1        Soul Bound

1.1      Finding her Feet

1.1.3    An Eventful Journey

1.1.3.8  Forward planning, Womble style

At lunch time, Kafana tried preparing a cold lunch with intent to boost travel speed, but it didn’t work. Probably sandwich construction wasn’t complex enough to count as ‘cooking’. Alderney made a simple xistera for Bungo which he went off and practised with, while she made him a snarling mask and painted a gruesome death’s head on his shield. Tomsk paired Bungo with Wellington and had them practise for a bit with sword and shield.

After lunch they set off again, and this time they chatted in the group chat rather than out aloud, because Alderney was scouting ahead. Wellington soon noticed that the game-time was moving much faster, and figured that in absence of encounters, the game had switched to the night-time x6 mode to avoid players getting bored in areas where there was nothing to do. Bungo, much to his disappointment, turned out to have the wrong sized feet to wear Alderney’s boots.

He sulked: {It would have been so cool, jumping through the skies in one bound, like Superman, cape flapping. I always wanted to be more than human, a superhero with powers who arrived dramatically, saving the day.}

He tried striking a threatening pose behind his snarling mask, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Bulgaria could have carried it off, but their part of Bulgaria wasn’t here and in any case Bulgaria didn’t have the stats for it, he wasn’t the one who could survive the enemies trying to hit him.

Kafana spoke up: {I’ve been thinking about songs to get all the aggro on Bungo. I think we’ve been going about it the wrong way. Are you guys willing to try something? Alderney, sorry, if this works it will mean redoing your designs.}

Alderney: {No problem. What’s your idea?}

Kafana: {Think like a bandit. You’re greedy, low on food, there’s a whole bunch of you sitting in ambush when some plums ripe for plucking stroll along. Life’s been mean to you, you deserve some nice loot. Do you charge at the biggest, baddest threat among the enemy, or do you hope one of your allies that has more muscles than brains will go for that target, while you quickly pick off someone weak who looks like they might have a fat purse?}

Tomsk said glumly: {Weak groups will split their attacks by the individual preferences of each bandit. Groups with discipline, a strong leader who enforces strict hierarchy by punishing those who disobey battle orders, will attack whatever the order giver says. And who knows what monsters will pick? Smart groups won’t send everybody to mob the enemy tank; they’ll try to hit the enemy healers and glass cannons.}

Kafana: {I remember when we had a movie night and watched Flash Gordon. I loved the sound track by Queen. The scene I loved the most was where Gordon confounds a whole room full of enemies by changing the rules on them. He turns it from being ‘big group of you trying to capture all of us’ into ‘win this game of grab-the-ball, or your leader loses status and you all look like fools’. Dale turns into a cheerleader and Zarkov subverts others into taking out enemies one by one without being noticed because all the attention is upon this flashy infuriatingly confident guy saying ‘I’m better than you, and you can’t catch me’. They desperately want to prove him wrong, while he taunts their incompetence.}

Bungo: {I remember that! I wanted to be Flash Gordon so badly.}

Kafana: {So imagine the following scene. Bandits appear. All the small warriors scream in fear and run in panic towards the tall cool guy who remains calm. ‘Save us’ they cry. ‘Fear not’ says he ‘you just wait here, I can deal with pitiful scum like these all by myself.’ running towards the bandits he sticks a burning metal object on the nearest and crows ‘you’re doomed’ next target ‘and you’ next target ‘cant catch me’ points at the boss ‘these are going to explode you know, and your followers are too weak to prevent me sticking one on you too’}

Wellington, cautiously: {Might work. Implies a time deadline, makes him appear to be a mage glass cannon, status challenge against the leader, annoys them and makes it a personal grudge match. Very difficult to ignore that, as a leader, without losing face. You think you have a song to help?}

Kafana: {What else? ‘Flash!’ I’ll sing the lead, and everyone else gets to be chorus. If someone kept a drum from the holy play, Tomsk could even use his meteor hammer to do the initial beat.}

Tomsk: {Yes, yes. I want to try that. And the best thing? If this works and we get a recording of it, we could release the sense experience and use it to steer the attention away from Kafana to Bungo. Bungo, think you could stand being famous?}

Alderney: {I’ve got a good editing suite. I can use my boots to escape into the trees and film it from there. And I’ll enjoy the heck out of it, which means someone seeing the scene from my point of view will feel that emotion too. I’ve already got a ton of ideas on how I can alter Bungo’s stuff to enhance this. It has my vote.}

Bungo: {I have lived my life for this moment. Let’s make it happen.}

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That evening they selected a site for their camp with care, a big open glade with a stream across one edge. Tomsk surveyed it and said which directions he’d attack it from if he were a bandit. Kafana set up a big bonfire to cut off one approach and provide dramatic lighting. Alderney narrowed options further by strategically dragging thorn bushes and other obstacles to make them less attractive. She then bounced off to set a trail of artfully placed broken twigs, foot prints and threads of clothing caught on things, leading to the glade from the direction they wanted. {I’m gaining some new skills} she announced upon her return.

