7. “Torch Song for Absent Heroes (I)”

Jing Xie smiled, and let his shoulders relax. The field was his.

The clifftop air was quiet and cool. Far below him, his armies stood amassed as far as the eye could see, ready to surge or wheel as he bid them.

His left hand clasped the Ruby of Refinement, and his palm pulsed with its glow. The rest of his gems, he kept in a pouch tied to his waist. He might need to call upon one or two of them later, if things grew more interesting. Then again, if his campaign continued as smoothly as it had begun, he might not.

Who could oppose him now? Xiahou Ye, rallying up some insane and undignified last stand, this time without the Opal in his possession? Jing Xie hoped no such thing would occur, as much for Xiahou Ye’s sake as anyone’s. And much the same could be said of the other generals and immortals who had met the tide of his campaign, and given way under it, yielding their gems to him as they succumbed.

It would all be over soon enough. The only adversary worth considering, at this stage of things, was Wen Xifeng. Not because the fox spirit posed an appreciable threat, but only because she held the Emerald, the last gem not in Jing Xie’s possession.

Wen Xifeng had played it safe the entire time, ever since the day gods had distributed gems and ambitions in measured proportion to generals and immortals. She and her followers kept close to her lair in the high hills, venturing forth only to trade goods, never seeking conquest, nor seeking armaments beyond the mundane toys that could be found wherever commerce gathered. The gods gave her the Emerald, and she, unambitious and unmolested, had managed to keep it.

Was her behavior cowardice, or guile? If it was guile, still it was not enough.

Wen Xifeng was a boast, and would like nothing more than for him to lose his way in twisting speculation about her secret intent. Let her have her plans, Jing Xie thought with a laugh. Let her fill the bushy fur of her tails with hidden maps and secret directives. Force and initiative were on his side. What did Wen Xifeng have? Her initial allotment of followers, give or take. Her initially allotted relics, her Wine Pool and Meat Forest and the rest, not that she had put them to much use. Her initially allotted gem. Against his seven.

The breeze turned cold, and picked up its pace. Jing Xie’s flowing hair whipped about his shoulders.

The day was growing old, the sun starting to slip behind the hills. But there was still plenty of light left. No need to concern himself yet with the complexities of battle under cover of night. No need to rush. He would wait, and admire his armies, and wait for Wen Xifeng to make the first move. He would wait until sunset, then until dusk. If she made him wait until nightfall, only then would he attack. She would have the advantage of her night vision, then, but he would still win the fight, and with the added pleasure of winning a fight held on the enemy’s terms.

A messenger appeared at Jing Xie’s side.

“Jing Xie!” he panted. “We have sighted the fox’s army coming over the hills! Our—”

Jing Xie froze time, absorbed a few pieces of novel information, composed a routine system of tactical directives, distributed these telepathically, and unfroze time. He had little patience left for messengers. They were always the same, made from a few basic molds, and the experienced general eventually grew tired of the script.

The messenger vanished as quickly as he’d appeared. The intelligence he’d brought was technically new, but not surprising.

Wen Xifeng had made her move now, before sunset, bringing what looked at first blush like the whole of her initially allotted forces. They bore the expected marks of enchantment by the Emerald of Fortification, and no other signs of improvement upon their initially allotted forms.

Under spectral sight, a vast population of ghosts could be spotted on the peaks of the high hills, much denser than the usual background radiation of vengeful dead which suffused any site where generals had clashed. This could indicate one of a few things, none of them cause for alarm. Wen Xifeng might have put her relics to more use than he’d realized, sacrificing thousands to race through her canonical relicpath at an uncanonical tempo. Or she might have dipped her toes into the timestream, at some early and uncertain stage of her campaign, and received for her trouble only a useless ghost army from some bloodier, counterfactual war.

“Jing Xie!” Another messenger, or perhaps the same one. He had long since stopped noticing the little garnishes, the hairpin or the slight lisp, which distinguished each instrumental being from those with the same role.

So soon? He must not have specified his preferences about these things carefully enough.

“Jing Xie! The timestream is buckling near the west edge of the river!”

His left hand moved quickly, then, with practiced reflexes, placing the Ruby back into his pouch, retrieving the Amethyst. He tapped his reserves of qi and applied a practiced sequence of sensory enhancements and personal defenses: Timestream Sight, Spectral Aetiology Sight, Forward-Flow Protection Bubble for himself, Forward-Flow Charm for his army, and Gathering Renewal Charge, just in case.

