70

Project Mirage

Rian landed at the beginning of 1-1.

It was exactly as he’d left it: the city of Gorgheit in the middle of a war, squadrons of Pyceian androids running about, explosions thundering in the distance.

He was too surprised to feel upset. Had he come all this way just to end up at the beginning? Was the System spiting him for attempting to circumvent some aspect of it?

Maybe there was a different route he’d failed to find in the Rift. Maybe he was stuck here in the past, doomed to loop through the Worlds over and over until he found the right path to World 4.

In the end, it didn’t matter. It had really been all for nothing, as he’d feared.

He sighed, turned to Corvis, and—

“Corvis?” Rian said, looking around. He was alone.

Or at least he’d thought he was, as he caught sight of someone else: a woman wearing a karate uniform and hefty gauntlets like him, sprinting toward a group of nearby Pyceians.

Whoever she was, she seemed to be enjoying herself. After driving a Pyceian’s head into the ground, she got up and grabbed another soldier. The air around her hands flashed with streaks of light, a class skill. Then, as if the Pyceian she’d grabbed had become weightless, she hurled it into another who had just taken aim. The airborne soldier crashed into the other as if it now weighed several times more—enough to shatter both of them into a spray of metal and oil.

All the while, the player grinned with a look of determination in her eyes.

It was her.

Rian almost couldn’t believe it. The player was a splitting image of her. The character’s name was obscured when he opened the stat page, but he didn’t need proof. He was sure it was her. Azure #000.

Mom.

She was in the middle of suplexing a Pyceian soldier now. The others were either taking aim or starting to run.

And yet, almost as soon as he’d gotten his hopes up, his surprise and elation fell to disappointment.

If the player in front of him was his mom, her level wasn’t right. Azure was level capped. He’d seen it on his friends list shortly after entering the game. Right now, she was only slightly more than halfway there at level 22.

The level difference could only mean that he was seeing what had already happened.

He was witnessing the past, a moment in time of his mom’s play-through of the game.

It was just a recording.

Despite her efforts, Mom was starting to get overrun by the soldiers. It seemed she was soloing the Rift, and even her NPC guide was absent. As she dealt with two more soldiers up close, a nearby Pyceian running in from an alleyway knelt and aimed. As Rian realized that Mom hadn’t noticed it yet—it was going to get a clear shot at her—he shifted his feet, feeling the reflexive urge to run in and help before he caught himself and remembered that he couldn’t affect anything here.

The soldier turned its head as if it had heard something in his direction.

It can see me? But that’s impossible. This is all happening in the past.

He waited to see if it had been a coincidence, but then the soldier aimed its rifle at him.

No, there’s no way…

Answering the question for himself, he dashed forward in a blink and struck the Pyceian. He punched it so hard that something inside it ruptured and exploded. The shock wave and flames hardly damaged him, but now he was surrounded by smoke.

He heard the distinct sound of two Pyceians being slammed into the dirt, and then there was silence but for a pair of steady breaths.

As the smoke drifted away, his mom was looking directly at him—at first with confusion, and then total disbelief.

“Oh my god,” she breathed, her voice shaking. “Rian.”

“Mom?” He blinked. “What is going on? You can see me?”

She stepped up to him, eyes wide, then embraced him.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “It worked.”

Speechless, Rian shook his head, a hundred thoughts surging through him. He hugged her back, still unsure if this was really happening. It had to be some kind of cruel trick like a dream he hadn’t woken up from.

“I can explain,” Mom said, stepping back and wiping her eyes. “Sorry, I’m such a mess.”

“Is this really you?” Rian said. “I don’t understand. I thought you were…”

“We don’t have much time.” She seemed breathless. “Listen to me carefully, Rian. I’ll try to fill you in on everything while I still can.” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and seemed to calm down.

“After your injury,” she said, “I was approached by a few of the developers at Reflect Systems. They told me it was possible to see you again, even while you were in a coma. I didn’t believe them at first—I thought it was some targeted scam, you know, going after desperate people who were grieving. But it was really them.”

Rian had the peculiar feeling that this had been rehearsed several times. Mom stepped close to him again, placed her hands on his arms, and glanced at him up and down as if to reassure herself that he was real.

“The conversation we’re having right now,” she said, “is in two different times. The Mirage System is capable of predicting the future with almost perfect accuracy. That’s how this is happening. That’s how we’re able to speak with each other—in your future, and my past. You’re both here and not. I’m both here and not. What you’re seeing is like a recording that you can interact with. But to me, you’re a projection of the future.”

“How…” He couldn’t begin to articulate what he wanted to ask. He felt like his brain was in another galaxy.

“The implant,” she said. “It mapped your mind while you were in the coma. It fed that map into the System and it projected every possible outcome of the actions you could take through this world. It’s predicting everything you’re going to say to me, and the only proof that it works is that this instance is still stable.”

“All that…just to talk with me like this?”

She teared up again.

“Yes,” she said. “Just to see you one more time, Rian.” She hugged him tightly and rested her chin on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry I had to do this to you. I had to leave you in the dark for so long. The note I left you at home—I couldn’t explain anything, because they said it would interfere with the projection. The process, I mean. I didn’t want to risk anything if it meant I could see you again.”

To see me one more time, Rian thought. He had such a bad feeling about that, the way she’d said it.

He gently stepped back, and she let go of him again.

