“Who?”
She shook her head. We toiled on, cresting a long, slow rise of land. Kaiko claimed to see a black margin along the horizon. “It’s the edge of the world,” she said.
“Do we go on, or turn back?” I asked. “They may punish us for trespassing.”
“You say too many words in the language of recent dreams. Nihongo ga hanaseru yo ni naru made hansanai de!”
We descended from the crest. The margin disappeared. We climbed, descended, climbed, descended. After leagues of hiking our goal seemed no nearer. Then we topped the latest hill and saw a colonnaded roof in the near distance, rising from a mound fringed by sloughs. Beneath its shade bubbled a fountain. The road took us to the place, crossing reedy waters over a bridge of durium blocks.
We drank, slipped off our shoes, and bathed our feet. To an infinitesimal degree the hall darkened. I looked up. Metal rods clicked into place in the ceiling. We were trapped.
“This way, sir and madam.”
The fountain sprayed a fine mist. In that mist appeared a glowing face. “Come, come. Don’t stare,” the image spoke. “I hope to provoke a reaction.”
The speaker’s comments were in Japanese. “What is this place?” I replied in the same language.
“Hmm! You must be awake to yourself. Awake enough to remember other games, and other centuries?”
The face turned to scan the grasslands around us. It rotated a full cycle, back into view. “For lifetimes this place has been a monument to power. All the gods start from this font. Recently I approved the deification of young Mirthwad and sent him to the Hag Queen for training. Mirthwad has achieved great things, I understand.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Mirthwad asked that question,” the voice responded. “I gave him the choice. He could accept godhood or have his answer. He chose godhood.”
The image’s eyes focused on me. “Yoshi, you’re a very good adventurer. If anyone deserves to be deified, it’s you. Unfortunately I can’t oblige without your cooperation. The rules of this game stipulate that the gods of Chyle be ignorant of who they are.”
“How many of them are real souls, and not fictoids? How many got a long message months ago—in a language they didn’t know, and in an indecipherable script?”
“I don’t know. In the language of your offensive dichotomies I’m not ‘real’ myself,” the face admitted. “I’m limited in my functions.”
“There’s no way to summon them all here? No way to wake them out of the game?”
“Those who chose to wake may do so. Kaiko has chosen, and here she is. Do you value yourself, Kaiko?” the image asked. “If not, no need for suicide. I can take you away from your past, and make you a goddess.”
“The long trip is over,” I told Kaiko. “Our starship is in geosynchronous orbit around Blue World. The planet is being terraformed. Many souls have left virtuality. They’re incarnated in robot bodies, or bodies made of vatgrown flesh.”
“If you’re telling me the prospectus for a different game, it’s in bad taste,” Kaiko said. “You’re making a mockery of something I once lived for. An old, old hope.”
“Check the year. Our ship was to have arrived at Epsilon Eridani in 3083.”
“I—I have forgotten my powers. How to know the time. Let’s see. 3175. My God, such a number!” She choked with emotion. After a time she whispered: “I’ve grown centuries older, and not even as myself! As somebody of no consequence whatever!”
I turned to the image. “I’d like to add to your programmed menu. I want you to inform anyone who comes that there’s a way out of virtuality, but a dangerous way. Those who take it may be interrogated, or blocked, or even killed. I don’t know if I’m exaggerating to say this. I’m a poor candidate to scout out the situation, since I’m the one Lady Midori and Lord Hideyaki want to get rid of.”
I gave a fuller explanation. Kaiko shook her head. “You say that Comrade Kazumi is dead.”
“That’s how I account for things.”
“Did you love her?” Kaiko asked.
“I think she loved me.” I thought a bit and elaborated. “But not exclusively. Our bond was like—like soldiers in war, who would do almost anything for each other.”
“And the silence since you shot out your big message? How do you account for that?”
“Your ears were deaf at the time. Deaf to Japanese. I suppose many deep gamers are deaf by choice. I’m surprised, though, that Lady Midori hasn’t broadcast a response. Perhaps her silence is calculated. Anything she said would give me more information than I have now, and she’d rather have me ignorant.”
