Halting State

completely on the game box’s dual screens, her glasses shutting out anything that isn’t part of the reality in front of her. Totally intent, finger-joints twitching oddly as she turns the L-shaped controller around in her hands. “How long does this usually take?”

“What? Oh, the tutorial garden outside that door over there is designed to give you the basics of how to control your body in about half an hour to an hour. Then if you pick one of the shards, there are a bunch of solo quests you can run that will train you up until you can play competitively in about a week, um, twenty to thirty hours of online time. But if all you want to do is tag along with me, then just get through the tutorial in the garden.”

“You’ve got a whole load of kit.”

“Yeah. I’m Theodore G. Bear. The G. stands for Grizzly, and I’m an ursus.” You rear up and look down your nose at her from your full three metres, then pull out the huge, brass-barreled blunderbuss you carry in your pack and sling it around your neck where she can see it: “I believe in the right to keep and arm bears.” It’s about the size of a five-pounder carronade off of one of Captain Kidd’s frigates, and it’s been personally blessed by the Spirit of the Age, which gives it a serious edge against superstitionists and darklings. You wait for the groan, then add, “The best way to do this is if I carry you, so I’m going to sit down now, and then I want you to try the mount command.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Nope.”

She fiddles around for a minute, then suddenly she’s sitting on your pack, which has sprouted stirrups and a natty little leather saddle. “Hey! I can ride?”

“It’s a standard skill for epic characters. Don’t try it on anyone you aren’t campaigning with, they might get pissed off. Okay, time to wander.” You stand up and head for the big double doors at the front of the temple, keeping it slow. “This is the Temple of Newborn Souls on the Island of Is, which sits in the Nether Sea just off the coast of the main continent, which is called…Hell.”

Hell lies outside the universe, and is thus largely exempt from the laws of physics. Its geometry is a Dantesque parody, for while the Nether Sea is flat, the entirety of the continent lies below sea-level, a vast trumpet bell some thousands of leagues wide stretched out across the knife-sharp line where the sea meets the swirling vacuity that forever hides this realm from Heaven.

How do you describe a continent of pain that has been hollowed out into a frozen whirlpool, forever held below the cliffs of roaring, glass-green waves that somehow flail at the abyss, without ever curling over and toppling over to inundate the red-glowing wilderness?

How do you describe the turbulent flocks of the venal, swirling like starlings in the autumn air above the muddy fields of the Somme? How to picture the power-pylon ranks of impaled, damned souls marching in synchrony across the deserts of the fourth circle? The searing black-iron skyscrapers of Dis, windows glowing with diabolical light?

It’s like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, of course. Bosch, as pastiched by a million expert systems executing code that procedurally clones and extrapolates a work of art across a cosmic canvas. Procedural Bosch, painting madly and at infinite speed to fill in the gaps in a virtual world, guarded by the titanic archangels of Alonzo Church and Alan Turing, spinning the endless tape…

It’s funny how it takes game space to bring out the poet in you. And it’s even funnier how you’re embarrassed about letting it show.

“That’s Hell. Don’t worry about it, it’s just a little joke that got out of hand.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Not at all!” You lumber forward onto the stony path that meanders around the temple, heading downhill towards the beach front. “What happened was, the original set-up is where you go to acquire a body; hence, Limbo. Then a couple of the procedural content guys got bored and decided to have fun with the back-drop. This was all pre-alpha, back in the pioneering days, but they’d seen the movie”—and bloody awful you thought it was, too: an aging Patrick Stewart as Satan, hamming it up for the jeezmoid market—“and somehow managed to grab a chunk of scenery rights by a backdoor licensing deal. So we’re in Limbo, on the hill overlooking a sinkhole estate. And we’re about to teleport ourselves down to Earth, just as soon as I find the, ah—”

You find the right sacred grove, and flop down on the holy mosaic, which lights up in response: Standard Lambent Radiosity Tint #2, if you’re an accurate judge of such things.

“But why is it still here?”

“It’s somewhere we can banish persistent griefers.” The damned souls in this particular hell are there for violations of game law—ranging from beating up noobs and stealing to more recondite offences against virtual reality. All they can do is lie, broken and impaled upon their wheels, screaming abuse at the robot devils until their sentence is done, and they can go back to the game. “Okay, hold on. We’re going down to Vhrana.”

The sky turns deep blue, the world freezes, and a progress bar marches slowly across it from horizon to horizon. Ethereal runes written in aurorae six hundred kilometres high scrawl across the heavens, UPDATING REALITY, and for a moment your skin crawls with superstitious dread. Someday we’re all going to get brain implants and experience this directly. Someday everyone is going to live their lives out in places like this, vacant bodies tended by machines of loving grace while their minds go on before us into strange spaces where the meat cannot follow. You can see it coming, slamming towards you out of the future, like the empty white static that is all anyone has ever heard from beyond the stars: a Final Solution to the human condition, an answer to the Fermi paradox, lights on at home and all the windows tightly shuttered. Because it’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?

And then your claws click down on cobble-stones and the horizon implodes into the uneven Tudor timber- framed frontages of the high street in Vhrana.

Vhrana is the capital city of Cordua, in northern Breasil on the continent of Mu. It’s about two kilometres in diameter, built atop a mushroom-shaped dome of limestone that has come adrift from its foundations and floats about a kilometre up above the rain-forest-covered flanks of Mount Panesh. Enterprising adventurers have quarried out vast cellars beneath their picturesque guild-houses, and for a pittance you can descend through the endless passages until you come to a wicker platform overlooking the jungle. Then you can rent a bamboo-and-silk hang- glider and descend to the surface or, if you are Adept, levitate by the power of will alone.

Vhrana is a mess of clashing architectural styles, but the Duke has imposed a certain uniformity over it all by restricting the supply of certain building materials—not unlike Edinburgh, come to think of it. Thus, the timber- framed Tudor look hunches cheek by jowl with lighter wood-and-wicker buildings, some of them thatched, and the odd eruption of elvish structures—tediously similar to late-mediaeval Japan, in your opinion, but at least it doesn’t clash too violently. There aren’t many people out on the streets yet, for it’s still morning in most of North America, but as you make your way towards the northern market hall, you pass a number of hawkers selling their stuff.

“What are you looking for?”

“Voodoo board. I’m pretty sure it’s near the north end of this market. We’re in a no-PvP zone, by the way, you can hop down and explore if you want: Nobody’s going to jump you.”

“Oh. Okay, then.” She manages to dismount without impaling herself on a street sign while you sniff around among the market stalls—a lot of their keepers are in zombie mode, crying out their sales spiel in a loop—and look for the board. Eventually you find it, tucked away between the Golden Lotus Peace and Justice Co-operative (actually the local chapter of the Assassins Guild) and the Temple of Ru’aark. You scroll through flashing names and blinking icons, looking for—

“The missing guy. What’s his name?”

“Nigel MacDonald, aka Nigel Reliable. Not.”

“I meant, his Zone name. Names. Any inkling?”

“What, you mean what his character was called?”

“No, his true name. The one that’s attached to any character he’s playing, so his friends can find him. Like, I’m currently being Theodore G. Bear, but my Zone handle is JackReed. You’re currently being Anonymous Coward—sorry, that’s a generic, you haven’t named your noob—but when we logged you in we created an account with the Zone handle ElaineBarnaby. Yes?”

“Oh, right. Wouldn’t he just be NigelMacDonald?”

“Nope. For one thing, that’s a common name. I only got JackReed because I’ve been playing since the early days, and I pulled a few strings; name squatting is a national sport hereabouts. And for another, I’m thinking if we