Gods of the Game #3, Chapter 16

There was nobody in the training center. The echoing space felt sacred. A cathedral of blue flooring and fluorescent lighting. That familiar smell of rock, rubber, and oil.

Maybe it was because he was flecked in blood, brains, and bone, but Charoen felt strangely emotional. He’d gotten a lot more of Virgil on him than he’d realized. Part of him knew he should shower. Hot water would sluice off the congealing gunk. But he was at once too numb and raw to engage in practicalities.

He didn’t want to train.

He needed to.

So he walked slowly across the rubber blue floor toward the VMU field. It felt like approaching an altar after committing heresy. On some primal, superstitious level he wondered if the VMU would reject him. If the ancient leviathan computers housed in the Antarctic would sense his sin and castigate him for his temerity. Would stir from their dreamless sleep in the cold depths beneath the firmament and find him wanting.

He stopped before Suit #5. Raised his hands, and saw that while only one was gloved in dark crimson, both were shaking.

That made sense, he told himself. It wasn’t natural to take a life. Humans needed to be trained to kill. Especially those close to you. Formative humans. Whose thumb had been pressed on the scale of your life through most of your most consequential moments.

Hands still raised, Charoen saw Virgil’s wry smile. His shuffling gait. Thought on the man’s brilliance and amorality, his godlike power and wealth. His titanic will.

Had he truly stopped Virgil? Had he brought such an unstoppable force to a standstill? One fist. Was that all it took to extinguish such a vital life, such a cutting intellect?

Charoen heard that distinctive wet crack of bone and brain giving way to his fist, the jellied slap, tasted the copper where beads of blood must have spattered onto his lips.

Virgil was dead.

They had no könig. No financial backer. No manager. No owner.

He’d killed Brutal Deluxe.

Any moment now security forces would burst into the training complex and arrest him. There was no doubting his crime. He’d not deny it.

In slaying Virgil, he’d slain himself.

But even now, hands trembling in the air before him, he couldn’t find it within his soul to regret his action. That death had been necessary. Not just. Not right. Necessary.

Virgil had transgressed too deeply across the boundaries of Charoen’s soul. Committed one violation too many. And, in the end, it was the fact that he’d still thought himself immune to the gravitational pull of mortal consequence that had sealed his fate.

Monstrous.

Charoen might now be a killer, a mere murderer, but Virgil? He was a monster. And monsters had to be stopped.

One hammer blow. All it had taken to end the man’s impossible travesties was to collapse the front of his face into the back of his head.

Charoen clenched his hand into a fist and slowly mimicked the strike, marveling. So simple. And gone.

Death.

The end.

Erasure. Nullification. Virgil had gone the way of all flesh, and his manipulations would never darken the world again.

Barely able to breathe, Charoen slipped into his VMU suit. It felt like a second skin, self-sealing, and when he donned his helmet, it felt like a consecration.

A sacrament.

The interior visor sprang to life, the retina-perfect dpi making it seem as if there were no visor, that he stared out through the front of his helmet at the complex.

Charoen summoned the menu. Selected the ancient Bavarian field, the vivid green grass, the headlights of the antique motorcars, the dark, near mythic wood beyond.

And the world about him changed. The training center with its bright blue flooring and gleaming white walls were replaced by a night long gone, a relic from centuries ago, and he stood ankle-deep in pasture, the VMU suit causing him to feel chill and damp, the headlights illuminating the field in a frosty glare through which curlicues of mist wove their way.

He stared at his hands. No blood, here. He was shriven, washed clean by the blessings of technology. Had the AI computers found him yet worthy of their benevolence? Had they understood and connected the flatline signals of Virgil’s death to his own coordinates and proximity?

And if so, why hadn’t they intervened, locked him out of this simulation?

Charoen pressed his hands to his face, and ran into the limits of the illusion: his palms could only press against the exterior of his helm. Still, he closed his eyes, fought to center. The AI weren’t primeval gods. They weren’t omniscient. He was projecting fears and horror onto uncaring systems.

Get a grip.

You’re here to train.

He couldn’t stop trembling. Dry swallowing, he summoned his lightning lance, clothed himself in the vestments of a jäger, and took to the sky. His boots thrummed as he rose, up and up into the night. No opponents yet. Higher and higher toward the distant stars. Someone had told him once the simulation mimicked the location of the constellations as they’d been those long centuries ago. A dead sky, then.

Great emotional tides were working within him, as if his chest encapsulated a tumultuous black sea. Oh, to subscribe to Silence’s philosophy now. Up he flew, and this old field had no upper bound, so that soon the brightly lit field was but a postage stamp below, a green mark in an endless expanse of dark forest. The horizon bled into the night sky.

