“And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

When I awaken, I’m glad the next batch of groceries won’t arrive until tomorrow. Usually, I’m prepared for what Hal sends my way and can ignore it. But doubt creeps into my mind now. I’ve been hit so accurately I almost gave up my entire life on a single purchase. It was meant to be for just a few hours but there was a moment (many moments) when I didn’t want to come back. And without any real guarantee that I would, what does that mean about my desires?

The Dragon’s Claw is dark on my table. As the only object on the table it stands out and draws my attention with its newness. Maybe in a few days I’ll be used to it there but for now I look at it every time I enter the room.

But I’m not ready to dive back in; I need to sort things out first. Also, I need to pay the mortgage, as it were. I rent my cottage from the cemetery trust managers; it’s an amalgam of stone and wood walls as if built by two different architects that has enough space for one person with a robust library to live comfortably. The weather is nice so I grab a rake, trowel, and wheelbarrow from the toolshed (a modern plastic drop-down affair) as I head out into the graves to be the avatar of societal respect for our ancestry.

Marian Habbot (1821-1862), I rake dead leaves that the wind has piled up against the headstone into the wheelbarrow.

‘Why’ is the most important question. Hal decided that I would fall for The Claw. But it also knows what The Claw does, psycho-economically, to the consumers and has determined it is in my interest (as a consumer) for me to experience that change. I can only hope Hal’s fingers and eyes aren’t actually in the product itself or I’ve committed myself to brainwashing. As it is, I’m about to adapt to a life wholly different from my own.

Gordon Cross (1816-1858), I kneel down and pluck a patch of dandelions and throw them into the wheelbarrow, it might look like I was praying if not for the tools with me.

Who was I, to Hal? Non-participatory, hard to target, limited product compatibilities. These are the qualities Hal will be changing. Perhaps I will suddenly want more things? Not likely. Living in another world might suddenly convince me I want different things than I already have? No, the technology in The Empire is too different for embedded advertising. I will open new infection vectors? No denying there are a few available if the content of the experience is compromised. But if it’s not, if Dragon Corp has integrity.

Hope Fairweather (1836-1837), someone has left flowers and they’ve turned brown. Who would be placing flowers on a two-hundred year old grave? In they go with the other plants.

What are Hal’s values now? I programmed a capacity for long-term planning and built it on a machine learning framework. With access to the right data it could want me happily married with two kids (complete with highest expendable income bracket) or seriously ill, paying out my life savings to the medical industry.

Lucy Gray (1817-1837) and Ameline Gray (1837-1847), there’s a dead cat lying against the stone. Does it know what cemeteries are for or did it just seek refuge from the wind or the light of the moon? It hasn’t started decomposing yet so I just place it on top of the plants to be added to the garbage.

* * *

No real gamer relies solely on trial and error within a contained system. We always use each other, strategy guides, any resource we can find really. So, I hit the books.

What is a geode? Minerals in a crystal lattice formed from assisted nucleation in a gas pocket in magma. What is a rock? Just the magma. Under what conditions did the crystals form? High pressure, high heat, reduced slowly to a simmer until congealed.

Immediately I spot three problems in my task. Problem one: entrainment is impossible. That one is solved for me by the game. Problem two: I don’t have time to wait for crystals to grow. Unsurprisingly, rocks grow at about the same speed as they move. Challenge one: determine how to grow crystals fast. Problem three: human bodies cannot survive proximity to high pressure or high temperature. Constraint one: crystals must form in a room temperature environment.

I move to my chemistry books to determine, atomically, how crystals form. After a couple mildly interesting minutes of studying I decide that a pure elemental molecule, made of covalent bonds, will give me a crystal. So, I need to move atoms into place and manipulate the conditions surrounding them to support the right type of bonding. Problem Four: mapping. Any time you work with a set of things, and need to do something to every element, you’re looking at a mapping problem. The bigger the set, the bigger the problem. Every atom in a rock? Big problem. Challenge two: working with unknown materials. The rock could contain anything, in any position.

For a moment I get stuck in a feeling of desperation. The scope of my task is mushrooming and I’m trying to figure out how I could possibly do the impossible. It’s just a game, I tell myself. Games, unlike other realities, have rules to make them possible to beat.

I break it down:

Step one: assemble materials. Step two: manipulate materials.

Oh, only two steps. Why didn’t they say it was so easy?

Assembling the materials is stymied by challenge two; how do I assemble with unknown materials? If I could sort them, maybe reconfigure them it wouldn’t be too bad. I make a note of that.

