Photosynthesis, perhaps THE most important chemical pathway on our planet. And yet from an engineering perspective, it is a failure. You heard what I said-an absolute and complete FAILURE! Four percent efficiency? Hell, Mother Nature worked on this grand creation for four billion years and this is her feeble offering? Surely we can do better.
Todget’s right eye was nearly swollen shut, and the gash on his neck was deep. Still, he did not stop to properly tend to it. Like always, the moment the fight was over, he took just enough time to get his money and then he got out. For tonight’s fight in the pits, Todget was paid more than five hundred thousand dollars. His opponent had paid with his life. Todget clutched the bag of filthy, crumpled thousand-dollar bills tightly. The money may be good, but my ritual is even better, he thought while walking home to his apartment.
It was his well-deserved unwinding time, and he could hardly wait for it to commence. First, he would remove the little white box from under his bed, take out the appropriate medical supplies, and then carefully and methodically rub his body with pungent healing ointment and wrap his wounds with antiseptic white gauze. The gauze was magic in its ability to seethe and slither its way into the wounds, bringing welcome relief to the localized pains. Next, he would take a shower to wash away the filth of both the human’s and his own rage. The shower would be extra hot, and while standing in the stream of scalding water, he might even smile. Finally, naked and sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, surrounded by darkness, he would let his muscles and mind relax.
Todget let himself dwell on such things, which is probably why he did not notice the female human standing suspiciously close to his door, looking like a stranger to these parts. Glowering out from under his heavy hood, he recognized the woman. She was the one who had knocked on his door hours ago, before he had left for the pits. He had not answered the door. By Stag, what is she about? he wondered. It was too late to turn back, for if he did so it would appear odd and he would draw attention to himself. Instead, he decided to walk right past her and his apartment and return later when she was not lurking about.
“Greetings,” the woman exclaimed as he passed by. She bowed her head slightly while turning her face upward so that her emerald green eyes could remain fixed on him. She showed him a big, gleaming smile. Such white teeth, so straight, Todget thought. Teeth always reminded him of what these humans really were-just a skull with a little softness around it. That’s how he thought of humans every time he went into the pits with one to punch, kick, and tear at it.
A hairy muskrat of a thing slinked about the mysterious woman’s calf. Its eyes turned up at him in an unblinking stare. It is a machine, Todget thought. He did not like these constructs, for it was difficult enough to trust the living, who at least had some common ground with one another. What would compel any living creature to want to make such monsters?
The woman’s lips parted slightly as though about to utter something, but she did not. She simply smiled again and then began walking down the hall past him. Todget did not return her smile. Rather, he hung his face down, watching only the floor as he walked unhurriedly away down the corridor in the opposite direction.
She’s not in the pretend place. She actually looked at me. He had felt naked under that stare. Although she was merely a feeble human female, there was something confident, even powerful about how she carried herself.
A good fifteen minutes passed before Todget felt it safe enough to return to his door. Looking around, he did not notice the tiny points of eyes belonging to the ferret peering at him from around the bend of another hall as he waved his card past the key panel. Todget was one of the few in the mounds to have a lock that could be opened with an actual key card. It cost extra for a lock of this type; instead, most residents preferred to have a microchip embedded in them that proved their identity when approaching their dwelling. Todget would not abide anyone injecting machines into him. To him, the key card lock was well worth the money.
Having been slain by a hellhound and forcefully ejected from NeverWorld, his entire gaming account had been locked down. It would be nearly a half hour before D_Light could re-spawn and continue his search for private doors in the spanker ghetto. And so, after notifying the rest of the team of this setback, he sighed deeply and mouthed a silent prayer, asking that they find the demon fast. The sooner they found it, the more bonus points they got. That is, if they found it at all.
He then leaned against a poplar tree, its paper-thin leaves rustling enthusiastically under the moderate night breeze. There was no light, save the moon, which cast soft shadows upon the scene below. He was standing on the top of an apartment mound. Thick, dewy grass blanketed the dro-vine beneath him. Stationing himself at the top of this taller-than-average mound enabled him to get a better look around. From this vantage point, he hoped to get an idea of how much was left to search.