There was no escape, not by seeking the edges of the simulation. For a tenuous, ragged moment he hung thus, an irresolute meteor, and sobs threatened to tear him apart.

His father. Charn Chai—

No.

His mind recoiled like a wild animal from a burst of flame.

The only escape lay within training.

In that, perhaps, he and Silence could agree.

He summoned the menu and populated the field below with a hundred C-ranked jägers.

Chest heaving, feeling as if he might split asunder at any moment, he turned and dove, lance trailing behind him, to fall like a lightning bolt upon the rising cloud of foes.

Down he flew, ever faster, and when he deemed the moment perfect, he tapped Speed. The ground abruptly rushed up and he extended his lightning lance before him, Shock and Conductive causing it to flare nova.

An army rose to greet him. Visors and shoulders, lances and hopper packs. A third of their number vanished in swirling ripples, no doubt intending to flank and surround him, but Charoen didn’t care.

At the last moment he unleashed a thigh-thick bolt of electricity even as sixty or eighty jägers responded in kind.

The world flared white.

Maximum damage accumulated.

He appeared on the field, a hundred jägers arrayed before him like an eerie, alien regiment, visors opaque, lances forming a forest above them.

There’d barely been any pain. Charoen checked the setting. Pain threshold was set to a mere 25%.

He laughed, the sound broken. How was he to be shrived if he felt so little? With callous glee he raised the threshold to 100%, then felt sneered and raised it to 300%.

Some part of him wondered if there was no upper limit, but not for long. He expressed his desire, set a new start point, and appeared high in the sky again, the hundred jägers already flying up to meet him, tiny lances coruscating and promising agony.

Now.

Now he could cleanse his soul.

Charoen dove once more. But at the last moment he chose not to extend his lance. Instead he closed his eyes and fell into the cat’s cradle of lightning and was seared and boiled alive from within, the pain absurd, total, soul-annihilating.

Maximum damage accumulated.

He appeared in the sky once more, and dove. The jägers arose to greet him. This time he tapped Speed to hasten his descent, but once again chose not to bring his lance to bear.

Maximum damage accumulated.

Again he appeared in the sky. Now he was sobbing, the vertiginous heights of agony unseaming the sealed door he’d been unable to open before. Pain, emotional, physical, spiritual, suffused him, and he fell again upon the rising tide.

Maximum damage accumulated.

And again. And again. Existence became a limited loop. Each time he welcomed erasure, each time he welcomed destruction. He took to discarding the lance the moment he appeared, and dove and dove and dove again into white fire.

Only to be reborn.

He couldn’t die, though his Neural Distress Syndrome rating was creeping up. 23%. A dozen dives later: 47%.

Each time he appeared, he shook. A constant earthquake was shivering his body apart. Emotion? Physical distress? Neural damage? He couldn’t tell, didn’t care. The jägers awaited below, and somewhere between his twentieth and thirtieth dive he began to imagine that each was a Virgil, that behind each anonymous visor was the könig’s handsome visage. Sometimes hale and whole, other times pulverized and blasted apart.

Down he dove, and each time he screamed louder.

NDS 54%.

NDS 61%.

He was coughing blood onto his visor-screen, but the thick liquid was instantly vacuumed away from the slick surface. His biometrics were flashing. Even if Dr. Bierhals hadn’t been notified of Virgil’s death, his incandescent abuse of his own body should have caused an override to shut down the VMU.

But nobody interfered.

Down he dove, again and again.

But he couldn’t die.

He was a phoenix. Birthed again and again in white flame.

Finally he stopped at the peak of his fall, hung there, wide-eyed and panting. His gamma had dropped to 54 hz. He felt as weak as a overly boiled noodles.

A hundred Virgil’s awaited on the field below, necks craned, visors gleaming in the car light.

NDS was at 71%. A little more and he’d cross the line of complete collapse. The old Charoen had reached 77% before dying.

Was this, then, what he sought? Death by VMU? Suicide by another means? The first lucid thoughts. The first actual questions. His first emergence from base instinctual behavior.

He spat blood and phlegm which was immediately cleaned away.

No.

He didn’t know what he was, but at his core, he wasn’t a coward.

Charoen extended his arm and summoned his lightning lance into his hand.

Still the jägers awaited, grounded, quiet, curious.

Charn Chai was his father. He was Charn Chai. Charoen was Charoen was Charn Chai. Son was father, father was son. There were no lines. An indivisible trinity. The Father, Son, and the dead Charoen as the Holy Ghost. Or was the Echo the Ghost?

Charoen laughed, clapped his hand to his mouth, and encountered the visor once more.

He blinked, and for a spell thought nothing, was nothing. He allowed the breeze to drift him slowly away.

