Chapter Fifty Nine: Never Was and Never Will Be
May 21, 2011
Salt Lake City, UT
Sandra stepped off the stage. Somehow, she had made it. It was a good thing that this was her last official appearance during the tournament. Now, she could go back to her office and monitor the event with the door locked and the lights turned down.
Mary would be responsible for headlining the Finals, the four-team battle royal that would be held the next day in the apocalyptic city arena. Sandra had explained the rules while introducing the winning teams from the semi-final via a live-streaming broadcast from the main stage.
As the pictures of the finalists appeared on the monitor, Sandra almost lost her concentration when a picture of the leader of one of the teams flashed on the screen. It was the one who swept the entire opposing team during the knockout semi-final.
She knew that face. She had seen him, months ago at the launch event. Sandra was sure he was the one Mary had warned him about, and after seeing him chase after her, she kept seeing his face in flashes.
In retrospect, she realized she must have seen his player profile often, and it somehow imprinted on her subconscious. He was obviously an elite player, and she must have picked up on it while reviewing his player data. Maybe after the tournament, she would go back and really parse through his analytics. He was obviously a talented player, and there might be something interesting in his logs. Maybe the hallucinations were simply a waste of time for her brain to get her to pay attention to potentially interesting information.
This happened to her a lot. She honestly didn’t know where a lot of her ideas came from. Sometimes, she would just sit in front of her computer, and hours later, she would suddenly realize that she had been pounding on the keyboard for hours.
It was her greatest gift, but its providence would sometimes scare her. She didn’t even know where all the details and specifications came from. It’s as though her fingers did all the work, and her brain was simply a brace maintaining the structural integrity of her skull.
That was before this blasted cold, or flu, or plague, or whatever was going on now started. Now, her brain was a gumball machine that held a lifetime supply of migraines. It was all she could do to keep up the facade of a living human being. Now that the semi-finals were finished, she just needed to escape this cursed convention center so she could collapse in her office. Why was it so large anyway?
Sandra shrugged off the offer from one of her staff to accompany her. There was a large reception with the day’s participants and the VIP spectators going on, and she knew her team was looking forward to joining in. They had spared no expense on the catering, and some celebrity guests were slated to attend. Everyone had been working so hard that she couldn’t expect them to head back to the office now. The design team had been pushed hard to meet the deadlines, and it would be back to siege duty once the patches went live, so she wanted them to enjoy the last couple of days of the festivities while there was a short break in the endless development cycle.
With everyone in the main reception room, Sandra walked through the now empty cavernous hallway towards the parking lot, where her driver was waiting to take her back to the office. She could hear the muffled noise behind her as cheers erupted from behind closed doors. They must be introducing the finalist teams now, she thought to herself.
Then, at the end of the hallway, she saw a figure standing in a darkened, side hallway exit. At first, it almost looked like one of the character display stand-ups that were used at the entrance, and she scolded herself for being so jumpy. Then she looked closer, and it was indeed a person, a man, standing absolutely still, staring directly at her.
She immediately recognized him. He shouldn’t be here. He was supposed to be on the stage in the reception area right now. It was that guy, TRAVELER, the one who beat the number one team single-handedly. The one Mary warned her to stay away from.
He took a step towards her, and she froze. Then he took another step, and as he did, the pain in her head pulsed. It was like an icepick through her skull. He kept walking, and as he approached her, the pain started to increase. She raised her hands to warn him to stay back, but already the pain was taking over all her senses, and she grasped her head in both hands as the pain started to rip her skull apart from the inside.
A shocked expression appeared on the man’s face as she opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Sandra crumpled to the ground and lost control of her body. The pain felt like her body had been dropped into a pool of acid. Each step he took toward her raised the intensity of the torture, but as she fell, he rushed even faster toward her.
The world went white as her senses shut off. Every sense except for the pain, which inconceivably seemed to have no limit. Every cell in her body was now a nuclear explosion. Her entire existence was agony.
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Marc ran to the side of the woman who looked exactly like his companion Kira. She had seen him, and then she collapsed to the ground.
After the final bout of the team round, Marc had joined his team in their waiting room. While there was a lot of cheering and smiles, he could also sense a feeling of apprehension and even fear in their eyes.
Marc understood that his performance had been over the top. He had taken care, up until now, not to dominate the game with his knowledge. After his performance taking down team 8Mile, Marc felt a pang of guilt, knowing that it had confused and perhaps even alienated his teammates.
Still, Marc was resolved to see this through. His dive into the game had all been for one goal: to understand what Mary was doing with this world and to confront Kira to confirm that it really was her.
