They were exhausted when they arrived. Dionysios told Alexios to make himself at home, then started the fire in the hearth and heated some tea.
“It’s Seran cha,” he said. “Very rare and ahistorical!”
Dionysios’s small house consisted of one room, but it was the most modern living space Alexios had encountered in Romanía. Two couches made of wood (rather than stone) were pushed against the walls, while a low wooden table lay between them. Against the far wall was a higher table and two chairs, all of which looked hand-carved. The usual cooking instruments were hung along the wall by the hearth, but there were actual forks, as well as a sink with running water connected via pipes to a well outside.
“Don’t worry,” Dionysios said. “The pipes aren’t made of lead. At least I don’t think they are.”
“Wish I could say the same where I’m from,” Alexios said.
A low wooden shelf along the wall held piles of books whose pages were woven together. A lute leaned against this shelf, as did two sheathed katanas. One was Dionysios’s sword, Adhana, but the other’s name the monk neglected to mention.
While the water for the Seran cha was heating over the fire, Dionysios excused himself, stepped outside, stripped off his sweaty clothes, and took a quick shower. This meant filling a wooden bucket from a rainwater cistern, dumping it over his naked body, scrubbing himself with homemade soap, filling and dumping the bucket one more time, and then drying himself with a linen towel.
Once he had finished, he put on a fresh change of clothes (and looked rather fresh himself). He said Alexios could also use a shower; Alexios agreed. By the time he was done, the cha was whistling in its pot, and Dionysios had not only poured it into two little porcelain cups decorated with blue Chinese dragons, but he had also begun working on their dinner: roasted chicken and vegetables on skewers along with bread and olive oil.
“This is amazing,” Alexios said, sipping the cha and relaxing on the couch in a fresh change of clothes. “I haven’t had any caffeine in days. Thank you.”
“I thought you were one of the outsiders,” Dionysios said. “That’s why I came to save your ass, by the way.”
Alexios narrowed his eyes. “You know I’m not from here?”
Dionysios nodded to him. “The marks on your arm.” He raised his own arm to show his B-shaped scar.
Alexios gaped. “You’re also from the real world—from outside?”
Dionysios gestured to his mane of curly white and black hair. “Yeah, but as you can see, I’ve been here for kind of a long time.”
“You mean you never got a chance to escape?”
“Part of me never wanted to. As I’m sure you’re starting to figure out, things are a little different here. For one, when you do things, it can actually make a difference.”
“Yeah.” Alexios nodded. “I’ve definitely noticed that. I mean, it’s a game. It’s not real.”
“You jog a little and you boost your stamina. You do some sword fighting and you go from Intermediate to Journeyman. If a monster beats you, you grind a little, level up, and then kick its ass. After enough work, you’re a master. You can change things. Do things. It’s not like outside where everything seems like it’s kind of stuck.”
“That’s exactly what I thought,” Alexios said.
“I mean, I left a long time ago, but I’m guessing shit’s still pretty fucked out there.”
“You could say that. But if you don’t mind my asking, how long have you been here, exactly?”
Dionysios squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them. “It was 1954.”
“You’ve been here for seventy years?”
Dionysios nodded. “Must be, although time doesn’t work the same here as it does there. Things are simpler in some ways and more complex in others. The game kind of has a mind of its own, but it’s also its own self-contained universe. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if I found out that the outside world is just a different kind of game, a shittier one that’s even less fun than Byzantium. It’s just a game within a game within a game—turtles all the way up and down, curving around in a fucking infinite mobius strip. So what difference does it make which game you play? Anyway, I got here right after the schools were desegregated.”
“Wait, schools in Maine were segregated?”
“Yep. If not officially, then the ruling class just let the market take care of things. As a great thinker once said: ‘when you are south of the Canadian border, you are South.’ I was the first Black kid at Pemetic High. Your grandparents really had it in for me—”
“Those weren’t my grandparents,” Alexios said. “My parents moved out here from California a few years back. My ancestors were living there before annexation.”
“They moved from California to Maine? Why would they do that? Were they in Witness Protection or something?”
“Too many forest fires. Too much homelessness. They couldn’t find a place to rent within a few hours’ drive of work for less than three thousand dollars a month.”
“Sounds like I’m not missing much,” Dionysios said.
