11

An Imperfect Reflection

The main roads of Thile Harbor radiated out from its center like the spokes of a wheel. When Rian found one of them, he followed it with ease to the town square. Dozens of other players were gathered, chatting, checking out the merchant stalls. At the center of the square was a stall that sold maps of the harbor and the surrounding plains for a meager five gold.

Gold which he didn’t have.

“Oh dear,” Corvis said, watching Rian stare at the empty gold count in his inventory. “I’m afraid I never had the chance to give you some starting gold in the tutorial instance. Allow me.”

He floated over to one of the streets leading in, where there were fewer players nearby, then retrieved two coin bags from his pockets. After Rian followed over to him, he instructed Rian to hold out his hands, then dumped one of the bags into his palms. Dozens of coins flooded out and started piling. Rian nervously glanced around, wondering how this looked to the other players who couldn’t see Corvis—gold appearing out of nowhere, probably—but no one else had noticed yet.

For some reason there was no system text informing him of the amount, and the gold count in his inventory was ticking up even though he hadn’t pocketed any of it yet. There were so many coins that they overflowed from his hands and spilled onto the ground. Rian started to kneel, reaching for them.

“Ah, not so quick,” Corvis said, stopping him. He discarded the empty pouch and retrieved yet another item from his pocket—a yellow horseshoe magnet with red and blue tips. It glowed as Rian watched.

Coin Magnet

Grade: B (Rare)

“Retrieves all gold belonging to the player at a range of 10 meters. When stored and activated, the magnet will automatically gather coins into the player’s inventory.”

Corvis tossed the magnet at him. On reflex Rian caught it, pulling one hand away from the other, dropping half the pile of gold in his palms. But the moment the magnet touched him, all the falling gold halted mid-air. The coins on the ground began to clink, vibrating, and gradually they lifted up and started floating toward the magnet. In a matter of seconds, a huge ball of gold coins had gathered together.

Rian glanced up at Corvis. “Am I…really supposed to fit all this in my pocket?”

“Your other hand, please.” Corvis brought forward the second bag of coins. “Behold.”

He dumped the second bag into Rian’s empty hand, and immediately all the coins attached to the magnet released and gathered into his palm instead, as if there were an even stronger force pulling them away. Light surrounded the coins, growing brighter as they collided, condensing together.

In a flash of light, hovering above Rian’s palm was a glass cube. Inside the cube was another cube, gently revolving, splintering the sunlight like a prism.

Tesseract (Colorless)

“A condensed form of spiritual energy, equivalent to 100 gold.”

“You can place both of those into your pocket now,” Corvis said.

Rian did so, and in his inventory the magnet appeared with an “ON” marker, suggesting that it could be toggled. When he stuffed the tesseract item into his other pocket, it disappeared, and a cube icon appeared next to the gold count in his inventory. The counter beside it ticked up from “0” to “1.”

You have obtained 1 Tesseract!

[!] Currency

The spirits of creatures slain in Miracia persist momentarily before materializing into gold, which can be exchanged for goods and services. If 100 gold coins exist within the same space, they will converge to form a tesseract—an item which has many uses. Tesseracts will revert to coins when an amount less than 100 gold is retrieved.

Rian dismissed the message. This was all…actually really convenient. He wouldn’t have to reach down and individually pick up every single gold coin that dropped, he supposed. It was the first thing Corvis had done for him that wasn’t horrible news.

“Wow, um—thank you,” Rian said, truly meaning it as he looked over his inventory. Corvis merely watched him, contented, and Rian stepped up to the stall to purchase a map.

The mustached NPC inside the stall greeted him. Rian almost opened his inventory, but then reached into his pocket instead, wondering if this would work. He felt the gold materialize into his hand. When he opened his palm, he was holding five gold coins—exactly how many he needed for a map.

Awesome. The game just knew.

When Rian handed the gold over, the NPC nodded and gave him a rolled up parchment. “Welcome to Miracia,” he said, his accent thick and lilting. “May your ascension be swift.”

Rian stepped aside to unfurl the map. As he’d expected, there were six main roads leading out of the town; the lower three led to the ports, but the upper three led to Elmguard, the Temple of Altir, and Aetheria respectively. To get to Elmguard there were mostly plains and forests to traverse, but before that was a small farm located just off the path. “Help wanted, reward offered” was inscribed and circled above it.

“Looks like a quest to me,” Rian murmured, then glanced over. Corvis, floating alongside him, smirked as if to agree.

Confirming his suspicion, a vibrant scroll-shaped icon appeared and floated over the farm on the map. Leading to it from Rian’s location was a dotted line, showing him a route through the town and the plains. When Rian focused upon the icon over the farm, it expanded to a text box.

(Quest available!)

“Infestation! Seeking adventurers to hunt local creatures in exchange for gold and experience. Please contact Farmer Jensen to initiate the quest.”

Difficulty: D (Easy)

Reward: 100 EXP, 30 gold.

Seemed reasonable enough. When Rian looked over the map, there was a small training area located near the southern end of the town, but he decided he’d rather not waste his time; he was confident enough to deal with whatever the early-game threw at him. The worst that could happen was that he’d die in combat and respawn.

A twinge of doubt straightened his spine.

Wait a minute. How does respawning work in this game?

It had almost come up while talking about how the locator item was soulbound, but he hadn’t actually considered what would happen to him. If he had truly died in reality, and if the respawn mechanic potentially required his physical body to reinstate his virtual one, then he really only had one life.