Smorgeous informed him that it was nearly dawn. Any minute the eastern sky would begin to glow as the rising sun began her ascent. D_Light’s view of the surrounding land was hindered by other tall mounds in the distance and by tall, woody-stalked flowers that surrounded him. D_Light pushed aside a few of the more ambitious flower stalks that had managed to grow up to his eye level. The stems bent gently, but they did not break-breaking them would actually take some effort. They had been engineered to be pliant but tough, a good design for wafer-thin plants in a place where people held little regard for designated trails. Soon, when the sun broke, these beautiful and patient marvels of industry would get to work converting the sun’s rays into energy-energy to be used by the mound beneath. The strong, fibrous texture of the dro-vine mound contained just enough elasticity to give him the sensation of walking on an exceptionally tight trampoline.
It was quiet at this time of the morning. A few hard-core spankers sprinkled the streets here and there, but for the most part, the place had cleared out. However, as soon as the sun came up there would be more of them to be sure-the morning players, the responsible ones who tried to get in a little spank before they reluctantly grinded for an hour or two to get a bare ration of points. They would then take the rest of the day, as well as night, to spank some more. D_Light knew the drill, intimately.
Years ago, D_Light himself had been hard-core, the hardest of the hard-core, in fact. He used to engage in a lifestyle called “ramboing,” a term that meant he lived entirely off the land. Not that ramboing was that big of a deal, as many spankers did it at one time or another. Finding free lodging was easy. There were tons of wild dro-vine burrows in between the official housing tracts. The stuff grew anywhere, and it spread tenaciously. If you could find a bit of abandoned land, chances were you had somewhere to stay. And dro-vine did more than just shield you from rain and the morning dew. It actually regulated its own internal temperature and humidity, which made for quite a cozy dwelling. Nevertheless, living in abandoned dro-vine burrows meant that you had to go without a few things. For one thing, you had no electricity, no lights, no wiring of any kind. However, this was of little concern. You could just jack into SkinWare to be able to see, and your familiar or onboard computer could provide trivial entertainment, like music and video. D_Light rarely used electricity at home, except to recharge Smorgeous.
What was more of a hassle than lack of electricity was no running water. Luckily, bathing was not a high priority to most ramboes. And when it came time to relieve yourself, you could do that outside, or if you were lucky and had an extra dro-vine chamber in your hovel, you could just do it there; after all, although dro-vine was efficient at extracting nitrogen from the air, it did not mind the extra fertilizer.
For a rambo, the acquisition of food in the wild was even easier than the acquisition of shelter. Everywhere you went there were trees and flowers engineered for the sole purpose of creating nectar, the most ubiquitous source of energy on earth. People, products, most machines, and many plants, including dro-vine, could eat the sticky, honey-viscous liquid. And nectar came in many flavors, all of them tasty enough to impress even a distinguishing palate, at least for a while.
Indeed, ramboes did not have to sweat the basics, and they did not have to beg anyone for anything either. The real downer of living off the land was the loss of drugs, and not just the performance enhancers that helped you sicken your game. Worse than that was the eventual revocation of your health contract. The health contract was one of the main costs any player-spankers and grinders alike-had to bear. You could always tell which gamers had been ramboing for a while because they were the ones who were starting to show their age, having gone off contract. Not much at first, maybe just some bags under the eyes and a few laugh lines. But little lines would soon become deep ones, laugh lines would become permanent creases, and the next thing you knew, you just started to look like shit in general. D_Light remembered how one guy he used to rambo with had even developed a few specks of gray in his hair. That served as a wake-up call for D_Light, who knew he was headed down the same destructive path. It was then that he knew it was time to turn back to the OverSoul, back on the road to salvation, an undertaking that was both a great relief and a painful loss.
D_Light peered down on the soft rolling hills, trees, and trails below. He imagined what it would be like to have to depend on artificial light to see in the dark, as was the case generations ago. He had played spank games set in post-industrial era times. These games strove for authenticity, so he felt he knew the old-time night city well enough-the countless eyes of car headlights snaking along the freeway, the R-shaped streetlights, the illuminated curtains of countless windows of synthetic shelled apartment buildings and the distant light patterns of partially lit skyscrapers and high-rises. Most of these unsightly artifacts of the past had since been removed or overgrown by dro-vine.
D_Light was grateful to be living in a day and age when artificial lights were unnecessary, when you could just patch into a skin to navigate in the dark without spraying photons everywhere-wasting them. He was grateful to be living in the age of nanosites, the technology that made this possible.