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Kafana put some effort into cooking supper, and took the opportunity to make some ‘hero potion’ for Bungo to drink later. They ran through a rehearsal, with Alderney checking camera angles and preparing easy to land upon branches that she could see out from but which would protect her against being shot from below.

Wellington complained: {You realise that now we actually want to be attacked? This will be such a waste if there are no bandits, or it is just a bunch of ghouls.}

Tomsk: {Art is never wasted. Alderney has done a glorious job on Bungo. His boots even have feathered wings on the sides. And if it doesn’t turn out as we want this time, the practice will help for another time, when we can whip this out on the spot.}

Wellington: {There’s a price for art. Here’s the watch schedule.}

Kafana lay on her back, looking up at the stars. The devs had done a spectacular job on the constellations, and Luna was beautiful, larger than the Earth’s moon and tinged violet. Ringed Morob was low on the horizon. She wondered, idly, what the sky would look like if she developed a ‘mage sight’ skill of some kind. Perhaps she could find out when they reached the city.

She didn’t feel sleepy. In arlife it was 8:30am and she’d only been awake for about 4 hours, though it felt longer.

{Bungo, what have you been up to in arlife over the last decade?}

{After I got my M.A. in biochemistry, I accepted a position with a swiss firm working on intelligence boosting drugs. There were a lot of people back then who were worried by the news that China had developed expert systems to improve the cost efficiency of in-vitro fertilisation, and was encouraging millions of their rural farmers to have children with sperm created by recombining and synthesising DNA from a pool of approved donors.}

Wellington broke in, harshly: {Donors? Like hell. They never asked me, just took it. And I will never forgive them. Never. I will never stop until they are utterly crushed and unseated.}

Kafana had never heard such venom in Wellington’s voice, or that much emotion from him of any kind: {Oh gods, Wellington. I never knew. I’m so sorry. You have children out there you don’t know about and can’t help? That’s terrible.}

Wellington: {I wasn’t the only one they stole from. There were 10 of us. They stopped the program after the first year. Too high a fatality rate. They couldn’t hush it up. But three years later, they sent officials to each of the villages, and put all the surviving children through a series of tests. Then, having identified the brightest prodigies, the ones who at the age of 3 could read fluently and do long division sums, they told the headmen of those villages that everyone in the village would get a tax break if the parents signed a piece of paper sending the children off to a ‘wonderful’ government school with great teachers that would give the children a bright future. It was a privilege, the parents should be grateful for the opportunity. Some probably were. Most realised they’d never see their child again, but signed anyway, because their village would ostracise them if they didn’t. I hear the schools have very strict discipline and the children are all very obedient. They were effective, though. About 10,000 of the children graduated with the equivalent of a university degree at the age of 12, and were whisked straight into secret government projects where they’ve been labouring for the last 3 years. Someday, their bodies may get freed, but I don’t know if anyone will be able to free their minds.}

Bungo: {A free mind in a free body. That could nearly be the motto of the Neo Songhai.}

Tomsk: {Wellington, hard stuff man. If you ever come up with a plan big enough to rescue them, call on me. I’ll be offended if you don’t. I count myself your brother. That makes them my nephews, sort of.}

Alderney: {Me too. Say the word, and I’ll work out how to drop a big rock on any target you name. I’ve got a lot of friends up at Lunar Base, after all the design work I did for them.}

Wellington: {Thank you. Sincerely. But now I don’t want to talk about it more. Bungo, tell me more about the Neo Songhai, they sound interesting.}

Bungo: {They’re a movement that started off Timbuktu, where Islamists fighting the government in Mali decided to burn down a library containing thousands of ancient scrolls. Irreplaceable. The worst desecration of knowledge since the Library of Alexandria. The Neo Songhai decided that Africa had had enough of being a playground for foreign powers and religions, whether there to exploit them or be ‘white knights’, but fighting them head on was a negative approach. What was needed was a positive alternative that could be seen to work better. }

{They’re organised into mobile tribes, and they’re big on self-sufficiency. They don’t want a hierarchy, they want to try lots of solutions, make their own decisions, their own mistakes. There’s a lot of transhumanists among them, making use of genetics, expert systems, pharmaceuticals, mathematical social models, trying to find the next step forwards for humanity.}

{They’re non-coercive, and they use a lot of orglife streaming and transparency to avoid the corruption trap. If someone wants to make solar furnaces to melt sand into glass and use that to construct pyramid shaped greenhouse farms in the desert, then tribes which are interested can offer help and share in the resulting rewards and status. They sort of compete on whose solutions let them be most helpful, like a potlatch. The tribes seen to be able to help the most gain members and get to divide into offspring tribes with variants of the parent tribe’s approach. Very evolutionary. I admire them. I believe in them.}

They carried on chatting into the night, Tomsk telling stories about stunts he’d done for films, Alderney enthusing about her swarm of mechanical dolphins that could self assemble into barriers for sea steadings which generated electricity from wave power, Kafana telling stories about difficult customers and Wellington describing the army of drones being used to plant gene-tinkered trees across Siberia to replace some of the forests humanity burned down in past decades.

The glittering stars smiled down upon her as she fell asleep, clutching her pendant.