INSIDE by Chris Savage

Author:Chris Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-15T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

The Hunt for Hestia

I had stopped there, in front of the tavern, eyes blinking red and screaming at me. This was an all-new tavern—some place on the far side of the city, where we hadn’t previously pissed off the barkeep. Privately, I had always wondered before why, in ERDE regular, there were often different taverns in the same city. Just seemed redundant. Now, having lost my drinking and rumor-gathering privileges by exerting my own living privilege, I was suddenly aware of how vital an information-gathering spot would be and the need for redundancy. You couldn’t well brick a player off from quest progress, could you?

Little logical inconsistencies like this in the game world bothered me. The gaminess of it. I knew it was a part of the experience, the balance, but at what point would I have to make a decision? Was this a real world? Was it a game world? My manic hope for the future seemed to rest on the decision in my head. Could something be two things at once? How realistic does a simulation have to be before it counts as real? I mean, I knew they’d been working on the project for nearly a decade but there was no way on Earth AI could get this advanced… right?

Maybe, I thought, we weren’t on Earth. Maybe we were on some distant planet, where magic works and the undead exist. Maybe we were here in the middle of another galaxy, blasting our consciousness via radio to some intricate digital avatar that moved and walked and talked just like a human, and the whole of this society just so happens to be based on rules some twenty-something sadist neckbeard came up with in his free time.

Fat chance of that, I thought. The truth was. I knew this idea was crazy. I knew trying to rescue my son, to bring him back to life, here of all places. It would be difficult. Maybe even impossible. Maybe I was just trying to punish myself, I thought, tears threatening to burst from my face, for letting him die. Making myself relive this same grief over and over again. Each time I thought of him in my arms, cooing or laughing or smiling at me, it broke my heart again. A mother’s love is one thing—a father’s love was just as hot, just as angry, just as tormented. My little man, a whole future ahead of him, and he was snuffed out.

It was too much to think of endgames. What would happen if it did succeed. There were a million horrible outcomes that could arise. That was even forgetting the pertinent question. If he could be revived, what would be the next block? The next step? Would Augustus even be able to really revive him, for good? Without some kind of horrible mutation? That was a whole possibility in and of itself. Would I want to have some revenant baby? At what point would it be JJ at all?

I closed my eyes.

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