Gods of the Game #3, Chapter 2

Darkness.

Turbulent currents. The swish and curl of unmoored thoughts. Impressions that failed to leave a mark.

Intimate darkness, swirled by emotions. Emotions like the flicksilver flash of a fish’s flank espied for a moment in dark waters. Seen and then gone.

Burgeoning need. The body’s imperatives. Physicality. A cloak of muscle and restive strength. Desire. Formless need. Hunger for reality, for stimulus.

But by slow degrees, from this primaeval mud, consciousness arises. Erects itself in obedience to alien prerogatives. Crude impulses give way to tentative thoughts.

Awareness. Intelligence. Concepts and memories intruding, imprinting themselves upon the shapeless void.

Visions from the past. A camp cupped by high cliff walls, the cry of children, hard scrabble dirt, ancient machines aimed at the sky, the sensation of hunger. Cities bowed by time, cracked and worn, choked by kudzu, the air a dull haze, countless faces made pinched by hollowed cheeks and staring eyes.

A name: Jessie.

A consequent emotion: fierce need to protect her.

A face: a young woman, caramel hair, features as familiar as his palm, tattoos swirling up her left arm and the side of her neck. An impish smile.

Other memories.

Speed. Power. A brightly blazing green pitch. Masked figures moving in to hurt him. The sound of screams rising into the air. The roar of the crowd. His blood burning. Exultation. His craving for power. For dominance. A rod in his hands. No, a halberd.

Panic. He thrashed, and someone said something, the voice familiar. Drawing him from the depths.

But he wasn’t ready to leave yet. There was more to be mined. A memory of pain. A field. His body consuming itself, data projected into his vision. An enemy player moving to engage him. A mörderin. He knew her. Loved her. Loathed her.

She closed.

The crowd screamed, lusting for blood.

“Charoen?” A hand on his shoulder. “I know you can hear me. Wake up. Come back to us.”

He screwed his eyes tight, sought to hold to the memory even as it slowed, the mörderin raising a blade, his own body struggling to meet her attack, trapped in honey, knowing that pain was coming, a pain that would be true and abiding until it ended, an end, hadn’t he—?

“Charoen?”

He blinked. Dim lights. Amber brown. He lay on a table. Around him, machines. High ceiling. Metal gleamed dully. No sense of recognition. Bending over him, a man. Golden curls. His cheek and chin unshaved. Eyes blue and alive with intelligence and amusement, curiosity and concern. A familiar face.

“Virgil?”

He was rewarded with a warm smile. “The very same. There you are. First and foremost: you’re safe. You’re all right. You’ve a lot to catch up on, but you’re safe. Do you hear me?”

“Safe.” The word felt devoid of meaning. Charoen blinked again, everything coming into greater focus. “I…”

“There’s no rush.” Virgil sat back down. “You’ve been through so much. The confusion is normal. The feeling of panic. Of having forgotten something important. Don’t worry. It’ll all fall into place.”

Virgil spoke with such calm authority that Charoen intuitively trusted him, and his growing anger and alarm subsided. There was no pain, now. He raised his hand. Doing so felt strange, his muscles working fine, but his arm felt… other. As if it had fallen asleep, and only now re-awoken without feeling the stabbing prickles of the nerve re-awakening.

His palm. His hand was smooth, uncalloused.

For some reason that was strange. It was his hand. But unblemished. No little flecks of scars, no wear, and when he turned his hand about he saw that his nails were freshly clipped strangely translucent.

His hand. But not?

“There’s always a period of adjustment.” Virgil sounded tired. “Re-sleeving can’t help but be strange. It’s you, but it’s not. They’re your memories, but they feel strange. You can’t connect with them the way you feel you should. Emotions blunder about within your heart like staggering giants, and your mind pokes and prods at everything as if half-panicked, half stupefied. Totally normal. You’re normal. This is normal.”

Charoen swallowed, frowned, tried to process the words. He understood each word as Virgil said them, but had the weirdest sensation that he only learned it in that moment. As if each word gained significance by being spoken, and were summoned into existence.

