“And I will do what?” asked Djoser, who was clearly irritated by the back-and-forth banter between D_Light and Lyra. “Oh, I know, maybe I can do the sales pitch to the gay spankers,” Djoser said sarcastically.
Lyra smiled sweetly. “No, Djoser my dear, as much as I’d enjoy watching you work your charm with the gentlemen of this ghetto, we need you on security detail. Remember, it’s not the spankers we care about, it’s the demon, and if the demon thinks there’s something up, there might be trouble.” Lyra’s expression became serious. “You need to stay alert and keep your hand near your hilt.”
“True, and I’ll be jacked in, so I won’t accurately see what’s going on,” D_Light added.
Djoser glared at D_Light, a slow smile spreading across his face as though he was thinking, Like you would be of any use anyway. “Funny, I thought we brought bodyguards for that very purpose,” he said.
Lyra rolled her eyes. “Look, we’ve all lived under Rule Seven for decades, right? I would hope the three of us could handle one demon.”
D_Light thought about his throwing discs, Djoser’s short curved sword, and Lyra’s unmatched skill with open-hand martial arts fighting styles. Yes, his mother was correct that they had all become resourceful in combat in their own individual ways. From the day they joined House Tesla, this had been a priority.
Djoser looked skeptical. “Yeah, well, demons are not constrained by divine law, so we’re likely to be up against modern weapons. We’d better not get confrontational. Let’s just ID the bastard and call it in.”
CHAPTER 9
Dro-vine is the wood and steel of the present day. Why waste resources and labor to build a house when you can grow one from seed? If you want to get fancy about it, build some synthetic stairs and some basic skeletal framing. The dro-vine will happily grow over your scaffolding; however, don’t expect this plant to do exactly what you planned! Because of its variability, dro-vine is not for the control freak, but rather for those who want a cheap yet comfortable place to live. To grow a house, just find some land and plant one-that is, if this ubiquitous organism hasn’t already colonized the area on its own.
Thanks to hyper-photosynthesis during the growing season, dro-vine goes from seed to a small cocoon large enough to sleep in within two weeks. Within a month, you’ll have yourself a small home, complete with several chambers. What makes dro-vine brilliant is how it naturally forms cavities in itself, which tend to connect with one another.
To make a door from one cavity to another, you simply cut out a rectangular hole in the wall and place a hinged door in the opening. The dro-vine, in an attempt to fill the hole, will grow over the hinges, but it won’t grow over the door itself since such doors are coated with chemi suppression enzymes suspended in a tough polymer. However, if you really want to be lazy, don’t even bother with a door. Just cut an upside down “T” slit (like an old camping tent) and treat the edges of the wound with the suppression enzyme to keep the wound from healing.
Cutting windows is even easier than doors, but why bother? In our minds, SkinWare can adorn the chamber walls, ceiling, and floor with any vista we desire-from faraway canyons, to the ocean, to a rainforest, to the Martian landscape-all in real time (with a little over a three-minute delay in the case of the Mars scenery)…
In summary, I’m afraid that for those of us who enjoy the building games, we had better forget about the mass market and focus our play on the distinctive but often unpredictable tastes of the rich.
D_Light heard the familiar whistling noise as he jacked into NeverWorld. The hallway that connected the apartments of this floor was brightly lit in real life, with subdued shades of green and brown Van Gogh swirls for walls and a bright green mossy floor, but as his nervous system plunged into the game, the light dimmed and the hallway turned to rough-hewn stone. Torches spaced at regular intervals materialized to light the way. In the distance he heard someone screaming. A woman, he thought, being tortured. Or perhaps it was just a lure set by some clever fiend, patiently waiting for a hero to fall for the ruse.
There were the sounds of other creatures too-faint groaning, the occasional snarl, the familiar distant clang of metal against metal signaling combat underway. And there were more ordinary sounds, like the subtle cacophony of dripping water from a thousand sources. This labyrinth, its hallways and chambers filled to the brim with terrors and treasures, was leaky, dank, and in great need of repair.
The smell of rotting flesh-faint, but unpleasant just the same-permeated everything. Olfactory input in NeverWorld was not as sophisticated as auditory or visual, being less important for game play, but the game did have a few scents in its inventory. Unfortunately, most of them were foul. Rotting was particularly popular. The rotten stench of death left by carcasses in the battlefield, the pungent aroma of moldy food abandoned by the long since ambushed caravan, and the ogre’s breath (who lived on an assortment of Soul knew what).
D_Light had barely acclimated to his surroundings when the sound of heavy footsteps caught his attention. They were close by and growing louder. Without hesitation, he summoned an invisibility spell. Waving one hand while tracing a symbol in the air with the other, he murmured an arcane phrase. As his spell completed, D_Light was relieved to discover that he could no longer see his own hand. That was a good thing, as he sometimes made mistakes, especially when rushed.
The spell took effect none too soon, for only a few seconds later, a lumbering beast of a creature turned the corner and headed in his direction. A maltoc, as the creature was called, resembled a man only in its general shape, having two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head. This was fitting, given that maltocs were human before their corruption by Salem, the son of Pheobah, the Dark Queen. But the maltoc’s general shape and size was the end of the similarities between these nasties and men. Bristling, greasy hair covered mounds of muscles and other more irregular and freakish lumps. Through the amorphous face peered beady, pink eyes, which glistened slightly in the torchlight of the hall. Around the eyes were crimson red sockets that excreted thin trickles of blood down its wrinkly face-a face that most closely resembled raw hamburger. The creature did not breathe as it stalked, for it had no nose or mouth; only its footfalls betrayed its passing. Maltocs, incidentally, were only lesser devils, but nonetheless, they were not something to be trifled with.
Having played NeverWorld for countless hours in the past, D_Light’s gaming habits were nearly hardwired. He had to fight the urge to blast this nasty in the back as it passed by him. “Nasties” was the term spankers used for computer-generated enemies in the game, and destroying them was one way to get points in NeverWorld and build up the power of the character one played. He had to remind himself of his purpose here-he was not here for treasure or glory in battle, but to look for doors or the absence thereof. For D_Light, this was a sort of agony, akin to sending a gambler into a casino just to count men with brown hair. It was a numbingly mundane task in an exciting world.
Two ghosts stood nearby, one to his left and another just behind. They looked like human-shaped jellyfish with only the very edges of their bodies highlighted by thin, translucent lines, while the fill of the form was nearly transparent. D_Light supposed the ghosts to be Lyra and Djoser, but he could not ascertain which was which because NeverWorld rarely skinned objects or people as they looked in the real world. In fact, one could never predict how the game’s artificial intelligence would skin non-game objects and creatures. From the game’s perspective, it was only important to make clear who was a spanker and who was not. Skinning non-spankers as benign ghosts enabled those submerged in the game to identify the non-players without losing the continuity of the game.
Both ghosts had the appearance of being men. One was an old man with an unrelenting crooked smile, wearing only wisps of rags. The other was younger, although D_Light could barely tell because the man’s face-his entire head, actually-was split down the middle to the root of the nose, much like a log of wood cleaved on the edge by an ax. This ghost was naked, and one of his arms twitched.
No sooner had D_Light focused in on the ghosts than a pop-up sign appeared over each one declaring, “Not in play. Do not interact with this agent.” It really was an incredible use of space, when D_Light thought about it. All of these alternate dimensions occupying the same physical area, dimensions facilitated by software. Consequently,
