35

The Observer Effect

Rian blinked, and they were standing inside a tower of bronze with etchings on the walls. A whirlwind surrounded him and Kat—another level from clearing the previous stage. Kat was right: the levels really were flying by.

Rian upped his Strength, DEX, and INT. He took a moment to admire his arms, considerably thicker than when he’d entered the game, then checked the time remaining for the Rift. It seemed the next stage hadn’t begun yet, though the overall timer was still ticking down with nearly an hour left to go. With Kat typing into guild chat and Decha enjoying his tea, no one seemed terribly rushed.

Corvis was sitting inside the single window before them.

As Rian approached, he realized they were all standing in the observatory tower he’d seen at the beginning of 1-1. He could see the layout of Gorgheit from here as he came up to the window, and—

And then he looked down and saw himself, Kat, and Corvis, standing at the tower's base.

Rian watched himself in the past turn around and look up at him.

“What the—” he muttered, stepping back, recoiling in surprise.

“Is something the matter?” Corvis said.

By the time Rian collected himself to look out the window again, he and Kat in the past were meeting up with Decha and continuing further into the first stage of the Rift. Neither of them looked back.

“Is that really us?” Rian said, but as he watched, everything was playing out exactly as he remembered it.

He shook his head. It had to be some kind of playback function. What he was seeing was probably just the System playing video of what had happened in 1-1.

Decha, sitting and drinking his tea, lifted a finger. “Ah,” he said. “I suppose you just gleaned an understanding of our predicament. We are indeed traveling further into the past as we go.”

Rian, aghast, looked up at Kat, who was surrounded by text as she spent her new attribute points. “So all that stuff about Mirage having negative latency was…true?” Rian said. “The System can see the future?”

“Sort of,” Kat said as if it was just a fact of life. “The server can look ahead sometimes, but only a little bit, and only in-game, of course. A lot of things have to line up for it to work. But it’s possible, especially in the Rifts. You can’t really interact with them very much, but our past selves are actually here, in a way.”

Setting aside his tea, Decha asked Rian, “Have you ever heard of ‘quantum interference?’”

Rian nearly double-taked at him but nodded. This random kid knows about quantum mechanics? “Doesn’t that have to do with observing things and changing the outcome?”

“That’s what most people think. But ‘observation’ might not mean what you think it means—it’s more about interacting with a system and altering the outcome through that interaction.”

“That’s an Onsolian for you,” Corvis said, sitting in the window and letting his legs dangle. “They are, as you say, huge nerds.”

“Observing something on the macro level doesn’t have an effect,” Decha continued, “as you can see by the way you just observed your past self without causing any major disruption. If you were to meaningfully interact with your past self, however—well, then we’d have some problems. Thankfully, it’s never happened yet, though I’m not sure if that’s because it’s impossible or if it would destroy all of reality if it did happen.”

Rian swallowed. If he’d looked out the window and had thrown a rock at his past self, would it have broken the world in some way, like Decha was suggesting? Maybe it would’ve ended the Rift instance prematurely. Or maybe nothing would’ve happened at all. Still, he wondered if he could’ve caused an off-shoot timeline or something, such as having a conversation with himself.

It wasn’t like the game could genuinely fabricate his past self’s reaction to him.

Could it?

How deeply could the system see into him, he wondered? Far enough to create other, life-like versions of himself? The AI was always there, watching, but he had no idea about the true level of insight it could glean from his mind. Maybe it was listening to him right now, thinking these very thoughts.

If what he’d seen wasn’t just a recording, and if the System could already instantiate versions of himself, then it wasn’t that big of a leap to assume it could do things like make separate copies of him. It was already doing that, in a way, with things like PVP-instancer items, which made a duplicate of himself from his Overworld version. And, essentially, that was what every player was: a copy of their real-world selves. He and everyone else already were copies of themselves, inhabiting new bodies.

Rian thought about jumping out of the window or scaling down the observatory tower, but it didn’t seem like he’d survive either way. If he were to descend the tower from the inside… He recalled that the entrance had been destroyed and blocked by enough rubble that he probably wasn’t strong enough to move or get through. And though Decha could easily nuke the blockage out of the way, that was assuming Decha would willingly risk blowing a hole in the timeline by letting Rian meet his past self.

