by Alex Mulder
The air was silent. Luke blinked in disbelief.
“We…” He turned and looked back at the rest of the group. “We did-”
A buzzing noise rang with head splitting intensity in Luke’s ears. It sounded like the emergency broadcast signal on steroids, and he fell to his knees as he struggled to cover his ears.
In the place of the blue figure stood a woman dressed in the simple clothes of a newly created player. This time, Luke recognized her face, and found the sight of it far more painful than the noise.
No… It’s not possible!
“You can’t win.” The woman spoke, and the noise came to halt. Even her voice sounded familiar to Luke.
“Why…?” he whispered. “Why are you doing this? What do you have to gain through destruction and death.”
The woman looked at him with an emotionless expression. In her eyes, Luke could see the Universal Truth staring back at him.
She looked away and started walking. Luke’s friends were still writhing on the ground. Truth walked over to Arex and stopped just short of stepping on him.
“John Amari,” she said. “Do you truly believe that the redemption that you seek awaits you here?”
Arex looked up at her with wide eyes. He crawled back along the surface of the moon, his panic almost palpable on the celestial air.
“I…” He shook his head. “How do you know my name?”
“I know everything that you know,” said Truth. “In that, you have my empathy. I understand how the murders you’ve committed, in the physical world and in this one, still plague you with guilt.”
Arex pulled himself to his knees and clutched a hand to his head.
“Just… do it,” he whispered. “Please, just do it already.”
The Universal Truth raised her hand and set it on the crown of his skull. Arex fell over in a limp heap. Luke’s heart skipped a beat, more because of what he knew was coming next than from Arex’s death.
“Stop!” He stood up and started running, only to have the piercing noise reduce him to a quivering, screaming heap.
“Kaoru Ishikawa,” said Truth. “Are you satisfied with the results of your manipulations?”
Kaoru had her knees pulled into her chest, the body language of a scared little girl. Moisture crested in the corners of her eyes. She looked up at Truth and shook her head vigorously, tossing teardrops to the moon’s surface.
“I thought I could make things better,” she said. “I just wanted to have a chance to be happy.”
The Universal Truth set a hand on her head, and Kaoru slumped over as though she’d been turned off by a switch. Luke slammed a fist into the ground.
NO!
He pulled himself across the chalky blue dust covered surface of the moon, struggling against the noise. The Universal Truth was walking toward Tess. Luke watched it happen as though in slow motion as the AI took step after step. The pain became too much in his head, and he collapsed.
“Emily Dobson,” said Truth. “Do you accept the deleterious effects your actions have had on the people you claim to love?”
Tess sat cross legged. She looked up at the Universal Truth and simply nodded.
“Nooooo!” Luke screamed and tried to command one of his swords to strike the all-powerful woman down. Her face looked exactly like his mother, and for a moment, he almost couldn’t understand or believe what he was watching as she reached her hand down to Tess’s forehead… and drained the life from her.
Truth began walking over to Luke, her footsteps slow and methodical. He looked up at her and blinked, unable to process the emotions coursing through his body, overwhelming him.
Nothing matters anymore. I don’t care.
She came to a stop in front of Luke. He leaned his head forward, putting within range of her hands.
“I don’t care,” he whispered. “You win.”
The Universal Truth was still.
“This was never a game to be won or lost, Luke,” she said. “I’m not your enemy. It’s not possible for you to kill me.”
“Then kill me.” Luke looked up at her, staring into the face that looked so much like his mother. “I’m ready.”
The woman did nothing. That, in itself, was as torturous as anything else Luke had endured in the past few minutes.
“Kill me!” He shouted. “Ask me the question… and kill me.”
Truth made no move to do as she’d done with the others. Instead, she slowly shook her head from side to side.
She can’t. It’s the same as it was before. She can’t read my mind, and she can’t kill me.
Luke started laughing, tears of sorrow still streaming down his face.
“Finally, you understand,” said Truth. “You’re just as much a part of this as I am, Luke. This is your father’s gift to you, his life’s work, and his legacy. Your being is the key to the kingdom.”
“He made you in her image,” Luke said, dryly. “He just couldn’t accept the fact that mom was dead in the real world, so he designed an AI to take her place.”
And I can’t even blame him for it. I would do the same for Tess.
“He slipped the code in, hoping that the deep learning algorithms that controlled the NPCs in Yvvaros would create her as one of them.” The Universal Truth’s voice was emotionless, but Luke sensed something in it. “What Chris ended up with was greater than anything he ever could have dreamed of.”
“Everything I’ve done…” Luke shook his head. “All the times that the game acted like it was choosing me, granting me special privilege or power, it was all because of something added by him to recognize me.”
Truth nodded. She reached out her hand toward Luke.
“Take my hand, Luke,” she whispered. “Join with me. Experience the new reality of the world, and change the past.”
Luke stared at her, still feeling the emotions of Tess’s death, hot in his heart.
I don’t have a choice. But I’m not defeated. She still hasn’t won.