Marc had left the other life behind. He had no magic here, and his friends had passed on or gone their own ways. The only ties he had left to that world was the guilt he felt whenever he contemplated the results of his actions. The mistakes he had made and the repercussions of his decisions were trapped in another universe, and he had a clean slate here to live a normal and quiet life.
Ever since he had returned, however, there had been these hints, loose threads that begged him to tug at. His father’s accident, the appearance of beasts with Mana crystals, and strange portals. Finally, the appearance of a video game that was plagiarized from his own life experiences, developed by a woman who was the exact likeness of the preferred avatar of the system interface who had been his only constant companion in the other world.
He wanted answers. He needed answers, but since returning, all he had accomplished was adding to an ever-growing pile of questions. His behavior during the tournament had been a tantrum, his message to Mary that he was here and he was going to get to the bottom of everything. He wasn’t going to leave without the answers he desperately needed.
After the semi-finals ended, Kira, no, the woman known as Sandra Olsen, came up on stage and announced the results. She confirmed that tomorrow’s final round would be a battle royal with the top four teams. She also confirmed that Mary would be here tomorrow to headline the event.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Marc was determined to get some answer from this Sandra somehow. Was she an avatar? She couldn’t possibly be a projection if everyone else, including cameras, could catch her with no hints of deception. He had checked her profile out on the I.S.K. webpage, and she appeared to have a full biography, including a hometown, education, and everything else a normal human would have, but it was not possible for her to be real. She had to be part of this game that Mary was playing.
Deep down, Marc understood that he was hurt. It was painful to imagine that Kira had forgotten about him, turned on him, and even sold off his memories to make a video game, of all things. He could never have imagined Kira doing something so abusive to their partnership. More than anything else, he wanted his friend and companion back.
It wasn’t until he had been back for a while that he had fully come to understand how cruel it had been to depart the other world so abruptly. He had been so sick of seeing the consequences of his actions that he wanted to escape. He had overturned an entire world, imposed his values upon every person on the planet, not just those who were alive, but all those that would come in the future. Then he just left. Left them to deal with his meddling, and his final sin was to discard his truest companion in a selfish act of suicide. She had tried to persuade him to put it off. In the end, he made the decision without any thought to what it would mean to his companion.
He hadn’t died as expected, but his survival came at the cost of not knowing what happened to her. Then, suddenly, she was standing in front of him, not as a voice in his head, or an imaginary projection, and likely not even as a puppet avatar made of magic and treasure. A real human woman who was a perfect reflection of his memory of her. He wanted to speak with her now, more than anything in the world. He needed to understand. He needed to hear her voice, her laughter.
Marc had exited the waiting room with the team, but as the crowds gathered, he took off his jacket and slipped away, around a corner. In the moments before anyone noticed his absence, he had passed into an empty part of the convention center. He tried to find an area between the presentation room where the broadcast commentary for the games was recorded and the south exit. Without any more concrete intelligence to go on, he just had his gut to go by.
After walking around for a few minutes, he had ended up in a very empty hallway. Just as he was about to head back toward the main reception area to try a different path, he saw her. It was Sandra Olsen, staggering slightly as if she had been drinking. She was alone.
Marc realized that he couldn’t just run up to a woman in an empty hallway and start demanding that she answer his questions, but she didn’t look well either. He was about to call out to her to ask if she was alright, when she clutched her head in pain.
He quickly walked over to her to help, but as he did, she doubled over, and the fell to the ground, having some kind of seizure. Marc rushed to her side, and after a moment’s hesitation, he reached down to touch her shoulder. As his fingers made contact with her sleeve, everything went white.
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“Did you feel that?” Ryan asked Leeroy.
“Yeah. Was that…”
“A quake?” Selena broke in.
The room had gotten strangely quiet, then murmuring grew as people were commenting on the strange sensation.
“Is that what a quake feels?” Asked Leeroy.
“Maybe, I dunno, I’ve never been in a big one. It felt like everything shifted over a step, like vertigo?” Jess smiled uneasily, shrugging it off.
“Anyway, where is Marc? You told George to go find him, right? They are about to start.”
Selena nodded, looking unnerved. Things felt… off. A strange chill was running up and down her spine. It was almost like that night…
The precious celebratory mood in the room had momentarily dampened as people exchanged strange looks, then shrugged it off. The party continued and the moment was quickly forgotten in the festivities.
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“We are both late. They will begin the selection without us.” The One With Concern chastened the other.
“We can still be there in time.” The One Who Is Observing was closely watching as the strange animal hopped awkwardly off the branches of the plant.