Indeed, nanosites were the only thing more ubiquitous on earth than dro-vine. They were far too small to be seen with the naked eye, but they were everywhere. Although these simple bots had limited capabilities, what they could do they did extremely well. Nanosites coated everything on the planet-every plant, every rock, every wall, every surface of everything. They climbed onto animals and people and then embedded themselves in the living tissue. As they travelled, looking for a place to plant themselves, they would listen to the tiny, short-range signals that emanated from brethren. Once they found a spot that was neither too close nor too far from others of their kind, they would plop down and stick to the surface on whatever object they had chosen. Once they had found a permanent home, they would send out their own “I am here” signal over and over until their energy source finally exhausted itself.
Nanosites spontaneously formed a regular pattern whereby every nanosite was exactly 0.694 millimeters apart from one another. Although this spacing might seem miniscule to a person, it is like an ocean of distance to a nanosite, which consists of a mere few thousand molecules itself. Together, their intensive global coverage and their talent for announcing their existence created a three-dimensional map of the world that software could easily understand. And they did this with greater precision than any satellite. More importantly, they marked moving objects in real time, whether outdoors or inside.
Hence, there was no need for artificial light at night in this contemporary world. The tiny, invisible chips implanted in D_Light’s eyes when he had his mind interface kit installed could “see” the nanosites and rendered for D_Light a perfectly accurate representation of his world in total darkness.
And it wasn’t just the ability to see, but also the ability to hear. By focusing his attention on a location covered with nanosites, it was likely that there would be some audio output there along with the visual. Even now, as D_Light scanned the vista below him, he heard a male’s voice calling, “Fighter needed. Join the Orc Slayers. Preferably a tank.” There was an icon next to the message hot spot indicating to inquire within. As D_Light’s eyes roved to the right of that message, a video of an armor-clad party of heroes battling a small army of nasties popped up, which arrested his eyes for a moment. This pause encouraged the pop-up to zoom in so that D_Light had the opportunity to see the action up close. This message was just a brag, a spanker willing to spend a few paltry points to display his proudest moments over his doorstep.
Messages like this, ones aimed at other spankers, had been barraging him whenever he was skinning, and since he was not there to spank, it was getting more than mildly irritating. It fact, it had become downright overwhelming, and he felt a slight headache coming on. Jacking out of the SkinWare, he let the world go dark again, save the meager glow of the moon and surrounding stars. He then picked up Smorgeous and held the cat up above the flowers so he could get a good look around. Smorgeous had better sensory hardware onboard than D_Light, and the familiar would not only be able to see everyone in sight, but he would also be able to get a good image of them for the purpose of grokking.
No longer using SkinWare, D_Light was now “realing,” meaning that now he saw only what his natural eyes could see, a meager vista of shadow and silver provided by the moon and stars. This was a little unsettling, but he fought his urge to immediately jack back in. Is this how the demon sees this place? he wondered. Demons typically did not have mind interface chips and therefore would not be able to jack into SkinWare. Maybe seeing the world like the demon did would yield a clue.
After a minute of staring down the mound at the gloomy landscape below, he shook his head and sighed. How depressing, he thought. He wondered how people years ago could stand such bland and colorless monotony. Just plants, rocks, and dirt. Can’t even see those things clearly at night. What did they have to think about?
Master, I have detected the emotion you’ve in the past labeled “sad and pointless dwelling.” Would you like me to take countermeasures?
No, D_Light answered as he jacked back into the base skin. The view sprang to life again, and he felt the pit that had been forming in his stomach ease.
D_Light was tired. He had been grinding hard through the night, and the peps he had been taking were beginning to wear off. The very moment this thought occurred to him, Smorgeous offered to give him another bump, but D_Light declined. He had an overwhelming urge to sleep. Just a tiny nap, he told himself. It was as good a time as any to go unconscious since he had time to kill before he could re-spawn into NeverWorld. He ordered Smorgeous to awaken him in twenty minutes, just long enough to feel refreshed, but not so long as to fall into a deeper slumber. Leaning with his back to the poplar tree, he slumped down in a heavy heap. His eyes closed before he even hit the ground.