Explosions thudded in the distance. From this vantage, Rian could see it through the window: the battlefield outside of Gorgheit, where countless Onsolian mages and Pyceian soldiers were fighting. Robed bodies and machinery littered the plains. Vast walls of fire and water slammed against tanks and aircraft, which answered with shrieking missiles and sweeping beams of light that seared the ground with explosions in their wake. Entire rows of mages held their staffs to the sky before meteors rained down and pierced through Pyceian armor, soldiers and vehicles alike, pocking the ground with endless craters.

The scale of the battle was incredible, hundreds of times larger than the force they’d fought inside of Gorgheit. And yet it seemed the war was as Rian had thought: humans fighting machines.

“So are all Pyceians just…androids?” Rian said.

“Not originally,” Decha answered. “Nowadays they are, but the king of Pyce, Zeniyon, was mostly human at the time of Pyce’s founding—when he broke off from Onsolia. That was a long time ago, though. Almost a hundred years, as it was. Over time, to keep up with us Onsolians in battle, the Pyceians integrated more and more of themselves with machines, sacrificing their humanity in exchange for power that not even our schools of magic can provide.”

Entry added to lore book: “The King of Pyce”

Progress to next lore achievement: 25%

You have gained experience! (+163)

Decha took a long sip of his tea and sighed. “That’s what’s kept this war going for so long. We’ve always had the upper hand in terms of strategy and knowledge, but there’s seemingly no end to the Pyceians when they can simply create copies of themselves. It’s been an endless war of attrition. Our magic versus their forbidden technology.” Looking up at Rian, his eyes were full of hope. “But that’s where you guys come in. With your help, we can finally turn things around.”

Corvis, meanwhile, watched the distant battle from the window. Rian straightened up in realization, remembering the meeting with the shopkeeper in Thile Harbor. The woman with the eye patch. Someone who’d fought in this battle and had been nearly blinded by Corvis.

Was there a past version of him here, too?

Corvis’s gaze, cold and stern, met Rian’s before turning away to the horizon again.

“What happens here has happened countless times before,” Corvis said, “with thousands and thousands of off-worlders like yourself coming here in an attempt to alter fate, but there is no changing of what has already come to pass. The war is eternal. More or less, it always ends in disaster. In the Undoing.”

That sense of hopelessness—Rian could hear it in his voice. He almost felt bad for him.

“Know this,” Corvis said, “for it is the plight of the Loyalists: there is no choice but to fight. Always.”

“Cob?” Kat said. “You ready?”

Kat and Decha were heading toward the bronze staircase leading down. Rian hadn’t even heard them moving around.

As they descended the stairs, Rian asked Decha, “So what was the deal with jumping off the cliff back there, at the end of 1-1? Just for a cool transition?”

With his staff tapping against each step, Decha said, “We have to be in a certain position when I open the next rift to land in the correct spot for the subsequent stage. The rotational alignment of Miriad—that’s the planet if you didn’t know—the wind velocity, our positional values. All of these things have to be perfect for us to end up inside this tower when I Summon more temporal energy from the future, sending us further into the past.”

“That…sounds a lot like glitching your way through a game.”

“Indeed it is! Gylitch Edrunia was the first Onsolian to discover the method of chaining rifts together to create a stable, backward pathway through time. Though, personally, I think the Kanenpo’ek method is better.”

Rian opened his mouth, then closed it. He wasn’t sure why he was even surprised by this world’s lore at this point.

As they reached the bottom of the stairs, there was a massive pile of collapsed metal and broken Pyceian armor blocking the entrance, as expected. The stairs continued, leading deeper into the ground. In the center of the stairwell, a light encased in metallic rings floated alongside while they descended.

“All right,” Decha said. “Now for the hard part. There’s a fragment of Ulm down here that we need to get from the Pyceians. A tesseract.”

“How the hell did that happen?” Rian said. “I thought this was before the Undoing. Shouldn’t it be impossible for a tesseract to be here?”

“Right,” Decha said. “Someone else has been tampering with the timeline. They managed to pull some of Ulm’s fragmented energy from the future into the past, and Pyce has ended up with it. They’ll likely use it to take countless more lives unless we stop them.”

“There’s a sort of mini-boss fight up ahead,” Kat told Rian. “A Pyceian Runeknight.”

He almost stopped walking. “What? Really?”

She seemed to remember what he’d run into in Elmguard. Laughing, she said, “Oh, not the level 85 version. Decha’s level-equalization spell’s still working, so it won’t be that tough.”

As they reached the bottom of the stairs, Rian gripped his fists tighter. If a Runeknight was just a mini-boss here, he couldn’t imagine what a real Pyceian boss looked like.