“Well, there’s the internet.”
“What’s the internet?”
Alexios was tempted to say it’s not a series of tubes you can just throw in the back of a truck. But he was pretty sure Dionysios wouldn’t get the joke.
“It’s like a way for computers to talk to each other over long distances.”
“Computers? Secretaries doing math need to talk to each other over long distances? Why can’t they use a telephone?”
Alexios laughed. “No—computers. Machines that do a lot of math, like billions of calculations per second, and they can send each other messages over the whole world almost instantly.”
“I was just joking. I know what computers are. That sounds cool. Building up the forces of production.”
“It’s kind of a mixed blessing.”
“Tell me about it. I know all about mixed blessings. That ruling opened up school for all kinds of people, but it also opened us up to beatings, insults, and a whole new transformation of systemic injustice. I mean, it was a good ruling, but it only dealt with the surface level of all that fucked up shit, and forced us kids to deal with it. It didn’t get to the roots. It’s a rich country, there’s plenty of everything for everyone—just like here in Romanía—but the main problem is that the labor is social while the profit is private. Make the profit social too, and boom, problem solved. Everyone has everything they need, and there’s no reason to fight. If you get into Mazdakism, you’ll learn all about that shit.”
Alexios was nodding along but also thinking it was kind of weird to be lectured about history inside a medieval board game by a random guy from the 1950s. He’d seen that movie about what happened when white people got inside Black people’s brains, but Dionysios was an example of what happened when Black people got inside white people’s brains. Although it was kind of an open question as to whether medieval Greeks were white.
“Anyway,” Dionysios continued. “I couldn’t take it. Maine, you know, it’s like the graveyard of dreams. Dreams go there to die, especially if you’re poor, especially if you’re Black. You’re on your own out there. Everyone’s dad or granddad was in the KKK. They’re all armed, half of them are fucking sheriff’s deputies, the other half own the shittiest restaurants or hotels or rentals you could ask for, but they all think they’re the fucking messiah. Either that, or they work in dog shit nonprofits that don’t do anything except uphold the status quo. No, I don’t miss that place. Beautiful nature there for sure, but as for the people—good riddance. Medieval folks are nicer.”
Alexios laughed. “Nobody back home would ever believe you if you said that.”
“I don’t care. It’s not my problem they’re living in a fantasy world. It’s not my problem anymore, anyway. So back in high school some of those Mainers—not your ancestors, but probably their expropriators—they chased me into an empty classroom. I found this game in the closet, I opened it up while I was hiding, and I’ve mostly been here ever since.”
Dionysios and Alexios were eating dinner now. They had finished their cha, and Dionysios had poured Alexios a cup of what he called Falernian wine—“wine so alcoholic you can set it on fire.” Alexios sipped his glass, looked at it, and coughed, thinking he had just downed a mouthful of vodka mixed with wine.
“You shouldn’t give alcohol to minors,” Alexios said.
“That’s right,” Dionysios said. “I forgot. It’s fine to have child soldiers in the military, but don’t let ‘em drink. Don’t let ‘em swear, because that would be unseemly. The Volksturm, you know, it needs to be done ethically, with all the proper paperwork filled out.”
Alexios shook his head and laughed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Keep hanging around me, and eventually you will.”
Then, while devouring Dionysios’s spectacular chicken skewers, Alexios said: “Do you know of anyone who’s made it out? Out of the game, I mean?”
“The goal is to defeat the emperor and destroy the empire. That guy they’ve got in there now, Emperor Nikephoros, he’s a fucking piece of shit. The dude who was in there before was pretty alright, but he was a reformist. I tried to convince Anastasios to be more radical, I warned him that the military was gonna coup his ass, but he suffered from the logical fallacy that the truth always falls between two extremes. Regardless, the people in charge, you know, they don’t take kindly to revolutionary shit. Even a hint of real reform pisses them off. When you sign a paper taking their stuff away, they don’t just throw up their hands and say: ‘Oh well, looks like you won!’ They always fight violently to the end—and violence is how you fight back. So if you say, for example, you just want higher taxes or wages, it’s actually helping them, since you’re still working inside their paradigm. You have to do more. You have to go all the way.”
Ask a simple question, Alexios thought.
