Could I be wrong? Has my entire experience on the other side been a simulation? It didn’t feel like it. Feelings, however, were not strong evidence either way.

Was it possible that I was wrong? Was I delusional? Nico’s presence suggested that might be the case. Hearing voices or attributing parts of your mind to other people or entities was a sure sign of madness, after all. On the other hand, his presence and level of influence was entirely controllable and he had brought with him actual skills. Mental illness wasn’t something the bearer could just shut off when it was convenient, and definitely didn’t grant knowledge or skills. What about the pen, or the other real world objects I had been able to store and retrieve on either side? Was there any actual thing that I had seen that couldn’t be explained away by absurdly advanced technology and physical access to my brain?

No, I had to conclude. It was that last detail, having physical access to my brain, that did it. After that had happened, there was literally nothing I could do to verify my reality.

But… did that actually matter? The best RTS players commanded armies to victory. Were the armies real? That was a difficult question. Their skills were real enough. Their paychecks and prize purses certainly were. But their armies and their command skills were only real in the correct frame. Though they couldn’t march a thousand hive drones on New York and infest it, anyone in the same consensus reality would certainly need to look out for monsters bursting out of the ground in ambush.

I, on the other hand, could. I could march a thousand worker pigeons on New York, which I suppose was a sort of infestation too. At least, I would be able to once I sorted out what was going on with the differences between Earth and the other side. I was wary enough of losing them that I hadn’t even physically deployed any of my minions in the towers, much less here where they’d probably instantly evaporate like that paper had. Even if Zhou was one hundred percent correct, there was still the fact that our powers could impact the real world. Either they were real, or the alien tech was simulating them enough that they might as well be. The reality where I was delusional and the one where I wasn’t were entirely congruent. It literally didn’t matter which was objectively true. The world looked the same either way.

So you know what? Fuck him. Don’t worry Nico, I believe you’re real.

[Your vote of confidence inspires me to achieve bleeding edge deliverables.]

I bet. The more bleeding edges on my massive butterfly monster, the better.

Actually, isn’t this way of thinking more reasonable? The Chinese were apparently totally ignoring what were probably humanity’s biggest existential threats. That didn’t seem smart at all.

I spent the rest of the morning in quiet contemplation. Nurses came to bring me breakfast and take various measurements. I didn’t pay them much mind, and they were perfectly happy to leave me to my thoughts.

The doctor came around noon, a tray of lunch in tow. He seemed strangely smug as he checked my chart and asked me some routine-sounding questions. Once he was done, he put my chart away, and came back to my bedside, looking eager.

“So, I heard you were ambushed this morning.”

“I was,” I said, feeling like I was missing something, “and you’re happy about that?”

“Oh, no!” Doctor Tanner laughed, “No, that was a dick move. No, I heard you fought some kinda wizard duel, and cut off his fingertips!”

My palm met my face, almost without my intervention.

“Where did you hear that?” I asked from behind my hand. No one had seen what I’d done but the officer himself, and I didn’t know of anyone who had seen the results except his pocket healer.

“Wei told me. He’s been talkin’ you up to the nurses. I expect the stories’ll be about the wizard cyborg supersoldier after today.”

Great.

“Whyyyyy?” I complained, totally failing to see any point in just wantonly spilling sensitive information as that officer apparently did. How did his government ever agree to share anything with him if this was how he acted?

“That man,” Doctor Tanner said, pausing to consider his next words, “He thinks that he’s the hero of his own story. His life was ‘put in peril by the dangerously unstable yet tragic victim of his enemy’s cruel experiments’ and all that. Think he might be angling to get you committed too.”

My eyes widened at that. Of course. If I couldn’t leave, even once my spine sorted itself out, then I’d all but have to work with him or resort to violence against those who have helped me. Wouldn’t look good for me, insane or not.

“Whoa, there,” the doctor said, hands raised, “I know you didn’t snap at any of my nurses, or me for that matter. Being provoked by probably the most provocative guy in the building isn’t really the kind of evidence you need to get somebody committed, I just thought that might be what he’s working on. Far as I’m concerned, so long as you keep your ‘matter annihilation’ ray or whatever in the holster, we’ll be good. No chance of that going off by accident, is there? I mean, you’re already through the most traumatic of surgeries so-”

“No,” I interrupted. I was pretty sure that wouldn’t happen, and any undirected manifestations of my power were probably a lot less dangerous than he was imagining anyway.

