The Goddess Quest

by Lawrence Ambrose

  "Whoa," he said. "This lady doc is freaking hot."

  Alex could've done without that, but his response wasn't surprising. His face grew serious as they came to the place when Dr. Lanson started busting her metaphorical balls.

  "Huh," he said. "She seems unnecessarily harsh." A disbelieving smile formed as he watched Alex return the favor. "Holy fuck. You really got in her face!"

  They paused to give the server their order, and watched the video together a second time. Alex had been happy with the way it had turned out. The camera kept still and focused on the presumptive evil doctor's face. The audio was clear.

  "So what do you think?" Alex asked.

  Brandon stroked his chin. "Suspicious. Something off about her attitude. She's too hostile."

  "Exactly. And if you watch her face closely when I accuse her" – which Alex had numerous times – "I think you'll see she really isn't as surprised as she pretends to be."

  "I see what you mean. Her response seemed more cold than surprised."

  Their meals arrived. Alex had a shrimp-lobster plate about the size of Maine. Brandon had ordered a chef's seafood salad.

  "Watching your waist?" she asked.

  "Someone's got to." Brandon rearranged his salad pensively before forking up a mouthful. "You know," he said between bites, "she might just be pissed off about what happened and not wanting to share that with her coworkers. Got a reputation to maintain and all. Doesn't mean she's doing anything nefarious in the Real."

  "I know. But apart from being the kind of person who slaughters virtual families, she also threatened to get me in real-life. I've been playing a long time, and that's not something I've ever heard personally. That's gangsta shit."

  "She sure doesn't look like any gangster I ever saw."

  Alex gave him the evil eye.

  "I'm just saying," said Brandon, "the lady's got a lot going for her, working for a special clinic and consulting at a hospital. Has to be raking in three or four hundred grand a year easy. It takes a lot of drive and discipline to get two degrees. How do you do that if you're a psycho?"

  "You don't think there are psychos with degrees?"

  "Probably. I don't know. So what exactly do you think she's doing in the Real?"

  "I think she's doing what she did at the North Carolina hospital. Killing patients."

  "Why? What's her motive?"

  "Aside from being a psychopath? I have no idea." Alex scowled. "I wish I'd taken a moment to ask her about that before I killed her in the hospital."

  Brandon slid her camera over to her. She tucked it into her small purse. They concentrated on their meals for a while.

  "So," said Brandon, "I'm almost afraid to ask. What are you going to do next? Please tell me, 'I'm going to forget about Dr. Evil, B, and her hypothetical sins and chill out for a while. Then you and I are going to team up to finally solve the Silver Chalice.'"

  "Bran..." Alex chewed up a bit of lobster and swallowed it down. "I'm going to forget about Dr. Evil, chill out, and we'll solve the Silver Chalice together."

  "You don't mean that, do you?"

  "I meant everything except forgetting about Dr. Evil. Not so sure about the Silver Chalice, either."

  Bran's head slumped forward into his hands.

  "I'm just going to check into her bit more, B," said Alex. "Just enough to satisfy myself that she isn't guilty of hurting anyone."

  "And if she is?"

  "I'll turn the evidence over to the police. Let them handle it."

  "You sure?"

  "Of course I'm sure. I'd make a pretty piss-poor vigilante, wouldn't I, hobbling around in pursuit of my next victim?"

  "You don't need to run fast to shoot someone." Brandon polished off his salad with a few noisy chomps. He eyed her. "Have you ever even shot your gun in real-life?"

  "Yeah. I practiced on a private range for part of an afternoon with the person I bought it from. She was surprised at how good I was. I left her a believer in virtual training."

  "Too bad it doesn't work for walking."

  Alex surprised herself – and Brandon – by reaching over and placing her hand over his. "Someday, B, someday. You're young. They'll figure it out in the next decade or two."

  "Same for you." Brandon stared at her hand. Alex withdrew it.

  "In the meantime," she said, "we have a whole fucking world where we can be superhuman athletes."

  "Yeah. Right."

  Alex patted him lightly on the shoulder and eased away from him, propelled by his glowering presence. He was not, as her father had so often said of her on their nature outings, a "happy camper."

