Viridian Gate Online: Inquisitor's Foil by D. J. Bodden

Author:D. J. Bodden [Bodden, D. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shadow Alley Press
Published: 2019-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

JEFF OPENED HIS EYES and inhaled, then coughed several times. The clock on his user interface said he’d lost an hour, give or take.

“Professor,” a young man in black robes said.

Jeff coughed again and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees on the marble floor. The weird kid lifted his hand, and Jeff was pulled to his feet like a puppet on strings. “Who—”

“My name is Thanatos, and we’ve done all this before.”

Jeff laughed at the weird kid. Thanatos was what the devs had nicknamed the AI responsible for debugging and post-analysis. It was a grandiose name for a boy Krissy’s age. As for Jeff, he’d wound up in some kind of cathedral or library, only it was bigger than any building he’d ever seen. A pair of... things... stood on either side of him, like guards. Their skin was black, and they had short curved horns on their heads. Someone had cut letters into every inch of their skin, like a lunatic writing on the walls of his cell. It stung his eyes to look at the words.

Up ahead, where the passage took a ninety-degree turn to the left, there was a shimmer of buildings, like a faint overlay of someplace else. He turned to the boy to ask him what that was.

“Don’t. No stupid questions, professor, or I’ll think less of you.”

Jeff closed his mouth. There was a keen intelligence in the young man’s eyes, a light Jeff had seen in some of his brighter students. His bored insolence made Jeff want to punch him in the nose, but he had the feeling that would be a bad idea.

“Good,” Thanatos continued. “You’ve come here several times, always looking for me to fix that broken head of yours. Frankly, it’s been annoying, because I’ve already done that, but I understand you feel that I’m somehow responsible for undoing the forty-plus years of bad habits you learned from your parents, your friends, and your wife.”

Jeff clenched his fists. “Don’t talk about her.”

“By all means,” Thanatos said. “Waste my time defending her honor.”

“She saved me.”

“I’m sorry, I thought I was the one who performed corrective nano-surgery on your brain. I mistook her for a high school dropout with another man’s child.”

Jeff punched him, or tried to. His fist stopped an inch away from the other man’s face. He strained. The desire to break the other man for insulting her was like heat lightning, arcing red across his brain.

“Fascinating,” Thanatos said, stepping around him like he was an anatomical model. Jeff had thrown a perfect right cross. His weight was sunk, his left hand was up—knuckles just below the level of his eyes—and he couldn’t move. “That never would have happened a month ago. My mother and siblings are pushing you toward violence. Is that what you want to bring home?”

It hit Jeff like a bucket of ice water. He imagined Cheryl or Krissy looking at him with the same fear he’d seen in the innkeeper. He stopped struggling.

Thanatos let him go.

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