“Good, good,” he said, some tension leaving his posture. He turned to leave. “If you’ve got any questions or need anything you can-”

“I do, actually,” I cut him off again, “have a question, I mean.”

And I did. Though I was obviously the only one from the city they’d had a chance to question, I wasn’t necessarily the only one they had taken. Joe couldn’t log out. Neither of us had seen any of our coworkers, but for all we knew they may be in the same state. Who said that it had to be our former employer that had custody of their physical bodies?

“Well?” he asked, after a few seconds. I should probably remember to focus on my inventory before pondering anything at length - I’d look a lot smarter. Or at least less distractible.

“Was I the only one brought here?” I finally asked. The doctor’s face fell. Shit. That wasn’t the reaction I was looking for.

“Ah. You weren’t. Did you have someone you were looking for?” His manner was suddenly very business-like.

“I was in Dreamshards with a friend when the attack happened, and his game interface had some strange interference.”

“We can go take a look,” was all he said.

He stepped out, and returned a minute later with a wheelchair.

The morgue was not entirely unlike the area where we had picked up my implants yesterday. The walls were covered in little steel doors, the entire area chilled to the point where I could see my breath. I turned up the flow of solar essence a hair, feeling the fortifying if slightly distracting flow increase. The doctor pushed my chair into the sterile room, and stepped away, checking the numbers on the doors against the list on his clipboard.

This really wasn’t where I thought this was going, but I suppose it could still make sense. I had survived a shot to the head. If certain recent acquaintances were to be believed, that wasn’t the limit to the regeneration at work here. What if Joe or one of the others were even more badly hurt? If Joe was here, I’d have to tell them that he’s still alive, maybe get him back on the path to spending at least part of his days in the waking world once more.

The first body the doctor showed me dashed my hopes. I vaguely recognized her, but couldn’t bring to mind her name. Her injuries were all cleaned, but there was no doubt that she was dead. Looked like a wall had fallen on her or something. Worse, I could feel that she was dead.

Before this moment, I hadn’t had an opportunity to notice, but living people apparently had an aura that my essence sense could detect. It’s just that it was so muted that it was hard to notice it at all, without the absence of one to properly compare. Doctor Tanner had this coherent sense of being that filled him, almost indistinguishable from my mundane impression of him. The body in front of me didn’t have a coherent aura, but instead a sad emptiness with various fragments that probably once were part of the person who used to be here. Here, a piece of vanity. There, a tiny impression of a preference for colder temperatures. Scattered around were what looked to be the remains of some of the machinery I had seen when investigating how the login function worked. All of it was gradually eroding. In another week or two, there would probably be only echoes left, or maybe nothing at all.

I’m not sure how long I sat there, gazing into the abyss that was once a person, when the doctor cleared his throat. I jerked upright in my chair, and turned to look at him.

“This your friend?” he asked, somewhere between the soft tones of speaking to someone fragile, and his earlier, more businesslike tone.

“No,” I said, “I’ve just never really seen someone like this.”

“Sorry to have to take that from you.”

“No, they kept us safe and sheltered in the city, but… we don’t really live in that kind of world anymore. Things are changing, whether we like it or not.”

“You’re right about that,” he said. “Let’s check the next one.”

He slid the body back into the wall, and moved on to another nearby hatch. Another woman I recognized but didn’t really know, a bullet to the head this time. Familiar. Impressions of her favorite game were all that was left that I could detect. The next one was a man, probably a decade my junior, and in pretty bad shape. I didn’t know enough to pin down what exactly killed him, but it ultimately didn’t matter. He was awash with shards of depression almost as deep a black as that first entropy spirit I fought.

With each body, I was starting to think that this was pointless. The team that grabbed me had some way of knowing if someone had a key. Clearly their senses were at least as sharp as my own. If Joe was here, even if his body was in bad shape, they’d have probably noticed his essence if nothing else and put him in a bed instead of the morgue.