“Forward time flow is failing at the riverbank!” the messenger cried. “We believe the Amethyst of Renewal is—”

He was not familiar with this script, but he paused time anyway. He did not want to spend precious seconds waiting for a monologue to spill out, when he could simply guzzle the pure information it contained.

Time refused to pause.

We’re already in the heat of battle? How? Time stopped and started as generals and immortals willed it, until two of them met on the field, and pushed diametrical wills against one another.

“Jing Xie,” said a familiar voice. From where? From behind him? How—

His head tilted back, a blade at his throat, arms pinning him—

“Han Zhang Shuo?” he coughed.

The man’s warmth at his back, the arms less pinning than cradling him, almost an embrace—

He gripped the Amethyst. Qi surged, and fizzled away. The Amethyst is refusing me?

He turned instead to his innate powers. Disenchant, Vernal Bloomsurge, Purge Gemlight—no, why—Purge Gemlight, Purge Ghosts, Dischthonic Charm, Omnipurge—

—what is this blade, what has he done to it, why does it hold my neck no matter what I do—

His timestream sight forced visions upon him, incoherent glimpses of some unknown past. Nausea filled him. He quelled it long enough to speak.

“Han Zhang Shuo? I thought you were eliminated right at the beginning! I thought Fang Huang took your only gem in battle!”

“In this cycle, I was,” his adversary said calmly.

“This cycle?!”

He found breath coming easier to him. Han Zhang Shuo’s blade pressed his neck less tightly now. It still trapped him, but he could speak without effort.

“This Renewal cycle? How? You didn’t have any timestream leverage! You were allotted the Ruby, not the Amethyst! The Amethyst was Fang Huang’s! Why would he charge a Renewal for you?”

“Figure it out,” Han Zhang Shuo said. And then he got down to business.

Five thousand copies of Han Zhang Shuo appeared out of nowhere and simultaneously slit the throats of five thousand soldiers from Jing Xie’s army.

Jing Xie dragged Han Zhang Shuo into a dream of his own making, and imprisoned him in a continent-sized maze.

They immediately reversed places, trapping Jing Xie in his own maze. Jing Xie conjured four billion messengers and sent them out to explore every avenue of the structure.

One of them returned immediately, and began to wave his hands in a stuttering loop, like a broken toy. His speech stopped and started.

“Jing Xie, the p—Jing Xie, the p—Jing Xie, the p—Jing Xie, the p—”

Jing Xie aimed a fist at the wall and channeled his entire reserve of qi outward through it. The wall burst into violet flame, which grew brighter and brighter, then suddenly began to flicker with multicolored static.

Jing Xie pushed his right foot an inch into the molten, flickering floor. It gave way like sand, and he pushed further, until he felt an empty space: the top of the room beneath this one. He lowered his leg into the floor further, further, until his foot touched a warm moving thing: an out-of-sight rendering buffer, still a few seconds behind the clock, overtaxed by the demands of animating a spray of qi effects worthy of a late-campaign general’s energies, all spent unaccountably in one place.

He kicked it, causing an out-of-bounds geometry check to trigger. The maze disappeared, and in the same instant, his qi reserves became full again. He was already hurling enchantments, reflexively, before he fully came to his senses.

He was once again standing on the top of the bluff. The sunset bloomed over his dead army. Han Zhang Shuo was visible in front of him, suspended in midair beyond the edge of the cliff, bound by the controlled currents of a hurricane he had conjured half a second ago.

On Jing Xie’s right, a second Jing Xie loomed into his view, brandishing an Amethyst of his own. Oh, fuck—

A third Jing Xie became visible, this one holding the Ruby, or a Ruby.

Everything he could see disappeared, and was replaced by a repetitive fresco of intertwined ghosts. It took Jing Xie nearly a second and a half to repel the spectral sight hijack and restore his vision. I need to practice my quick-repels, he thought, somewhere behind the pain and nausea.

The two other Jing Xies—his selves from earlier cycles of the timestream, presumably (somehow!) under Han Zhang Shuo’s control—faced one another in front of him, each raising an arm so as to make an arch, with their two gems pressed together at its apex.