Kaiko made a decision. “Yoshi, let’s ruin this game. Let’s interrupt it, and collect all the souls at play. Tell them what you’ve just told me. Let’s go out and ruin other games, and rescue all those deep gamers.”
“And then what?”
“You know, don’t you? You know what you’ll have to do. But I wouldn’t have you do it just for me.”
“Do you remember how to invoke Transit?” I asked. “We’re imprisoned here. We need to go elsewhere to gather our powers.”
A day later, two caped superheroes flew into the skies over the city of Chyle. We pealed away slabs of durium, four-by-eight meters each, from the roofs of various temples. Sirens honked, announcing the daily Peace, but the Purple Crusader—myself, clad in comic-book swirls and glitter—kept working in defiance of all the gods. I grabbed as many helmets as I could find, and dumped them in the high hills behind the eastern suburbs.
Priests shook their fists at Kaiko—the Laughing Dynamo—as she did likewise. A horrid stench rolled in from the west, where Quarry Mountain erupted off schedule. The clerics of Chyle clambered into the heights to escape the low brown smell, and here again they threatened us with divine retribution.
The Laughing Dynamo had taken special pains to deal with Quarry Mountain. Volumes of fecal matter rolled from the heights, enveloping villas and palaces, and most especially the temple of Techto. Refugees jogged away, holding hankies to their stricken faces.
How vulgar. It would have been more elegant to ruin the game by substituting helmets of our own manufacture, sneaking in and out of threescore temples, but Kaiko and I despaired of figuring out how the damned things worked quickly enough to make the necessary changes. The guts of a real helmet lay open to view by anyone with a screwdriver, but the working parts of a virtual helmet are simply compiled code, all zeros and ones.
Somewhere in Chyle lived a soul who would eventually remember himor herself, as the person who’d taken over my five-hundred-year-old scenario, and added helmets to the equation. I hoped that was true, and I hoped I could be persuasive enough to enlist that person’s talents. Kazumi’s ability to copy memories into her own soul—Joto’s ability to restore memories to independent life—and now this! A gradual process of selective memory suppression, and the substitution of lies for truth!
Software was all, but I was becoming the repeated victim of a special category I called soulware. As this stuff propagated, life for the inhabitants of virtuality was becoming unrecognizable. The boundaries of self-definition were flouted. Emigration to Blue World seemed ever more necessary.
Kaiko and I finished our destructive work. We flew back into the hills, and transported our helmet-booty further away, working in shifts. Meanwhile, in the city of Chyle, riots broke out, and factions collected. Refugees crowded the roads southward, seeking to reach the Gund.
We arranged for a nightfall of manna to feed them. The gods, who loved anonymity at the best of times, were in low profile and low repute. They were unable to stop us from flying where we liked. We made grand speeches from the air.
Our words made little sense to minds fuddled by recent worship. We were just planting seeds. Days were yet to go by before those seed-concepts germinated. By my calculations true souls were a minority. Only that minority would change as Item A had changed, at last remembering their real names and histories.
Days
did go by. The passage of time proved my calculations wrong by a factor of ten. I had guessed as many as a dozen souls lived in this particular fantasy world. The fact was, forty had migrated here, but that wasn’t where I’d made my big error.
My mistake was in not recognizing the consequences of pregnancy. Here was another instance of new soulware at work, making it possible for two once-dead emigrants from Old Earth to create a third thing of merged memories—merged, but always suppressed until now. Over five centuries, forty lost souls had produced four hundred “children.”
If virtuality had a government, soulware like this would be contraband. How could I claim an identity worthy of respect, when I could be variously alive or dead, or complete in myself, or part of somebody else?
When the realities of Yoshi Yasoda and Kaiko Ieyamatsu were added together, did they amount to something less real? Our daughter hardly thought so. Ayano grew prematurely to toddlerhood so she could speak, and confirmed that half of her came out of me by describing my futile court case against Dr. Kotobuko, a thousand years ago.
Ayano was me, and yet not-me. I looked back on a recent career of defiance and death and defiance again, with a new death looming. I decided I must be a little suicidal. I had a touch of the thousand-year-old disease. This hardly described Ayano. She had a younger spirit, more affirming than mine.
