Eclipse Two

by Jonathan Strahan

  The twink confronting Imogen Fairweather, human, who sold fishing supplies from a shack on Bonetalon Pier, was a bavian warlord of the highest rank. He dropped from the saddle of his giant, vulture-winged hyena-griff and planted himself in front of Imogen's shack, his hairy simian form, powerful though it was, nearly dwarfed by the huge curling shoulder-pieces of his ornate, rune-carved obsidian armor.

  As Imogen opened her mouth to begin her rehearsed sales pitch, the bavian spoke (in a voice like tearing metal, like the burning of cities) seven Wu-accented words of Mandarin Chinese:

  "Peng Yueying," the twink said, "would you like to go home?"

  The Kingdom surrendered on a Tuesday

  The Kingdom surrendered on a Tuesday.

  Perhaps a year had gone by since the twink invasion, perhaps no more than a fiscal quarter. It was hard to know, in the Kingdom, where the closest thing to a calendar was the endless succession of Maintenance Tuesdays.

  The cast had known something like this was coming ever since the Kingdom's owners had gone into bankruptcy protection, but Imogen (whose name once had, yes, been Peng Yueying) had hoped for some gimmick—a new marketing campaign, another major patch, even the long-delayed ninth expansion—to hold back the rot a little longer, maybe even long enough for her and Kallia to vest.

  Kallia—Kallia Darkwater, Imogen's Legion counterpart and nominal rival, who from a coral-walled cave some five fathoms below Imogen's shack sold a more or less identical selection of fishing supplies—was already home, half-submerged in the heated pool that served their backstage apartment for a sitting room, when Imogen came through the door. Kallia held an official-looking scroll unrolled in her long, boneless blue fingers.

  "The MoGuo Corporation, Limited," Kallia declaimed, "is pleased to announce the approval, by the arbitrator-appointed trustees, of the transfer of all content, intellectual property, and intangible assets of the MoGuo Corporation to Ambrayses ACP, effective immediately." The initials were in English; the rest was in Dragontongue, the only language she and Imogen really had in common. As a language, Dragontongue was florid, metaphorical, allusive and cliché-ridden, but when it came to matters of finance and contract it could be eerily precise. "Ambrayses ACP, for its part, looks forward to a new era of immersive worldbuilding. . . dynamic realism. . . growth of the player base. . . investment. . ." She rolled up the scroll and tossed it to Imogen. "Blah, blah, blah."

  "What's an ACP?" Imogen asked, opening the scroll.

  "Autonomous Contracting Party," said Kallia.

  "The Kingdom's sold out to an AI?" Imogen said—or tried to. In Dragontongue, the nearest she could get to sold out was traded eggs for sheep. For AI, she used the English, and knew she was mangling it.

  "Get used to it, sister," said Kallia. "Ten percent of the player base is AI, and it's the only part that's growing. There aren't enough flesh humans left who can afford the gear, and free posthumans can only stay interested in men-in-tights games for so long."

  Imogen found she shared the sentiment. In her mind she heard again the bavian twink; heard, in that cartoon-monster voice, those seven words of Chinese. Heard her original—she corrected herself—her real name.

  The invading twinks had been swiftly banned, of course, but that hadn't stopped a repeat performance two weeks later, the twinks this time not Legion but League—humans, merlings, perroquets, 'quatchen and so on, their armor gleaming the silver of winter stars and the gold of angels' wings. The one who came to Imogen was a terrapin sea-shepherd, his shell thick and crusted with barnacles beneath a great hooded mantle of living kelp. His Mandarin (again with the same hint of Wu that had been Peng Yueying's own) was as fluent as the bavian's, his voice like the crash of surf and the songs of great whales.

  "Peng Yueying," the terrapin told her gravely, "you're going to need a friend on the outside."

  But Imogen was prepared this time, and her answer, in Dragontongue, came straight from the script—specifically the section titled Dealing Politely With Guests Who Break Character.

  "Don't think we carry any of that, sir," she told the terrapin. "But perhaps I can interest you in these fine Scaletooth Lures?"