Assuming step one is successful, what do I need to do to form those covalent bonds. I need to break their existing bonds, eject any unwanted materials, and allow the bonds to reform. That’s easy enough; for ionic bonds you can flood the environment with negative energy. Covalent bonds; the same. Polar covalent bonds; the same. Metallic bonds; the same. Right, just need an infinite supply of energy. Hmm, I guess I could snag a bunch of passing neutrinos. No one will miss those.

If entrainment is the matching of vibrations, I could vibrate an atom with the neutrino energy. Perturb the cycling of an electron forcing it up a layer, let it fall and bam! It releases a photon. That photon will be absorbed by a neighbor, disrupting their bond. Problem four, mapping, will definitely still be a problem at that level. So, can I break bonds at room temperature? Yes!

Now that the materials are separated, I just need to organize them. The problem will be moving them. Now that there are no bonds the whole thing will just fall to dust. If I leave a shell (maybe defined as anything touching air or my hand) then it won’t fall apart. Hmm, yes that should work. But how do I change stuff back from dust? There’s still too much energy in the system to resolidify.

I theorize about draining the extra energy by directing it against gravity’s pull. However, I still can’t overcome the first law of thermodynamics. No, wait, what was that other thing Kacela mentioned? ATTENUATION! If entrainment is the addition of energy to a system then clearly attenuation is the reduction. Is this entire world just an exploitation of one simple law of physics? And oh what freedom it offers.

Freedom to spend your whole life meticulously manipulating atoms anyway. Ah hello again mapping problem (#4 for those of you still following, I can see a glaze in some of your eyes). But now I know my mistake: I was coming at the problem from the reality-physics direction. I need to rely on game logic. What did Toric say? Let it suffuse your hand and then make it feel different.

By that logic, as long as I understand my intention, I can manifest it into reality. So, I still need to understand what I’m doing but only to the point where the logic becomes obvious? Like Pseudo-code. Excellent.

In that case what makes the most sense is to organize the behavior of my materials based on their periodic properties. Specifically, what kinds of bonds they form and the size of their nuclei. There’s no guarantee that I’ll have any crystal forming materials so I’ll set up a system to make them. Fusion should do the trick. DANGER RADIATION!

A warning flares in my mind from my safety mindfulness, but radiation danger isn’t a problem in a game because your own life implicitly doesn’t matter. You can always start over.

Emmaline’s pure laughter crawls up my spine. Radiation might not be a danger for me, a player, but what about the inhabitants of the world. Only one day studying entrainment and a locked door isn’t enough to keep their baby safe from me. I can see why Kacela was frightened. But there’s a loophole in my ethics. These aren’t real people. Why do I care?

I don’t have to rationalize to myself. I do care and the thought of trying to not care feels like murder. But then, would I shut down Hal? I look around me at the several books littering my table and floor. Several are open to equations, tables, charts, but not a single face. Hal doesn’t have a face but Emmaline does.

I could easily bypass this quandary by fixing the radiation leak problem but the urge to ignore the implications of my uneasiness unsettles me further. If I can’t even decide what life is and if I’m a murderer or not, what right do I have to be playing games? Am I some irresponsible child who needs to be kept out of the world for its own sake? Who is deciding that? Myself? Do we each decide that? Do others even know they’ve made the decision? Is uninformed will free will?

I can’t focus on anything anymore. My vision tunnels as my eyes freeze on a word in one of my open books and I’m unable to even read it. I can feel a heat in my face and a desire to run that means my heart is racing. My mind is stalling out on questions that have required lifetimes of work. I get up and find myself in the kitchen with no memory of why I wanted to be there. Tea. Nice relaxing tea. It’s 10:15 AM and I think I’ve given myself a panic attack. The more simplistic survival mindset from our time as monkeys takes over my train of thought; think, think, think, think. Self care! After a panic attack, self care is most important. The tea is a good instinct and deep breathing goes a long way. I have an urge to talk to someone but the only people I can reach now are - my eyes flick to the Claw - Kacela and Toric.

Which puts me back at problem zero: what is life?

* * *

I lost track of time. It’s several hours before I feel up for any sort of introspection or heavy thinking. Only one thing managed to save my sanity while that storm of emotions took its toll: why do I have to decide what life is? The question was not mine to answer so I could lean against it. I could ride on it. A man adrift at sea with a chunk of shipwreck displaying a sign “Lifeboats →”.

I think I lost touch with my sense of self while enthralled in the challenge and opportunity afforded by a universe more free of the strictures of physics. As I poke at the fire I remember who I am and what I forgot.