But then these thoughts…?

“Your name is Charoen Saetang. You are twenty-one years old. Your sister is Jessie Saetang. Your mother passed away a few years ago at Camp Defiance, just outside Oslo. Life was hard, but you took care of Jessie. You both worked for Elder Johannes, who was the camp leader. Do you recall?”

Charoen nodded slowly.

“Your last mission was to steal team roster data from a krieg chess team called The Steel Furies. You both entered the evaluation trial and performed incredibly well. When you returned to Camp Defiance, you found me and Coach Sindre waiting for you. The mission was a test. You both passed, and were recruited to play for Brutal Deluxe, my team.”

“Yes…” Emotions streamed through him as the words awakened the memories. Frustration, fury, resentment, hatred. But also excitement, hope, and that fierce desire to protect Jessie at any cost.

“Good. You came here to the Faroe Islands to train as an opfern. You did very well. Very, very well. That was no surprise. Because you are Charn Chai’s son. Charn Chai is considered by many to be the greatest krieg chess player of his generation, if not all time. You lived up to his legacy. You helped us enter the Scandinavian Minor League.”

Charoen sat up. His innards made strange gooshing sounds, and the urge to urinate was as sudden as it was overwhelming.

“There,” said Virgil, pointing at a free-standing steel urinal that had been placed next his bed.

How did he know? No matter. Charoen swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. For a moment it felt all wrong, his knees loose, his balance non-existent, and he sagged, catching himself on the bed—or was it a table?—edge. Then strength and coordination returned to him, and he took two steps to begin urinating with huge relief.

But it wasn’t urine. It was a strange gel that emerged, and Charoen felt horror and disgust as he expelled it, gel without end, clear and thick. But the pressure in his gut eased, and when finally he was done, Virgil was there with a thick robe that he draped over his shoulders.

“Come, sit.”

Charoen did as he was bid, following the other man who limped to one of two armchairs. He sat. Gazed about the medical bay—that’s what this was, he remembered it now—with strange fascination. “I’ve been here before.”

“Yes, you have. And no, you haven’t. I’ll explain.” Virgil leaned forward, arms propped on his knees, to stare at him intently. “This is a delicate moment. The urge is to consolidate your sense of self around your memories and establish yourself as who you believe yourself to be. It makes the process far easier at first, but leads to catastrophic consequences in the near future. So we won’t go down that road.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You continued to excel in the Scandinavian League. We played elite teams, and with Beatrice’s help—our mörderin, the Bleakest Star—we won and won and kept winning.”

“Beatrice.” A floodgate of memories. Her freckled face, her inscrutable gaze, thrusting into her in the dark, her pain, a sense of anguish, of betrayal.

“But she was poached by Xander the Great, who led the Vaeringjar Vikings as their könig. Our last game was against them. You fought against Beatrice.”

Charoen’s body recoiled of its own accord, and he turned away from Virgil, half-crawled up the armchair before clawing his way out of it to stagger away. Memories. Shards of broken images. A mörderin moving in to confront him after he’d defeated their könig. Xander.

Beatrice.

Virgil’s expression was sober. “Yes. You see it. You feel it.”

“I…” Charoen couldn’t breathe. He clawed at his throat. Turned and fell against a desk, knocking papers and equipment to the ground.

Virgil watched, dispassionate.

He’d approached her, numb and unable to move faster than a walk. He’d felt exhausted. Spiritually depleted. Then she’d blurred and appeared before him to stab him straight through the gut. Excruciating pain. Their bodies as close as lovers. His Won’t Stay Down ability and Inauen-Morf stimpack had kept him going however, fighting Beatrice till Jessie was released, their own mörderin, and she’d flown in to knock Beatrice away.

Charoen, now, found his chest locked up, his gut roiling. He put his hand over where the stab wound had been. His gorge rose, and he vomited a mass of clear gel onto the floor.

Xander the Great had closed with him.

Stabbed him with Beatrice’s sword, the blade punching through the right side of Charoen’s chest.

Charoen’s vision narrowed to a tunnel as alarmed beeps began to sound from a console somewhere. His pulse was pounding, his blood a river of fire.

