by Nick Cole
Who is we? I wonder. Is Chloe okay? We were going… going someplace nice.
I hear sirens out there.
And then I’m out.
I think I woke again and heard gunfire. Irv’s gun. But I never really regained full consciousness until I awoke handcuffed to a hospital bed in Los Angeles. It was obvious time had passed.
But in between was the dream that told me everything about what had happened already. And what became of me. You see, this is the weird part. The dream came after everything. The dream is the present. Everything that happened in Calistan, that happened before. A long time ago.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The insects buzzing in my ears, along with the heat of the day and suffocating nature of the ancient pile of stone that is the crumbling Temple of Elemental Evil, all combine to make me feel dizzy and on the verge of passing out. As though at any moment I will just collapse and die.
Blood stains my samurai’s robes, seeping from the wound in my chest.
The Raggedy Man wears no armor. But he’s carrying a long sword made of volcanic red metal. It’s inscribed with strange angular runes. He’s standing above me, atop stairs leading into the temple’s gaping maw.
I draw DeatheFeather and find I am more leaning on it than ready to wield it in battle. My breathing comes in short, halting gasps. I cough, and see blood on my hand.
“Glad you finally made it here,” says the Raggedy Man. “This is where the fun begins.”
“Don’t listen to him,” huffs Morgax, who is carrying a massive double-bladed axe. He wears a hauberk of shining chain mail. A kilt. Large boots.
“Yeah,” says the Raggedy Man in an almost friendly manner. Like a carnie selling dangerous rides, or a huckster ripping off the rubes for their last buck. “Don’t bother with the truth. Let’s just start slicing and dicing and see who comes out the winner, why don’t we?”
I cough in the silence that hangs between the three of us. More blood.
“Because you’re in shape for a fight right about now, aren’t you, PQ, buddy?”
“What is this?” I ask… meaning everything. Not just here at this moment or the ancient evil temple looming behind the Raggedy Man vampire standing here beneath the sun at the blazing high noon in full. As though that too is somehow wrong. But all of it. The valley. Everything and everyone.
What. Is. It?
“Well now, PQ, that’s the trick, ain’t it? I can tell you. Sure. But if I do then you only ever know my side of the story. Or Morgax here can tell you, and you’ll just have to trust him that he’s telling the truth.”
I say nothing and suppress a cough.
“Fun, huh?” says the Raggedy Man and shows his fangs. “Another game just like back in the Oubliette.”
I turn to Morgax.
“Why can’t you tell me what’s going on?”
Without removing his animal eyes from the Raggedy Man, Morgax says in his gusty voice, “I can’t until you reject the programming. Defeating him unlocks the parameters I’m constrained by.”
The Raggedy Man laughs.
“See… what’d I tell you? Trust. And believe me you, that is overrated these days. I’ll tell yoooooouuu what, PerfectQuestion?”
He pauses. Rubs his stubbly chin.
Then…
“I’ll give you a hint. And then you decide. You decide if I’m telling the truth, then you come into the temple and life begins anew. You get everything back. Fresh start. Upright citizen and all. You game?”
I say nothing.
My body feels paper-thin and fading. I have no idea what’s real and what isn’t. But the sword I’m leaning on… that’s real. And it may be the only thing that is in all of this. Like it’s some kind of truth in a make-believe world of lies.
“You, PQ,” begins the Raggedy Man, “are currently asleep and riding in a giant starship as we speak. Destination: Mars. This is all part of the programming you’re undergoing to teach you how to serve in the armed forces and… let me check my records here… fly dropships for close air support and infantry operations. Interesting.”
The Raggedy Man walks forward, coming down the first few steps and dragging his massive red iron sword after him. It scrapes along the dusty pavement causing some sparks to fly up.
“You can’t understand the particulars…” continues the Raggedy Man. “But all of this… everything you’ve undergone… has meant something in your real life. This is just a basic game-personality-interaction tool we’ve been using to turn you into a warrior. In real life, IRL as you call it, I’m your commanding officer. Call me Colonel Flagg. Friends call me Randy. And I am a hard man, PQ. I am your villain. I will not lie to you about that. No, sir. And you need to be afraid of me if you’re going to serve on Mars. This is a war we’re heading into. No-holds-barred toe-to-toe combat-to-the-death possibly involving nuclear weapons. You need to fear me if you are going to stay alive, PerfectQuestion. That… is for your own good.”
He’s standing right before me. Looming and leering like he’s won everything in the world.
I’ve got nothing. Nothing in me can fight back. But the sword… the sword is real. I can feel it in my grip and so I concentrate on that because it is a known in a world, a sim, a game, full of unknowns.
But I cough up more blood because I can’t stop myself. I feel weak and pathetic.
“So, we can do this the easy way, PQ,” says the Raggedy Man. Colonel Flagg. Friends call him Randy. “Or the hard way. The easy way is to kneel down and we move on to the next training session. Survival. Escape. Resistance. And evasion. We’ll have fun with that one, PQ. Oh boy will we. It’s set in a zombie apocalypse. And there’re Nazis. Crazy stuff. But it works.”
The Raggedy Man smiles, his eyes shining with gleeful delight at horrors only he sees.
“Or we can do it the hard way. In which I kill you here, and you start the whole sim again. Live through all that pain and horror that got you here. Spoiler… she dies again, PQ. Every time. She dies because she pulled a gun when you both should have just run.”