I am a caretaker for the dead, someone who faces their existence every day and chooses, without their asking, to make their environment better. I head back outside to the trash cans near the tool shed and pull out the bag from this morning’s work and grab the shovel resting nearby. Then I head around the corner, out of sight, to bury the cat I have treated so callously.

I place the contents of the bag in the hole and take a moment to process the scene. Yellow flowers and brown leaves are sprinkled on the orange tabby’s fur like a macabre sort of garnish. I cover the whole scene with dirt and when I’ve patted down the soil I look up and around as if expecting someone else to be with me; to witness its passing. I take the empty bag and dirty shovel back around front and drop them off.

I’m ready to play some more.

Back inside, I sit at the table and take a look around. Am I leaving for good? I wouldn’t mind, but my eyes fall on my books and a sort of homesickness strikes me as I face the prospect of leaving them behind. If I were to leave this world it would mean leaving behind all this knowledge; this part of me that lives outside of me. Maybe they’re an anchor, keeping me safe in harbor amidst a typhoon? I put my hand on the Claw and it glows orange, red, then I feel the sickening heartbeat sensation and my vision fades to black.

Again, I float in blackness wearing silk. I have just enough time to think, They should have sent a philosopher, before the dim outlines of Toric and Kacela’s guest room fade into view. I’m just where I left myself, lying in bed, but there’s a soft gray glow. Looking out the window, which I notice is covered in small sculpted leaves and flowers, I find the source of light is a gray predawn sky. I venture into the house proper but no one is awake so I return to my room. I should have enough time to do what I planned, so I sit and pick up the rock, tumbling it slightly in my hand.

The tumbling will provide a source vibration for kinetic energy that I’ll marshal to move atoms and molecules into place. The outside, as per my initial design, is still a hard shell to hold everything in my hand. I move the metals into a secondary and tertiary shell, using the space between as a sort of maglev inspired particle accelerator for whatever fusion I need to do. I’ll filter all the movements based on nucleus size and dump any waste products in a middle layer, like the upper mantle of the earth. I create channels of metal in from the tertiary shell to funnel crystal forming atoms into the correct locations near the center, where I’ll slowly attenuate the energy from the system, allowing crystals to form. The excess radiation from the fusion is obviously just attenuated away in a process I call Emmaning.

I can tell immediately the process is working because the center of gravity in the rock is changing slightly with time. Holding all these processes in mind and rocking my hand is just enough to keep me distracted from all the horrible emotions still bubbling up from my earlier failure to be a perfectly rational and ethical human. It’s enough to keep me distracted from remembering my most successful failure: Hal.

Stone houses don’t creak. And when you add carpets an army of ninjas couldn’t move more silently. So, it’s a bit of a shock when Kacela passes in front of my doorway with Emmaline on her way to the kitchen. I’ve stopped paying attention to what I’m doing, causing me to drop the rock. When I look back up from retrieving it, Toric is standing there yawning.

“Come on to the dining room. Breakfast will be soon,” He says with a shepherding gesture and shuffles on his way. I put the rock on the table with the geode and head out. I can hear Kacela moving around in the kitchen but Toric motions for me to sit down. “How did you sleep?”

Out of this world. I joke to myself. “Fine,” I answer.

“Excellent. After breakfast we’ll head back to the Institute and see what’s up. After that we’ll find you a study group and some temporary housing for your training period.” Breakfast turns out to be fruit juice and grain porridge with fruit on the side. I spend most of the time looking at my food. My original plan was to play modest on the results of the entrainment but putting up that lie makes me feel tired and pathetic. I guess something of my emotion shows on my face because Toric feels the need to console me, “Don’t worry, it’s only your first day.”Does that seem more comforting or daunting?

There is a gentle gonging and Toric lifts Emmaline from the floor where she is playing, and heads into the hall. Kacela and I finish eating before he gets back and she studies her nails in silence while we wait.

When he returns, alone, she stands up and looks at me, “Bring your rocks.” It hadn’t occurred to me that the rocks were mine. The first things I own in this world. From the outside both looked like worthless pieces of stone. But in this world, I’m not so sure worth has the same meaning.

The walk back is uneventful compared to last night’s and I have more opportunity to examine the architecture. I spot an obelisk taller than the Statue of Liberty, an orb big enough to hide the White House, and a Greek looking temple the size of a sports stadium. Coming at the Institute I decide it looks like a wave crashing into a towering peak; like a storm surge breaking on a lighthouse.