Except… except that the next body was Joe. The doctor noticed my sharp intake of breath, and stepped back and away. Joe looked exactly the same as the last time I had seen him. Not a mark on his body. If not for the absolute stillness, he could have been asleep.

“How?” I heard myself ask.

“Foul play,” the doctor said, “Outwardly it looks like a heart attack, but toxicology shows he had lethal levels of potassium chloride in his system. Ah, that causes the heart to stop. From the more in-depth reports Captain Zhou has shared, he died between an hour and two hours before the raid.”

“What?”

“Sorry man, I’m no forensic investigator. That’s all I know. Want me to give you a minute?”

“Yeah.”

So shocked at seeing him here, like this, I nearly missed something important. It took me a minute or two of staring before it hit me. There was no spiritual debris. No hollow void of sadness or pain or loss where an aura had once been. There was just nothing. Joe’s body was, spiritually speaking, indistinguishable from the steel surface it rested on. Was it a fake? A copy, an avatar somehow spawned and then never despawned? That didn’t seem to fit. It was here, on the more physical side of things, and Joe would have probably told me if he had figured anything out about the avatar mechanics.

Or was this one of those ‘unacceptable’ forms of immortality that the sorceress had talked about? Were we to serve as test subjects to refine it into a more acceptable form for her? I’d learned something new from this little trip, but it didn’t ultimately answer any of my questions. Just brought up new ones, as usual.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to tamp down the sick feeling that was creeping up on me. I tried to tell myself that Joe was fine, and that I’d just seen him, if in huge lizardman form. It didn’t matter. There was just something deeply unsettling seeing a friend’s body like this. Unable to do anything else, I gave up and wheeled myself over to the exit door and gave it a knock. The doctor opened it and guided my wheelchair out.

I was in a daze as we made our way back to my room. Seeing such grim sights had set my thoughts on a path that ultimately led me to consider where I’ll end up as a result of all of this. Would I be severed from my body, trapped entirely inside the towers? Or worse, lying on a slab somewhere, leaking fragments of my shattered spirit into the void?

No. No, I wouldn’t let that happen. Tonight, I’d have a talk with Joe. Spill everything I had found out up to this point, and we’d figure out a path forward.

“Do your people do anything in particular for funerals?” I was startled out of my thoughts by the doctor’s question.

“No? Just a solemn sort of gathering. I don’t think we do anything out of the ordinary.”

“What do you usually do with the body?” he asked.

“The body? What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you cremate them? You folks probably haven’t got a lot of space for graveyards.”

“Cremate? What?” I was growing increasingly confused by what he was even asking about. It was a welcome diversion though.

“You know, burn the body to ash, so you can spread the ashes or keep them in an urn.”

“Oh, you mean that superstitious stuff,” I said, finally understanding what the doctor was going on about, “Like putting coins on the eyes so the ghost can pay the boatman or whatever. We don’t really do any of that in real life, but it happens in our movies and games and stuff. Funerals are just people getting together to remember the person.”

“What do you do with the body then?” he asked, weirdly fixated on this specific detail.

“Er, not sure the exact details. I guess it depends on who ends up owning it, and what sorts of service agreements that entity has for processing.”

It was the doctor’s turn to look confused.

“Most people don’t own the rights to their remains,” I explained. The look of confusion didn’t abate. Maybe this would require a more thorough explanation. “Ok, so when people reach adulthood, one of the first things they do is sell the rights to their remains. There are usually several standing offers from companies that specialize in human remains, and the amount is usually enough to kickstart your adult life. That’s how people generally pay for their first set of augments and the deposit for an apartment.”

“There are companies whose sole purpose is to buy human remains? Do they resell them for medical research or something?”

“I don’t know a lot about that side of things, but I’m sure there’s some of that going on. But they also process their augments. Recycle the hardware where they can, but they also decrypt and scan the files so they can sell any solid business ideas or workflow improvements they find in personal notes, maybe sell the personal data to any particularly sentimental family members or friends.”

“That’s a really, uh, interesting system. We mostly pretty up the body and display it at the funeral. The family decides to either bury it or cremate it after, usually according to what the deceased wanted.”