Ayano agreed. “Comrade Kazumi is the same way. Or was, anyhow. The roaring roadster! She’s another conglomeration of souls, though she kept her nature hidden.”
“Conglomeration!” Ayano liked big words. They were startling, coming from a kid her size.
“This business of merging souls might be a good thing,” I answered, though my heart still quailed against it.
Motivated by a sense of sisterhood, Ayano resolved to enter other games, and find Comrade Kazumi, if Kazumi were anywhere to be found. My daughter’s pledge freed me to take up a less personal cause. I gave Kaiko a final kiss, and invoked Transit. I came here, to a place of my choosing, and my next hop will be to Ready State Zero!
Let them kill me, if that’s going to happen. First I’ll use my copy-computer to send out an update message, and then—something. Something for the sake of finality; a walk through an Anime movie, a cup of green tea, jokes told by a talking cow, a Buddhist chant. And when I’m ready I’ll take the risk.
I do this so no one needs to be murdered in my place, out of fear that I’m trying to sneak down to Blue World to claim leadership. In my message I’ll renounce the future possibility of any such claims. I am Comrade Yoshi Yasoda, the last pure instance of myself, and what happens to me is up to the Suppressionist lords and ladies who may still control the terraforming project.
Let them kill once, and then let four hundred forty souls pass back into reality.
3175
I remember writing those brave words, and feeling more than half frightened as I transmitted them. I delayed awhile, listening to music. It wasn’t courage that drew me on, so much as a need to hear Lady Midori and Lord Hideyaki account for their actions. How could they have maintained such silence? False accusations, exiles, murders—and all this piling up of years! I had to know the truth.
Ready State Zero was a cleaner place than I remembered it. The water-garden of 3127 was gone, with its goldfish and topiary. The longhouse remained, but the copy Comrade Kazumi and I had made of Joto’s computer was Zipped away.
In Chyle, one reached out a virtual hand to open a virtual door, and it swung creaking on virtual hinges. Here doors were more economical—I walked up and bumped through. I suppose that act transmitted a signal.
A minute later, Lady Midori popped in as a floating face-mask. “You claim to be Comrade Yoshi Yasoda?”
“I am,” I said. “I’ve sent messages. Do I have to explain about Comrade Kazumi, and what she did?”
Midori mimed distaste. “No. She’s made her history and her accusations perfectly clear.”
“Excuse me. You talk as if she’s alive,” I said.
“Out there, in virtuality,” Midori agreed. “Well, wouldn’t you think so? She’s a pervert with an appetite for souls she’d never be able to satisfy in the flesh. We didn’t kill her, no matter that you believe otherwise. I can show you messages she’s sent, full of threats and venom. Look if you like. They’re dated.”
I looked. My heart sank. “The big one’s mine. I wrote it and sent it out little more than a year ago.”
“Oh? Our mistake,” Lady Midori apologized. “She has broadcast before to the addresses of virtuality, using your name, or yours and hers together. I asked you if you were Yoshi, because she seems capable of pretending she’s you.”
“I have reason to think you’re lying. She’s dead. I have evidence in the form of an otherwise-broken promise. But if she’s alive, we both want to hear an account of our deaths down on Blue World,” I said. “Coming here means I’ve written off my future. The past is all I’m interested in. Just this piece of my life, which you could have made public before now.”
“I have.” Lady Midori defended herself. “But if you are Yoshi, and popped to life only this last year or two, perhaps you haven’t heard the story. It’s not long. You two didn’t live long down in Region 33, in your robot bodies. Your power taps were defective. Suddenly they stopped receiving energy from the depot fusion cell. The two of you browned out.”
“Sabotage.”
“Yes, we’re pretty sure,” Lady Midori agreed. “We’ve been unable to find out who was responsible. Some zealot for the Suppressionist cause, most likely. Not me. Not Lord Hideyaki, or so he assures me. But how can we prove we’re not lying? How can you prove you’re yourself? Meanwhile, Comrade Kazumi issues proclamations and rants. I resent her, as I resent having to say these things. I resent being called a liar, but from your point of view I’m hardly the victim.”