Master, awaken. You have slept exactly twenty minutes. The voice was soothing, and it was as though it was coming from his own mouth. A sharp but not quite painful ping echoed in his mind, bringing him to a fully awakened state. There was soft pink in his vision, and so he opened his eyes as slits. The sun had just begun creeping up from behind the mountains on the horizon, a sliver of fire that straddled the distant precipices as though it wished to consume them. The glow warmed his face ever so slightly.
He had been dreaming, as he always did, of sailing on Terralova on a brilliantly sunny day, the wind just perfect. D_Light always looked forward to sleep because his dreams were always relaxing-a welcome respite from the intensity of the Game. He very much wanted to just close his eyes again and let the sun’s warmth ease him back to that place. Maybe just for a few more minutes.
Master, you still have a quest to finish. Do not let your teammates down. As his familiar relayed these words in D_Light’s mind, he hated the machine and its ability to read his thoughts. However, the hatred began to subside and give way to mere irritation as the pep Smorgeous had just given him began to work its chemi magic. D_Light had not asked for the drug. It was the sort of thing that made Smorgeous worth all the points D_Light had spent buying and maintaining his on-sale, higher-end familiar. Smorgeous knew what his master needed, as opposed to what he wanted.
D_Light stood up slowly but did not take a step, instead allowing himself a minute for the fog and heaviness of sleep to lift. The shadows cast by the multitude of flowers around him were long and getting deeper as the sun continued its ascension. A few more spankers had filtered out while D_Light had slept. It was rare for D_Light to be around spankers while not jacked in himself. Watching the drones as they careened about, intent only on their game, reminded him of a horror spank game he once played, a game that featured zombies. The similarity was eerie and a bit unsettling. He found himself breathing as shallowly as possible so as not to attract their attention. Reminding himself that they were not, in fact, zombies, he took in a series of deep breaths and let them out slowly. His uneasiness, however, did not leave him, and so he pushed himself off of the tree he had been leaning against and turned around in a circle, surveying the area with a heavy dose of paranoia.
He spotted a woman only one tree away. Her face was tilted up toward the sunrise, and her eyes were shut-not pressed shut in concentration as one communing with her familiar, but merely to avert gazing directly into the sun. D_Light realized that he had not seen her earlier because the trunk of the tree on which he had been leaning obscured his view. He assumed that she could not see him behind her closed lids, so he did not hesitate to stare. She was beautiful, fair, and there was an innocence about her that D_Light found alluring. Her long, blond locks, illuminated by the sun’s early light, shimmered like corn silk, and they commenced to slow-dance with the flowers and poplar branches stirring in the morning’s gentle breezes. Entranced, D_Light could not take his eyes off the creature.
Master, as you have pointed out, a female in this male-dominated region is uncommon, and so I took the liberty of attempting to match her to an individual in the demon database. Result: no match found.
Still studying the mysterious woman, D_Light was about to ask Smorgeous to expand his search when the dutiful familiar informed him that he had already performed the task and had found no matches for anyone in the Cloud.
D_Light was perplexed. It was rare to come across a “nobody,” someone who had managed to remain completely anonymous to even the Cloud. Indeed, even a run-of-the-mill sideliner could usually be found somewhere in the Cloud. He scrutinized the woman again and quickly determined that she was no sideliner, as her face was entirely too perfect to be a descendant of a “native” bloodline. She must have had engineering in a recent ancestor-perhaps the last generation before human genetic engineering was banned.
He immediately thought that perhaps she was a concubine. That would explain why she was not found in the Cloud. In most cases, the owners of high-end concubines would spare no expense to scrub their property out of the Cloud or to give them fake identities. It added to their mystique. But something in his gut told him that that theory was incorrect, so he quickly discarded it. D_Light had rented his fair share of concubines, and this woman simply did not fit. First, the lines that framed her face were just a tad softer than they should be. For example, the Thesies line (a well-established concubine family that D_Light favored patronizing), although absolutely stunning, had defined, almost cruel lines which projected a nearly predatory look that declared, “I’m going to rock your world, little boy.” Of course, there was a variety of concubines to keep even the most jaded client interested, and this included more innocent-looking choices like this girl. However, D_Light had spent many hours over the years scouring catalogs and had never encountered one quite like this one. She must be custom built, he thought. She bore no visible product tats, but that was to be expected. Only the most ghetto rent-a-body products wore tats.