One life in an MMO. He might as well be already dead.

“If I die here,” he whispered to Corvis, “I’ll come back, right?”

Corvis straightened up, blinked. “Of course you will.” He grinned. “But—”

Oh no. He should’ve figured it wasn’t going to be that simple.

“Normally,” Corvis said, “a new instance of yourself is spawned upon death, and such an instance is born from the original.” He was already going into lecture-mode again, raising a finger to command Rian’s attention. “But since you exist only in the Cognitive-Mirror as of now, your respawned self will originate from it instead. And when you came into this realm, the Cognitive-Mirror didn’t capture all of you. Usually, it creates a perfect replica. But from what I can tell from the game’s diagnostics, it didn’t happen—because of a certain injury you experienced that created a defect in your mind.”

Pacing back and forth in the air, he hovered to face Rian again. “There was a glitch,” Corvis said, “an unforeseen error in your transference which resulted in your confinement here. Your circumstances are quite remarkable!” He spread his arms with theatrical flair. “You, my friend, are an imperfect reflection.”

Thinking back to when he’d first activated the headset, Rian remembered something. A number. Cognitive-Mirror 99.87% operational, the floating text had read. That number had stuck with him, somehow.

Only that much of his mind had been salvaged by the game. Less than all of it. He wasn’t sure, but the neural implant was almost certainly screwing him over again. The missing 0.13% that hadn’t translated into the game—he wondered if that had been the cause of it.

“Yes, with each death,” Corvis said dramatically, placing the back of his hand against his forehead in mock distress, “you will lose a piece of yourself. Each time, you will come back lesser than you were before. Oh, Yindra, what games you play!”

He was enjoying this entirely too much.

Rian struggled to keep his voice down. “And you didn’t tell me any of this before I was about to step into that…war zone with Kat and Maia? What the hell! I could’ve died right there!”

“You weren’t in danger until you stepped outside of the town, Rian. I was certainly meaning to tell you, but the great game has many rules, after all.” He shrugged. “It would be unreasonable for me to explain them all at once to you.”

Another horrible thought found its way to the forefront, as Rian considered it: the Cognitive-Mirror was some kind of construct that contained the copy of himself that was now him. But it was likely also a tool, one that measured the stability of a player’s connection to the server, as evident by the percentage it had displayed. All sorts of things could get in the way of that connection, just like in traditional games. Interference. Faulty hardware. If that connection fell below a certain threshold, the game would attempt to re-establish a better connection than before, discarding the old one.

Except Rian’s real body was—apparently—dead. If he fell out of sync with the game, then being “logged out” wouldn’t just reset his connection. It would probably kill him. The him that existed here and now.

So much for his hopes of logging out, then. And here he’d thought that he wouldn’t have to worry about this kind of stuff anymore.

“Corvis,” Rian said slowly, “what’s the sync cutoff for the Cognitive-Mirror to attempt a new connection for a player?”

“Ninety percent.” Hovering, Corvis crossed his legs, then held up his hand as if to catch something. In front of him, an old accountant-style calculator with a paper feed materialized in a puff of smoke. In his hand, a pair of gold-rimmed glasses likewise appeared, and he put them on. “If we assume that your current sync level is reapplied and degrades each time you respawn, then 99.87% of 99.87% of you will remain, leaving 99.74% after the first death. And then 99.74% of 99.74% the next time, and so on.” He tapped away at the calculator with blistering speed, the paper noisily advancing. “You have six lives—six deaths—before you fall below the ninety-percent threshold.” He tore the paper out of the device and took off his glasses, which vanished in another puff of smoke.

“The seventh,” he said, “will be permanent.”

Rian backed himself against the wall of the alley and slumped down.

He gazed up at the sky, a blue reflection of the brick road beneath him, condensed to a line on either side by the buildings of the harbor. A path he couldn’t escape.

Could he really do this—play a video game with his life at stake?

He was technically immortal, as in ageless, while in the game. And there was nothing, as far as he knew, keeping him from staying inside Thile Harbor indefinitely. If he really wanted, he’d never have to leave the town.

But he couldn’t stay forever. Someday—if there were actual days inside this game—he would have to leave and start his adventure into Mirage. Games themselves weren’t immortal. They were weird, faulty things created by humans; they crashed and glitched and…hell, if the servers even went offline for maintenance, that would probably be the end of everything. The game would take him with it.

He couldn’t let himself give up here. There was no point in giving up. His mother had been here, somewhere.

He wondered, in a moment of despair, if she had somehow fallen victim to the same threat he faced, becoming less and less of herself with each death until the game had logged her out for good. She was ill with a rare disease, but she hadn’t injured her head like he had; he wondered, could it have happened to her anyway? Could the game have trapped her inside, too?

Rian calmed himself. There was no point in ruminating like this, no reason for him to believe one way or another. Not until he gathered more information. Not until he found Yindra.

He’d tried his best to deny it—that he was really stuck here, that he was really dead in real life, and that his mom was missing on both sides of it all. But he couldn’t do anything else than accept his circumstances and move forward. He wouldn’t let any of it stop him.

He could do this. It was just another game that he would overcome. He was more prepared, more experienced than most. He was a speedrunner, and he was going to tear this game a-fucking-part if he had to.

Standing, he dusted himself off, and then took out the aviators Kat had given him. The lenses were pristine, unscratched. He unfolded the hinges and put the sunglasses on, feeling more confident already. He drew the short sword out of the scabbard at his hip and headed for the western plains.