Holly spent most of the next day reading up on Silenia, watching gameplay videos and trying to talk herself out of returning to David’s VR home away from home. Well, that and eating a significant portion of the junk food that she bought the night before.

She learned that when an avatar’s eyes went white, as Meg’s and the others had the night before, it meant they had logged off. Rather than simply have their avatar disappear or freeze, the game developers had designed a sophisticated learning artificial intelligence system that monitored the players actions, speech, fighting style, even their mannerisms, and used that data to approximate the players actions during the hours when real life got in the way of saving Silenia.

As Holly read through the guides, she came to realize that David’s avatar, and the AI that had controlled it since his death, was almost a sort of digital echo, or ghost. Stories about ghosts and spirits had existed for as long as there had been stories, but Holly had never felt as close to one as she did at that moment.

Part of her wanted to create her own account, solely to interact with David’s avatar when she needed to hear his voice. As unhealthy as that would be for her psychologically, Holly couldn’t deny that the idea pulled at her. She had no idea how to go about doing that, and knew that the quest they were going to begin that night required a base level she would never have time to reach before they left.

Regardless, she knew that she would log back in to complete the quest with David’s friends. Outside of that, she knew that if she kept logging in and playing as David’s avatar, after a few weeks of game time her personality and gameplay decisions would start to make a dent in the mountain of data that Silenia had stored from David. In essence, she would begin to slowly erase her son’s digital ghost.

The idea of part of David continuing on in Silenia warmed her heart, but the avatar held little reverence in her heart. Overwriting it, as well as she understood the system at the time, would be like taping over someone’s wedding tape. You still had the memories of the event, and the loss of it changed nothing about who that person had been to you. It would still be a loss, but it wasn’t like she was costing her son an actual afterlife.

When the agreed time rolled around, Holly put away her snack food and went back into David’s room. She wiggled his mouse, hoping that everything was still configured as it had been the night before. Her fears proved unfounded as the machine sprang to life and light, the now familiar voices of Meg, Laird, and Ritesh filtering through the headset speakers.

As Holly opened the door to Silenia, the view that met her bounced around, causing her stomach to clench out of motion sickness. She mastered it with an effort, the understanding that David’s avatar was riding a horse helping her mind accept the movement. The horses mane, reflective and iridescent as though grown out of spun mirror glass, dazzled her. Holly took a steadying breath, closed her eyes, and stepped through the door.

Her eyes remained closed until she felt her body adjust to the new motion. She had never ridden a horse before, extravagances like that were never in the cards for a city girl in the lower middle class, but she had plopped down onto her grandmothers waterbed as a child, and the undulating motion of the horse reminded her of that.

Once she felt safe to trust that adding sight to the equation wouldn’t cause her to fall over, she opened her eyes. Ritesh sat to her right on a horse of his own, a brilliant orange animal with a mane a lazily waving flame. Roughly even with her on the trampled path they were travelling, Meg and Laird paced on mounts of their own, each far more fantastic than anything Holly had ever seen in reality. Meg’s mount was some hybrid born of a pegasus and a unicorn, and Lairds looked to be entirely made out of a dark green glass, perfectly reflecting the sunlight above, giving the entire creature the look of obedient liquid.

Glancing around, Holly took in her surroundings. To their left, a vast expanse of open prairie stretched away from them, the moisture rich air occluding objects in the distance with the blue/gray haze of filtered shadow. The shapes could be rocks, could be trees, Holly had no way to know for sure. To her right, a thin forest gave way to foothills, and further beyond that a rise of rock, climbing vertically at an exponential incline. Off in the distance, she could barely make out a settlement, which she assumed to be their destination.

“Ah, you made it back. Very good.”

The voice came from her right, and although she knew Ritesh to be in that direction, the overwhelming grandeur of the scenery, coupled with the disorienting motion of the horse, caused her to require a verifying glance before answering.

“Yeah. I guess I needed the distraction. I hope no one minds?”

Ritesh smiled back at her, nodding slightly.

“No problem at all. We are happy to have you.”

Laird looked back, his expression unreadable.

Curious, Holly turned to Ritesh.

“What’s the matter with him?”

Ritesh glanced at Laird, who had turned around.

“Everyone grieves in their own way. Laird tends to keep his own council on things. Try not to worry about him. He’ll come around.”

