Unbound (43 page)

My remorse and resolution twine in our fear and my tears flow again. I tremble with effort. "Not yet a sorcerer, but I do mean to kill you, my heart--for that is what you are and a sorcerer needs no heart."

You strike at me as I draw close--close enough to touch you. But your stroke is no more mortal than the raking of the eagle's claws--you cannot kill me, for I do not bleed.

But you do, and I stab my knife into your throat.

We fall together as your blood flows over me, covering my skin, filling my mouth, blinding me. I lay your body on the tower roof and kneel beside you.

My guilt compels me to speak--if I could only leap through time until this were over I should hold my tongue, but, though I try, I cannot. You are my weakness, even as I feel you dying. "Once we were one, my heart, but I put you from me--all my better feeling, my mortality, and frailty. I cast you as a stone, far away. But perhaps I should have held something back, for such was your goodness and humanity that you sprang up again as a being more perfect and more pure than I, yet tied to me. My own beating, living heart, eternally mine. You plague me with your emotions, your desires, your love. I do not want them. They are my weakness. So today, heart of my heart, I shall murder you and be plagued no more with mortality or feeling."

You say nothing--what can you say, indeed, with your throat slit from side to side?

I plunge the knife into your chest and cut to draw forth the tiny sliver of stone as black as jet that is all that remains of the once-large heart I threw away. The greater perfection around it has grown to be you and this hard cinder is the one cold, hard thing within you--the one thing that ties me to you, still.

My breath steadies and I grow colder as you die, all feeling flowing from me like the blood from your body.

I draw the shimmering crystal from my pocket--the stone the owl brought to me--to bathe it in our blood. This will serve as my heart now. The stone has turned black but for a single brilliant star.

I hear a rustle of wings and look up, the two stones in my hands.

The eagle, the owl, and the bat assemble on the parapet as the last red light of sunset touches it. They watch me with cold eyes as the bond between us dissolves. . . .

Your life snuffs out like a candle, and the kernel of my heart crumbles between my fingers. I--too late--know I have been a fool, reached for immortality and the chill of power unleavened by emotion, and all that remains in me now is horror, swiftly fading.

The creatures watch me without feeling--the feeling that I endowed them with by my fancy and the empathy by which I bound them, now as dead as you are. What I saw as weakness was the sinew and fiber that binds resilience to power into true strength, and what remains without it is as brittle as ice. I have deceived myself to my own doom and slaughtered you for nothing.

The crystal in my other hand goes black . . .

Now they come for me, heart of my heart.

Michael J. Sullivan

Jeri Blainey’s blissful ignorance shattered before dawn on the morning of July 30th when the “Ride of the Valkyries” ringtone jolted her awake. She fumbled for the glowing iPhone, charging on the hotel room’s nightstand.

“Yeah? What? Who is this?” she asked, pressing the smooth glass to her cheek.

“What the hell did you do, Blainey?”

Even groggy and disoriented she recognized Brandon Meriwether’s voice. She sat up, wiped her eyes, and noted the clock’s red LED digits shining 5:04 in the dark. She managed the math . . . two o’clock in the morning in Oregon.

Why the hell is he calling at this hour?

The convention wouldn’t start for another five hours, her meeting with FiberNexSolutions wasn’t until eleven, and her presentation was at two. Any last-minute changes could wait.

“Mr. Meriwether?”

“Blainey, if this is an advertising stunt, you should have cleared it through Dickerson. Are you doing this, or is it someone on your team? People think it’s real. They’re freaking out. I want you to shut it down. Now!”

“I’m sorry. I . . . I honestly don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t give me that, Jeri. This is serious. Have you seen the news? This isn’t the 1930s, and you’re no Orson Welles. Publicity is all fine and good, but people can be pretty unforgiving about having their chains yanked so hard. And oh how they love to litigate! It’s practically an American pastime. Amnesty International already has more than 68,000 signatures on a petition at the White House’s page. I just dodged a call from there—the freaking
White House
, Jeri!”

“The
President
phoned—and you didn’t pick up?” Her fingers groped across the top of the nightstand. Finding the lamp, she switched it on.

“No, not
him
, some staffer. I need answers first. If a petition gets 100,000 signatures in thirty days, the White House
has
to respond. Did you know that? I looked the damn thing up!”

“Mr. Meriwether, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Are
you
running Troth?”

Troth? The
Realms of Rah
character? My god, is Brandon drunk?

“Troth? No. I was sleeping until you woke me.”

“Then who is? Ajit? Get him to stop. Shut the game down if you have to. But I want this nonsense to stop. Right now!”

“Mr. Meriwether, you’re not making any sense. No one on my team is in the game. We’ve been working sixteen-hour days the last five weeks. Everyone is exhausted. Maybe you should back up a bit and explain.”

A long silence followed. Jeri could hear him breathing—hard, heavy puffs.

Jeri stuffed a pillow behind her back and realized she needed to urinate.

“Troth is off the script,” he said, his tone deadpan serious.

Maybe this is a dream?

A software bug in a massive multiplayer role-playing game wasn’t cause for phone calls from the White House and petitions from Amnesty International.

“Troth?” she asked. “He’s the NPC that starts the Spectral Robe quest.”

“I guess.”

Jeri drew hair away from her face. “What do you mean he’s
off the script
?”

“Which word didn’t you understand?”

“Are you saying Troth isn’t giving out the quest anymore?”

Jeri couldn’t fathom how this could be a problem. The game always had glitches. If Meriwether had called to say the game was completely error free,
that
would be noteworthy. She couldn’t make any connection between the virtual world and the White House.