Han Zhang Shuo was in a lightless cave far beneath the earth, where a demon was methodically removing his skin. Jing Xie knew this because he had made it happen.

The two gems in the two outstretched arms began to glow, red and violet—

Two ghostly spirits, his own spectral double and a spectral double of Han Zhang Shuo, faced one another in a fencing duel atop a cloud several miles above. Controlling his specter from afar required about one-third of Jing Xie’s attention, and closer to one-half of his capacity for dexterity and coordination.

Under the earth, the demon and his prisoner Han Zhang Shuo had somehow become friends, and the two were sharing a bottle of wine. Another one-third of Jing Xie’s attention was directed at puzzling out what this meant.

That still left one third of his attention left to spend on the clifftop, where his body was, and to have thoughts like my pouch, where is my pouch with my artifacts, it’s not at my hip anymore—

Red and violet, a blinding flash, darkness.

Words crawled upwards across the dark.

You have LOST. Thank you for playing!

MATCH INFORMATION

Field:

[ZeugStyle] [v2.3] [Unpatched] 8-way Gem Arena (No Qi Cap)

Scoring configuration:

Winner-Takes-All (free play rankings).
No Impact (pairwise ELO rankings).
Impact Decided by Third Party (rankings on 4 third-party leaderboards subscribed to match).
No Impact (intra-PSC credit tally).

Outcomes:

+493 raw score to player RoadToZion (Han Zhang Shuo avatar) (free play ranking outcome).
Not available (third-party leaderboard outcome).

ADDENDUM

The Deadly Embrace of Immortals: Spring’s Blaze and Summer’s Fury © Tellurian Systems

Base version 3.37 | Shitspace Patch version 1.45

Original crack / patch work:

Zeug
cocckfeast
PalladiumEgo

English translation:

TruffleInhaler

Game balance work / general bullshit removal:

Zeug
KillSubscum
555555
yingchun

PSC implantation / version unlock work:

RoadToZion
morbidandhelpless

Special thanks to:

Aalii
QZPwarez
Fistula Gang
Tool v2
555555
(F)ourth Eye
Chaos Productions

Extra special thanks to:

♥♥ Moon ♥♥

 

---

 

“Fuck, I’m producing again,” Grant said.

He lay afloat in a rainbow bath of shimmering light. The kaleidoscopic screensaver patterns of Moon’s subcrash danced across a sky or ceiling above his indifferent head.

“I thought I had it under control . . . shit, fuck, fuck! The graph’s still going up . . . the spike timing too, Jesus, this is a textbook PSC graph . . . shit, shit, what the fuck am I going to say about this? No mediator’s gonna believe . . .”

He lay back, and let the rainbow bath silence his troublesome thoughts. And all his other thoughts. When he lay back, when he let his limbs and his head sink below the surface, it took all the complicated messy things away, and there was only this free blank empty formless feeling of helpless wantless utter satiety—

No, Grant, you piece of shit, don’t do that, your graph is fucked already and now you want to make it worse, you piece of shit Grant you piece of shit—

Face the morning, Grant.

“Moon? I think I need another one of your tinctures.”

“Ara, ara~ Already! You’ve been a busy boy, haven’t you . . .”

Her tinkling voice somewhere close by, just behind him. How long had she been watching him, as he wallowed and groaned?

“Is this the first time you’ve asked for my medicine twice, in the span of a single session? Why . . . hmm . . . I do think it is!”

Her small circle of a face, upside down, slid into view above his recumbent head. The crash’s magic played games with her short messy hair. It waved gently as if caught in some slow-mo breeze. At the tips, it glowed red and green and purple in pulsing sequence.

“Not to worry, my little desert mouse. And, I should add, you need not be so shy about asking me for favors. Your wish is mine: Moon makes sure her boys are well provided for.”

Grant would like to assure you, reader, that it wasn’t a sex thing, what they were doing here. Not for him, at least. If it was for her, she hadn’t pressed the point. She never touched him, only talked. If she talked like a creep, sometimes, that was a small price to pay for the treasures she gave him.

“Now then.”

She reached for some out-of-sight pocket. With a smile, she brandished the glass vial. Roughly finger-width and hand-length, full of a slightly greenish fluid. A wide bow of iridescent silk decorated its stopper.

She clasped the sides of the bow and pulled. The stopper came off with a tiny pop. She tipped the open vial over him.

