The Goddess Quest

by Lawrence Ambrose

  On the other hand, being brought in for questioning with the backpack as evidence pretty much guaranteed they'd hold her without bail, which could cost her days if not weeks behind bars. Fortunately, her avatar would be reset in the Verse after this competition, but even a couple of days imprisoned could cost her the quest.

  The cop pulled out a severed hand that was still dripping blood. He dropped the hand and reached for his gun. Do or die.

  Do.

  Alex stepped forward, grasping the man's right wrist just as his pistol cleared the holster, punching him with all her strength in the face. The collapse of cartilage and the bones vividly reminded her she was now operating at 3x strength. The cop's eyes rolled up. She caught him as he sagged and hoisted him into the back of the van. His face looked like a Clydesdale had kicked him. He was out and possibly dead.

  Alex hauled out the backpack and tossed it toward a patch of brush ten feet away. It sailed over the brush and landed with a plop in the sandy gravel beyond. Good. With the van shielding her from the other cops, she dragged the officer out of the van and into the plants. Not much cover, but at least his body wouldn't directly implicate her van and by extension her avatar.

  Back at the van, Alex closed the rear doors and peeked around one side. A cop talking to a paramedic glanced in her direction but showed no suspicion. She stepped out and walked casually around the van to the driver's side door. There, with the van still between her from the police, she slid out her pistol and AR. She holstered her pistol and chambered a round quietly into the rifle, thumbing it to single shot. I can't believe I'm about to do this. But it truly was do or die.

  Bracing the rifle on the van's hood, Alex popped two quick rounds each into the cops talking to the paramedics. Not waiting to see them fall, she twisted and shot a cop turning from one of the stopped cars. Another sprinted toward the cover of a highway patrol cruiser. She fired reflexively, catching him in the head just as he dropped behind the trunk. One other cop made it behind his vehicle. Alex slid low into her front seat as pistol rounds smacked through the windshield. Staying below the dash, she started the car and put it into drive, steering with her left hand and pressing the gas pedal with her right. A quick peek over the dash to orient herself before ducking back down and aiming the van blindly at the center of the police cruiser.

  Other shots rang out on her right side. The passenger window sprouted holes. A bullet blew the stuffing out of the headrest inches above her head. Either civilians with guns were joining in or some of the officers she'd shot were still in play.

  Alex slammed into the steering wheel as the van impacted the police car. Two more shots blew through her passenger-side windows, thankfully striking above her. Alex squirmed around and shoved out through the door. Speed was her one big advantage. Sims, despite their imitative sophistication, struggled in complex and fast-developing situations. Their reflexes were subpar. Though this was the first time she'd taken on police, her experience with other sims – and the generally received wisdom among gamers – was that full-on, decisive aggression worked best.

  Her 3x strength allowed her to leap over the police car and fire point-blank into the startled trooper's face. She landed and spun toward the other gunfire. One of the cops she'd first shot still lay facedown, but the other was crouched behind the nearest of two ambulances, bracing his shooting arm, exposing just enough of his body to make a target for her M4. She popped a pair of rounds into his chest, and he dropped.

  A man scrambled out of a pickup at the head of the opposite line of cars, swinging a shotgun toward her. Alex double-tapped him in the chest and he dropped. The farthest ambulance started up, squealing through the gravel toward the road. Alex clamped down her jaw – even in virtual reality, she was starting to feel like a homicidal maniac – and blew out the rear and side tires. The ambulance slowed but kept going. She called on her enhanced strength again to launch her after the ambulance.

  The second time she'd run at full-speed, and she still hadn't mastered sprinting in what effectively Martian gravity. After flailing ridiculously in the air, she found her stride and center of gravity, pulling even with the front of the ambulance and its terrified driver. Alex placed two rounds through the window into the driver's head. The ambulance swerved away from the highway and ground to a halt in the sandy dirt.

  The other ambulance was also spinning out of the gravel, fleeing in the opposite direction. Once again, Alex called on her superhuman virtual speed. She guessed her unaltered maximum avatar run might be 12 – 15 MPH, which fit her estimation that she was sprinting in the 40 MPH vicinity now as she overtook the ambulance. She reached its rear doors and managed to pry open one door and leap inside.

  The body of a young girl missing a hand lay on the stretcher gazing blankly at the ceiling. Alex clamped down on revulsion and moved forward. The driver was so intent on the side-view mirror that he didn't even notice Alex until she slipped into the seat beside him. She was tempted to shoot him, drag him out of his seat, and take the wheel, but she sensed a less messy and more strategic option.

  "Hi," she said.

  The driver gasped and grabbed the door handle. She leveled her short rifle on his head.

  "You'd never make it." She felt she had to point that out to the program, though it was possible an actual human would be that stupid. "Just relax and drive."

  "To...where?"

  "Where were you going?"

  "Los Alamos Medical Center."

  "Where do you live?"

  "Santa Fe."

  "Let's drive there."

  "Are you gonna kill me?"

  "That depends."

  "You're the Highwayman, aren't you?"

  "Nope."

  He shot her a startled look. "But...then who...?"

  "Someone who was looking to track the Highwayman down, but instead got punked – framed – by him or her."