D_Light tilted his head and leaned further to one side in hopes of catching some clue as to the girl’s identity. He determined that while her looks did not completely rule out concubine, her body language certainly did. A high-end rent-a-body would not be caught dead carrying herself like this girl. Her back was arched like a bow, her arms hung loose and downward as though pulled by gravity with more force than the rest, and her face was turned upward into the light. In contrast, concubines always had a stock posture, which they vigilantly maintained-a tall and straight stance, chest lifted slightly, face tilted only a few degrees upward, and vacant eyes that were always fixed straight ahead. This was not so much a matter of training as it was instinct. Training cost resources and could be botched or unlearned, while DNA offered far better quality control.
She could be a human concubine, D_Light thought. They were much less common than their engineered counterparts, but they offered a uniqueness and spirit that their cloned competition could not. But what the hell is she wearing? She wore a long, black cloak that opened in the front to expose a cheap synthetic blouse with far too many flower imprints on it to be considered tasteful. No concubine, whether human or product, would wear that atrocity. Period. Still gawking at the hideous blouse/cloak combination, D_Light could make out a slender but athletic torso with somewhat larger than proportionate breasts. Clothes aside, this woman was striking-so striking that it had taken him far too long to notice the blouse.
A member of the Bergstrom family? Although typically not concubines, they were uniformly attractive, and most-for family branding reasons-had remained Northern European in their ancestry. They also happened to have a large house not fifteen miles from this location. D_Light furrowed his brow. The Bergstroms seemed unlikely. Again, that clothing! The Bergstroms were very socially conscious, and any family member who dressed like that would have been disowned without hesitation. Unless it’s some sort of hazing ritual, D_Light thought. Every family had its own entrance requirements for new player draftees. An interesting thought, but still not likely. The Bergstroms were devout and thus rarely idle; this woman was just standing there. Also, D_Light had never seen a Bergstrom without a familiar nearby.
It was all very mysterious, and D_Light felt frustration at the realization that despite all of his scrutinizing and hypothesizing, he was still no closer to an identity for this girl than when he first set eyes on her.
D_Light decided it was time to take a different approach. He thought it would be useful to initiate a conversation in order to gain some additional clues. He was then about to spout off some inane remark about the weather when he stopped himself. He had a better idea. Smorgeous, publish a new game challenge to my usual contacts. The challenge is to correctly guess this girl’s family. If no one gets it before she tells me, I win. Ante-in is a thousand points. Give ’em a real-time feed from me, but limit it to audio and visual only.
Smorgeous pinged confirmation, and D_Light leaned back against the tree and waited quietly. The girl remained still.
Yo, Dee, count me in! D_Light heard a familiar voice in his mind.
The generic game mediator followed this with, K_Slice has joined the game.
Easy points, Dee, K_Slice chimed in with a Taunticon™. I say there is no family. She’s a sideliner for sure. I mean, what the hell is she wearing?
I’m on this bitch, relayed another familiar voice.
TermaMix has joined the game, intoned the artificial game mediator.
Come on, K, you got no judge of character, declared a cocky TermaMix. Sideliner? That bitch is way too raw to be one of those crack hippies! She’s gotta be sellin’ all that lushness to the spankies. That cloak she’s wearing, whew! That’d turn them on for sure. TermaMix sent the blink and followed it up with a micro-archive of him doing a stupid, taunting dance that resembled running backward in the air.
The debate continued over the next few minutes as D_Light peeked around the tree at the woman in question. Additional players joined-C, Flava_God, Boo_Girl, Blitz, and Sugar_Papa. Players anted in and additional bets were made. When D_Light thought enough interest had accumulated and the pot was sweet enough, he decided it was time to break the ice. He pushed off from his tree and came out into the open.
“Is there something I can help you with?” she asked. The girl did not move, nor did she so much as open her eyes.
D_Light was caught off guard, completely shocked and speechless. Soul knew for how long she had been aware of his surveillance of her. She must have a familiar nearby. Maybe she was a Bergstrom after all. If so, D_Light decided it was best to be direct, logical, and honest.
“Um, because you are beautiful, I prefer to look at you more than anything else currently available. I apologize for staring. I meant no disrespect. I, um, I didn’t think you would notice.” D_Light scrunched up his face and smacked himself lightly on the forehead for stammering and sounding like an idiot.