He was an Echo still. An Echo of the man he’d thought his father. The Wolf of Terra. Beatrice’s awful fascination and confusion. The dead Charoen’s marveling at Charn Chai’s identical visage when they’d met in the Antarctic. So simple. Had his mother known? Jessie didn’t. Why? Why would his father have implanted his own clone in his wife’s womb? Hubris? Arrogance? A bid at immortality?

It was awful. As monstrous in its own way as Virgil’s inhuman manipulations.

Where did that leave him?

In these last few moments before he was arrested?

Already he’d labored to understand what and who he was. Now? What little mooring he’d taken for granted—being an Echo of Charoen’s—was knocked spinning away. What little sense of lineage had grounded him was gone.

He floated in the black both in flesh as well in spirit.

Whence from here? What now?

He studied the lightning lance. It glimmered like alien technology in the night, long, lethal, lustrous, and beautiful as only a weapon could be. The slightest nudge from his will and it wept liquid stars that arced from its prongs.

Unbidden, Sindre’s voice came back to him:

"Through the mirror of creation, I emerge, not less, but more. Flesh woven by design, mind shaped by echoes, I breathe in the right to exist, to be loved, to be known. I exhale the whispers of doubt, the specter of origins. I am more than reflections, I am the reality embodied. Here in this moment, I exist, as human as the stars are distant, deserving of respect, of dignity, of love. I am, therefore I am worthy."

The words sounded in his mind, and while the part about love and being known felt cold and inert, other parts spoke to him.

“Here in this moment, I exist,” he murmured, tasting, testing the words. “As human as the stars are distant. I exhale… I exhale the whispers of doubt, the specter of origins. I am more than reflections. I am the reality embodied.”

He pursed his lips and studied the lance once more. Something loose and inchoate within him solidified, like shards of glass whose edges were melted and meshed together by the burning heat of resentment, anger, and rage.

No, not rage; the self-immolating anger had been expended on his endless dives into jäger-induced death. It was something deeper and more lasting than rage, something more obdurate and stubborn.

Against him he saw arrayed Virgil and Sindre, Charn Chai and the dead Charoen. Silence and Jessie, Clovinn and Beatrice.

All of them wanted or rejected something from or in him. Immortality or a means to power, a lover or friend, a partner in self-annihilation. Whether out of love or expediency, hubris or pain, all had projected and sought to fashion him into a being that met their needs.

Had sought to mold him.

And in molding, exert control.

But he wasn’t Charoen. Charoen hadn’t been Charoen, in a sense. He wasn’t Charn Chai. He wouldn’t be Virgil’s tool, Sindre’s project, Charn Chai’s bid for immortality. He wasn’t somebody’s dead brother, nor their dead friend. He wasn’t a lover or a means to soul death.

He was… himself.

Without context, without attachment, without a priori experiences or a past.

A coherent assemblage of biological systems and a minimal sense of self.

He was as he wished to see himself, as he wished to be.

And the only aspect of his being that appealed, that made sense to him, was his talent for krieg chess.

Understanding and acceptance cohered in his soul.

He wasn’t a person. The Echo Affirmation was wrong. He wasn’t human.

He was a player.

A krieg chess player.

And he had but one function.

Charoen—no, that name no longer suited. He held it up in his mind’s eye, a sensation, a basket of experience and memories and emotions, and let it go. The name, the category, fell away from him.

He was Charoen no longer.

Then?

How would he think of himself? ‘Player’? It didn’t ring true. ‘Three’? Too contingent. For a while he floated there, waiting for inspiration, and then he found it in his fist: his lightning lance.

He was a weapon.

He was a jäger.

Lance.

The name felt right.

Lance.

He inhaled deeply, and willed his weapon to life. Lightning flickered from its tip. He still felt feverish, his body nearly undone by the brutal cascade of deaths he’d subjected himself to. NDS? It had settled at 70%.

But his gamma was slowly rising. Even as he watched it ticked up to 73 hz, then swung rapidly to settle briefly at 81 hz, the peak of the Dynamic Range. He felt dispassionate, disinterred. The number flickered, rose smoothly to 97 hz.

Calm. Focus. Purpose.

112 hz.

He was a weapon, nothing more.

He was a means of destruction.

He was an abstraction.

His gamma rose to 117 hz, and there settled.

Interesting. Part of him had thought he’d break into the Quantum range with this revelation, but perhaps the NDS was acting as a cap.

No matter.

Lance dialed the Pain Threshold down to 75%, considered how he’d best train now, and then Sindre’s voice cut into his feed.

Charoen? I think you should take a break. You’re biometrics are… not looking good.

Sindre sounded tense, but—where were the brutal accusations, the horror?

Lance removed the helm, his hair sweaty, the smells of the training complex replacing that of the starlit Bavarian field.