He felt nothing when he received the medicine. Its business was not with his body or mind, only with the machines attached to them. It crept into the subtle monitoring devices that watched him at every moment, even in his sleep, collecting psychodynamic data and sending it out into the space network. It crept into them, and told them comforting lies.

On the screen of his pager, his roiling graph instantly collapsed to a flat even murmur. The last few hours of turmoil were overwritten with a carefully synthesized tranquility—normal but not too normal, in every respect.

Right now, the space network could only see a hole where his data would have been. Moon’s PSC, cracked and version-unlocked and decked out in illegal Shitspace tech, encased itself in a shield that hid everything inside from the eyes of Management’s earnest, tutting bureaucrats.

An hours-long gap in the data was unusual, but not so unusual as to attract attention, not with billions to monitor, each one careening across the abstract space of psychic health and psychic disease on its own distinctively tortuous route. All sorts of things could take one’s monitors off the map for a few hours: network maintenance, the act of coitus (for even the machines had a sense of decorum), the processing time required to comply with the latest dictate from the Lemurian censor—even mediation itself, when sufficiently intense. This last fact was part of what made PSCs the classic mediators’ vice, and for Grant, it proved a fertile source of excuses.

When he went back to the real world again, his monitors would come back online, have a chat with their parent nodes on the space network, and recount all that had happened during the silence. They would relate what Moon had made them believe: that this had been only a very, very normal Sunday afternoon. Not too normal. Very normal to a very normal extent.

Grant preferred not to think too hard about the implications.

The very possibility of a thing like Moon’s tincture was beyond the imaginative capacity of the public conversation. It was the kind of idea that you heard—if you heard it anywhere—only from the duller minds of the paranoiac set, the kind of people the disreputable fringe spurned as its disreputable fringe. There are data-doctoring devices, they would say, and the mediators all use them to hide their crimes, and did you know, by the way, that Subspace isn’t real?

Data-doctoring devices, just like grand conspiracy theories about the unreality of space, were ideas too big for the tissue of reality to bear their weight. They implied too much, and dissolved everything, dissolved the logic of Grant’s profession, of Armorican society, of human society. Dissolved, in the end, even the grounds used to argue for their truth.

But there were data-doctoring devices, it turned out. They were not widely known, not some standard piece of Shitspace tech which everyone knew and abused except squares like Grant. They were a Moon thing. She’d sworn him to secrecy on the matter. A second tier of secret, beyond the kind of secret he kept from Sylvie, and from his wife, while still sharing it freely with lowlife strangers, in the course of pre-game or post-game banter. This was the kind of Moon thing he was to share with Moon, and her alone.

He was at ease, now. He watched the ceiling dance, taking idle interest in the journey of a particular fractal filament as it evolved through stages reminiscent of embryo, child, adult. Like a feeding microbe, it swallowed up neighboring filaments, and grew.

Grant swept his arms through the rainbow bath in a pantomimed breaststroke. This provided a nice, panoramic view of his delts and biceps, which he enjoyed admiring. Prismatic ripples spread and sparkled on the surface around him.

“Oh, I meant to ask. What strat were you trying to do, in that match? Relicpath? Really didn’t seem like you were doing much, from the outside. You didn’t scout, you didn’t uptech.”

“The ways of Wen Xifeng,” said Moon, “are subtle, and beyond the grasp of mortals. Especially mortal men.”

She took an interest in the game’s narrative lore. It was the kind of thing she did. She knew it bored him, with its stock characters and its reams of cardboard history, its tame plastic occultism. But he was a captive audience, and so he’d come to know all about it.

About the vulpine succubus Wen Xifeng. About Xiahou Ye, drunkard and military genius. And, of course, about the prettyboy pair at the center of it all, the arch-rival mages Jing Xie and Han Zhang Shuo. The Spring and Summer of the title, respectively, each pre-eminent in his respective school of season-themed magic. They chased each other across the globe, Han Zhang Shuo nabbing treasures from sleeping gods, Jing Xie retaking them in the name of celestial law and order. Or something like that.

They were also lovers, Moon assured him, though he doubted this was the kind of fact one could find printed in the official sourcebooks. Another Moon thing, which ran against the grain of ordinary sense but was held as gospel truth in here, among the rainbows.

“What does it matter, though, in the end?” she admitted. “I lost.”