As he finished speaking, the girl’s eyes shot open and she turned her head to look at him, hard. Only her head moved. Her body remained slumped as though so content with its current position that it refused to obey its mistress. She seemed surprised, puzzled even.
Wow, creepy and stalker-like, Dee. Way to work it, K_Slice said over the game chat, finishing off the remark with a nOObicon™. D_Light put the chat on mute.
There was an awkward silence. Then, all at once, the wrinkle in her brow dissolved and her lips relaxed, although she did not smile. Her body straightened, and she took a slow step toward D_Light. The dawn’s light colored her face pinkish, and her skin glowed. Now that she was fully facing him and a touch closer, he could see her with greater clarity. Yes, her features were indeed soft. Soft, but not weak, like a torch’s flame that gently flickered to entrance an onlooker-just before burning him.
“So I’m about the best thing around here, huh?” The woman casually stretched out her languid arms and swept them about, looking back at him pointedly with large, unflinching blue eyes.
D_Light felt stupid now. That’s what I get for gawking, he thought. Oh well, e veryone comes off as a fool from time to time. Since he did not live here, chances were he would never see this woman again anyway. So why not play the idiot? He had nothing to lose and everything to gain, especially all those points floating around in the guessing game he was hosting. He noticed more bets were being placed. Apparently, the players were excited by this first exchange.
D_Light took a breath and nearly shouted, “Yeah, you are! I mean, don’t get me wrong, these are great!” He waved to one of the vacant-eyed zombies who stood several meters down the mound. The spanker to which he motioned was a man who was crouching down, apparently spying intently on an unseen menace.
A silken laugh suddenly erupted from the amused girl. “Fine then, you don’t look so bad either, I suppose, for a-” Her voice had been confident and smooth, but then she stopped suddenly like a sprinter at his finest hour rushing full into a stone wall. Just then her smile, a byproduct of laughter, vanished, and her nose crinkled. Her eyes flashed.
A moment passed, and then it was D_Light who was puzzled. “For a what?” D_Light leaned in inquisitively. He saw what could be a look of disgust on her face. He repeated the question. “Don’t leave me hanging. Not bad for a what?”
“Well, for a male, I meant to say. Your kind is not exactly what anyone would call beautiful.” She shook her head as if in mock sadness.
D_Light smiled. “Yes, we men are all angles and boxiness with little to interest the eye.” He gestured over the length of his body as though to say, “Have a good look.”
The girl nodded and puckered her lips with mock admiration. “Aesthetics aside, might I ask what you are doing out here? I saw you leaning against that tree and it inspired me. I thought, why not just stand here and take in the new sun?”
“Oh, I’m just waiting for some friends,” he replied.
“I’m here as much for the sounds as the view,” the girl said, looking into the horizon. “There was a storm a few mornings back. There’s nothing like the wind in your face and the rush of the leaves and the branches and the grass.” The poplar tree leaves rustled with a hiss as though in agreement.
Damn, D_Light thought. K_Slice was right. She’s gotta be a hippie sideliner.
Although not happy with the prospect of giving K_Slice the pot, it thrilled him to think that he was speaking to a sideliner. He had only met a few in his life.
“Yes, it’s nice-for a ghetto,” returned D_Light. Oh Soul, I’m being stupid again. She might live here, D_Light thought at the very moment the words left his mouth.
The girl seemed oblivious to his faux pas. “The flowers are especially appealing,” she said. “I hate it when those clods go off the paths, stomping about without a thought in their heads, crushing them underfoot like they’re nothing.”
D_Light nodded with feigned sympathy. “ Those clods, huh? So I take it you don’t play spank games?” D_Light grinned at her. He decided it was time to start fishing for clues regarding this girl’s identity. There was a game on, and he needed to keep up the players’ interest.
She shook her head.
“Um, you do know when those clods are jacked in they can’t actually see the flowers, right?”
She nodded, but D_Light detected a note of surprise crossing her face. “These guys can’t see you, me, or anything the way it actually is,” D_Light said offhandedly so as not to sound like a know-it-all.
The woman seemed to hesitate as she toed the dirt. “No, I don’t…um, I don’t do them. What are they like?”
Although muted, D_Light could see in the periphery a text from K_Slice. It read, She doesn’t “do” them? Is that some kind of throwback hipster-speak?