“If this is really happening,” he said, “does that mean I can tell you about the future and change the past? Wouldn’t that create a paradox?”

She shook her head. “Part of the projection process requires that none of the information you have is capable of changing anything in my time—at least for the few minutes we have. Just…be careful. If you start to divulge too much about the future, our connection could unravel. It’s like we’re standing in a very fragile tunnel between the past and future right now.”

He had to choose his words carefully, it seemed.

“I don’t know if you can answer this,” he said, “but a year and a half from now—from your perspective, I mean, when I would enter the game—you’re not there anymore. I tried to find you, but it looks like you’re always logged off.”

She frowned. “That’s odd. I…I don’t know why that would happen.”

Rian swallowed. “What are you planning on doing, right now?”

She met his eyes. She looked like she was hesitant to tell him something.

“I’m going to the Penumbra as soon as I can,” she said. “Yindra’s been guiding me there.” She took a deep breath. “I think I’ve been caught up in a lot more than I thought. There are other forces at work here. It’s not just Yindra manipulating things, but the GMs, too. They’re at odds with each other. Yindra’s been asking certain things of the players because of it, to shift the balance between them.” She chewed her lip. “The way things are going, I’d almost say she’s attempting to escape. To break free from this world. The GMs are failing to control her.”

“So you’re going north to…stop her?”

“To see what she’s really after. I want to make sure this world continues despite whatever happens.”

“Where are you, right now? I mean physically—er, back on Earth,” he said, correcting himself. He was still getting used to thinking of this world as more than just virtual.

“My body’s at Reflect Systems’ headquarters, but it won’t matter, soon. I was just getting worse each day. I’d have died in a few years either way, Rian. I’m going to fully integrate with this Vessel and leave my body on Earth behind.”

“You can do that? Because I think I’m in the same situation. I…I died when I entered the game. I think my body’s still in your house…”

With a flicker of horror in her eyes, she blinked. It diminished, and she looked him over again.

“That’s okay,” she said. “You’re still here. You’ll be here.”

“But,” he was reluctant to add, “if I die too many times, I won’t come back. I have a limited number of revives. Something about the way the Cognitive Mirror works…”

She locked eyes with him. “There’s a way to make your Vessel permanent, even without a living body back on Earth. I don’t know how exactly yet, but it involves Yindra. That’s all I know so far, but hopefully…” She glanced away, her shoulders dropping. “Hopefully it worked out for me, in your future.”

Rian’s heart sank. If his mom had vanished from Miriad, then he couldn’t be sure that she was still alive in his present. But hopefully—and he so dearly hoped it was the case—it was because of the way the Penumbra worked. Maybe it was similar to how the deeper Rift areas lost connection with the Overworld.

“Still,” she said. “We can’t get hung up on uncertainties. Right now I have to do whatever it takes to make sure this world persists. For both of us. In the end, I don’t know what will take. If we can negotiate with Yindra, act as mediators between her and the GMs, then maybe we’ll find a way.”

Just as he had the thought to tell his mom not to go north to the Penumbra, or whether he could convince her to change her mind about anything, something in his surroundings shifted. Waves of distortion grew around them.

“What’s happening?” he said.

“We’re out of time.” She looked around at it too. “It’s temporal interference. This meeting can only last for so long before there’s a potential divergence.” She embraced him again. “Rian, listen—I’ll be up north. Come find me. If you can do that, we can change both of these worlds for the better.”

“But that’s—”

“Rian, I love you.”

Darkness swept across them, and Rian fell backward into nothingness, into the space between Worlds.

A bitter sadness filled his chest. As he’d thought, his mom would be in the Penumbra, and here he was, pointlessly chasing after Ogrot—Devon, the player who’d taken everything from him—for nothing more than petty revenge. He still had so much to do, and it was all so impossibly far away. If the Penumbra was as deadly and arduous as he’d heard it was, it would take him months to make his way there.

And yet, despite that, it filled him with hope: that it was possible to find his mom again. Maybe not in his future, but in her past. How many more meetings were they fated to have with each other?

The darkness receded, and the Overworld surged into existence around him. A second later, he knew something had gone wrong with Elmguard.

He was in a dead forest, the sky crimson and filled with floating rubble. The ground was littered with bones and shattered glass. Hundreds of mirror shards hovered in the sky and slowly revolved, catching the light. And in the distance, above the trees stood a black tower eclipsing the sun, casting a long shadow across the land.

You have discovered a new a̴r̷e̵a̸!

You have gained experience! (+0)

THE PENUMBRA

You have entered T̵̫̮͙͗̍͘͠Ę̵͇̦̻̃̈́͜M̷̹̗̜̜͕̀͂̔̔́P̸̞͉̬͂̃͘͜͠Ơ̴̫̐̔̂͜Ŕ̴̨̺̰̲̣̈́͋͝A̷̪̮̪͋L̸̢̨̻̼̫͛ ̴̤̹̜̲̫̑͆̚Ŕ̸̢̫̗̿Ị̴͈͙̺̮̈́̂F̵̙̱̄T̸͈̏̄͗ ̶̨͈̭̮̰̚4̵̧̣̫̉͌̚͠

Goal: [REDACTED]

The Temporal Rift will close if XXXXXXXX. (Recommended party size: -1)

World 4 time remaining: 99:99:99 [100:1]