  "I've ordered our Gen 4s, by the way," she said, and smiled as her friend's face instantly brightened. "We should both be flying high in a week or two."

  Chapter 24

  ALEX BUSIED HERSELF WITH domestic chores for the next couple of weeks. For starters, she paid back her mom for roughly five years of tuition and associated costs – 90K – and added an additional one million dollars to her savings account. Her and Brandon's Gen 4s came in at $2.4 million total, including delivery and setup fees (the setup involving about two weeks of calibrating to their bodies). She left the rest – about 68 million OD – in her Oink account, and made her mom a cosigner on that account. They'd milk money from the account as necessary to space out the capital gains pain.

  Alex wasn't feeling much drive to return to gaming. The Goddess Quest had sucked out her competitive juices – at least for virtual gaming. She still had a hard-on for Dr. Rose Lanson. Yes, even literally: she'd been having dreams of being her beloved Dionysus, pinning the doctor on a bed, and fucking the living crap out of her from behind. Jeez, and Lanson was supposed to be the sick one.

  But most of her thoughts centered on catching Lanson at her game and bringing the witch to justice. After a few days of banging her head against a digital brick wall, Alex had a perverse inspiration: hire a private detective! She talked to a few and settled on a guy who sounded more like a professor than a P.I. Morton Sally. Even his name sounded professorial. Possibly a cross-dressing professor P.I.?

  Sally asked what this was about and seemed to accept her story about observing Lanson do sick shit in the Verse and wondering if she might be mirroring that in real-life. He confided that some time back another client had wondered the same thing after observing a business partner play fast and loose with the books in a Verse business. His partner had indeed been guilty of embezzling in their real-world business.

  Alex accepted his $5,000 weekly salary plus expenses without protest, only asking that he report to her daily.

  For the first week, Morton Sally called her at eight sharp every evening. He shadowed Lanson in her travels between the clinic, the hospital, and her upscale home in North Hampton. He talked to some of her neighbors about her while pretending, variously, to be her pool man, gardener, and interior decorator. They knew next to nothing except that she was a high-powered local doctor. He even checked out her trash. Nothing suspicious that he could see. Yet he didn't recommend stopping the investigation, claiming he had a "feeling" that something wasn't quite right about the "good doctor." Perhaps it was just a ploy for more money, but Alex had some experience with following feelings and decided to play along. Money was no – or barely any – object, after all.

  Then, halfway through the second week, Sally stopped calling. He didn't return her calls. Alex located his home, which he apparently shared with a wife, Lorna. She got her number from one of the sleazy people-investigator websites, and gave her a call. Lorna sounded happy to hear from her. She'd been going nuts trying to track her husband down after he hadn't returned home a few nights ago. She knew he'd been investigating "some doctor," but he hadn't told her any details. In all their years of marriage, he'd never disappeared like that before. She had placed a missing person report with the local cops.

  Alex hung up with a bad case of gooseflesh – and a sickening shot of guilt. Had she just gotten the dude killed? But no, the guy was a professional,
unlike her. She'd leveled with him about her suspicions, and he had his own negative feelings about Dr. Lanson. He should've known to proceed with caution.

  Her guilt gradually surrendered to a fearful sense of self-preservation. It was one thing to hypothesize, to call the lady names in her office knowing staff was nearby, to accuse her of hypothetical crimes. It was quite another to have her suspicions come back and bite her in the ass, to have confirmation of her dour hypothesis. Purely circumstantial, could be a coincidence, blah, blah, blah, but Alex could not make herself doubt. The predictable but shocking truth: Dr. Rose A. Lanson was a stone-cold killer. And if she'd killed the detective for prying into her life, why not the instigator of that prying, someone she loathed far more than Morton Sally?

  So what should she do now? Hire another private detective? Someone less professorial and more brutal physically. A big, rough and tumble dude. "Oh, by the way," Alex would say, "she probably murdered the last one I hired." "No problem, lady. Let 'er try. I'm ex-Special Forces. I can fookin' handle myself." For some reason she gave him a New Jersey-Irish accent.