  She hadn't answered the bavian at all, only stared open-mouthed until—some assistant director moving with unusual speed—the banhammer came down and the twinks vanished from the Kingdom, leaving Dragontown's cast members blinking in the suddenly brighter sunlight. No one would admit to answering the twinks. There was a shared, unspoken feeling among the cast members that even to discuss the incident during the Tuesday downtime would, in some way, constitute a break of character, and incur a corresponding loss of seniority.

  And seniority was everything. Seniority was a cast member's ticket out, the end of servitude, the end of guests and scripts and the limitations imposed by the Kingdom's rules and roles—and the beginning of true immortality, in the limitless, protean form available only to a fully realized posthuman.

  Like the rest of the Kingdom's cast—like more than ninety-nine percent of the world's dwindling (but still enormous) population of flesh humans—Imogen, or rather Yueying, could never have paid for the transfer process herself. She'd sold her soul to the Kingdom, and she was buying it back, on the installment plan.

  "How screwed are we?" she asked Kallia. (In Dragontongue: What portion of our hoard remains?)

  "Pretty screwed," Kallia admitted. (One but meager.) "But cheer up," she said. "Even if the arbitrator's voided the contract, we've still got the union."

  "Right." Imogen brightened. "We'll go down to the union hall after dinner and get the real story."

  "Sashimi?" Kallia suggested. "I'll catch it if you clean it."

  "Done," said Imogen—with a smile that faded as Kallia left.

  Of course what she'd told herself when she sold her soul was that it was only a copy she was selling. But from where that copy stood now, wearing this tall pale simulacrum of a body, with its birdlike bones and idealized Caucasian flesh, staring out to sea over the terrace, that argument seemed less than relevant.

  She had no idea whether the flesh Yueying was alive or dead. It was easiest, she'd found, to look on the transfer in the metaphorical terms that the structure of the Kingdom invited, as a kind of emigration, to a new land from which there was no return.

  The problem with the Kingdom's promise of a new life in posthuman paradise was that it depended on the Kingdom's profits. The seniority list might determine the order in which the cast members vested, but it was the Kingdom's revenues that determined when one vested at all.

  Imogen couldn't remember the last time it had happened. Well, that wasn't quite true—she remembered the event, and the vesting party, for a merling wave-witch called Sophronisba Shellycoat, and she remembered moving up from 338 on the seniority list to 337. But she couldn't count the Tuesdays that had passed since then. She only knew that it had been a great many. The Kingdom's glory days were long over, and Imogen couldn't honestly say whether she herself had seen them; she only knew that her cast member's life had the taste of a pyramid scheme, joined too late.

  It hadn't seemed that way when she made the transfer. The contract she'd signed had been a good one, vetted by fully posthuman lawyers working for organizations like the EFF, FSF, SAG, CLB, FWICE, AFTRA and SEIU. It specified such things as the seniority system, the revenue targets, and the vesting schedule. It specified the extent of the license granted to the Kingdom for the intellectual property known as Peng Yueying, and the conditions under which that license could be suspended, transferred, or terminated.

  And (perhaps most importantly, given that the major leisure-time activity of the Kingdom's guests—rare eccentrics like Valerius Redbeak aside—was the systematic slaughter both of cast members and of each other) the contract specified what could be done to a cast member, and what a cast member could be made to do. Imogen Fairweather had died several times, always by violence, since she'd come to the Kingdom, but she'd never felt any pain.

  The contract had been written to su
rvive a number of possible future events, including the transfer of the Kingdom to new ownership. It hadn't been written to survive a choice between violation of MoGuo's license for the original work Peng Yueying, and erasure of the derivative work Imogen Fairweather.

  "Here you go!" said Kallia from behind her. She laid a half-meter yellowtail down on the kitchen island.

  "It looks lovely," Imogen said. And it did: clear-eyed, glistening, not a scale out of place. Just like every other yellowtail she'd eaten in Dragontown.

  Imogen thought about the memo again, as she took a dwarf-forged knife from a drawer. She wondered what this Ambrayses AI had meant by "dynamic realism" and "immersive worldbuilding." What would an AI's idea of immersion be? she wondered. Let alone realism. . .