D_Light cleared his throat. “Well, a spank game works basically like any SkinWare app works. The game software keeps track of what is in the game and how everything behaves and, just as importantly, where everything is. So, like if I was jacked in, that tree would look different. Maybe it’d be a pillar from an ancient ruin or, I don’t know, a big ol’ lamppost. The tree’s still there, it’d just have a different skin.”
“And the flowers?” she asked. “What do they see those as?”
Since D_Light had been playing in NeverWorld among these very mounds for the last eight hours, he actually knew the answer. “Oh, they don’t see the flowers at all. The game is only obligated to show you stuff that can hurt you if you run into it.”
“So the flowers don’t make the cut,” she remarked with disappointment. “They don’t make the cut, so they don’t even exist.”
“You have the idea, yeah,” replied D_Light with a tone of encouragement. “Spankers can feel them a little bit, maybe even be tripped up when they’re running hard, but in general, they don’t pay them any mind. Spankers really are oblivious to this world.”
Enough lecturing the nOOb. When you gonna ask her how much? TermaMix texted.
The girl crossed her arms, drawing her cloak around her. She adopted a pensive look, as though seeing spankers with a whole new level of understanding.
“Allow me to demonstrate,” D_Light said. He enthusiastically started down the mound while waving for her to follow. She crinkled her brow suspiciously, but smiled faintly as she tentatively trailed behind.
D_Light got on his haunches not two feet from the crouching spanker he had pointed out earlier. He then spoke loudly at the crouching man, using a strange, unidentifiable accent. “I say, dear sir, do you have a fresh bowl of porridge?” The spanker did not move, but continued staring straight ahead. His body, however, tensed up.
D_Light stood up. “You see? They can barely hear you. That probably sounded to him like a faint echo.”
The girl chuckled softly. “Interesting,” she said quietly. She then walked over to D_Light and the crouching man, somewhat hesitantly as though approaching a beast caught in a trap. She waved her hands in front of his face. The man followed the movement and scowled, but he did not get out of his crouching position. Her eyes widened with surprise. “I thought they were blind to the outside world.”
“Not exactly blind,” D_Light whispered. “They see you as something, probably a ghost, um, but not a nasty or dangerous sort of ghost. If the game could cut you out completely it would, but-” D_Light interrupted himself with a chuckle. “I mean, just because you and he are in different audio and visual worlds does not change the hard fact that you share the same physical world. The game has to take that into account.”
The girl seemed intrigued, having the curiosity of a young child. “What about touch?” she asked.
“Oh, certainly. I don’t recommend-” D_Light was going to discourage any physical contact, but it was too late. The woman stuck her index finger into the ribs of the spanker. The man let out a grunt, and then his lips curled into a snarl as he swung his arm around hard. The young woman leaned back just outside of his swing. Nice reflexes, D_Light thought.
The man boomed, “Don’t make me come out there and beat you senseless, you bloody clod!” His eyes were fixed on the woman, and he crouched low, as though to pounce. The girl had already assumed a position, D_Light supposed a defensive one. Her knees were bent slightly, and her body was turned askew so that she did not face him head-on. Instead, her left flank was turned half toward him while her left arm bent up like a shield. He stepped forward and threw a punch hard and straight. She moved swiftly to one side while her left arm swept away his blow. He hit nothing. Although his punch left him wide open, she did not counterstrike; rather, she stepped back a pace and resumed her defensive position. She did not appear afraid or angry, merely curious.
The spanker looked like he was about to yell at her again when he stopped cold. He looked over his shoulder for an instant and then ran off-sprinted, as though the devil himself was chasing him.
D_Light’s eyes met those of the confused girl, and he grinned while biting his lip. “As I was trying to tell you, yes, they can feel just the same when in the spanker game as when outside of it. Oh, and as I imagine you now know, they don’t much like being messed with. It’s considered very impolite.”
The woman relaxed her posture as she watched the spanker go. “Crazy, all this!” She let out a short, nervous laugh. She paused, her bottom lip transforming into a pout. “I feel bad for him. I am sorry I bothered him. Still, how interesting, how sad.”
“Sad? How do you mean?” D_Light inquired.