  "You didn't kill those people in the SUV?"

  "Nope."

  "Then why did you shoot all those police – the other EMTs?"

  "I got backed into a corner. The Highwayman planted his backpack filled with body parts in my van. The police weren't going to believe me."

  "How did he get into your van?"

  "Pretended to be a hitchhiker seeking refuge from the rain. She left her backpack behind."

  "Didn't you just say the Highwayman was a man?"

  "He could be. No way of knowing. But he or she manifested as a young woman."

  "I don't understand."

  "Of course you don't."

  Alex knew it was pointless to have this conversation – not as if this bot could offer any insights – but it felt good to just talk, to say things out loud.

  "Are you saying it could've been a man disguised as a woman?"

  "You could put it that way." As the EMT sat there looking confused and scared, Alex asked: "Where do you live in Santa Fe? Do you have a family or roommates?"

  "No. Just an ornery cat. I have a small house just outside of town."

  Cat. Man, they didn't scrimp on the small personal touches. The idea of killing a sim with a sim cat bothered her. She'd always liked cats, but they'd soon discovered she was allergic to them. She wondered if anyone had ever considered creating an avatar pet...

  Alex shook her head. Stay focused.

  "Do you have a car at home? Or work?"

  "Home. That's where I park the ambulance, usually. It's mostly an on-call kind of operation."

  She could kill him and steal his car. How long would that buy her?

  "Who knows you were going to that crime scene?"

  "Dispatch."

  "Not the highway patrol or sheriff's department?"

  "They wouldn't know which ambulance was being sent."

  Looking better. Alex thought for a few moments.

  "If you called your dispatcher and said you were returning home because your services weren't needed, what would they say?"

  "That they had received a different report?"

  "But t
hey couldn't really question you, could they, not without police reports contradicting you?"

  The mobile phone on his dash was beeping. Alex thought quickly.

  "That's your dispatcher?" she asked.

  "Yes."

  "Okay. Tell them that you're sick. Food poisoning or something. You had to return home – never made it to the crime scene."

  "They would send someone else to pick up my ambulance."

  "Fine. Tell them you'll leave the keys in the ignition but not to bother you. You don't want the other driver to get your flu or whatever it is. Do you understand?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Do it. And make it convincing."

  The driver picked up the phone. "Reynolds here."

  "Don, where are you?"

  "Headed home. Never made it to the scene. I'm sick." He glanced at Alex, who nodded. "Too sick to work. I'm sorry, Glynnis."

  "Is it serious?"

  "Food poisoning, I think. It's bad, but I think I'll live."

  "When will you be home?"

  "Oh..." Another glance at Alex. "Thirty minutes or so."

  "All right, Don. I'll send someone over to pick up your ambulance. From the reports coming in, we have a real situation there. Multiple casualties, including police officers, with a heavily armed shooter on scene."

  The driver stared flatly at the road.

  "Don?"

  "Yes...uh, that sounds horrible, Glynnis."

  "Okay. Get home safely and take care of yourself."

  "Thanks. Will do."

  Interesting, Alex thought. She knew, from Omniverse, Inc. ads and papers, that the founders' stated goal was "simulation to the core," and their purchase and incorporation of Google's AlphaOmega – an "AI to rule them all" was the humorous official slogan – was aimed at fulfilling that goal, but until now she'd never seen the sims' world from the inside. It was one thing to have them respond to you, but there was something strange, even creepy, seeing them go through the motions of normal, thinking human beings relating when they were in truth nothing more than zeros and ones bouncing off each other. Though some speculated that the system as a whole, particularly under the supervision of arguably the most powerful AI ever publicly known, might just achieve sentience. Or, some worried, possibly had already achieved it.

  Alex remembered the sims dropping under her fire, the anguished expression of the other ambulance driver before she blew him away, and she had to forcibly shove aside the silly notion that any form of consciousness existed in the sims. The whole idea that imitations of conscious behavior, even in unthinkably large aggregation, could somehow add up to true awareness had always struck her as a basic logical fallacy. Analogy did not equal identity. The popular fears about AI danger seemed based on a kind of religious zeal or even superstition more than reasoning.

  She'd never wanted to believe in the essential stupidity of machines more than she did now, especially talking to a sim that gave every indication of being intelligent and self-aware.

  Alex rubbed her avatar's large blond head in exasperation. She'd just never gone on a virtual killing spree before and it was getting to her a bit. Maybe if it hadn't been so realistic – more cartoonish as in the early years of MMOs and LIONs – she wouldn't be having these thoughts. It was just an illusion: shooting stick-figures didn't trigger a crisis of conscience. Shooting figures that resembled people did.

  Alex knew the Founders were peaceniks and that their prime programmers mostly reflected that mindset, so placing her in a position where violence was the prime solution seemed out of character. So maybe the correct move had been to surrender, and she'd just failed that test? Horribly failed.

  If that was true, well fuck them. They had to have orchestrated the confrontation. She wasn't sure how, if the Highwayman was an avatar. Maybe bated him with that family?

  Or was the Highwayman, despite her/his knowledge of the Real, a sim pretending to be an avatar? She wouldn't put that past the GM.