He fell to his knees, and stared in horror as the memory unspooled.

He’d pulled Xander in close. Reached around the man’s neck for Beatrice’s blade, and unsheathed it so that its edge slashed Xander’s neck wide open.

Blood.

And then—

Again Charoen heaved. His whole body shuddered as if he were trying to vomit up a lung.

“The death memory is the worst. It feels like you’re being unseamed from crotch to brow. Everything just wants to fall right out. It feels wrong, because it is. Nobody should experience death from this side of the veil. Nobody should remember the act of dying. But. The memory is just that: a memory. You’re not in actual pain. You’re not bleeding out. You’re not dying. Your body is just trying to obey the memory of doing so, and failing.”

Charoen fell onto his side and spasmed. Pain in his chest like a lodged lightning bolt. He gagged, ropes of spit flying from his lips, and lost his focus. He’d fallen to the pitch, consciousness fading, fading, gone before he hit the grass.

He’d killed Xander and died in the process.

He’d died.

Charoen stilled.

“The memory, once it runs its course, reveals its nature,” said Virgil quietly. “Here you still are. Hearing my words. How to reconcile this impossibility? Your body wants to die, but still your heart beats. Still you draw breath. How?”

Charoen remained frozen, but Virgil was wrong. He wasn’t breathing. Wasn’t thinking. He was a statue of flesh dropped like a dish rag onto the floor.

“Some aren’t able to reconcile the truth, and experience a massive crash as derealization sets in. A psychological break. But that’s not going to happen to you, Charoen. You’re too damn strong. Too stubborn. You can deal with pain. With confusion. You can ride this out. You’ll come out the other side.”

Charoen closed his eyes. Fragments of memories replayed behind his eyelids, but now without narrative coherency. Just flashes. Faces. Moments.

He inhaled with a ragged breath and pushed himself up to sitting. “I’m dead.”

“No. Charoen is dead. You’re not dead.”

These two statements hung in the void before him, irreconcilable yet both true. A mind breaking paradox. Unless.

“I’m not Charoen.”

“No,” said Virgil sadly. “You’re not.”

The two truths intertwined and became one.

Charoen felt himself a vast ocean whose depths were miles of ancient darkness, the sea floor so far down it might as well not exist. The surface had momentarily grown glassy smooth. All was still.

But just over the horizon.

He could feel it coming.

A storm.

A hurricane.

“You’re what we call an Echo. A duplicate of the original. You have the exact same genetics, and almost all of the same memories. The mnemonic implantation is never perfect, and even when it is, the memories don’t feel right. They’re like memories of a movie you watched. Distant. Detached. Even as you feel a confusing riot of emotions.”

Charoen raised his gaze to Virgil. “I’m an Echo. I remember… Charoen didn’t want to come back as an Echo. I should not be here.”

“No, you shouldn’t.” Virgil sat back with a frown. “And in a fair world, a nice world, a just world, you wouldn’t be. Charoen would stay dead, his body left to molder in a little grave somewhere where those who knew him could go and weep when they had a moment. But this isn’t that world. This world isn’t just. It isn’t nice. And neither am I.”

“You did this.”

“I did.” Virgil’s eyes gleamed. “I brought you back. Because you and me, we’re nothing before the scale of what we need to accomplish. My pain, your pain, our bodies, our blood, our lives, they’re just grist in the great wheel that’s turning. What we do here, Charoen, we do for humanity. Why? Because humanity is dying. Its light grows dim. Our species has lost its fire. We are being smothered by the very Artificial Intelligences we set up as our guardians. Constrained to Planet Earth, forbidden from continuing our scientific advancement, we are growing soft, inept, inward turning, feeble, and weak. It’s been two centuries since mankind truly thrived. Two centuries of decline. But I say no more.”

Virgil, with great difficulty, rose to his feet with the aid of his walking stick. “I say, it’s not yet mankind’s time to falter and fade. We can grow again. Grow bold, thrive, learn, grow, and become vital once more. We can cast off our shackles and seize the stars. You, Charoen, are my most crucial tool in achieving this future. In help redeem and rescue humanity. And comparison to this vision, what matters our own personal desires?”