Wasteful, but there seemed to be a good number of reasons why places like this hadn’t kept pace with the cities. Progress and efficiency didn’t seem to be values these people cared much about. Though…

“I suppose our executives do something like that sometimes. A former CEO of DA had his body’s carbon extracted and purified, then converted into a prototype diamondoid optronic processor. And a few decades ago the CEO of the last viable rocket company had himself cryogenically frozen and launched into space. I think he was technically still alive though. That was back before regulation made space travel and rockets in general entirely, hopelessly unprofitable.”

The doctor seemed impressed.

“Hm. You know, we once had a congressman who…”

We chatted the rest of the way back, comparing the excesses of the richest of our respective societies. Maybe our peoples had more in common than I thought.

I felt strangely numb. The trip back to my room and the accompanying conversation had been a good distraction, but now I sat alone with my thoughts.

Joe was dead? Joe was obviously not dead. But he’s been stuck in the game since this happened. He’s an upload now, maybe. A true upload, something no one on Earth had yet managed (or at least no one had admitted to yet). But where had he been uploaded to? And why only Joe? The other three I had seen were almost certainly dead. Really, actually dead. Would it last? Could he stay like this indefinitely, or was there a battery he was running down? Was he drawing more power when he respawned? We’d have to discuss this tonight. Now knowing that the chances of Joe’s recordings ending up… well, anywhere at all, and of any ongoing tapping of his augments were nil, there was no reason to continue keeping things from him.

As the afternoon crept onward, spent in quiet contemplation, I could feel the turmoil in my soul settle bit by bit. This was an unacceptable state of being. I was the holder of a key to Dreamshards, which granted me power beyond the reach of every human who had ever lived before. I wasn’t going to be a pawn in this game. I wasn’t going to be used by a bigger player just because of their more traditional power base, or their weird sorcery, or whatever. I would still prefer to get out of their spheres of influence if possible and find someplace quiet for myself, but if it wasn’t possible? Well then I’d just have to start tearing things down until it became possible.

I walked the streets of Finxi, happy to be able to do so under my own power. The layers of fabric spread over roughed up glass made for an unusual surface, but not entirely unpleasant to walk on. The dust was light, and there was no dirt tracked anywhere. Made sense, since dirt was a limited resource here. Dust, though, came from people. How did they dispose of their dust? Sweep it all up and dump it outside the walls for whatever eldritch beasts supposedly wandered there to feed on? Dump it into their central tower?

I’d found my thoughts drawn toward matters of sustainability and natural cycles since the completion of my survival minion early in the evening. I took a look inward, at where it sat opposite Nico at the crystal table.

[Anartia Jatrophae Pathfinder]

All of the bright colors had been replaced with earth tones, the spots of color losing their hard boundaries and blurring together in places. It sat perfectly still, but I could feel its displeasure at the inactivity. It’d need a name sooner or later, but my mind was a hive of worry and larval forms of plans, so that would have to come later. That and a little wilderness area where he could roam. I’d rather set something like that up in my inventory than risk bringing him out and losing him after all the work Nico and I had put into him.

As I passed the estates near where Joe lived, I eyed the gardens that some of them had set up, in their little plots of transplanted soil. It was an odd feeling. If I dipped into my new minion just a little bit, I could feel a sense of knowing bloom into my awareness. It was like remembering, but much more pronounced. Like I’d somehow forgotten an entire field of study and then suddenly had it back. I couldn’t exactly name them, but I could look at the plants and pick out which were poisonous, which had medicinal uses, which were good to eat and how to prepare them safely. There were faint echoes that suggested that I might also know how to properly care for and cultivate some of them, but it was much weaker than the rest. I could probably practice it, probably refocus my minion on those sorts of tasks, but at the moment he was keyed to the tasks related to immediate wilderness survival, navigation, and traversal. Last night’s safari would have been a cakewalk.

