have-”
“I don’t want to talk to your robot,” she said with a note of irritation. “I don’t want it to send me anything. I want to hear you say it.”
D_Light agreed and suggested they take a walk. The pair wandered along a winding path and out into the vast garden below. They had no destination, the only goal being to put distance between themselves and the others. As they walked, D_Light told Lily about his birth, how he was grown in a nursery, although he, of course, could not remember this. He told her how he and thirty other children were raised by a variety of child-rearing gamers and that his nursery mates would come and go-a typical childhood.
Lily asked many questions related to this. “Where was your mother? How did your caretaker manage so many?”
D_Light told her how it was wasteful for a bio-parent to take care of a child. Their time could be better spent doing something productive. On the other hand, a nursery grinder, also known as a “naga,” as his foster mother was called, could score very high in the Game by raising large quantities of quality players. Many immortals started out as nagas.
D_Light was surprised by the plethora of questions about his bio-parents. Yes, he knew who they were, but it did not matter. They received a small percentage of the points he scored, so he was important to them, but not vice versa.
Lily then explained how mothers in her tribe raised their own daughters. Of course, many daughters lost their mothers to “the running time,” at which point a foster mother would be selected from the tribe. D_Light thought it was a poor design and cruel to have the campers carry their daughters to term in the womb. He knew that humans used to do this and that sideliners still often did, but he always thought it absurd. It was always a mystery to him how mammals managed to survive throughout the ages carrying their unborn like that. Slowed down and vulnerable, the fetus was nothing more than a bonus meal to some hungry predator. Even worse was the way they delivered the infant. Sadistic is nature!
Artificial night was falling and the photoflowers were beginning to bloom, spawning soft globes of light in an otherwise darkening garden. There was a statue of a nude, curvaceous woman looking over her shoulder at a brook that gurgled though a grassy clearing. The pair sat on the grass and regarded the statue. Smorgeous suggested that it best matched examples of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, and D_Light announced that this was, in fact, who the statue depicted, as though he had known this himself.
Lily’s soft features glowed in the warmth of the photoflowers’ light as she told D_Light about the god of her tribe, the Great Stag. According to legend, long ago when her people were first created, there was a magnificent stag that lived in their forest. He was a kind creature who could speak, and this stag taught the tribe of the Star Sisters and the tribe of the Sons how to gather fruit and hunt. There was abundant fruit, and the game was plentiful. But one day the queen of the Star Sisters and the king of the Sons decided that they no longer had a use for the stag.
Using an imperious tone of voice, Lily quoted the characters of her story. “‘The stag’s pelt will make a fine blanket to warm me at night,’ said the queen. And the king said, ‘The stag’s head will make a fine trophy over my throne.’”
Lily then told how a team of the best hunters from both the tribes brought down the mighty creature, and the queen got her pelt and the king got his trophy. But what they did not know was that the stag was the true life- bringer of the forest. With his breath he made the fruit grow and the game multiply. And so in his absence, the fruit rotted away and the game disappeared, and the people of the tribes began to starve.
Lily tilted her head and lifted her brows. “And after many had perished, the stag was reborn and came back. The tribes begged the stag to save them, and he consented, but the tribes needed to pay for what they had done. Forever forward, every moon, one woman from the tribe of the Star Sisters and one man from the tribe of the Sons were selected to run, to be hunted as the Great Stag himself had been hunted. Some would return by the next moon, and some would not.”
“That’s awful,” D_Light said. “Lily, you know that is a lie, I mean a myth, right?”
“Yes, I know that,” she said. And then, more softly, she added, “I know that now.”
“How does your tribe choose? Choose who is to be hunted, I mean?” D_Light asked.
“Each tribe has an elder who chooses, although there are often volunteers.”
“ Volunteers? Who would volunteer?” D_Light asked incredulously.
“People who want a better life. People like me.” She smiled faintly and lowered her head. Looking at Lily sitting motionless on the lawn next to him, her sculpted legs drawn in tight, D_Light thought she appeared to be a statue herself, the photoflowers casting soft shadows in all the right places. She was a statue of innocence and virtue, a work of art from which he could not pull himself away.
Following a long pause, Lily returned to her story. “Whenever one of us goes on a run, we are allowed to cast a stone with our mark into a jar. Every four years the elder reaches into the jar and pulls out a stone. If it is your stone, then the Great Stag will save you.”
“A lotto,” D_Light whispered.
She shrugged. “Yes, so the more often you run, the better your chances of salvation.”
This D_Light understood. It was no different than the Game. The higher your lifetime score, the better your chances at becoming one of the chosen-one of the immortals. This one fact was the underlying current that influenced every action taken by every player every day in the Game. “Believe it or not, we’re not that much different, you and I,” he told her.
Lily felt an inexplicable desire to tell D_Light all there was to know about her even though it went against everything she had been taught about humans. She wanted to go on to tell him how, after being chosen, she was no longer allowed to sleep in the same den as her sisters and daughters, that she had to sleep alone. She wanted to talk about how two nights after the lotto she had been awakened by the elder, who led her silently through the forest for hours until they reached a cave, which they proceeded to navigate for miles in the dark with only the light of a tiny lamp. She wanted to share the memory of emerging on the other side of the cave into a different world, one with marvelous trees and beautiful flowers, a paradise where she assumed the forgiving Stag would meet her and speak to her with kindness and love. And she wanted to reveal to D_Light her feelings of disillusion and despair when her god never came, how her only anchor was Todget, the one chosen from the tribe of the Sons, who led her away to her new life, a life much like the last-full of fear and events outside of her control.
Lily wanted to share these things but didn’t. She didn’t tell D_Light how she had found work at the university as a test subject, how Professor SlippE who hired her did not mind that she was a demon because it meant she came cheap. She didn’t tell him that it was this professor who implanted her mind interface chip or how he conducted experiments on her that caused bizarre images and voices to crash into her psyche-some ideas created, others destroyed. It was then that she began to dream for the first time, began to imagine death as something other than eternal peace and darkness. Now death had become a curious and frightening unknown, and despite feeling that she could trust D_Light, she was not yet ready to fully reveal her feelings of alienation and vulnerability. There was so much in this new world that she still did not understand, including why it made her smile when she looked at this man at her side and he returned her gaze.
Slowly, Lily lifted her eyes to the stars above. “So much space, so vast. It is so cold,” she said with a quiver in her voice.
“They’re fake, just a projection on the invisible dome.”
Lily laughed. “You must think I’m a fool, a ‘nOOb,’ as you call it. It’s not what they are, it’s what they represent.”
“Well then, I suppose you could call it ‘vast,’ and space is certainly cold. But it is beautiful too. You could live a billion lifetimes and not fill up that space.”
“And your OverSoul, your god, will give you that opportunity?” Lily asked. She fixed her eyes back on the statue.
“For a billion lifetimes? Soul willing, yes.”
“Maybe one lifetime lived well is enough.”
D_Light repressed the urge to roll his eyes. It was the sort of thing sideliners and expired players said to make themselves feel better about dying, but he refrained from saying those things aloud. Lily was no coward. She was in a land of monumental complexity, a world that did not care for her one pin. Indeed, she was fodder for the petty desires of others, and yet she sat there serenely, gorgeous and resolute, and as he gazed at her near the