He was right, of course. Holly had known about David’s death for three weeks. While the loss was no doubt worse for her as David was her son, she simply didn’t know enough about their relationships with David to be able to tell how each of them were handling it.

Erring on the side of caution, she decided to take Ritesh’s advice and let Laird be.

They rode on for another half an hour, and while they were moving at a casual pace, the amount of ground they had covered, contrasted against how far they had yet to go, made Holly restless. Wanting to pass the time, she turned to Ritesh.

“Where are we going?”

His head turned quickly in her direction, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. A moment later, he remembered again that Holly was not David, who no doubt would not have had to ask. Not having the benefit of those adventures made her question completely understandable, which Ritesh quickly recovered to answer.

“We are going to see the Oracle.”

“The Oracle?”

Ritesh chuckled at the incredulous look on her face.

“Yes, the Oracle. Today is the culmination of the past few months of grinding for our party.”

“Grinding?”

“Grinding is a gamer term for completing mundane or tedious tasks to gain a more desirable position in a game, such as killing low level enemies in order to gain levels, or gathering items for a fetch quest to get a larger reward.”

“Ah.”

“We completed several interlinked tasks in order to each gain a magic token called the Seal of Enlightenment. By itself, the seal is rather unremarkable, just a gold coin embossed with some rays of lights streaming across an open book. It is the currency of the Oracle.”

Holly thought she understood so far. She nodded in a way that she hoped would convey that fact, encouraging Ritesh to explain to her what they needed to pay the Oracle for.

“The Oracle in Silenia is not just an NPC, or Non Player Character, it is the outward facing portion of a sentient artificial intelligence, a massive supercomputer housed in the Scource Technologies datacenter. Silenia is meant to be a safe place for it to interact with people, where a limited number of players get to earn the right to ask it questions, and the AI answers them. The seals are a limited commodity, meant to limit the number of tasks it is given, but outside of that, its power is mostly unlimited as far as it’s ability to answer any question for which an answer exists on the internet.”

“What question do you plan to ask it?”

It didn’t dawn on Holly until the words were already out of her mouth that asking what someone wanted to ask was not unlike asking someone what they wished for after blowing out the candles on their birthday cake. Ritesh had the grace to patiently explain the process to her.

“Sharing the information you get from the Oracle is not permitted. The AI is part of the system that controls this world, so if you ever try to tell anyone what it tells you, your avatar will not only be unable to speak the words, it will also become mute for a period of 24 hours. If you try after that, the penalty is losing the ability to speak for 48 hours. And so on. Also, since most spells have a spoken component, you lose the ability to cast as well, making survival difficult. It might also be a tactic by Scource Technologies to skirt a gray area.”

Holly’s eyebrows rose.

“I see. So David never told you what he planned to ask?”

Ritesh shook his head humoring her with the obvious answer.

“No.”

Holly thought about it, and the only real mystery in David’s life was his father. His father had left when David was still having trouble giving up diapers. Well, left is giving him more credit than he deserved. The man was an alcoholic, and every time he came home from a night of drinking he would get physical. Not in the angry, rage filled ways some men do, but in the way where he doesn’t know his own strength. He was still accidentally dangerous, and after breaking a large beer mug against the kitchen table in an attempt to mimic the “ANOTHER!” line in a famous superhero movie, Holly told him to leave after noticing that a large gash on David’s shoulder from one of the shards. She had only meant to send him away for the night, to allow him to sleep it off, but David’s father had taken it as the excuse he needed to escape the family he’d never asked for.

That made the most sense to Holly, that David wanted to learn more about him, to find him if he could. Holly had shrugged off the few questions he’d asked her over the years, but holidays were always hard on him. All of those other fathers with their kids, doing things like making snowmen, hanging lights, picking out a Christmas tree, David would never have that. She tried to do as much as she could with him, but there never seemed to be enough of her to go around. She didn’t miss David’s father, but sometimes she did miss having another set of hands around.

Over a decade of separation meant that even if she wanted to track him down, if David did, it would be nearly impossible. He could be anywhere. He could be dead, for all she knew. The thought that if an afterlife existed, and David’s father was now closer to David than she was, threatened to undo all of the emotional progress she had made over the past three weeks. She pushed it away, eager to steer the conversation to more worthy topics.