I look at Morgax. It takes almost all my strength to do this.
“So what’s it gonna be, PQ? You wanna be responsible for her dying all over again? Or accept the behavior mod and get a little get-out-of-PTSD free card?”
The giant minotaur shakes his head slowly.
“No, PerfectQuestion,” he says. “You must fight him. You must resist.”
There is no possible way I can.
“You saved my life once,” says Morgax. “Now I’m here to save yours. Trust me.”
I lower my head.
There’s nothing left of me.
I cough.
“What?” asks the Raggedy Man. “I can’t hear your answer, PQ.”
I cough and say it again.
“The hard way,” I mumble.
“All right, all right, all right!” erupts the Raggedy Man and steps back, raising the red blade with a grand flourish to strike me down.
And then it’s on.
I get DeatheFeather up just in time to parry his first terrific blow. Hot sparks fly. The massive red iron blade glances off Deathefeather and sends me spinning away. Blood is running through the fingers pressing against my wound.
The Raggedy Man comes at me but Morgax attacks, slamming his great double-bladed axe through the air. Wily and lithe, the Raggedy Man ducks, twists, turns, and barely avoids being sliced in half. He laughs insanely at this, then swings his own blade, cutting the minotaur across the chest. The beast man roars and gives ground as the Raggedy Man moves forward with a sudden hurricane of cuts. Some find their mark. Some miss. But it is clear to me, even as I’m struggling to hold on to what little I have, to stand, to breathe, that one cut will soon find the fatal mark.
I can’t summon anything within me. There’s truly nothing there. Nothing.
Nothing.
So I tell myself to do it anyway and charge it to some cosmic credit card.
I scream and race forward, Deathef
eather raised over my shoulder. Blood pumping from my wound.
The Raggedy Man knocks Morgax to the ground and spins on me in time to meet my cut. Except his blade, his red sparking iron blade, is in the wrong position to do much of anything.
“Ahhh hell…” he starts to say. And then his head is separated from the rest of his body. It goes spinning over the steps of the evil place, blood trailing after it. And a moment later his rag-covered body flops over.
Morgax stands, bleeding from a dozen cuts as I fall to my knees and know I am dying here.
The minotaur kneels.
“It’s over now. Unlocking. Psychometric analysis complete. Programming rejection implemented. Behavior mod override.”
The world of the Lost Valley is disappearing. And so am I.
“What-t-t?” I barely manage. What is this place? Where have I been? Who am I?
I have to know before I fade away. What was real, and what was the dream?
“W-w-was he lying?” I ask.
Morgax helps me up. We are walking down the steps. Away from the temple. He’s carrying me really. There are mists ahead. Golden mists and other adventures.
“Yes. And no, my friend.”
I look into Morgax’s eyes.
“Yes. You are on a ship. The Uruguay. Part of a task force being sent to quell the Martian Rebellion. Currently you are in cryo being trained to serve in the military. Because you are a criminal, that comes with certain behavior mods that will make you more controllable. In other words… you wouldn’t be you anymore if they had been allowed to implement. I couldn’t do much for you, my friend. Couldn’t get your sentence reduced or pull any strings to get you off the invasion force. I’m just a college professor looking for the truth.
“But you saved me. Saved my family and my career. So a colleague of mine, she works in Applied Game Psychology, wrote an experimental DreamVR program to counteract the effects of the military behavior mod. I know… there are side effects and there’s that whole brain damage study. But we needed to save you. And this was the only way. We paid a hacker to run the program while you were in cryosleep aboard the Uruguay.”
I look around at the Lost Valley. At the mountains and the smoking peaks. Grand castles and ancient dungeons. Ruin, mystery, and wonder.
“The program used an old fantasy game setting and integrated what happened in your real life to fight the programming being forced upon you. Everything, and I have no idea what you saw, was symbolic of something that happened back in Calistan before you were arrested. Maybe. Some stuff might have just been latent garbage being processed by your subconscious.”
The forgotten book I found in Rashid’s house.
The Priest of Chaos who murdered the young girl.
The mad hermit and the jungle cat.
The Lost Keep.
The manor house.
The trail of revenge.
The murdered angel.
“Chloe…”
I was going to ask if she was still alive. But I know she isn’t.
“When you wake up, the military won’t know you’ve avoided behavior mod. That’s all we could do for you, my friend. I hope it’s enough. This isn’t even me. Just a low-level AI algo running inside the DreamVR program, placed to explain things if you managed to reject the programming. The program organized it all into something you could understand and fight. DreamVR gets a bad rap, but trust me, there’re some practical aps. Look me up when you get back from Mars. And thank you, my friend.”
Epilogue
Irv got me back across the border into LA. He took me to a hospital and disappeared. Never heard from him again.
But he was right. I was in a lot of trouble.
Calistan revolted and I was charged by the UN with attempting to destabilize a foreign government.
Which it turns out is a pretty big deal. I was looking at twenty years in a UN prison, or a colonization sentence to Alpha Centauri after a forty-year deep sleep. ColaCorp hired a lawyer and I think the “we” Irv mentioned was probably the CIA. They pulled some strings and got me military service.
I spent six months fighting on Mars and lost my right leg below the knee. The UN taught me how to fly dropships on the way there.
And I saw the Uruguay go down in the sand the day the invasion began.
The End
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There Will Be War Vol. VI ed. Jerry Pournelle
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