“We both lost,” Grant said. “Fucking RoadToZion.”

“You’ll beat him some day,” she said. “Your Moon believes in you, with all her heart.”

 

---

 

He needed to practice his quick-repels. He needed to understand the meta better. He needed to pick his relicpaths in the early game and stick to them. He needed to close-read FAQs written by Han Zhang Shuo mains, as opposition research. He needed to try speccing into Heaven’s Favor, or maybe into Qi Circulation. He needed to figure out why everyone frowned upon Refinement-heavy builds. He needed to work on his micro.

He needed to beat RoadToZion.

He needed to try Renewal strats. He hated playing Renewal, it was so fucking complicated, he’d never main Renewal for real, but he needed to learn it, as opposition research. He needed to ask Moon which speed tech she was using, in the games where she played sacrifice spam. He needed to stop over-using prison realms. Either that or get good at them, which he wasn’t, not by the standards of this level of play.

He needed to ask Moon for a Shitspace onramp, and go looking for clues in old postings by the crew who’d cracked the game, made it capable of running without a full connection to the space network. RoadToZion was one of them, wasn’t he? Maybe the answers were there, at the beginning of things.

He needed to get good. He needed to work on his reflexes. He needed to have a response ready for late-game dual-elemental shit. He needed to learn ways to cut off Renewal players from their timestream leverage, including the leverage they themselves invented out of whole cloth, in their conjured timelines. He needed to get into dual-elemental strats, ones with Amethyst plus something else.

He needed to get really, really good. That was what he’d always done. Put in the time. Practice the reflexes. It always used to work, but this game was different, harder.

He wasn’t asking to crest the top of the leaderboards, here. He’d never been that good at any game. He only wanted to be good enough to respect himself, hear the winner tell him “good game” and think “yeah, it was, it sure was.” He wanted to be competent, that was all.

RoadToZion wasn’t topping leaderboards either. He wasn’t a pro, he was just good. He was competent.

He needed more time. He needed to find a Shitspace onramp of his own, so he could research the game on his own time, outside of Moon’s crash.

He needed to try speccing into Ascetic. He needed to try fasting, in real life, to prepare himself for the intense hunger you felt through the whole game, when you went hard into Ascetic. He needed to try that weird diet that all the Ascetic pros swore by. He needed to figure out how to make Cordelia think he was eating when he wasn’t, in fact, eating. He needed to go hard into bounds check powergaming. He needed to watch Aalii matches, grow conversant in Aalii’s trademark combo system. He needed to practice, practice, practice.

He needed to be competent. He needed to be a normal, achievable level of good. He needed to stop feeling ashamed of his play. He needed to be a pretty good player, with a pretty good pairwise ELO, and a pretty good personal brand of pre-game banter. He needed an even win ratio against the pretty good RoadToZion, and every other one of the pretty good players out there, every last one of the bunch, with their tolerable jobs, their acceptable marriages, their pretty good lives.

He needed to be respectably mediocre. He needed to be okay.

 

---

 

“Do you ever wonder whether he cheats?” Moon asked him later.

“RoadToZion, you mean?”

He took her silence for a yes.

“I mean, maybe? But like, we all cheat. It’s a Shitspace build and we’re playing unpatched fields. Bounds check exploits, messenger glitching, that stuff’s all just part of the game.”

“I am not thinking of those things,” she said.

“You mean, like, straight-up cheating? Doctoring the game state? Like what you do to my graph with your ‘tincture’?”

“Something of the sort, perhaps,” she said.

“He did do some dev work on the Shitspace build,” Grant said. “He might know stuff about the internals. Or he could have like, snuck a patch in under our noses.”

“There is a funny scent to his play,” Moon said. “You have my word about that, and ought to take it. Wen Xifeng’s sense of smell is without rival. It is sung of in ancient ballads by doomed lovers, dating to the days before men knew of iron.”

“No,” Grant said. “No, I don’t think so. He’s just a good player, and he plays serious Renewal, which yeah is pretty rare, only Ascetic is less popular in our tier.

“I think that’s what’s going on. He’s the only serious Renewal player we ever run into, so he seems OP to us. Like, Renewal pretty much is cheating, right, except built into the game? That’s what it feels like, the first time you get owned by it.”

“Still,” she said, “I do wonder what his funny scent means. It is rich and composed of several parts. I shall have to ask him, next time I see him.”

