Continue Online (Part 3, Realities) (63 page)

Jeeves was dead. Treasure had followed rapidly. Dusk had been killed in this game. Xin's chance at resurrection vanished. Every crushing failure piled together resulted in one irrefutable fact. I was capable of murder when pushed this far. Virtual or not, Commander Queenshand had been alive.

Xin had faith that I wasn't a killer, and this just violated it. I knelt on the ground and tried to hold myself together. No sound existed beyond the lightning crackling overhead. Frozen rain formed an endless cloud up above. Pieces of my companions littered the area.

My head jerked upwards quickly. We were in a digital world. This was all virtual and generated by artificial intelligences. We were inside the ARC, but that didn't matter. This mess needed to be fixed. Successive failures on so many counts could be undone, maybe. I had to hope.

This last message came from my slightly older twin sister. She was worried, but my mind was elsewhere. I rapidly paced through twists and turns of my recent experiences, evaluated the choices made since coming to Advance Online. Each moment was turned over and compared. Five minutes, ten, maybe more time passed as I sat there at the heart of a dead world.

Events came together to form a large picture. The players I had encountered. The
[Mistborn]
. Eggman and his Continue Online counterpart, KeylessLock. Delivering a message to the ogre version of Auntie Backstab. The army following Shazam. My own autopilot among them. Dusk. Jeeves. Starting on the
[Wayfarer Seven]
.

There were too many puzzle pieces for a human hand. Multiple occurrences pointed to more than simple coincidence. A final fact slid into position. All of this started with letters from my
[Messenger's Tube]
. There was only one set of beings in existence that might be able to manipulate so many variables to reach this point.

Among all my self-reflection revelations was one more emotion. Anger. I was so god damned angry with the Voices. To them, my struggles were a test, a challenge like William Carver and Requiem Mass had been.

"Activate NPC Conspiracy, username, Hermes." The words slipped out, and around me, everything changed.

Session Sixty Five – The Plea of Orpheus

The world inside my ARC had changed. Rocky cliffs and purple lightning clouds up above had faded. A ruined landscape made of my companions' and enemy's bodies vanished. The gray space of
[Mechanoid]
afterlife sat there waiting.

"Awaiting input," the ARC said in its calm feminine tone.

I didn't know how to proceed. There wasn't a box to start screaming at. My
[Mechanoid]
body had faded only to be replaced by the virtual Grant avatar. It felt slightly slimmer and full of more energy than the version of me before Continue Online.

"The Voices!" I shouted up at my ARC. My body literally lay inside an ARC bed, my mind within the ARC machine, but for some reason, the presence always seemed to exist above me.

"Please provide further detail for your request."

"I want to speak to all the Voices!" Picking a specific Voice didn't matter. They were all in on this together. There was no way that one of them would sneak around and start a plot without the others being involved.

The room abruptly tore in two, as if paper were being ripped endlessly. My body spun as if an old fashion dryer were trying to wring me out. Hands went out to each side in an effort to find stability. Though the horizon flipped end over end wildly my feet stayed firm.

My eyes drifted to one side of the room. Once again I sat oddly between virtual realities. Decorating each side was a backdrop adorned with an old heraldic shield.

The clear blackened space of Continue Online's world was given a man's outline, in his hands, a giant sword pointed down into the ground. The
[Mechanoid]
gray afterlife sat on the left. Its symbol was a large metal man pointing a Gatling gun toward foes unseen.

These two pictures on either side of the room resembled my characters between the two games. My feet sat pinned in both worlds. Straddling the same border I stood in was an ARC. It felt still, almost like the body inside were dead. I half expected roses to be littered against the bedside in tribute.

A being appeared in the blackness of Continue Online's half. First the Cheshire's grin, then a motley pattern of clothes. Last was the hat, split into ends with bells hanging off. My least favorite Voice had answered the call first.

"What's here? The portrait of a blinking idiot!" the Voice clacked at me. Its words sounded neither male or female, but rather like a doll being wound up. No teeth or eyes lay beneath the mask, only a grin, and deep sunken eyes.

"Where are the others?"

"A blinking idiot who can't even use his gifts correctly. Do you not remember the words, dear Hermes? Is yon vessel the real world?" the Jester asked. One slender hand pointed toward the ARC sitting ten feet away.

"Isn't it?" I snapped at the Jester. For once the creature's mocking presence didn't upset me. Irritation and fresh anger overrode all prudence.

"Do you think me a fool? I am not a monkey here merely to answer your tantrum demands," the Voice said.

"It's about time I got answers."

Both the creature's hands went up. Jingles accompanied the movement. The Jester's face turned and an elongated nose stuck out comically. It said, "Then look to the East."

James, a heavyset black man who served as my personal Voice, faded in near the ARC. He stared down at the figure inside and smiled in my direction. There was a twitch of one cheek that hinted at amusement.

"Two realities, both alike in dignity, in your fair ARC where we lay our scene," James said with a hand up in the air. He held back a chuckle that threatened to make his belly quake. "From petty desire break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean."

I blinked a few times trying to understand what James was saying. This made no sense, and it wasn't how my usage of this ability was meant to go. It sounded like they were both quoting plays at me like Jeeves had just moments before being punched clean through.

Dammit. Jeeves had died for me because I couldn't move fast enough in a giant metal body. Commander Queenshand could have easily killed me instead with that kind of power, but she chose to pick off all the weaker party members.

"James!" I shouted at him and tried to move. Neither foot responded, instead I felt frozen, stuck with a leg standing in the gray and the black. "What's going on!?"