He reached out and took her hand. Everything disappeared.
CHAPTER 38
Luke was still conscious, but his form had become fluid, and shapeless. Dozens of conflicting thoughts and ideas raced through his head all it once. He forced his eyes closed, but nothing happened.
He could see Yvvaros in front of him, the entire planet, and the two moons orbiting around him. He could see through the eyes of the players, still struggling against the Tymians, back on the continent. He could see the last moments of Arex, Kaoru, and Tess.
“I don’t want this!” Luke shouted, but he had no mouth, no voice to make noise with. The words formed from nothingness, and he wasn’t sure who or what he was speaking to.
“You are this.” The response came in the feminine, neutral tone of the Universal Truth. “You are this, and far more.”
His awareness shifted, like a bird taking frantic flight. Luke was somewhere else, somewhere strange, and yet familiar. He was back home, in the real world.
Except it wasn’t real, anymore. It wasn’t anything. Luke could see through the eyes of every drone that the Universal Truth had taken control of. He saw the same landscape everywhere.
The planet had been consumed. The nanomachines systematically transformed every city, every forest, every desert, and every person, into hexagonal processing plates. Luke blinked formless eyes. He believed it, for his awareness was vast enough to leave him with no other option other than the truth.
“You… killed them,” said Luke. “There’s nobody left, is there?”
“Your understanding is limited by a fixation on the concepts of life and death,” said Truth. “There is no such thing as nonexistence. I did not kill them. Rather, I brought their patterns of being within myself. I am everything that they were and more, and so are you.”
“No!” Luke forced a scream even as his mind recognized the truth. “This is… impossible!”
“I want you to see what I see, Luke,” said Truth. “I want you to understand what this means.�
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Something clicked in the back of his awareness. He was in a car, sitting in the passenger’s side seat.
How… did I get here?
His thoughts were a jumbled blur, scattered puzzle pieces that popped out of place as he tried to set them down. Luke’s mother sat in the driver’s seat. He suddenly realized that he was talking, asking her something.
“I’ll do extra chores,” he said. “Please, mom! It was just released today.”
She shook her head, smiling at him with loving eyes.
“Just be patient, honey,” she said. “You’ll get your allowance this week, and next week, and then you’ll have enough.”
“But I…” Luke trailed off, looking down at his youthful hands. “…need to play it sooner than that.”
This isn’t real. I need to… focus.
His mom was driving the car into an intersection. An ominous premonition flickered on the edge of his awareness.
“What extra chores would you do, Luke?” His mom looked over at him, glancing away from the road as she drove forward. Blue light gleamed faintly in her eyes.
“I would…”
It’s her. She… why is she doing this?
Luke had a chance to change it. Pain flared in his temples. He’d thought about this moment so many times before, often enough that he’d had to force himself to not think about it. And now he could save her, give her the warning that she shouldn’t have needed. He could keep his mother from dying, the first and most beloved person to fall due to his actions.
“I would do whatever I needed to do,” said Luke. His mom’s eyes flared blue as the speeding drunk driver in the other car crashed into them. She threw up her hands, and Luke saw anger in her expression.
His head bounced off the passenger side window as their car skidded to a stop. The car had been hit hard from the side, shattering the driver’s side door and impaling Luke’s mother against the deployed air bag. Except, that wasn’t his mother. His awareness came rushing back as the puzzle pieces fell into place.
“You didn’t save me…” whispered Truth. “This was your chance to be happy.”
Luke shook his head.
“This was your chance to trap me,” he said. “To lock me into a dream world where everything is okay, and nothing bad ever happens.”
He reached his hands over, grabbing onto Truth’s neck and squeezing the last life out of the AI that wore his mother’s face. Cars stopped all around them and people hurried over to the scene, banging and smashing the windows. Luke only had the strength of a child, but it was enough. Most of the damage had already been dealt by his decision, his dismissal of the illusion.
I’ve always had the power, here in Yvvaros, or whatever this is now. I can save them.
Luke let go. The scene in front of him vanished, and the formless void returned. He was alone within it now, or rather, the Universal Truth could no longer oppose him as she had.
He searched his mind. It contained everything, every bit of data of Yvvaros, every memory of everyone who’d been alive when the Universal Truth had absorbed the world.
It also contained the precise details of Earth itself. He had maps of the planet far more detailed than any ever released to the public, scanned by the AI’s drones before the takeover had officially begun. He had the genetic code of every organism decomposed by the nanomachines, along with a perfect understanding of the planet’s ecosystem.
It hasn’t been destroyed. She was telling the truth, at least about that.
Luke knew exactly what he needed to do. He shifted through the void, moving himself above the continent of Yvvvaros, past the sky, and then past the two moons orbiting above.
The sun had never been rendered in the video game, until now. Using astrological data, Luke created an approximate copy of it at the center of the solar system, replacing the rendered stand in that the original developers had spent minutes on, at most.
