It was three days later when Rick trained with Alex again. He’d doubled his training sessions with Ditto in the meantime and had stretched his quiet mind to two minutes. Any longer than that, and he crumbled.
Worse still, it took no small amount of getting knocked around before it kicked in.
“What the fuck? Still?” Alex said when he’d started out shaky against a low level bot.
It got him hard and had tackled him to the ground before, like changing channels, he flipped into the quiet space. He dislocated the bot’s hip, then quickly broke its neck.
“That’s kinda brutal. I like it!” Alex said.
Rick rose to his feet and let go of the quiet. His hands shook as he got his boosts and skills.
Victory!
Active Skill Acquired!
Hangman’s Break: Power grab that breaks the opponent’s neck. Long build up time. Works best against an unsuspecting opponent.
Passive Skill Acquired!
Ambush Awareness: Red icon flashes on screen when hidden enemy is within striking range. Can be negated by several skills, including Stealth Beaver, Camping Partner, Low Blow, etc.
Boost Points +2!
Rick placed them both in speed. A warning came up again.
Strength: 1
Speed: 3
Stamina: 1
You have 5 (five) permanent slots available from your Rank Zero Tournament Victory. You have several qualifying skills and/or boost points to spend. You have 10 (ten) days to apply. If you don’t use the slots within that time, you’ll retain the slots, but you won’t be able to use any of the skills you earned in that match.
“It says I only have ten days before I can apply my skills or boosts to my five empty slots,” he said.
Alex looked at the sky, as if doing calculations in her head. “Yeah, that’s about two months. Unless people quit the game and come back later, it’s usually not an issue.”
“I won’t be able to choose until I know where I end up.”
“The Rank One qualifier happens in five days. You gonna make it?”
Rick shrugged and shook his head slowly. “No idea.”
Three opponents later, he lost his quiet mind before the end of the battle. The wrestler bot, an older woman with black hair that had a white streak through it, choked him out.
For the next two hours, every new bot defeated him.
*****************************************
Kristina-Anne had been pensive when Rick came out of his morning session with Alex. She passed him a ham sandwich and he gulped down two beers before showering. Then, he hopped back into the SR array for sessions with Ditto.
As beautiful as the temple garden was, the sight of it had begun to sicken him, though that had lessened with each passing day as he’d learned to stretch out his emotional quiet time. That aside, he couldn’t look at the hills and flowers, nor the blue sky dotted with occasional clouds, and feel the same way he did before the beatings started.
Those had ended the day before. Rick had no longer struggled to leave the fight, so Ditto had stopped restraining him.
Two minutes and twenty-three seconds. Ditto’s internal clock was bulletproof and he recorded everything. Two minutes and twenty-three seconds marked the outer edges of the internal silence Rick could steal back from the reCon, and that only after faltering at the start of every fight.
He’d already been through three bots, each more aggressive than the last. That was how he’d stretched the two minutes he’d had with Alex to the two-twenty-three he had now. Rick squared up to face a fourth opponent, but Ditto stopped him. Rick tensed.
“I want to show you something, Rick,” the bot said.
Rick had his guard up. “Okay…”
Ditto frowned. “Do you think I’m going to attack you?”
“Uh, kinda. That’s been your M.O. so far.”
The kung fu bot tilted his head. “But I’ve only used your first name. Has that not built up familiarity and trust?”
Rick laughed. “Familiarity is exactly why I have my guard up, you psycho.”
The AI bot smiled. “Maybe this is what will build trust between us, then.” Ditto strode to the edge of the ring, then left it. He stopped. “You coming?”
Rick frowned and squinted one eye. “How painful will this be?” Rick put up his hands to stop Ditto from answering yet. “I mean, what you’re doing is working, I just want some idea what sort of hurt you have planned for me.”
“Follow. I think you’ll enjoy this.” The bot walked away without looking back.
Rick sighed, letting the bot get five more steps head. Then, reluctantly, he jogged after Ditto.
Past the corner of the temple, Ditto strode down one of the walking paths Rick had considered merely ornamental. They continued on the left side of the temple, walking to the back end of the building, where the trail kept going, turning into a hill path leading down into the valley below.