  Or call the St. Louis police department and tell all? It wasn't as if she'd done anything wrong or had anything to hide. The police wouldn't take her seriously, not at first, but at least Dr. Evil would be on their radar. And hiring another private investigator didn't seem completely dumb. She would warn him about what happened to Morton Sally and what she'd seen in the Verse. Lanson must've been feeling a bit desperate to kill the detective. Another investigator could push that desperation even more. Desperation bred mistakes. At least that had often been her experience in the games.

  As she toggled through the list of private "dicks" in and around the St. Louis area another round of guilt struck. This wasn't virtual reality; these weren't sims she could shuffle around like mindless chess pieces. Bottom line, Morton Sally was dead because of her. And here she was, lollygagging around the internet, lining up the next victim as if it was some fucking Verse game.

  There was another option. Certainly not talking to Bran or her mom, who would both freak. Wendell Martin. The dude knew a few things, probably including people who might be helpful. And since his game had pointed her to Dr. Lanson, he might feel some responsibility.

  Alex took a walk in the neighborhood's central park to clear her head. It was early evening, the summer sun in decline. A few Joggers and dog-walkers, exploiting the weakening heat, shuffled along the asphalt path that circled the twenty acres of grass, evergreen trees, and a duck-studded pond.

  She sat at one of the benches and called Professor Martin's private cell – a gift he'd bestowed on her during their last meeting. Surprisingly, he answered after a few rings.

  "Alexandra," he said.

  He has me on his contact list! She tried not to let that go to her head.

  "Professor Martin," she said. "How's your evening going?"

  "Uneventfully. And yours?"

  "Boring, as usual. I wanted to tell you something." She frowned. "Actually, ask you something, first."

  "Yes?"

  "Do you know the owner of the Highwayman and Dr. Lawsone avatars? Not asking you to tell me, of course, just asking if you know. I mean as in personally know."

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Because I think I've tracked her down." She paused for him to speak, but he didn't. "Her name is Dr. Rose Lanson. She practices psychiatry and general medicine in St. Louis."

  Several seconds of the silence of the lambs. A woman strolled by walking two Siamese cats on a leash. Only in Jefferson.

  "I see," said Professor Martin.

  "God, you're worse than the therapist my parents strong-armed me into seeing."

  A soft chuckle. "You know I can neither confirm nor deny. But as before, I can urge extreme caution when pursuing knowledge of possibly dangerous individuals. I would further recommend that you cease pursuing that knowledge."

  "I hired a private detective to check into her."

  More silence.

  "He went missing a few days ago."

  She heard a sound like an intake of breath or perhaps a sigh. "Have you contacted the police?"

  "Not yet. That's why I called you. I thought you might have a suggestion."

  "Calling the police would be my suggestion."

  "You know they won't take me seriously."

  "Likely not."

  "Do you have any suggestions that might actually accomplish something?"

  After a few moments, during which Alex regretted the harsh note in her voice, he replied, "I will suggest to them that they take you seriously. That much I can do."

  "Um...thanks. That couldn't hurt."

  "On another, perhaps more benign note, I have spoken with George Valence" – the Computer Science Department head – "and he okayed my recommendation that you be permitted to complete your degree 'off-channel' in a special program under my supervision."

  "That..." Alex batted back a wave of emotion. "Sounds pretty cool."

  "And upon completion of your UCJ studies, we were hoping you would consider joining us at OmniCorp."

  Alex swallowed. For a few blissful moments, she was not able to stem the tide of optimism – the ridiculous notion that she would have a long and grand future working a dream job for her dream company.

  "I would certainly consider that," she said. "What did you have in mind?"

  "Perhaps whatever you can imagine, Alexandra. Or what we can imagine together."

  "Thank you, Professor Martin."

  "We'll talk more soon. Please take care of yourself, Alex."

  "I will."

  Alex ended the call feeling numb. She slipped her cell into her blouse pocket with a shaky hand. I could have ten more good years. Maybe twenty. I could do my work in a wheelchair, even if I'm semi-paralyzed. Wendell Martin had opened the door. She would have a chance to enter a world only a vanishing few could enter. How much more could she ask for? And if she could hang on a bit longer – who knew? – some genius might discover a cure. It could happen.