“Why must you stop and investigate every new life form? They are never interesting.” The One Who is Losing Patience complained.
The One Delighted By New Creatures ignored the judgment as this was the purpose that brought the greatest satisfaction. The Selection would happen, with or without them.
“If you will not act responsibly, then I will leave you to your playthings and go alone.” The One That Lectures moved away from the flora and the strange creature.
The One Who Is Not Dissuaded exclaimed in surprise when the small odd creature unfurled large flat appendages from its sides, making it look three times larger than its previous compact shape. Then, in a coordinated movement, swept both protrusions down quickly.
This movement resulted in the creature jumping into the air. The One Surprised By The New Development was delighted and watched as the creature continued to float into the air, gracefully plotting a course to a large plant in the distance.
“Did you see that? It was so clumsy, then it moved through the air so gracefully. If it can move in the air like that, why was it hopping so awkwardly before?”
“What does it matter? It does what is in its nature. Come, it has left, let’s go.” The One Leaving Quickly had no more patience for the pointless investigation. That kind of behavior was for recorders.
“What it did must be in its inherent nature, but why it chooses to act that way is what makes things in this dimension so fascinating.”
“Then hope that you will be selected as a recorder, or an analyzer. If we are late, however, you can look forward to staying in the garden for another cycle.”
The One Who Realizes The Situation reflected and moved to follow.
“What is your hope for the selection?”
“Administrator, of course. Who would not wish to cultivate a new node?” The One With Ambition replied haughtily.
“No, it is too much. The responsibility is too great.”
“Then what? Recorder? Such a pointless task.”
“Perhaps. It would not be objectionable, but instead… I would like to wander. Wander the universe and, look at everything, and ask questions. I would like to be a wanderer.”
“A wanderer? I have never heard of such a task.”
“I just thought of it. I can do that now; in this universe, we can create new things.”
The One Tired Of Nonsense expressed disdain at the frivolity. “You do not understand how things work. It is your first cycle.”
“As it is yours. Perhaps it will work out that way. The creatures here can be graceful and also clumsy. Perhaps we can also be many things.” The One With Hope proceeded to follow the The One Pleased To Be Moving to the site of the gathering.
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“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“You! GET YOUR HANDS OFF THE WOMAN!”
“GET BACK! PUT YOUR HANDS UP! HANDS UP!”
Marc blinked sleepily as the blinding white light slowly faded from his eyes. He was confused. He remembered he was talking to someone… but he couldn’t recall who it was, or what they were talking about. He couldn’t even remember where he was. It was like a dream that faded as soon as he woke up, leaving only the belief that something else had just transpired, but no actual memory of what.
He blinked again and realized that people were shouting at him. Several voices were yelling loudly.
He looked around. He was kneeling in a large hallway. It looked familiar. He looked down and saw the crumpled form of a woman below him. Who was it? He reached out to touch her arm and see if she was okay.
Marc was knocked off his legs and pushed several feet until he rolled onto his side. Immediately after that, hands grabbed his limbs and pinned him to the ground, face down. His arms were pulled behind his back, and his legs were pinned down by someone kneeling on him. He struggled a bit, but he was still disoriented and couldn’t understand what was going on. He winced at the pain as his arms were twisted forcefully behind his back.
He heard metal clicks and a cold sensation on his wrist, then felt more pain as his arms were pulled back behind his body roughly. More clicks and the tension on his arms and torso relaxed slightly. Then, his head was slammed into the ground.
“The girl? Is she okay? Sunavabitch, who is this creep.”
“I dunno, can’t see any wounds, but she’s out… There’s a pulse… it’s weak.”
“Who are you? Name! NOW!” A voice screamed into his ear.
“Get him up!”
His arms were wrenched back as he was roughly pulled up, then pushed back down into a kneeling position.
“She doesn’t look good. Call it in. 10–52. Don’t move her, get the EMT’s over here.”
“He’s not talking. Looks baked.”
“Get him in the back. Book him for assault, throw in resisting and obstruction.”
“But…”
“Do it! Piece of shit, Do you know who she is? She’s one of the I.S.K. bigwigs. They’re gonna flip out.”
“Sure…”
He looked at the woman on the ground. He knew her… From where? Trying to get close so he could see her face, he tried to stand up, but as he moved, someone pushed him forcefully on his back, and his face smashed back into the ground.
“STOP! Don’t resist, you piece of shit.”
A gloved hand grabbed him by the hair and slammed his head into the ground again. Sound and light faded as the world faded to into black.