As I watched the battle, I kept trying to remember the name of the girl behind the character Nine. Julia? May? I couldn’t seem to remember it. I kept guessing. Something told me it matched a month of the year… June? June. That was it. The name came out of the abyss of memory along with the surname—Curtis. She must be around forty.
A citizen search showed me several hundred June Curtises, and a third of them fit the age bracket of thirty-five to forty-five. And then there were noncitizens on top of that… Should I message each of them? “Sorry, but you didn’t happen to take part in any Dis beta tests, did you?” It would probably just go straight to spam. Pointless though it was, I decided to do it anyway. I gave the home assistant an order: “O, send messages to all addressees with the name June Curtis, surname starting with C or K.” Then I dictated the message.
I didn’t know myself what I was trying to achieve, but I at least wanted to see Beta the sadist in real life. If she was still alive. The main thing was to confirm that the original Beta existed, and hadn’t rotted away in a capsule after the failed test. If I could find her, then that could be the ace up my sleeve in negotiations with Nine.
“Four thousand two hundred and seventy-three addressees matching the criteria found,” O reported. Without limiting by age and including noncitizens, the number rose by an order of magnitude. “Simultaneous mailout impossible due to violation of the articles of citizenship on unwelcome correspondence. Solution: limit simultaneous…
“Do it,” I ordered, not waiting to hear it all.
O would probably just send the messages one by one.
A delivery drone soon arrived with the cartridges. I quickly replaced the old ones, got undressed… I didn’t get into my capsule right away. First I set a forced-exit timer for twelve hours from now—I’d spend a little over eight months in the Nether.
Nether, take me… Logging in.
Synchronizing…
The melding of minds didn’t go as fast as last time. Scyth had spent another year here and lost almost all his weapon skills, along with Night Vision, Cartography, Cloak Essence and Imitation. With each death, he lost a mote of his humanity. I felt his joy when Nine and her friends almost killed Nine-Six, and Seven-Two was locked in his own castle and afraid to poke his head over the parapet. It was hard for me to feel Scyth s feelings as my own.
I found him where he spent most of his time—in the great nothing. Less than an hour left to resurrection.
When our minds melded, he came alive, felt my presence, felt his life continuing, and with that came emotions: anger, fury, pain, longing for his parents, his friends and Tissa. The events of the party awakened with him… I don’t know how to explain it… his spirit? He didn’t approve of my choice of Karina, but he still envied me. I was talking to myself. Some might call that schizophrenia, but it was just the way it was. However you span it, I had two personalities within me. The boundary between them was steadily fading, but it was still there.
“I would have chosen Rita, since you broke up with Tissa,” he thought. “She’s nice.”
“When you come back, you can choose for yourself. Let’s decide what to do and how to get out of here.”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried? I’ve tried everything so many times. Tried to negotiate, gain their trust, make friends, escape, steal something from the castle, find some kind of artifact… Nine doesn’t even punish me for escaping anymore, she doesn’t want to waste the time. She just kills me without a word and disappears.”
From there, we thought together, as one. But not for long. Revival in the castle yard, Nine’s indifferent face, a lightning bolt, death…
Beta flew straight off as soon as she killed me, to attend to her own business: farming shards or sieging Seven-Two. But then something failed to go to plan. One time, resurrection didn’t take twelve hours! I didn’t even go to limbo at all! Ten seconds after I died, I reappeared in the same spot. Technically I hadn’t even died: Second Life! You managed to dodge death!
“Lucky…” I thought aloud. “But how? My skills are blocked…”
Once sure that Nine was gone, I checked my other abilities—everything else was still locked. Strange. Second Life had a fifty percent proc chance, but this was the first time it had activated in so many thousands of years. Why? I spent some time pondering it, but couldn’t figure out what had happened. Nothing had changed, but the previously locked ability, earned for gaining two hundred and fifty’ levels without dying, suddenly activated. No point in wasting time wondering why. I was just lucky that Nine thought I would be dead for the next twelve hours. I hoped she didn’t show up any sooner.
I hid in a corner of the castle walls and started going through my inventory. The other ‘me’ thought that was a waste of time, since he’d already tried everything, but he didn’t protest. I couldn’t do anything with the still unidentified artifacts from the Treasury of the First Mage.
I scrolled through the whole list of abilities again, then scoured my inventory and found some cooking ingredients and tools. Food! What if I could create some new dish with some kind of effect? Wait… What if I put my skills on scrolls? I slapped myself on the forehead. That was it! Nether, how did I not think of it before? It was so simple!
I fitfully pulled out