"All the world's a game, and the humans merely players; they log on in, and they log on out, and one man in his time plays many characters," James spoke and waved his arms around in emphasis.

"Why do all this?!" my yell echoed across the landscape. It felt like there were two, maybe three of me shouting. The ARC's feedback made my head spin. Their acting and words were throwing me off.

"Witless fool. Did you think you were the only actor upon this stage?" The Jester clacked with laughter. Its form wandered through the dark half.

"Oh, happy dagger!" The Temptress suddenly appeared. Reddened curves teased from the Continue Online side. She was close, breathing hotly upon my neck. Her quick and playful growl sent shivers down my spine. "I've got thy sheath."

My head shook rapidly and her voice pouted. There was a hint of an
[Instant Gratification]
quest box popping up that faded promptly. I could see a slightly flirtatious smile as the naked woman disappeared. The Jester cackled a fresh round of amusement at us, visibly it was gone, but the Voices always watched from inside the darkness.

"Your companion's enjoyment of Hamlet has us inspired, Hermes," James stated as he approached. "Mezo had originally asked for an entirely different play, but we reminded her that last time she was turned down."

"I don't think this is what Shakespeare intended," I said. Mezo's idea probably wasn't what Shakespeare intended either.

"It seemed fitting enough to me. Cross Star'd lovers," James said a cherubic smile across his lips. "For did you not cross stars for love?"

That one phrase reminded me why I was so angry. This song and dance the Voices had assaulted me with proved a distraction from the original issue. Jeeves, Treasure, Dusk, their passing. The
[Mistborn]
falling into other people's hands. All of it aggravated me.

"And failed, because you set me up from the start." I wanted to point a finger at James, but my body moved slowly.

The black man shook his head and asked, "Why would we do such a thing?"

There were a lot of facts that came to mind. I was given a title
[Messenger of the Voices]
in Continue Online. They offered this
[NPC Conspiracy]
ability. Not just the real world variant I had used, but one that gave me abilities in Continue Online. Being overly invested in me playing and performing all these tests made no sense when I tried to reconcile it all in my head. Or rather, it made sense when I thought about it from a certain angle, but that idea felt so dangerous to consider that I couldn't even think about it.

Anger clouded my judgment when it came time to act. Mezo, the Temptress, had clouded my senses and took time to shake off. I inhaled deeply, then again twice more. Relaxation techniques helped me back away from making further choices when overloaded by emotions. One question at a time, forward toward the destination, eventually I would run out of time on the
[NPC Conspiracy]
ability or get my desire of saving Jeeves and the others.

"That's exactly what I want to know!" I shouted. "And this play, it's Romeo and Juliet, right?" The Temptress, Mezo, had given me a rather firm reminder with the happy dagger line. That was the sentence Juliet used before stabbing herself. "Romeo and Juliette died at the end, are you hinting at something?"

I started to go down the very line of reasoning that had me worried. William Carver. Xin Yu, both were examples of deceased people within the game world. I had no desire to go run off a cliff just to join her on this side of reality.

"Ah yes. It is your turn for an answer. We would prefer if you didn't die, Hermes. Is that clear enough?" James asked.

"No." It didn't tell me anything about what they expected; only that dying was not desirable. There were a number of ways to read into the phrasing and my head hurt trying to get our conversation back on topic. I wanted to be angry but felt confused.

"Then, to answer your other question, you have grounds, more relative than this. The game's the thing, wherein we'll measure the conscience of a man," James said, distracting me with his babble.

"What sort of response is that?" I yelled. My efforts to throttle the large black man were met with failure. Both feet were still bolted to the ground.

"The best I can offer," he said, not at all phased by my outburst. I had forgotten how infuriating his smile could be.

"What good is this ability if I can't get a clear answer?"

"The fault, dear Hermes, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." James looked up briefly then back in my direction.

That sounded like an excuse. It was the same line I had delivered hundreds of times when working for Trillium. The policies and prices weren't mine to set. I only worked for the boss above me, they made the rules.

"Make no mistake, dear Hermes, you're an unwitting actor on our life's stage. Strut your brief hours upon the board, then out, out brief candle!" The Jester made a shooing motion in my direction. Bells jingled and the tips of its hat bounced around.

In the distance, other Voices faded in abruptly. Jean, the Voice of Blood and her liquid dress. Vlad and his intensely uncovered chest topped only by a bow tie. There were others, the teen in his leather jacket, a centaur who was disturbingly anatomically correct, both priests, the thick blonde doctor who watched over Lia Kingsley. Their faces came and went too fast for me to get a feeling for.

As their faces faded away, I understood what to do next. There was an NPC, an AI, who had everything to do with Continue Online, but wasn't inside the game. She, the bright light that flashed above all other Voices to settle their squabbles.

"I want to talk to Mother." My head nodded in time with the demand. One lip hurt from where I had bitten it. Virtual pain echoed into my mind.

"Dare you reach so high?" The Jester was uncomfortably close now. I could practically feel its long nose reaching across the distance to touch the side of my face. If I tried to look we would bump right into each other.

I turned anyway, feeling braver than ever before. The Jester's face gave its creepy smile, but we didn't actually touch. "I dare."

The figure faded away from me and reappeared ten feet away. One of the frilled hands waved back in my direction. "A dare made by an idiot, full of sound and fury, worth nothing."

"Don't you owe me something? Anything? Haven't I delivered your letters and done these quests?!" I yelled. At the very least they could consider my idea. Why weren't any of the Voices arguing in my favor? Even James appeared content on remaining passive when normally the figure was all about questions.