  And as she laid her hand on the yellowtail's side and set the point of the knife against its skin, everything changed.

  The yellowtail went slick under Imogen's hand. It convulsed, jaws working desperately, red blood flying from its open gills. The knife—a crafted cooking implement that in a guest's hands could not even be equipped as a weapon—slipped, and Imogen made a desperate grab for it, her fingers greasy with slime and scale.

  She caught it by the blade.

  After Imogen's hand had been bandaged, and the fish—which somehow neither Imogen nor Kallia now had an appetite for—had been disposed of, and the two women's frantic pulses had slowed and the fact of again having a pulse was no longer by itself enough to start them racing again, Imogen, from where she sat on the floor, her back against a cabinet, surveyed the wreckage, the overturned kitchen island, the knife upright and point-down between floorboards smeared with the mingled blood of fish and human.

  At her side, Kallia said: "I'm not sure the union's going to be able to sort this out."

  The union voted that night to strike

  The union voted that night to strike. Every local in the Kingdom voted to strike. Most of the votes were unanimous. A few voiced fears of what Ambrayses might do in reprisal, but they were shouted down by the majority, their abstract fears overwhelmed by fears more immediate and concrete. Imogen's injury was not the worst in the immediate aftermath of introducing "dynamic realism," or the most unnerving.

  Guests came to the borders of Dragontown, the gates of Stonehold and Mistweb Maze and the other great cities, and were turned away by the picket lines. Quests ceased to be dispensed or quest rewards granted. Shops and auction houses shut down; class and profession trainers refused to teach. Someone in Dwarrowhelm started a strike newspaper, and halfling and mechanist aeronauts dropped bundles of it from the cargo ramps of zeppelins and autogyros. Strikers taught each other protest songs in their native languages, translated "Joe Hill" and the "Internationale" into Legionary and League-speech.

  The cast members' worst fears failed to materialize. No one was erased, and the Kingdom's servers—as far as anyone could tell from inside the game—continued to run. Part of dynamic realism, it seemed, was a reluctance on management's part to intervene by sysadmin ex machina.

  But what equally failed to materialize was the player boycott the union had hoped for. If anything, the novelty of the strike was attracting even more players. Redbeak, denied access to the pier, hung up his fishing pole, got his battleground gear out of storage, and set himself up on the main road into Dragontown, picking fights with corven and gaunts. "Immersive worldbuilding," of a sort.

  And if Ambrayses was actually negotiating with anyone, Imogen wasn't hearing about it.

  In the smaller towns, villages, outposts and instances, particularly in the low- and mid-levels, things quickly turned bad. Immersive worldbuilding attracted the curious guest; dynamic realism attracted the sadistic. Low-level strikers poured into Dragontown, telling of high-level guests crossing the Dragonlands, looting, burning, killing for sport. Many of the new arrivals were dead, and even the living were severely traumatized. Many of the dead refused to respawn or be resurrected, preferring the relative safety of the spirit world—and, some said privately, its comforting numbness—to the chance of suffering again what they had already suffered.

  A lot more elected to stay dead after the strikebreakers showed up.

  Imogen was pinned down. She was low on the Spine, with an uphill half-kilometer of crooked empty streets between this burnt-out alchemist's shop and the union barricades around Skull House. Across the way, behind a spur of bone, were two fire-juggling clowns and a halfling tinker with a Gatling gun that, "dynamic realism" or not, seemed to have a limitless supply of ammunition. PINKERTON, the halfling's guild banner said; BALDWIN-FELTS, said the clowns'. The names meant nothing to Imogen, but the dwarf sharpshooter who'd held the shop's upper floor, a union organizer from Glimmering Caverns who answered only to some American name Imogen couldn't remember or pronounce, had cursed when she saw them, and not in Dragontongue.

  And in a moment the three strikebreakers were going to figure out that the dwarf was now dead, and that the corven warlock on the ground floor was dead, and that the only striker left at this corner was a mid-level nominal noncombatant with a few earth spells and a lacquered iron staff that, though reasonably puissant, was at least five kilograms too heavy for her.