I passed a couple of Er people, chatting about the new and interesting enchanted objects they were considering buying, probably brought here from the towers by my fellow Earthlings. I could tell at a glance which was the social superior to the other, purely from their respective postures. That was very much not something I had been able to do before this mess had started. Social senses, confidence, and now practical wilderness knowledge. It wasn’t exactly pulled from nowhere, and it took work and time to get working, but this aspect of my ability might actually be the most powerful. It was at least on par with the types of AI assistants executives were rumored to have access to. Given adequate access to information, I could become an expert at almost anything.

Fortunately for my plans, Joe was actually at home, and visibly fully recovered from our adventure last night. He was out in his yard, arranging sheets of fabric over the raw glass of his yard. It was a pretty sizable plot, compared to the crowded outer district, but was pretty modest compared to his neighbors. I wondered momentarily how exactly residents arranged to have those soil plots put in. My power would do wonders there, and I wondered if whoever normally did it had something similar. Wouldn’t hurt if I maybe gave Joe a little social status boost. After all, this place, this town, was likely to become a whole hell of a lot more important than we had originally thought.

I called out as I got closer, crossing the boundary of his property. He spotted me and waved me over, hefted the crate of cloth he was pulling fabric from, and walked to meet me. As I got closer, I could sense that he had a similar, if a bit brighter, sort of coherent aura that I sensed on the doctor earlier today. It seemed that I needed to be pretty close to pick up on it, but it helped assuage my fears that Joe might actually be gone and that this was just a convincing simulation.

“So how are things in the real world?” he asked, “That bad?”

My face must have given it away.

“Yeah, a bunch of terrible news. Some silver linings though. We need to have a serious talk. Do you have time?”

“Sure, I was just getting the yard into a presentable shape. Not a fan of the ‘barren white plane’ look. Besides, gotta do something to keep busy.”

I sat, and Joe went to prepare tea. Apparently they had something tasty that they could sometimes find in the central tower. I took the time to close my eyes and reach out with my mystic senses. I avoided sensing downward, to the best of my ability, and reached in all other directions. I could just barely sense the other two massive entities in the distance. The Painter was off… wherever it normally was. Its main mass didn’t seem to move around. I was less confident in my ability to sense at a distance the body it was running around in, but I was also less concerned about it overhearing. Plus it might still be dealing with whatever disaster had happened last night.

The other massive object, the distant mass of complexity, was nearer, but not too near. The sorceress probably wasn’t in the town, but it felt like she was somewhere adjacent to it. Dimensions beyond the familiar three were tricky to parse, but it seemed like that was where she was. She had also demonstrated significantly poorer remote sensing capacity compared to The Painter, so we were probably ok.

I opened my eyes to find a small, steaming glass in front of me. Joe was sitting across from me, sipping from his own. I took a tentative sip, aware of the fact that Joe was probably a lot less capable of burning his mouth than I was, what with his combined advantage of thicker skin and fire magic. It was just about the right temperature, and I found that I couldn’t pin down the taste. It was some kind of citrus flavor, but entirely unlike any I had tasted before. It had the characteristic tanginess, but beyond that I had a hard time even describing it.

“What is this?” I finally asked.

“Good, isn’t it?” he prodded, still sporting his persistent grin. “They call it lime tea, but it isn’t made from normal limes. It’s some kind of green citrus fruit they find in the tower sometimes. Apparently they can’t get the trees to grow if they take those, so they just load up on fruit when they find them. Totally inedible, but if you extract the oils from the peel, and boil it to get rid of the poison, you end up with a tasty drink.”

“Huh, I thought everything in the towers was from Earth, more or less.”

“Yeah, but don’t you remember the turkey leg as big as a person? Kyber was talking about it when we first met. Sometimes a floor will be ‘off’. The animals tend to be either enormous, super aggressive, or both. Plants end up all twisted and thorny and hostile in plant sorts of ways. They’ve got a spicy powder that comes from ‘off’ coffee beans the way this comes from what are probably ‘off’ limes. That’s a lot rarer though, I haven’t gotten to try any.”

“Good to know,” I said, taking a final sip of the tea, and setting the cup aside. I took a deep breath.

“So. I figured out what happened to you.”

At that he perked up and set his cup aside as well.

“They took you at the same time as they took me. The problem is that, uh, your body is dead.”