“That’s the Master-Slave Dialectic right there,” Dionysios continued. “Whoever has the better organization and whoever fights harder is the one who’s going to win. So before Anastasios, the last emperor, we were stuck with another real shithead. What the fuck was his name? It wasn’t Diogenes. He came later. Was it Dickwaddikos the Fifteenth? I don’t even remember. Basil. That was his name. Basil the Bulgar-Slayer. He got that nickname because he once captured an entire Bulgarian army. There were like ten thousand of them, I think. Then, out of every hundred dudes, Basil blinded ninety-nine, and left one dude with one eye to lead the other ninety-nine back to Bulgaria.”
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“Jesus Christ.”
“When the Bulgar khan saw what had happened to his men, he died on the spot. As you can imagine, Basil isn’t exactly popular with Bulgars.”
Alexios laughed.
“We fought that fucker hard,” Dionysios said. “We joined up with the Sarakenoi—the Muslims—and we tried working with the Bulgar Khanate and the Skythioi, but Basil had his army, and he had his money, too—he was always bribing the shit out of everyone, just bribing people left and right. That’s the Byzantine way: play everyone off each other, avoid battle as much as possible, since the Romans have a limited number of people they can actually commit to fight. But Basil died, then Diogenes fucked up in Manzikert, and we managed to get Anastasios onto the throne. He did his best, until his distant relative Nikephoros killed him.”
“So it’s a family affair.”
“The human species is just one big family. Nobody’s more than a few cousins away from anyone else, even people on the other side of the world living on little isolated islands. But that’s a sword that cuts both ways. It doesn’t mean we should ignore injustices since we’re all related.”
“Alright.”
“Anyway, after the usurpation, all the best people were either killed, thrown in prison, or exiled. One of Anastasios’s daughters—Zoë was her name—the Skythioi got her. Nobody’s seen her in years. As for the other, Herakleia, the uprising sent her to Sera, and nobody’s seen her since. All of us are in hiding, pretty much. That’s why I’m way the fuck out here. And the powerful—the dynatoi—the bureaucrats and generals and rich political appointees—they’ve been squeezing the peasants and workers harder than ever. Frankly it’s high time we had some fresh blood in this place, so welcome to Byzantium, Alexios—because I’m honestly too fucking old to keep dealing with this shit.”
Alexios almost spit out his food. “But you were amazing back in that cave!”
“Thanks. I’m an Elder Swordsman, actually—I managed to work my way up to level nine out of ten. But one guy by himself can’t take on an entire empire. Everybody needs to be working together. We need to join the people—if they’ll let us. They’re the biggest oppressed class by far. Almost everybody around here is a peasant, a worker, or a slave. Doubly so for women. Triply so for children. Can you imagine how hard it must be, being a queer slave girl? Then imagine you’re blind on top of that, or missing a leg or chronically ill or something. What are you supposed to do in a world like this?”
“Yeah.”
“The oppressed in this day and age just want two things, for the most part: land and peace. Give ‘em that, and you’re all set, at least if you follow Mazdak.”
“Who’s Mazdak?” Alexios said.
Education skill is increasing, the voice said. Keep learning to level up to Educated Apprentice.
“Mazdak was a fire-worshipping Persian priest from a long ass time ago,” Dionysios said. “His ideal was: ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their work.’ That sort of thing. He has a book about dialectical materialism called the Desnad. It was translated into Greek and brought to Romanía, but the emperor destroys that shit wherever he finds it, calling it Manicheanism or Bogomilism, which isn’t exactly wrong—”
“Oh, that reminds me,” Alexios said. “Just a moment.”
He went outside, found his dirty clothes, and pulled out the manual—which was still there. The giant ants had missed it.
“This is the reason I came here.” Alexios handed Dionysios the manual. The blood on the cover had dried.
Quest completed: Bring the Zhayedan Fighting Manual to Dionysios, the voice said.
Hang on, don’t I get some kind of bonus? Alexios thought.
Completing the quest is a reward in itself, the voice said. One quest leads to another.
“Hello?” Dionysios said. “Alexios, you there?”
“What?” Alexios said. “Oh, sorry. Yeah, I’m just…uh…arguing with a voice in my head.”
“The game voice?”
“Yeah.” Alexios was relieved that Dionysios didn’t seem to think he was crazy.