  Caught up in her hopeful reverie, Alex only dimly registered the woman jogger crossing the lawn behind her. Nothing unusual – not everyone followed the asphalt "beaten path" through the park. But the pffft sound and the sharp, hornet's sting burn in the center of her back were distinctly odd. Alex sat up and snaked her arm around her back, but couldn't reach the source of pain.

  Footfalls approached behind her.

  "Let me help with that," said a soft woman's voice – and the burning pain that felt like a stinger in the center of her back retreated.

  The woman strolled around the bench to face her, tucking something away in her fanny back. The woman lowered her dark sunglasses, confirming Alex's worst fears.

  "Hello, Dionysus35567," said Dr. Lanson. Her smile featured perfect, polished white teeth. "Who would ever have believed the big, beautiful and mighty virtual warrior was a pathetic homely little cripple girl?"

  Somehow, her usual self-deprecating "cripple" didn't sound so acceptable coming from Dr. Lanson's full lips.

  "The dart..." Alex's own lips, if not so full, were feeling rather thick. "What was in it?"

  "Potassium chloride."

  Alex reached for her cell. Dr. Lanson looked around, noting the only other person currently in the park – an elderly woman walking a yappy Pekinese fifty yards away, back turned to them – and snatched the phone out of Alex's hand.

  "You were pretty tough in a fake reality," said the doctor, propping one foot on the bench a few feet from her, smiling and nodding as if engaged in a friendly conversation. "Not so much in the real world. And that, my arrogant little cripple-friend, is where things are truly decided."

  Potassium chloride. Alex didn't recall the details, but knew it was a classic murder drug. Stopped the heart and didn't leave incriminating chemical traces.

  "You have a few minutes left to live," said Dr. Lanson. "Less, considering your weak constitution. Any last words?"

  "Why?"

  "Why you? Why the othe
rs?"

  "Why kill?"

  Alex was curious, but her focus was on survival, not whatever bullshit the evil doctor had to say. Her heart was skittering in her chest. The air was as thin as atop Mount Everest. She didn't doubt she had only minutes left. Maybe less. One obvious option was drawing her gun and placing a round or two between Lanson's smirking eyes. But the doctor was close. Wrapped in black spandex, the muscles in her legs and arms coiled. She might've been a fucking track athlete or something. Alex envisioned her hand snapping out – the same hand that had left her fingers aching after their handshake – and effortlessly snagging the pistol from her grasp. Being patient had never been her virtue – and surely this was the worst possible time to delay – but she figured she had exactly one chance, and the timing needed to be perfect.

  "You could say I'm an angel of death." The doctor's smile turned cold, serious. "I eliminate those who want to die, but are too weak to make that decision. Also, those who don't deserve to live – the congenitally deformed or stupid, the genetically inferior, such as you. Our society is suffering from genetic deterioration, and I chose to do something about that. Had you been a patient of mine, I would've ended you regardless of any Verse connection."

  "A black eugenicist." Alex's cold, dry lips cracked as she smiled. "Who would've thought."

  "I'm biracial."

  Alex released a phlegmy, lung-rattling laugh. She thought she knew what that meant: fluid filling her lungs in anticipation of heart failure. Dr. Lanson's smile slipped into a mask of pure hate. She stepped off the bench and started to back away.

  "Sadly for you," she said, "I will have the last laugh. While your scrawny body rots in the ground, I will continue performing my humanitarian services."

  "Sadly for you," Alex wheezed, "we can't let you do that."

  "We?"

  "Glock 19 and me."

  Alex drew the handgun out from the hem of her blouse, surprised by the steadiness of her right hand. She thumbed the safety off. Dr. Lanson stared at her – at the pistol centered on her chest – with transfixed cobra eyes. She leaned back as if cowering. Alex glimpsed her right foot whipping through the air an instant before it struck, whapping the pistol out of her hand. It bounced off the backrest and clattered onto the bench an arm's length away. Alex lunged weakly, got her hand on the gun. Lanson closed in a blur, pinning her hand and the pistol to the bench seat. She paused to glance around the park. Her grim smile told Alex all clear.