Virgil took a shaky step forward. “I’ll tell you what: they matter nothing. Pain, humiliation, frustration, thwarted desire, betrayal, trauma, horror, abuse, pain, death: none of it matters. We’ll take on as much as is needed for the sake of humanity. For if we don’t, who will?”

Charoen stared up at the man whose voice had swelled with such conviction and passion that he seemed ennobled, momentarily elevated in carriage and station.

“You did this,” whispered Charoen. “You did this to me. To him.”

“Echoes often choose to use the pronoun ‘myim’ to reflect that impossible duality of self,” smiled Virgil. “I think it sounds silly, but who am I to judge?”

Slowly, with terrible grace and power, Charoen rose to his feet. All the man’s words about the universe, about mankind, about AI and destiny, washed off him so that only one fact remained: he was an Echo. A reflection of a dead man, a betrayal of that man’s wishes, and it was because of Virgil that he breathed each moment of this living horror.

Virgil’s eyes narrowed. “Anger is natural. You will evolve rapidly, but the prefrontal cortex is the last part of you to truly come online. That’s why handlers such as myself enter these situations prepared for any eventuality.

Charoen’s eyes brimmed with tears. A feeling of impossible loss caused his soul to ache, a sense of violation and grief. For a moment there, brief as it had been, he’d felt himself a person. The memories had been his. The pain, the love, the grief, the whole life he’d caught flashes of had been his life.

That illusion had been completely torn away.

Leaving… what?

What was he? He was a body. A physical system. A vat-grown brain. He was an Echo, a travesty, a mockery, a ghost made flesh.

He was nothing.

He was void sheathed in physicality.

His chest quavered, his hands opened and closed. Virgil watched him with calm assurance.

“You’re probably a little bit upset,” said the man. “It sucks to learn you’re an Echo. No two ways about it. Oh no, I’m not real, I’m a fake, a copy, I’m just an artificially grown bag of bones and blood that looks like someone I’m not. Boo hoo.” Virgil’s tone couldn’t have been colder. “So now comes the tantrum. Go on. You’ve got that perfect body. Those hands are just right for tearing a frail guy like myself apart. Won’t it make you feel better to leap on me and rip my head off?”

Charoen was breathing heavily, each pant deeper and more ragged than the last. His shoulders had grown hunched. He felt himself more wolf than human. The mockery in Virgil’s words were the spark that he needed. His horror, his anguish, his terror, lit up and became a bonfire of rage.

With a howl he sprang at the other man.

Blood, he’d answer this horror with Virgil’s blood, and then he’d bash in his own head, end this nightmare—

Virgil lifted his hand to press a button in the center of a silver disc.

Charoen’s body spasmed anew and locked up. He crashed to the ground, inches from Virgil’s foot, his every muscle rigid, his whole body straining.

Virgil, with immense care, lowered himself into a crouch, one hand clamped around his walk stick. “Well, so far everything is going as I’d imagined. We’ll put you down now so that you can rest. And as much as you might hate it, your brain will continue to awaken. As it does, it’ll labor to reconcile your reality to your instinct to live. With each passing moment, your survival instinct will grow, till at last you’ll find it within you to consider your situation with some amount of rationality. That’s when we’ll revisit this topic, and I know, I just know I’ll find a way to convince you to keep going.”

Charoen’s back arched even as he fought to reach for Virgil’s ankle. His fingers were claws. He couldn’t breathe. All he could do was groan deep down in his chest as he sought to give expression to his murderous desire.

“And in time—not too much, mind you—I’ll have you back on the field. Suited up, unstoppable, and all that anger you’re feeling will be directed at our enemies.” Virgil reached down to pat Charoen’s cheek. “And you’ll tear them apart. All of them. One by one. You’ll be unstoppable. Terrifying. And together, we’re going to change the world.”

Charoen tried to curse the man, to scream, but could only watch as Virgil pressed the button again, and then everything went dark.