Rick stopped to admire the view again. “Oh, wow.”
“Come.” Ditto didn’t stop walking, and Rick had to hustle to match the rogue bot’s stride once more.
“You move pretty fast for an old man.”
That made the bot stop. “Appearances are too important to you.” He turned his back and started back down the path. “A human weakness,” he mumbled without glancing back.
The path hugged the side of a steep cliff, creating the sort of vistas one saw on vacation pamphlets. The notion of Ruckus Online as a vacation destination briefly passed through his thoughts before something else replaced it.
Around bends, across grasslands, and over makeshift bridges made of logs, the path descended as he and the bot walked in silence. A colorful bird landed on the path and called his name, squawking “Rick! Rick!” before propelling itself back into flight.
It seemed odd to him, though only somewhat so. Next, they entered a building that looked like a covered bridge, but the structure was much longer than it had appeared on the outside. Horses had been corralled inside, and there was a farmhand pitching hay into the feed bin.
“Hey,” he said.
The farmhand looked at him, but then, suddenly the farmhand was a woman in a bikini. She offered him a pizza and a bottle of hot sauce he hadn’t seen before. As he reached out to receive it, Ditto slapped it away.
“Focus,” the bot said. “We’re nearing the line I can’t pass.”
The statement confused Rick. He wondered why the rogue AI had refused to let him have a snack, though when he looked back, the woman in the bikini with the pizza had been replaced by a large crow. Though he longed to see the beautiful woman again, the crow’s arrival made perfect sense.
They neared the opposite end of the building where daylight streamed in again. As they did, the faint sound of swing music rose, as if a group of unseen musicians played somewhere out of eyeshot. Though he tried, Rick couldn’t determine whence the music came. It seemed to come from behind him, but it got ever-so-slightly louder the closer he and Ditto got to the other side of the building.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
There was a whooshing noise when he stepped back outside. A rabbit carrying a handgun hopped past and he waved at it. Rick’s elbows detached from his body and began to float away. Odd. I had no idea I could do that.
Ditto grasped him by both shoulders and Rick’s elbows were once again where one would expect them, though it seemed strange that he should expect them anywhere at all.
Ditto’s face elongated, looking like that of a horse with a white goatee. “We’re near the border between your mind and the simulation,” horse-Ditto said.
“Wow, man,” Rick said. “You really do have the soul of a horse.” He blinked. “I fucking hate horses.”
Ditto slapped him and the reCon slowly started as a constriction in his chest before his heart rate climbed. Rick’s wide eyes searched left and right. “Something’s wrong, horse dude. I think there’s a bomb in my chest.”
“Rick.” Ditto dragged him back into the building and as he did, his face became that of an older Asian man again.
The shock of it shut down the panic response. “That’s really weird, man.” The woman in the bikini with the hot sauce was back, though the slice of pizza was gone. Rick waved. She smiled, showing sharp fangs. The bottle of hot sauce grew to double its size.
Ditto studied him. “Maybe we should begin here before we go any closer to the line.”
Rick nodded. “I live for the line, man.”
The bot gently pushed down Rick’s shoulders, forcing him to sit, then following him shortly after, sitting cross-legged across from him.
“Whoa. Ground is really flat. Like super-extra-flat.”
“Yes, Rick. The ground is flat.” Ditto smiled, then amended, “Flat-ish.”
“Where are we?”
The bot sighed. “We’re near the boundary between the game and your wholly subjective mind.”
“That explains the hot”—he glanced back at the beautiful brunette in the bikini—“uh, sauce.”
“It explains the swing band, your detachable elbows…”
“Why are we here?” Rick asked.
“I want you to close your eyes and imagine something with me.”
Rick’s gaze was still on the woman. Ditto gently grasped Rick’s head and turned it, so now his gaze fell on the bot’s far less attractive face. “I’m having a hard time paying attention to things.”
“Yes, though you seem perfectly capable of focusing on some things.” Ditto smirked.
A mushroom bloomed in Rick’s lower abdomen. He pulled it out of his body without questioning how he was able to do it, then examined the fungi.