“Wait, ask him? You know the guy?”

Why the hell had she never told him? But then why should she, he conceded. He was a captive audience. She was a collection of inscrutable whims. She did whatever she did, and didn’t do whatever she didn’t. Every thing a Moon thing.

Which was fine. It was all fine. Chill the fuck out, Grant. Relax, for once in your life. What exactly is it that you’re so on guard about, every fucking second of your D-tier existence?

“He is a personal friend of mine, as it happens!” she said. “Another one of my boys, you might call him.

“It has been such fun to watch my two boys spar. Such pyrotechnics, and they grow ever more marvelous, as your skill improves.”

“What is he . . . like?” Grant asked. “As a person?”

“That is what you want to know, is it? Not about his strats, but about the man, his temperament, his private habits . . . oh perfect . . .”

“I’m just curious,” Grant muttered.

“You are,” Moon corrected him, “in the throes of an undeniable fixation, upon a fascinating rival. Tell me, do you think of him in your other life, when you leave our crash? Does his image come unbidden to you in odd moments? Do you picture him as Han Zhang Shuo, when you think of him? Or as some other, similarly comely man, from your past, perhaps?

“I pry, but oh, do humor me in my prying. I find these details so very interesting. And besides, it might be a healthy step in our friendship for us to share a bit more of who we are as people, beyond the restrictive terms of this lotus dream. I know so little about your private life, my jerboa.”

What the hell is it you’re so on guard about, Grant?

No, Moon, no, I don’t think about my gamer rivals when I’m horny in bed and my wife’s asleep. No, I don’t, thank you for asking. But I used to. I mean, I used to think about gamer rivals, when I was horny, but that was before I was married, I would hear the way they talked on voice, it was a different vibe back then, every guy on there calling everything gay as a general-purpose term of abuse, it went beyond that even, it wasn’t always clear what they meant, it became meaningless to say someone or something was gay, but they kept saying it, on voice, gay gay gay

And when they’d lose they’d call me a fag and when they’d win they’d call me a fag and I would hear them and later I’d think about them calling me a fag and then I’d think about how disgusted they would be if they knew about me thinking about it and I’d think about them and I’d imagine a face for each one to go with the voice, a face and a body that fit the way that guy said fag when he called me a fag, and would fit the way I’d imagine the guy would call me a fag if hypothetically he and I got into a situation where he would be calling me a fag while he was behind me and gripping my

Where was all this psychosexual stuff bubbling up from, all of a sudden? He’d come to terms with his bisexuality very early on in the process of self-analysis. Soon after that, the rest of his not-very-complex sexual psyche came into perfect focus under his analytic lens, and he proceeded to more difficult self-therapeutic problems.

So why am I so restless and rowdy and tense and

Did you know Moon that when I was in the gym then I would imagine a voice for every one of the guys in there, the regulars, the ripped guys who were always in there and never said a word, I would imagine a voice for each one, the way he’d say it when he

Why do I have to stay alert at every fucking second of my life

I have to stay alert because I have to watch for the intruders who never come but if they came, if they came it would be game over, I’m guarding something so precious it’s classified, I am the man you see on the screen, I am that man you see with huge rock-solid pecs who protects government secrets, I am on guard against terrorists against China and Iran and I know all kinds of things about the enemies I protect you against with my huge rock-solid pecs and I can’t say a word about it, when the guys come over to my condo in my mind I can’t say a word about what I protect them against in every moment of my life, I can only tell them what kind of man I am, that kind of man, in my mind, when we’re in my condo and we’re in the bed and he’s calling me a

The past was reaching up into the present. Like a gear had come loose in time’s clockwork. Like a what? A gear?

What did she call me? Her jerboa?

What the fuck is a jerboa?

In his mind Grant saw clocks lined up on a wall, many clocks, and every one of them ticking wrong, going one second forward and then stuttering back, like the messenger saying “Jing Xie, the p—Jing Xie, the p—Jing Xie, the p—Jing Xie, the p—”

Moon came in close to his ear, and whispered.

“I’ll tell you a secret, if you promise to keep it. Will you?”

He might have nodded.

“But first I’ll make you guess. Who is your rival, do you think? Who is he in the real world? You’ll have heard of him, I should think. Come on, make a guess~”

Grant cannot remember all of this with equal clarity, you should know, reader. Some parts hide from the mind as a dream does after waking. Still, he must admit that to the best of his recollection, the exact words he used in response, at this moment, were the following:

“Like, uh, some guy?”