“I mean, why would someone choose to blind himself to this world? To move around like someone-I don’t know, like someone who is…”
“Perfectly insane?” D_Light interrupted with a laugh.
“Don’t pity them. Spanker games are designed to be fantastic! I play them myself. However, unlike the plebs who haunt this place, I try to control my appetite.”
She looked over at him. D_Light hoped that it would be a look of affection, trust, warmth, or some other positive sentiment, but her expression did not contain any of those things. Rather, she appeared as she had while observing the spanker. She looked like an adult who was discovering something with new, childlike eyes, or perhaps like a young scientist who was hot on the trail of a new and exciting discovery.
D_Light lowered his gaze and kicked at a rock near his shoe. “Well,” he muttered self-consciously, “if you’re going to hang out among spankers, you might consider trying one anyway.”
“Hmm, yes, I expect the experience would be worthwhile, but I don’t know…Going around trusting this, this software? I wouldn’t want anyone messing with me.” She giggled uncomfortably.
“Yeah, unfortunately, spanklets-er, spanklets being the name for girls, I mean women-they get groped all the time. The guys usually get away with it ’cause the spanklets can’t ID the guy unless they jack out of the game, and by then the guy is gone.”
“Groped?” The woman looked at him with an amused smile.
“Forget it,” replied D_Light. “Okay then, so you’re obviously not a spanker. So how does a lovely creature like you spend your time?”
A text from player Blitz came into D_Light’s periphery. ’ Bout time. Need more info on this girl to get a lock. This was followed by a text from K_Slice that read, Yeah, Dee, you’re bleeding this out. Wrap it up, nOOb!
The girl adopted a soft, warm smile and answered, “Most nights I work at the university, but not tonight. I’m just taking a walk.”
D_Light was about to ask what “taking a walk” was when a priority-one blink from Mother Lyra barged into his mind. We have confirmation on his apartment!
Djoser chimed in. Got it. That’s it then. I’ll call it in!
No need, I called it in a few minutes back, Lyra replied.
A little late saying so, don’t you think? Djoser inquired. Holding out on us?
Thought it prudent, Lyra returned. I didn’t want you all jumping up and down for joy, tipping off our friend. As they say, it ain’t over ’til it’s over.
As the two nobles volleyed back and forth, D_Light thought, The demon located? Nailed the first quest!
Lyra had sent the coordinates of the demon’s apartment, which indicated that it was located in the mound directly across from D_Light, less than one hundred meters away. It would not be long now. An angel would have been dispatched quickly. He had never seen an angel in action. Of course, he would want to keep his distance nonetheless.
Due to all the blinks going off in his head, D_Light had been quiet for a while and had momentarily forgotten about the girl, who appeared to take the silence as a hint. She sighed. “Well, it’s late. I think I ought to get going.”
Presently, D_Light returned his attention back to the girl and said, “Oh, you’re going to want to stick around. You’re about to see something you don’t see every day.”
She looked at him quizzically.
“Ever seen an angel?” he asked.
“Uh, no. I…I don’t understand what you mean. Is this about the game thing? I don’t believe-”
D_Light interrupted. “No, not a game. Angels are the highest agents of the Divine Authority.”
The woman smiled and nodded and took a few shuffling steps backward. She appeared slightly uneasy. “That sounds interesting, but I’m, well, I’m late.”
D_Light persisted. “You know, the Divine Authority, the OverSoul?” Where did this woman come from? D_Light wondered. Having to explain spanker games was odd enough, but the OverSoul? It was like being ignorant of gravity.
Indeed, the girl did not explicitly say that she didn’t understand what he was talking about, but D_Light could tell when someone was trying to fake it-someone trying to pass as knowledgeable, but not having a clue. A faker always had a dismissive look mixed with a little fear that screamed out, “Sure, sure, let’s just move on to another subject.” He saw that look a lot in his profession (who didn’t?)-people trying to wing it. Doesn’t know the OverSoul? Was she from one of the outer colonies?
“Look, there is a demon in that building there,” D_Light announced bluntly, pointing down at the mound below.
The girl’s eyes widened and the color in her face drained instantly. Judging by her reaction, D_Light surmised that she did know the definition of a demon.
D_Light quickly added, “Don’t worry. The angels are on their way. They will take care of him.”
The girl looked away from D_Light, her body tense. “Todget! Todget! Run!” she screamed.