  The halfling's bullets or the clowns' burning pitch—Imogen wondered which would be easier. She'd died just once since the strikebreakers had reached Dragontown, caught in a simple death spell thrown by an anubim necromancer; that had been frightening in its way, but not painful, and she'd respawned only a few minutes later.

  She'd heard the screams of the dwarf upstairs as she burned, though, and she'd held the corven while he thrashed on the floor, trying to curl his angular black body around the wet red where his gut had been. They'd been—they were, wherever they were now—actors, not soldiers. They'd signed the same contract Peng Yueying had. Neither of them had asked to fight, asked to die writhing in pain—perhaps to respawn and suffer the same fate again, and again.

  And now Imogen had forgotten their names.

  She heard voices outside, laughter, chatter in some language she didn't recognize, neither Legionary nor League-speech nor Dragontongue nor any natural language she was familiar with. Imogen wondered briefly where Ambrayses had recruited its strikebreakers, and then wondered whether these guests were human or posthuman or AI, and what language AIs spoke among themselves. . .

  The halfling's shadow fell across the doorway. As the fat bronze snout of the Gatling gun crossed the threshold, Imogen brought the staff down. Red runes flared along its length, and whatever it had hit rang like a bell, the impact jarring her arms. The halfling stumbled into the room, shaking a head half-hidden under some outlandish helmet, all crystal lenses, iron tubes and brass cooling fins, and Imogen raised the staff for another blow.

  But the strikebreakers were all twinks, and even with the trainers on strike the halfling was well above Imogen's level, and her weapon's. In the old Kingdom she'd never have touched him; under dynamic realism he still kept his grip on the Gatling, and the magic of the flaring runes slowed him only for a moment before the lensed helmet turned toward Imogen.

  A clicking sound came from the lenses, and the iron tubes spat black smoke. But as the halfling's fat rocket whipped through the space where Imogen had been standing a moment before, roaring through the burnt-out upper floor into the sky, Imogen was already gone, leaping over the halfling and out into the street—

  —where the clowns were waiting.

  They were identical as two castings from the same mold: masked, armored, one in black trimmed with white, the other in white trimmed with black; comically fat and clumsy-looking in their pot-bellied breastplates, their bagged trousers and oversized shoes. But the hands that held their whirling fire-pots were sure and dexterous, their movements smooth and precise, and the smiles stamped into their masks were cold.

  Imogen shifted her grip far down the length of the staff and swung it in a great one-handed arc that left her right wrist in agony, as with her left hand she conjured up a handful of blinding sand a
nd flung it at the nearer clown. But the sand went wide, and both clowns swayed backward to avoid the staff with easy grace. As they swayed forward again, the fire-pots came up, flaring white-hot.

  And then her vision went dark as something came from behind and knocked her to the ground, sending the staff flying and driving the air from her lungs, so that for a moment she thought the halfling's rockets or bullets had found her after all; and as she waited for the pain, the cover over her eyes was taken away, and she recognized it for what it was: the gray-feathered wing of the old perroquet, Valerius Redbeak. It swung out in a wide arc, and a great wind caught the clowns and flung them into the wall opposite with bone-breaking force.

  But of course the clowns were just avatars; the real strikebreakers, AI or human or posthuman, were safe in the real world or at any rate somewhere outside the Kingdom's systems, comfortably buffered against whatever pains these puppet-selves might suffer. They bounced up again, fire-pots swinging.

  "Flee, Lady Fairweather!" cawed the perroquet in League-speech as he sent another gust toward the clowns. "I will chastise the Legion scum!"

  The airmaster had done well for himself on the road; his shoulder-pieces were nearly as tall as the bavian twink's, and the air around him swirled with high-level buffs.

  Imogen stood, slowly—then threw herself forward and down as a telltale click came from the ruined shop behind her. Redbeak spun and threw a wing up to block. The halfling's rocket knocked him tumbling, but he landed on his feet—in no more real pain than the clowns—and drew from a belt a pair of scimitars crackling with violet lightning.