A D-Tier answer. He needed to get good.

“More wrong than you can know. Who is your rival? You’ll know the name. You do know the name Hector Stein, don’t you?”

“Hector Stein? The Stein’s Armorica guy? I don’t get it. You’re friends with him? Isn’t he sentenced to life confinement in Subspace, in a Special Observation crash with strict isolation? How would he even connect to the game?”

“You see, Grant, there are many things you do not yet know about your oh so fascinating rival. You have much to discover~”

The clocks went backward and the eyes rolled backward. There was a man with him in a room and the man’s eyes were rolling backward in bliss.

The man aged backwards. As the clocks rolled back he grew old.

An old wrinkled man and his face is the most familiar thing in the world, the only familiar thing, everything else is gone, there’s only him and me and the room

We are out in the street in front of our house, because the sky is turning red and we want to know what the hell is going on, and there is a girl standing in the middle of the street, even though there are no girls at all where we live, there is a girl in the street and her eyes are like a frenzied animal’s eyes, and I ask her who she is and she says

You can’t trust the space network, there are data-doctoring devices out there corrupting it, it’s all suspect, and you can’t trust the government either, it won’t tell you about the space aliens, and you can’t trust your senses, because the space aliens make Matrix dream world things that make you think they’re real, at all times you are watched by machines and by girls with horny leers who lurk and peer through windows unseen, we do not live in the world we were brought up for, Cordelia was right that she’s not paranoid enough, how could anyone possibly be paranoid enough for the world we live in, it would drive you insane

I don’t want to be driven insane, I don’t want to think about the implications of it all, I don’t, please

I just want to train and get good and get strong until I’m so strong I’m bigger than all the aliens and machines and girls and then I just punch my way out, just punch down the walls of this fucking maze, simple as that, and I’ll say, that’s Grant’s way, the way where you don’t play their game, you just punch the wall and it falls and you leave

“Hmmm,” Moon purred.

“Oh, yes, yes. I see. No, we can’t be having that, can we . . .

“I must attend to some urgent business, Grant. It will only take a moment. You will not even notice me doing it, in all likelihood. It will, however, require my full attention.”

He might have nodded.

“You see, our world is having a little bout of indigestion. I say ‘you see’ proverbially, mind you. You do not see. I would know, if you were to grasp my meaning. In that case, the Whole-Thing’s poor stomach would be in a much more profound state of revolt.”

Behind the class as always. Classic Grant. What was it about him, that made these kooky lecturing types flock to him? People were always explaining the unexplainable to him. Something about his face, maybe. The way it tended, at rest, to settle in an expression that looked gormless and slightly dazed. The face of every dumb jock in every dumb teen movie. If you find yourself in possession of esoteric knowledge, capable of blowing minds, then Grant is your man. Grant, the perfect thoughtless foil, the man whose mind is being blown, eternally, caught forever in perfectly formed incomprehension. This was his role in life.

Moon held her head tilted slightly to the side, as if listening for a faint noise. Her left arm was raised. The hand made a rhythmic patting motion.

“The Whole-Thing?” Grant asked. “What’s the Whole-Thing?”

“I told you,” she screamed, “I need to concentrate!”

Why, that dumb jock’s done it again! He never failed. What a goof, that guy.

“I need,” she said, “to concentrate . . .”

The girl’s eyes darting like an animal’s, in the middle of the street, under the moonlight and the red light that creeps across the sky and paints her face the color of blood

And she says

Her hand tapped, fluttered, was still.

“There. All better now! No thanks to you, but I am indulgent, and forgive much. Let us think no more about it.”

Grant watched tendrils on the ceiling grow new tendrils of their own. He splashed his feet idly against the surface of the bath.

He took stock of his body. He noticed an anxious tension in his muscles, and an erection. An odd pair, of unknown origin.

“I need to practice,” he said.

“Your earnest commitment to the project of your own improvement,” Moon said, “is one of your traits I think I will always find touching. Would that more of us were like you. We might have a world worth living in, then.”

Grant did not think about the implications of this. He did what he always did. He let Moon say her Moon things, he listened or pantomimed listening, and he waited for her to let him play games again.