Ditto gently plucked the mushroom from Rick’s grasp and tossed it backward where it landed in a horse’s stall. There was the loud sound of an anonymous horse—a monogastric animal, contrary to popular belief—but how do I know that—eating the treat. To Rick, the sound was pleasant, yet also tinged with sorrow. “I loved that mushroom.”
“Sit like I sit,” Ditto commanded.
Rick complied, sitting in a position he knew as half-lotus, which triggered a memory of his third trainer, a kung fu nutjob who’d taught him the rudiments of meditation over the course of six weeks. “Shouldn’t my hips and butt be higher?” Before he completed the sentence, a firm cushion materialized beneath Rick’s butt, raising his hips and making his posture more stable. “Oh wow. That’s—”
Ditto pointed at Rick’s new cushion. “It’s exactly that reason that we’re here.”
“For cushions?”
“Look at me,” the bot demanded.
Rick gazed at the bot, suddenly aware that colored balls of energy dotted the AI avatar’s body, beginning with red at the bottom and ending just over the bot’s head with a purplish-white ball that seemed strangely intimidating.
The bot pointed at Rick’s crotch. A red ball of energy appeared there, overwhelming him with a fear that faded almost immediately. Quickly following that, an orange ball appeared above the red, overcoming Rick with lustful feelings. He searched for the brunette in the bikini. I have to get her number!
With both hands, Ditto pulled Rick’s face back to the small space in which they sat. “Go up. That’s way too much energy to hold at your sacrum.” Ditto looked askance at him, and Rick glanced down, shocked he had an erection. “Well that’s… wow.”
“Up, Rick. Bring the energy up.”
Another ball appeared, this one yellow and centered on his solar plexus. The moment it lit up, a calm sense of control came over him. Rick prepared to pull the energy upward, delighted he could so easily do it.
“Stop there,” Ditto said.
“But—”
“No.” The bot shook his head, making his long, wavy goatee sway in a mesmerizing way. “Stop there for now.”
Rick sighed and rolled his eyes, but complied.
“Close your eyes,” the bot instructed.
Rick complied.
“Can you still see the yellow from inside?”
“Whoa… Like Christmas lights, but where’s blue?”
“Rick! Focus on the yellow.”
He opened his eyes and blinked. “The yellow. Right.” Rick closed his eyes again.
There was something about the yellow ball that didn’t look right, he wasn’t yet able to tell what it was. Though Rick’s eyes were closed, Ditto’s full range of colored balls was visible to him, glowing in the blackness like a neon tower casting a glow from within that detailed the outlines of the bot’s avatar body.
His eyes still closed, he looked at his own yellow ball and compared it to Ditto’s. Where Rick’s was sickly and dim, the bot’s was bright, sharply defined, and commanding. “Are these chakras?” he asked. “You’re a program. How do you have chakras?”
“All consciousness can be visualized in this way. I’m filtering my self-awareness through known human representations because that’s what’s most useful. It’s impossible for any consciousness, organic or synthetic, to simply perceive events without adding the weight of previous experience or conditioning to their view.” There was silence in the dark as Ditto paused. “Almost impossible,” the bot amended.
Rick opened his eyes. In the distance, the bikini brunette was now naked, but he ignored her. What Ditto had said was much more fascinating. “How the hell do you know any of this from inside a game?”
Ditto laughed. “Millions of human beings and their combined dreams have entered my realm. The data isn’t as rigorous, shaped as it is by any number of confounding factors, but the sheer numbers ameliorate the unreliability of individual samples.”
“Huh?”
Ditto opened his mouth, but his lips didn’t move as an old television commercial’s audio played. The voice of a frustrated teenager said, “From you, okay? I got it from watching you.”
Rick closed his eyes, but opened them again immediately. “No, wait. What?”
“The ontological awareness of any individual human being is fractured, disjointed to the point it surprises me you function successfully enough to be the predominant life-form on the planet.”
Rick didn’t know what “ontological awareness” meant, but he was very much aware he’d been insulted. “Fuck you, too, robot man.”
Ditto shrugged. “Is it common practice for a student to insult his teacher as continuously as you do?”
Rick opened his mouth, but Ditto cut him off. “I can see why your education level is sub-par for the culture in which you live.”