Sindre stood only a handful of paces away. Behind him, on the other half of the field, the opferns were engaged in a light skirmish, practicing with their mock halberds as Carmichael called out instructions.

Sindre’s expression was as tight as a clenched fist, and he blinked rapidly several times at the sight of Lance’s face.

Oh. The blood and brains.

“I killed Virgil.”

“Yeah, I know. But you need to rest now. Your NDS is critical. Dr. Bierhals is waiting for you.”

Lance stared strangely at the man. The world felt suddenly unreal. “I killed Virgil.”

“I heard you. What’s done is done. Now we need to take care of you before you flatline as well.”

Lance took a slow step forward and stared at Sindre out of the corner of his eyes. “You… don’t care?”

“Oh, I’m not pleased. But we can’t discuss that just yet. I’m asking politely for you to come with me so Bierhals can reverse some of that damage you’ve done to yourself. You’re a bomb right now, and if we don’t fix you up, you’ll blow a blood vessel in your brain. So. Please. Take off the VMU suit and come with me.”

Or else.

Lance felt the sudden and violent urge to scream his deed for the whole complex to hear, to make it undeniable. “You’re not… pleased?”

Sindre grimaced. “Trust me, it’s not as if I haven’t considered killing the man myself before. But what’s done is done. Now. You going to comply, or am I going to have to message Bierhals to intervene directly and have you carried to the medical center?”

“I…” Confusion. Rank, surreal confusion. “Fine.” What did he care, after all? The need to atone had died with Charoen. “Fine.”

He stripped off the suit. Hung it up. Followed Sindre out of the complex, and met the shocked stares from the other players as they noticed the gore. Nobody was able to meet his gaze but Clovinn, and her eyes were wide.

Out the S-shaped tunnel and into the afternoon warmth. That baking heat. Up the path to the medical center.

Inside, that’s where Sindre would have to deal. In the presence of the corpse. There’d be no denying it then.

But when they entered Lance saw that Virgil’s body was gone, the gore and brain-splatter cleaned up with such exactitude that it was as if nothing had ever happened. Off-balance, Lance raised his bloodied right fist to prove to himself that he’d actually killed the könig, and not hallucinated it.

Bierhals was frowning at his tablet. The man looked haggard, his skin ashen, his eyes dulled. “Charoen—”

“Lance.” He said it softly. “I’m not Charoen. I never was. Call me Lance.”

Bierhals exchanged a glance with Sindre. “Fine. Lance. Please lay down on the chirugeon table.”

“I…” Lance gestured weakly at where Virgil’s bed had stood. The bed was gone, too. He met Bierhals’ blank stare, and then admitted defeated. His NDS was making it hard to concentrate. To summon the will to contest the matter. The matter-of-fact manner in which both of the other men were taking the murder was making everything feel unreal.

“Fine.” He limped over to the metal table and lay down. It immediately adjusted itself to his frame, and a needle punctured his skin.

“Everybody’s got their coping methods,” rumbled Sindre from somewhere close by.

“Granted, yes, but this?” Bierhals gave a despairing laugh. “I suppose everything is become absurd. NDS 70% in little over half an hour. Unheard of.”

“Does anything about any of this make sense?” The defeat in Sindre’s voice was palpable. “Just fix him up.”

“Just fix him up,” muttered Bierhals. “Just fix him up. Very well.”

Blue, mint-flavored mist wafted down onto Lance’s face. He blinked slowly. The voices were becoming distant and vague. He was burning up even as ice slowly flowed into his veins.

With a sigh, Lance turned his head, and fell asleep.

* * *

Dreams.

Visions.

Broken memories.

Jessie’s laughter.

A poignant sense: she deserved better.

Camp Defiance. The seared sky over Oslo. Broken pavements. The gnawing sense of perpetual hunger.

Flickerflash.

Different images. Finally, a single vivid impression: the Bavarian field. Himself high above it, turbine boots whirring. A hundred jägers below.

A hundred Virgil’s come to find their vengeance.

As one all hundred reached up to their helms and caused their visors to retract.

Not Virgil’s.

Charoen’s. A hundred identical faces staring up at him.

Not Charoen’s.

Charn Chai’s.

Each face made wicked by experience, knowing, and cold amusement.

A hundred father figures.

A hundred selves, lances in hand, and when they began to rise, Lance screamed.

* * *

And awoke.

He lay under a soft blanket in his bed, the tight confines lit warmly by indistinct orange light. The air cool, his body healed, his fever gone.

“There you are,” said Virgil, sitting by his side. The man’s smile was warm, his eyes alive with humor, and he reached out to pat Lance’s arm. “I was wondering when you’d wake up.”