfinished business. Isn’t that the general rule? If they can complete whatever obligation holds them to this world, then they can rest.
Weren’t ghosts also serving a sentence?
What makes a ghost? Assuming for a minute that they were real, which in the logic of this virtual environment they certainly were. Marie doesn’t believe in ghosts, but that doesn’t matter right now. Because aren’t they, pseudoscientifically speaking, supposed to be the leftover emanations of people with unfinished business, an unfulfilled purpose in life? Their guilt and need not permitting them to rest?
That never made a lot of sense to Marie. If you couldn’t finish something—or you didn’t want to, or it was too much of a pain—you left it for the next guy. No skin off your nose.
Ghosts could be released, though. Exorcised, right?
Right. So Marie has to figure out how to release the ghosts. That’s got to be the trick to proving she’s learned how to empathize. Figure out what they need, do it for them, and everybody can get on with their death. Or life, in her case.
And then she can rest, too.
A familiar rush of euphoria fills her with giddiness. The whole reason she got into game design in the first place was because of that particular dizzyingly pleasurable sensation. The feeling of epiphany. The endorphin reward that comes with finally solving a particularly satisfactory problem.
She’s been coming at it wrong. This is a game, and she just has to figure out how to solve it.
Is she supposed to exorcise the castle? That doesn’t seem likely. Anyway, she isn’t even religious, much less a practicing Catholic, although her parents had been. She wouldn’t count as old, and while she’s young enough, she’s no sort of priest.
And definitely neither a saint nor an angel.
She giggles nervously.
All she has to do is get past the apparition, read the book, and figure out the logic puzzle. And she’s home free.
Right?
Right.
She leans her forehead against the splintered door. She’s cold and exhausted. It feels like she’s been in here forever. She wants to go home.
flash
Marie wakes, still shivering, but tingling. A strange sensation floods through her—literally, she realizes, a flush of warmth radiating from the crook of her arm, into the arteries and veins, down into her fingertips until they feel prickly and distended, back up to the shoulder and across her pectoral muscle and into her chest cavity, where she’d swear she can feel it as the slug of rewarmed blood hits her heart. Her arm aches from the IVs. Her head aches from grinding her teeth against the cold.
She’s exhausted. Her body trembles.
She lays her damp head back on the dry pillow and falls asleep.
The therapist’s office is a little room like other little rooms, with a window and a floral carpet and two comfortable chairs against the wall opposite the desk, which faces the window, and the chair behind it, which is turned around facing Marie.
Marie’s therapist, for purposes of this intervention, is Jeff. She doesn’t think of him as her therapist, because she’s never seen a therapist in real life and doesn’t see the need to. He’s mandated. That doesn’t mean she has to claim ownership.
She says, “I’ve always thought ghosts were a pretty obvious metaphor. People have these guilt complexes. Useless emotion. It doesn’t make them behave any better. It just makes them feel bad about acting like who they really are. Hypocrites, every one of them.”
She’s setting a baseline expectation, from which her progress will be measured. That doesn’t mean what I’m saying isn’t true.
Jeff looks at her with that neutral expression that makes her want to say something outrageous, just to make him react. To get a rise out of him.
“Do you feel that the program is designed to evoke guilt?”
That gives her pause. Which makes her angry, because she’s sure it’s designed to. She refuses to be provoked by such juvenile tactics. She is smarter than these guys.
“You know,” she says. “Maybe that was a snap judgement.”
People trust you more when you reconsider your own judgment. When you appear to take their input on board.
Even when it’s stupid.
Well, yes. Possibly especially then.
Jeff waits. Marie hates how good he is at waiting. Marie wants more than anything to get a rise out of Jeff.
Okay, not more than anything. What she wants more than anything is to complete this stupid program and go back to her job and her life. What she wants after that is to get a rise out of Jeff.
Some attention. Anything.
Finally, just to break the silence, she says, “Obviously, people felt pain because of what I did.”
“Go on.”
She gropes, trying to find the right answer. Nothing about his aspect helps her.
“I don’t think I can make amends.”
Another long pause. “Why not?”
Because it’s not worth the effort.
She stares down at her hands.
“See you next week,” Jeff says, when a certain amount of time has elapsed. “Our time is up.”
It’s a long week. She’s on unpaid leave. She spends a lot of time sleeping, and looking at job listings. Not that her current job will give her a reference until she completes the training anyway. And it’s a small industry. Everybody knows everybody.
She’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to find out how far the story has spread.
And on Monday morning, Marie reports to the tank again.
flash
The worst part of this game is not the tank, or the wetsuit, or even the needles. The worst part is that it has no save partitions. Rather, Marie finds herself kicked right back to the beginning, and has to deal with the ghost and
the poltergeist and the unbelievable cold all over again. At least this run-through she spends less time fumbling and gets out of the great hall before the ghost descends through the ceiling, so she doesn’t have to look at the ruin of its face and the room hasn’t had time to be haunted into such bone-hurting coldness when she crosses through it.
She doesn’t nearly fall off the parapet. She doesn’t smash her toe. And the poltergeist doesn’t hit her with anything, because she knows she’s supposed to take the book with her and not leave it on the bed.
So she’s a lot less bruised, a lot less traumatized, and a lot less frozen when she gets back to the door into the great hall. Elapsed time—she guesses—under five minutes.
Health levels 90%, she tells herself, and has enough self-possession to smile.
She touches the metal handle. It has a simple thumb latch. It opens in.
The metal is so cold her skin adheres, and when she peels her hand off after pulling the door a few centimeters towards her, she leaves the whorl pattern on her thumb pad behind. Like a medieval thumb lock, she thinks.
She nerves herself, grasps the edge of the wooden door as colder air billows curls of steam around the door frame, and yanks it wide.
The faceless ghost poses—drifts?—in the middle of the room. There’s another doorway beyond her, much larger than the one Marie stands in now. Marie must have missed it before because her back was to it when the simulation started. She rolls her eyes at herself, mortified that she missed such an elementary bit of sleight of hand in the design.
Right. She doesn’t see a clever way around this, and anyway she’s pretty sure that what she’s supposed to learn from this experience is not how to be smarter than a programmed ghost.
She grits her teeth and runs. Maybe the exertion will keep her a little warmer.
Crowd Futures: We Have Always Died in the Castle Page 2