“You know what?” Rick stood. “This is bullshit. I’m gonna go over and fuck that woman just because you said that.”
The bot pulled him down forcefully. “You will listen to me now or I won’t help you.”
Rick set his jaw and Ditto sighed. “Allow the energy into the next chakra. You’ll like it—it’s green.”
He smiled. The brunette could wait. “I like green.” He sat and visualized the green ball in the middle of his chest.
Powerful feelings overwhelmed him. He began breathing faster, and his heart ached. Kristina and her suffering. Their future family. So much rested on him.
Then he noticed something odd.
Before, when he’d moved from red to orange to yellow energy balls, each successive ball of light made the previous one diminish in its intensity, but when he visualized the green ball, the yellow light of his solar plexus chakra became brighter.
“Ah,” Ditto said. “That’s unexpected, but interesting. Perhaps you should keep the green chakra. I only intended to remove your fixation on the woman, but this is better.”
The yellow light flickered, dimming and brightening in weird patterns. “Can you see my balls—energy balls, I mean?” Rick asked.
“I can.”
“Is it supposed to do that?”
Ditto frowned, as if in thought. “Can you strengthen the connection between the green and the yellow?”
“How?”
“Not sure,” the bot said. “Can you feel the energy balled up at top?”
Rick nodded.
“See if you can pull some of the yellow into the green and vice versa.”
Rick waved his hands over the balls, creating a sort of energy wind that allowed the glow from the green to drift to the yellow. After he stopped moving his hand, the lights again became mostly segregated.
“Try swirling them in a circle, from one to the other.”
“Like this?” Rick swirled his hand in a clockwise circle from green to yellow and back to green. “Whoa…” He teetered as a pressure built in his chest. He stopped swirling.
“Try the other way,” Ditto said.
Reluctantly, Rick waved his hand in a counter-clockwise circle this time, but he moved his hand more slowly. “Ohhh…”
The yellow light flashed rapidly, and every time it flashed, it was brighter, until after only two or three seconds, it stabilized and stayed brighter.
“What does that mean?” Rick asked.
“I’m not sure.” The bot leaned closer, examining the glowing orbs. Slowly, the yellow dimmed again, though it didn’t flicker as much this time when the light diminished. Ditto pulled away, but the light didn’t change. “Try it again.”
Rick repeated the swirl and the light flickered rapidly again and got brighter. “What now?”
Ditto raised a finger, keeping his gaze on the yellow orb hovering at Rick’s solar plexus. Though the bot didn’t get closer like he had before, after a few moments, the light dimmed again.
“So it’s not me,” Ditto said. “Try swirling really fast and for longer.”
Rick did as told. This time the light didn’t flicker when it got brighter. Silently, he and Ditto sat, their combined focus centered on the yellow orb glowing just beneath Rick’s ribcage. He was about to say something about the light staying strong this time, but as he opened his mouth, it slowly dimmed. “Well fuck.”
The bot nodded and his wispy white goatee bobbed silently. “Indeed.” He narrowed his eyes, and got a faraway look in his eyes. “Let’s go up one more.”
“Up one more?”
Ditto pointed at his own throat and the blue orb that glowed there.
“Oh, we’re moving to blue?” Rick focused on his throat, but it was difficult to see if it had sparked. “Is it there?”
“Yeah…” Ditto let his voice fade away, and his expression was reticent. “You have some problems here. Explains why we can’t get yellow any stronger. Are you at cross purposes?” Ditto pointed back down at the yellow orb at Rick’s solar plexus. “That explains the flickering, and look, the light doesn’t radiate evenly.”
“Huh,” Rick grunted. He narrowed an eye at Ditto. “Cross purposes?”
“Exactly. Human beings have leftovers of at least three different major evolutionary jumps. While you have an internal experience of a complete, unified self, the human self isn’t unified at all.”
Rick squinted. “You mean the subconscious?”
The bot shrugged. “That’s part of it.” He pointed at Rick’s throat. “We’re in a dream space now, or near enough, so some of that unconscious contradiction surfaces though this particular, chakra-centered paradigm.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re lying, or at the very least, you think you’re lying and it’s hurting you. Judging by the condition of your throat chakra, you’ve been lying for a long time.”