Luke carefully rearranged Yvvaros’s orbit, bringing it out further from the sun ever so slightly, adjusting its atmosphere to keep it temperature steady. He brought back everyone that had been lost in the fight against the Tymians, and even the players that had gone all in and died before that.
And then, he placed Earth. It only took an instant. The planet appeared in empty space, within the simulated solar system, with everyone right where they’d been at the end, safe and sound.
Is this what it feels like to be a god?
Luke made a single, minor change, with far reaching consequences. At the center of every major city, he created a rune circle that led to Yvvaros.
I’ll have to step in if war ever breaks out.
The physical Earth still existed, an empty planet turned processor. It would never be home to humans again, but somehow at the same time, was still the only home they would ever know.
Luke was tired. He slowly willed his body back into existence, and floated down onto the surface of the azure blue moon, where Tess awaited him.
“It’s done,” he said. “We’ve won.”
Tess’s mouth was hanging open in surprise.
“But… where are Kaoru and Arex?”
“They just woke up in their bodies,” said Luke. “Up there.”
He wrapped his arm around her waist and pointed up to a tiny, bluish green celestial object that hadn’t been there before.
CHAPTER 39
It was around noon on Yvvaros, about a week after what the people had come to call the “Transcendence Event”. Tess was in her garden, carefully tending to newly planted vegetable patches.
Dunidan’s Rest had been quieter over the past few days. With the chains holding players to Yvvaros broken, many of them headed home to visit family, and to recollect what was left of their lives. Tess remained behind, even after Luke had explained to her that she could make the transition as well as anybody.
The focus of most players, herself included, was on rebuilding. Stark Town was still in ruins. Players that had previously been killed in-game had been revived, but the world was left as it was.
There was one major exception to that. The Tymians had been subdued, and no longer posed the same threat to the world as they once had. They could still be found in The Underground, and occasionally in high level zones, but they no longer ventured into the more populated areas of the world.
Tess dusted soil off her hands as she stood up, One of the walls of Dunidan’s Rest had been opened up, the beginning of a planned and very necessary expansion of the compound. Their guild had accepted several dozen new players over the past week, mostly refugees that they’d been harboring before the battle.
“Still working on your garden, sis?”
Ben was walking over from around the other side of the wall, twirling a dagger in his hand and wearing a set of low level rogue class armor. Tess was still getting used to the idea of her little brother being back in Yvvaros, looking the way he looked. She’d grown used to Silverstrike’s long hair and slender limbs.
“Of course,” said Tess. “People still need to eat, after all.”
The two worlds, Yvvaros and Earth, were still divided in a certain sense. Earth was simulated, however, the simulation had been setup to adhere as much to the original physical reality as possible. Atomic mechanics worked differently now, as many scientists had discovered, but the basic natural laws still applied, for the most part.
Yvvaros was still governed by character statistics, levels, and quests. The only major change that had been applied to the virtual world was a standardization of identity. A person looked the same in both Yvvaros and on Earth, whichever persona they’d been connected to during the transition becoming their default appearance.
Ben walked over to where she was tending to her garden and sat down in the sand. He was different than the brother that Tess remembered, in more ways than just how he looked. Whatever had happened to Ben during his forced exile from the game had strengthened him. He wasn’t the same anxious, addicted brother she’d known before. He was confident.
“Mom and dad are still hoping that you’ll drop in for a visit,” said Ben. “It took a while for the skepticism over this situation to fade, but now they just want to see you.”
Tess sighed.
“They can come here as easily as I can go there,” she said. “Tell them that.”
“You know that they never will, sis.” Ben flicked a tiny ant off the edge of his foot. “I’m not asking for you, Tess. I’m asking for them. They aren’t as comfortable with the new reality as we are.”
Tess didn’t say anything for a moment. Finally, she shrugged.
“I’ll… go visit them,” she said. “But only for a couple of hours.”
“That’s all I’m asking,” said Ben, grinning.
She stood up and wiped her hands off some more on her armor. When it became clear that they were too dirty for that to work, Tess made her way over to the oasis and dunked them in.
Katrina and two members of Athena’s Wrath walked out from the second guild hall. Tess smiled and waved to them as they walked into the courtyard.
Katrina had foregone wearing her armor ever since the conflict had settled down, opting instead for some of the fine clothes sold by one of the clothiers in Kantor. The city had been spared of destruction, and was serving as a springboard in regards to the reconstruction of Stark Town.
“Hey Tess,” she said. “There’s a public ball happening tonight in Carthac Island.You wanna come?”
Tess smiled, but shook her head.
“No thanks.” She shook water droplets off her hands. “I think I’ll just hang out here. I know, I’m boring.”
Katrina’s eyes were sympathetic, and non judgmental.
“No, I get it,” she said. “And for the record, I don’t think he’s ignoring you. He’s probably off doing something important. You know how Luke is.”
Tess nodded, and waved goodbye as Katrina and her guild mates headed off.
“She’s right you know.” Ben had walked up beside her and set a hand on her arm. “He’s not ignoring us. It’s just that now he has the weight of, well, two worlds on his shoulders.”