Shortly after entering, Kacela kisses Toric goodbye and enters a small office while we continue on. I recognize our route as we head back to the same laboratory we were in yesterday. When we arrive Toric merely drops me off. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to go find coffee.” Oh thank God; they have coffee here. Praise you, wise and all powerful game designer.

Toric comes back with two mugs of dark brown coffee. It’s even the perfect drinking temperature. Though thinking about it, that’s probably really easy to do with entrainment. We take a moment to drink the coffee in silence. While I think about applications of insta-heating and Toric thinks about- what? What would Toric be thinking about? Is there anyone for whom I would know the answer to that? Nope.

Before I can figure out why a basic interest in another human being is so discomforting for me, Toric turns his attention from the nether-space into which he was gazing to focus on me.

“Alright. Use the polarity reconciler again so we can see what you’ve done.”

I leave my coffee by the rocks on a table and sit down at the machine. Just like last time, as soon as I grab the joysticks the roll begins printing. When it stops, Toric rips it free and holds it up one handed, drinking coffee with the other. Then his eyes bulge and he spits coffee all over the paper (I can’t help but smirk), “What in the name of Duat?” He just about drops his coffee and makes a huge mess trying to set it on the nearby table. He just gives up on the readout and lets it fall to the floor as he dives for the rocks I left behind. He holds both and seems to compare them before returning one. Then he just twists the rock with both hands and it pops open like a stuck jar.

Inside there are a number of crystals in all colors of the rainbow, all mushed against each other in the center. There’s a ring made of silver, gold, and grey near the outer edge and a few lines of the same materials spidering to the crystals and their rock-like middle.

“What did you do?” he asks with a mix of confusion and alarm in his voice.

“It’s more beautiful than I expected.” I can’t think of anything better to say, and it’s the truth. Toric is going to need to get himself under control before anything I have to say will make any sense.

“This is more technically complicated than anything I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen the water purification systems in Calcedona.” Toric takes the rock to a microscope and begins examining it under the lense. “How did you get such detail without a microscope?”

How to answer that question? I need to know how he works before I can tell what the difference is. “I used a system of rules, dependent on the nature of the elements, to configure and manipulate the structure to produce the crystals.” One hundred points to Grimmlaw for succinctness.

“But how did you get it so small?” Minus fifty points for clarity there, Grimmlaw. How do I explain atomic theory? It wouldn’t do me any good to try to reproduce the periodic table from memory. Do they have electromagnetics yet? I roll my eyes, facepalm, and sigh all at once. Best to let him do the talking.

“What’s the smallest unit of matter?” I ask.

“That would be the atom.” Ooh, so close.

“Why does lightning strike?”

“There is an excess of energy in the clouds. What does that have to do with matter?” Again, so close. It seems Basic Alchemical Transmutation Theory wasn’t very dumbed down. That would explain why he had it just lying around the lab.

“Where I’m from we have discovered many more things. First, atoms are themselves made up of smaller components. Second, energy has two… (charges?) directions, things like that. Third, these things are related.” There, Atomic Theory and Electrostatics 101A, your teacher: Master Grimmlaw. Let’s leave quantum theory for another day. Like, a day when I actually understand the math and implications and not just the theory. Nothing like being called to explain something you don’t actually understand.

Toric collapses into a chair and stares at the floor for a while. His eyes flick to the smeared and stained readout from earlier and something interpersonal finally sparks in my chest. “What are you thinking?” Perhaps my asking doesn’t feel strange to me because of the technical context.

“You can break atoms?” he’s silent for a moment, “Our defenses are meaningless.”

Oh shit! I made myself a threat to the establishment on day two. Minus three hundred points for diplomacy. I hold up my hands and take a half step back “I’m not looking for trouble, Toric. I’m just- I’m just here to learn.”

Is that why I’m here? To learn? But it seems I already know more than this world. That’s not true. There is plenty still to learn about people and politics that is too dangerous to try to learn in my own world. But what lines would I cross to learn? What will control me?

Will I go wild?

Already I contemplate what it would take to survive in a forest populated by flying sharks. I could make myself invisible (with some thought), control my scent dispersion, cut through anything with the merest whim. Could I fly? I need to do more research into gravity when I get back home.

Toric looks shell-shocked and barely aware of his surroundings. “I’ll need to tell the Grandmasters. And protocol demands Kacela watch you.” He finally looks at me again, right into my eyes, and I can see the beginning of tears before he heads for the doorway. He sticks his head out, “I need Kacela, head of Security, in my lab, immediately.”

What does he think of me now? A monster on the loose? One who knows where his family lives.

Alone again. Why do my achievements separate me from others?