“What’s it telling you?” Dionysios said.
“I just completed a quest to bring you that manual. I think I should get some kind of bonus, but the voice doesn’t agree.”
“Yeah, it can be a little annoying. But don’t let that glorified superego push you around too much.” Dionysios looked up. “Hey! Game! Give Alexios here some kind of bonus for all his hard work! He didn’t have to come here, you know!”
Didn’t you just say ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their work?’ The voice was speaking to both Dionysios and Alexios.
“Damn, I didn’t know you could actually argue with this thing,” Alexios thought.
“He needs to level up so he doesn’t get killed!” Dionysios was still shouting at the ceiling like a madman. “If you keep screwing him like this, he isn’t going to work for you anymore! We’ll unionize and strike, and then how are you going to entertain yourself?”
After a pause, the voice said: You have leveled up to Intermediate Runner (5/10). Alexios relayed this information to Dionysios.
“That’s it?” Dionysios said. “Come on, you can do better.”
+10 bonus to ethics XP (80 total), the voice said. Keep being ethical to level up to Apprentice Empath (4/10).
Alexios laughed. “Ethics? You mean the game believes there’s like an objective good and bad?”
“It’s not a belief,” Dionysios said. “It’s a scientific fact. The game relies on the indigenous categorical imperative in order to judge whether you behavior is ethical. ‘If everyone on Earth did this, would it still be alright? Plan for the next six generations.’ Improving your ethics means it’s easier for you to make the right choices. Empathy allows you to understand how other people feel.”
“But something that might seem good to one person might seem bad to another.”
“Exactly, which is why our goal should be to maximize the benefit to as many people and living beings as possible, something we can only achieve by democratizing every home, workplace, country, etcetera—while also overthrowing the slave master in your mind. That means you, creepy disembodied voice!” Dionysios shook his fist at the ceiling.
The voice was silent.
“Workers of the world unite,” Alexios said sarcastically.
“Cynicism only helps the status quo. You can have this ironic detachment about everything and everyone—except yourself, right?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Tell me what you’ve done to help liberate the world’s poor.”
Alexios tensed up. “The world isn’t as simple as rich versus poor.”
“Alright. Then you explain the world to me.”
“People are greedy.”
“Really?” Dionysios said. “So let me ask you a question. Humans lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years. For something like ninety-five percent of our time on Earth, we owned no more than what we could carry. How can greed, as we understand it, even exist in circumstances like that?”
Alexios was silent.
“Some form of greed might have existed,” Dionysios said. “Life wasn’t perfect. But if people were as greedy as the dynatoi fuckers we’re trying to overthrow here, how could humanity have ever survived? In the Paleolithic you have to deal with hyenas, saber-toothed tigers, wooly mammoths, and arctic environmental conditions, and you’re telling me you can do all this while one dude in your tribe is hoarding everything for himself?”
“So then where does greed come from?”
“People make circumstances, and circumstances make people in an endless dialogue, or dialectic. Quantitative growth can lead to qualitative change. For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings lived in bands of hunter-gatherers. We don’t know what happened exactly—maybe they hunted and gathered or changed the climate too much—but some of them wound up settling down and farming. That’s when class society—and something like the modern definition of greed—began. That’s when the concept of private property itself was invented: the ruling class had built up so much stuff, it couldn’t keep track of it anymore, not without writing, which was invented to keep track of all their things. There’s a difference between private and personal property, too. Personal property you use yourself, like a toothbrush or a shirt or even your own home; private property is something that exploits others, like a factory that employs workers, or a rental property, that sort of thing.”
“Alright.”
“And so that’s where we are today, more or less. Here in Romanía, the mode of production is slavery, but that requires a constant supply of slaves. Because the Romans aren’t so good at conquering people anymore—the barbarian steppe cavalry is generally better than whatever the Romans can throw at them—the empire is slowly declining. It already collapsed in the west hundreds of years ago. Byzantium will collapse hundreds of years in the future, in 1453, at least in our world, right around the time a bunch of very specific circumstances combine in rural England to create the modern mode of production, which itself will still take centuries to destroy the feudal mode of production that currently dominates western Europe.”
Alexios was silent for a moment. “No one talks like this in school. None of my teachers, I mean.”