  "What are you going to do when we get to my house?" The EMT interrupted her thoughts.

  "Lay low for a while, I guess."

  "Not kill me and take my car?"

  Alex stopped her frown. The sim was expressing an unexpectedly strong interest in staying alive. Most of her previous experiences with sims were akin to hanging out with recently lobotomized people.

  "You're not an avatar, by any chance?" she asked him.

  "Avatar?" He peered at her. "You mean...you're one of those people who believes we live in a simulated reality?"

  "Ha. Yeah."

  "The Cult of the Matrix?"

  "A card-carrying member."

  "Oh, God..."

  Alex laughed. "You're worried about me because I'm a cult member?"

  "Ah... It's just that I was hoping I could reason with you. No offense."

  Alex had to laugh at the absurdity of their exchange.

  "My name's Don, by the way," he said. "Don Reynolds. What's yours?"

  "Alex." It wasn't as if her name wasn't about to become public knowledge.

  "You never answered my question about what you'd do to me when we get to my house."

  Killing him and taking his car might gain her two or maybe three days of free travel, assuming no "higher intervention" (which didn't strike her as a safe assumption).

  Alex glanced over her shoulder at the lifeless girl on the stretcher and scowled. She spotted a dirt road leading off between two small hills across the scrub-brush wasteland. She pointed.

  "Turn there."

  "Why?"

  "We're going to dump the body."

  Don turned off the highway with an expression of weary reluctance. After a mile or two, they slipped out of sight of the road behind the two hills. Alex pointed to a patch of trees.

  "Over there."

  "I don't think the truck will make it."

  "Then stop here. Turn off the engine and hand me the keys. Also your cell phone. Get out with me. If you run, you'll join the girl under those trees. I should tell you that I'm an augment. I'm much stronger than you and can move much faster."

  With an air of extreme reluctance, Don dug a cell phone from his coveralls and extended it to Alex along with the ambulance keys. They circled around on opposite sides of the truck. A little unnerving for him to be out of sight for a few seconds, but what could he do? There was no place to run and he was unarmed.

  They met at the back. Alex had him slide the stretcher and the girl's body out, helping steady it with one hand – the other holding the M4 – as the back wheels sprang free and struck the ground. Don unstrapped the body. They carried it toward across a span of dirt and dropped it the center of the patch of stunted trees. Alex kicked some sand and brush over the body.

  "You really didn't kill them?" Don asked.

  "Nope. As I said, that was the Highwayman."

  They faced each other. Alex found herself resisting the logic that clearly called for the EMT's body to join the girl's. The longer he was alive the better the odds that he'd escape or find a way to alert someone.

  "If you kill me, you're no better than him," said Don.

  "He kills because he enjoys it. I kill to survive in this game."

  "Life is not some game, Alex. Please! Who's going to feed my cat?"

  The mention of his cat got to her. She imagined it slowly starving without food and water. It was completely irrational, nuts, to take this sim seriously, to treat him as if he were a thinking, living being pleading for his life. Not to mention care about his fucking digital cat. They had no more awareness than a pocket calculator or a socket wrench.

  Alex raised her rifle, centering it on his forehead.

  "I swear, I won't tell anyone!" Don cried, raising his hands protectively. "Take my car. I promise not to say anything about you for three days. That's long enough, isn't it?"

  "I don't believe you," she said. "I don't believe in you."

  "Maybe you've lost belief in your own humanity."

  The EMT's eyes were suddenly clear and hard
. Alex suppressed a shiver. A test. Had the Gamemasters just hijacked this sim? Or had they been masquerading as him all along? Were they giving her a second chance at redemption?

  Alex lowered her rifle. "Okay. I'll accept your word. But just to be on the safe side, I'll take your pussycat. No harm will come to you as long as you don't call the authorities."

  "I can't let you take her!"

  "I'll drop her off in a safe place with your 'personal information' in a few days. I promise I won't harm her. You'll have to trust me just as I'm trusting you."

  "But you don't trust me. Otherwise, you wouldn't need to take my kitty."

  This had to be the most ridiculous negotiation in history. Don stared at her sullenly. Alex shrugged and started to lift her M4. Don raised his hands.

  "All right, all right! I agree, damn you! But you better not hurt Robert!"

  "That's your cat's name?"

  "Yes. Named after the poet. You know, Robert Frost. Not because she's poetic, but because she'd kind of 'frosty.' If that makes sense."

  "About as much sense as any of this makes."

  They hiked back to the ambulance, Alex questioning her intelligence every step of the way. Kill the EMT driver – no fuss, no muss. This way could get messy in an instant. But the Verse rarely penalized kindness in a game, unlike meanness. This could be her way back into the game's good graces. She wasn't sure if that argument or her irrational revulsion about killing the sim weighed more in her decision.

  They drove to Don's house, which was true to his description: a small, even spare, little white house squatting on a chunk of dirt loosely populated by knife-like tufts of pampas grass and cacti. Inside, they were greeted by wall-to-wall plastic tile and an overweight orange tabby cat that regarded them with green-eyed indifference from the top of a scratched-up couch.