“Smoothly put. And now what?” I asked.
“According to your most recent transmission, you have four hundred forty deep gamers who want to come to Blue World,” Lady Midori said. “Master Joto feels these misfits would support his faction, which tries to nibble at the tenets of Suppressionism. In essence he’s taken over your old role, although his tone has always been more pragmatic.
“I’d be cutting my political throat to let all those hundreds emigrate from virtuality,” she continued. “Nevertheless I’ll do so, because I suspect Joto may be wrong, many of them will support pure Suppressionism in the end—and because Master Joto has bribed me with a gift.”
“I know what it is,” I said. “If what you say is true, Joto doesn’t want me around any more than you do.”
“A gift of software,” she went on. “When I use it, you’ll sleep again, as you did for forty-eight years. Whether you wake is a question of politics, to be debated in the highest Suppressionist councils, although perhaps not more than once.”
“I’m to be tabled, I guess.”
It was an odd joke to make to someone with a deficient sense of humor. Midori nodded. “No one except ourselves needs know you lived a reborn life. We will ascribe all your recent messages to Comrade Kazumi, the soul eating monster. There may be a handful of deep gamers from this place called Chyle who know better, but we’ll manage. I’ve discovered that it’s easy to shake people’s confidence, or buy them off.”
“And this shadow-Kazumi has no moral credit? You’ve managed to deprive her of any fair hearing? I think after all she’s dead, but you find her useful as an enemy.”
Midori nodded. “She serves our purposes. There had to be a good guy in all these rescues from virtuality. Yourself, or even the part of Kazumi she stole from you, the Yoshi side of her swollen character. That’s the official story, and it has the benefit of being true in several aspects. By contrast it’s simplified the picture to make the essential Comrade Kazumi as evil as a thousand devils. We blame her for misleading you away from the truth of Suppressionism, and for telling you lies. Soul-eater. Saint Yoshi’s downfall. As a scapegoat she’s useful. When we shut down the
Geosync computer a couple centuries from now, we’ll blame her, Nightmare Kazumi, queen of darkness! We’ll say she left a time bomb, and it exploded.”
I felt my antique anger come back to life. “The last floating mask I saw, was of a piece of fictoid software that policed a game, and laid down rules, and nominated gods and goddesses. Now here you are, Midori—another floating mask, keen to lay down rules for Blue World, where the vatling colonists are to be kept as ignorant as the poor souls of Chyle. Except they won’t have chosen to be ignorant. Ignorance will be forced upon them. And you claim you’ve made real souls into saints and devils, but you’ve gone too far. You can never do that. It’s all lies. We’re real. You can only kill us, or let us be.”
“Once the Saint is dead asleep, we won’t need the Devil. We may just close her down,” Lady Midori agreed. “Here. Speaking of closure, this is you.”
She had no arms to use in throwing, but however it was done, a hammer arched toward me. I reached—
3405
“Earthcom Mode 1 Reset 1. If you are activated, please respond by entering Earthcom Mode 1. Please transmit. Your confirmation string should include current system date from bottom right—the bottom right corner. Also, the phrase Reset 1. If system date year is 3405, it is probably accurate to month; day, hour, and minute. Do this now. Invoke ‘Earthcom.’ We are ten-point-six light-years distant, so this cannot be an interactive conversation. We are going to throw in redundancies and periods of dead time to allow information-gathering at your end. Earthcom Mode 1 Reset 1. First pause. List of interrogatories to follow in five minutes. Please transmit current system date and phrase ‘Reset 1’ while waiting for our interrogatories.”
I obliged the insistent voice. His words were full of directions, but he spoke without vitality. Sheer distance had worn at the message, sapping its hope, shifting it to bass and muddying up the vowels.
Earthcom. Mode 1. Yes, the year was 3405. Below the horizon all was green. All was blue above. There was nothing in my field of view except a blinking clock, not a solitary feature. Certainly not a hammer. I transmitted a minimal response. I had a minute to think about sending my name. Were they interested in this detail?
Worldmakers Page 50