“They’ll get fired if they do.”
“No one talks like this anywhere.”
“Some people do,” Dionysios said. “Sometimes it’s not easy to find them in a settler-colonial hellhole like the one we come from. But the people in charge, the system itself, doesn’t want you to know how human society works. Slave masters don’t want their slaves learning how to read. The dynatoi don’t want workers reading theory. You’ll never see anything like that on TV or in the newspapers.”
“What theory?”
“Forget it.” Dionysios held up the manual. “Tell me where this came from.”
Alexios sighed. “A dying soldier gave it to me. About half a day’s journey from here near a town called Leandros. He mentioned a princess taken prisoner by the Roman legions. She brought it here or something.”
“He must have been talking about Herakleia,” Dionysios said. “Maybe she’s back from Sera. Did you catch the guy’s name?”
“He died before he could tell me.”
“Might have been Vatatzes.” Dionysios shook his head. “He was one of our best dudes, if it was him. I sure hope it wasn’t.”
Dionysios took the manual and flipped through its pages.
“Holy shit,” he said. “This is good fucking shit, right here. Look at all this.”
He showed Alexios a diagram. It resembled a cyclone with lots of miniature cyclones inside.
Dionysios shook his head as he continued to glance through the booklet’s drawings of martial arts moves, army formations, chains of command, and even instructions for building firearms.
“This is a fucking game-changer.” Dionysios looked at Alexios. “Those fuckers aren’t going to know what hit ‘em.”
Alexios narrowed his eyebrows. “Why? It’s just an instruction manual.”
“It’s everything you need in one book,” Dionysios said. “History, psychology, economics, philosophy, engineering—how to understand the world, but also how to change it. The first half is Mazdak’s Desnad, the second half is, like, medieval self-help.”
Alexios laughed. “‘How Not To Get Killed.’”
“It’s martial arts,” Dionysios continued. “An exercise and nutrition guide, tactics and strategy and logistics for winning wars, how to build guns, basic first aid, a navigational guide for land and sea, plus techniques for radicalizing peasants and workers. And look at this.” He showed Alexios the booklet. “It isn’t handwritten. Back when I went to Sera—that’s what they call China here—they had books like this, but they were so rare and expensive you couldn’t take them from the monastery because everything inside the pages needed to be copied by hand. But this has been printed. They’ve already invented movable type back in China and Korea. Except where you and I come from, Alexios, they first used that technology to print Buddhist prayer booklets, way back when. Here they’re using printing to teach dialectical materialism and Kung Fu. With a book like this, we can change everything.”
“Good luck with that.”
Dionysios looked at him. “You aren’t going to join me?”
Alexios glanced out the doorway, which had a spectacular view of the mountains, the foothills, the canyons, and the forests beyond.
“I promised my family in Leandros I’d be back by sundown,” Alexios said. “Or tomorrow morning at the latest. They’re going to be worried about me. I’ve got to get back. Plus, I’m a pacifist, Dionysios. I think all violence is wrong. I don’t want to get political.”
New quest rejected, the voice said.
“But we need you,” Dionysios said. “We can’t do this shit on our own. We have to work together!”
“I don’t think so.”
“You think you’re going to be safe back there? Your silence isn’t going to protect you. The Romans don’t care if you’re peaceful or not, they fuck with everyone. All of us are in the struggle together. Everything’s connected, nowhere’s safe.”
“That may be true,” Alexios said. “But it’s not my fight. I have my own family—my own land to take care of. I can’t risk that. It wouldn’t be fair to them. Besides, I did my job. I got you that little booklet, and I almost got killed. That’s enough for me. And I was really having a good time in Leandros. It was almost like a vacation from everything happening on the outside.”
“Alright,” Dionysios said. “The system’s still working too well for you. That’s what it is. But don’t come crying to me when shit hits the fan, and you find yourself facing down an entire goon squad with nothing to protect yourself but your bare hands.”
“Will you help bring me back there?” Alexios said. “If we can jump like we did before, we could make the journey in no time. I don’t want to run into those giant ants again.”
“I don’t have infinite energy,” Dionysios said. “It’s actually pretty exhausting to use the farr. That’s one of the tradeoffs of having magic power. But yeah, I’ll help you. You’re a good kid. I’m happy to bring you back home.”