Unless terrorists are using the game as a meeting place to chat and plan.
She’d heard of that happening, rumors at least.
But what does that have to do with Troth?

“No, Jeri, he’s not giving out the quest anymore,” Meriwether said. “The last report spotted him in the Chimera Tavern in the Forest of Dim.”

She almost laughed. Being president of DysanSoft, Meriwether wasn’t a developer and didn’t know anything about the way things worked.

“That’s impossible. NPCs can’t—”

“And he’s been asking questions.”

Her desire to laugh died. “What do you mean he’s been
asking questions
? Asking who? Asking what?”

“Players. From the reports I’ve seen, he started by talking to other NPCs but gave that up because players have been more responsive.”

This was tripping well past bizarre, and Jeri doubted if even her unbridled subconscious could dream up this concoction. “What
kind
of questions?”

“Jeri . . . he asked, ‘
Is this a game?
’”

“No way.” Jeri switched on the phone’s speaker and dropped the device on the bed. Then she powered up her portable Wi-Fi hub and grabbed her laptop.

“I saw a YouTube video. Looked pretty authentic. I need answers, Jeri. You understand me?”

“Already booting my rig. I’m on it, and I’ll call you back.” She hung up. As bizarre as the conversation had been, one point was cause for real concern, and she was certain Meriwether had no idea what that was.

* * * * *

While Jeri waited for her computer to boot, she found the television remote, and the flat panel came on. Jeri typed her logon name and password, then rushed to the bathroom while the machine finished loading.

“. . . that would kill Troth, wouldn’t it?” a male voice from the television asked.

Troth! Holy shit! They’re talking about
Realms of Rah
on TV!

“That’s unclear,” another man responded.

“I think we should repeat that a lot is unclear at this point. DysanSoft has yet to make any statements other than to say they are looking into the situation,” said a third person, this time a woman.

Jeri didn’t recognize the voices, but it didn’t matter. Morning news shows were all the same: a bunch of men in suits and a blond woman in a skirt.

“It’s probably just some form of guerrilla marketing. Some gimmick to get free advertising. Well, I guess it worked, but it could end up backfiring. If your brand scares people, it becomes toxic. The creepy Burger King commercials lost the fast food giant market share,” added one of the men.

“Well I, for one, am plenty scared,” the woman said. “I’ve never cared for video games and don’t let my kids play them. They’re dangerous—they really are. How many Columbines do we need before people start realizing this? Millions of kids are being desensitized to violence, losing what little social skills they might have, and becoming psychopathic shut-ins. Am I right? I mean if Congress would have passed some legislation to regulate gaming, we wouldn’t be here. We have no idea what this
Troth guy
might start telling our kids. With all the hype, they’re bound to listen to him. This could be the start of some online cult, a way to mind-control our children!”

“Well, if it is a person or a corporation that’s doing the puppeteering, for whatever reason, that’s one thing,” one of the men interjected. “But let’s go back to the idea that it might be real.
That
changes everything. In a way it’s like discovering life on Mars, right?”

“I think it’s dangerous and should be turned off, unplugged, or whatever the heck they need to do to protect our children.” The woman again. Her voice grated.

There must be thousands of applicants for every opening on television. Why do they have to hire every reactionary, irritating moron with a teeth-drag-on-fork voice?

“But if it isn’t a hoax—and again I want to repeat for our viewers that nothing has been confirmed—let’s consider the possibilities. Artificial intelligence may have advanced to the point of achieving sentience, and Troth is—”

“What do you mean by
sentience
?” the woman asked.

Jeri cringed.
Are they paying her to act stupid?

“I mean
I
know what it means,” the woman said, and Jeri imagined she had gotten some rolled eyes from the others. “But I’m sure
someone
in our audience isn’t familiar with the term. It’s just not that common of a word, you know?”

“
Self-aware
,” someone else said. “Troth appears to be self-aware, the definition of intelligent life. That would mean he would have rights, including the right to exist. Turning off the server could be interpreted as murder.” This voice wasn’t as clear as the others, and Jeri guessed they had a specialist weighing in via satellite.

“Which brings us to the Amnesty International petition which now has over 325,000 signatures.”

Jesus, how long has this been going on? I only went to bed six hours ago!

“Which is just ridiculous,” the woman said. “I still think the person behind this is a pervert trying to lure our children away, or some cult leader. But even if Professor Hubert is right about this whole
awareness thing
, it doesn’t change the facts. This Troth character is not alive. He’s a bunch of electronic dots, or what do you call them? You know, pixies.”

Several people laughed.

“Pixies?”  Jeri said to the bathroom tile, which gleamed under the overhead light. “C’mon. “My grandmother is seventy, and even she knows computers aren’t made of fairies.”

“Pixels,” someone corrected.

“Whatever. As I said, I’m no expert on video games. I thought I established that.” Her tone was defensive. “But this Troth doesn’t even have a body, so how can he be alive?”

Any doubt that the woman was more than a talking head vanished. No journalist would tarnish her own industry this way, just as no priest would admit the Bible was on his to-read stack right under
Fifty Shades of Grey
.

“An amoeba is alive; a germ is alive, and they don’t have bodies—not like we do, at least.”

“But this Troth thing can’t exist outside of a computer.”

“And people can’t exist outside Earth’s atmosphere, either.”

“Of course they can!” the woman nearly shouted. “They’re called astronauts.”

“Astronauts aren’t existing outside the atmosphere, they bring it with them, contained in ships and suits. Troth could do the same thing. Just put a laptop running
Realms of Rah
on a spaceship.”

“But that’s not the same. Troth can’t build a spaceship and pilot it.”