Chương 38: Mike Was Probably Real

They went back to the dragon bar. Nobody decided it out loud. They came off the straight road into the city with the fog still on their clothes and their feet just took them, up the merchant street to the place with the carved dragon and the cold blue fire, because it was the only room in this whole world any of them had a memory of that wasn't a hole with bodies in it, and because Alice had said, in a small voice, that she was hungry. Alice was the only one of them with opinions left. Maddy was running on fumes.

Ben hadn't put together a full sentence since the loot room. They sat at the same table. Maddy clocked it the second they sat and didn't say anything. It was the table Alice had been crying at alone, eighteen hours ago, when she'd been a stranger with a Stanley cup and the saddest duck in the building. The blue fire was still doing its electric thing. The dragon still hung its head over the door. Same table. Different vibe.

Three of them now, and one small grey spider sitting in the middle of the table grooming its own front legs, and Maddy was too tired to think about how that had happened. Her hands were shaking. They'd started on the walk back and they hadn't stopped, a fine tremor she couldn't switch off, and she knew exactly what it was—adrenaline leaving, cortisol, a documented physiological response, she could've drawn the stupid curve on a napkin—and knowing all of that did not make her hands stop.

She put them flat on the table. The new spider pendant was cold against her sternum, +40 DEX she hadn't earned, pried off a dead place, and she pressed her palms into the wood and waited for it to pass. +40 DEX was stupid. It was the equivalent of eight levels at once. Her own level went up four times from the dungeon being cleared. She didn't care. Her brain was doing the thing. An intake she could barely hold. It was running the margin. Three people in that wall. Three.

With weapons the system had reached into their pockets for, the same as it had reached into hers and come out with a dildo, into Ben's and come out with a wax pen, into Alice's and come out with a forty-dollar water bottle. One of them had died with a hockey stick. A composite one, taped grip, fucking… Walmart or some bullshit. Some Canadian kid had died in a cave under two suns holding a hockey stick because that was the nearest thing to a weapon his entire life on Earth had handed the system to work with.

The only variable Maddy could find, turning it over, was the count. The dead kids had probably gone in alone, or in twos. New, broke, trusting the guild's D-rank stamp. Picked off one at a time. In the open. Picked off like she'd said in the crystal room, before she'd known how right she was being. She made herself stop. The guild had said D-rank. That was the snag her engineer brain kept biting down on, because it was a process failure, a catastrophic one.

A man with a velvet pouch and a forty-minute speech had stamped that hole D-rank and sent people into it, and Alice's system, Alice's flowery little system, the one Maddy had spent a whole morning calling a clanker, had taken one look and gone orange and said estimated rank higher, please be careful, twice. A water bottle had better threat assessment than the entire Adventurers' Guild of Silvermarch. And people had died on that difference. Their people.

"They were from Earth," Alice said. To the spider, or the table, or nobody. She'd torn off a piece of duck and was holding it out to the little spider, which ignored it.

"All three. The shirt, the stick. They were like…us."

"Yeah," Maddy said.

"Do you think anyone knew them? Here? Did they have a Sylvael, like—someone at a desk who's gonna wonder where they went?"

"Alice."

"Sorry."

"No. Don't." Maddy pressed her palms harder into the wood.

"You're right. They had a desk person. Somebody appraised them, somebody sent them, and somebody's gonna notice they didn't come back and just file it. F-rank casualties. Whatever they stamp on it. It's…" Here was the thing Maddy had been not-saying since the cocoon room, sitting at the bottom of her, heavy. She'd called Mike an NPC. She'd stood in the guild four days ago, fresh off watching a man's throat open on the road, and she'd said it to Ben with her whole chest. Mike was a fucking NPC.

The thieves were fucking NPCs. It's fine. Everything's fine. This is AI slop. She'd needed it true so badly that she'd made it true, out loud, because if Mike was a row of code then Mike's throat opening was a cutscene, and a cutscene wasn't a thing you had to carry. And Ben had agreed, because Ben had decided this whole world was generated garbage three lines into a webnovel on a train. The two of them had stood in a guild hall and downgraded a dead man to a graphics asset because it was lighter to hold.

Mike had a wife. The woman in red. The braid. The one who'd killed a thief with a knife she held correctly and then ridden back down the road with Mike's body because Mike had a brother in Mossgrove. That woman was a person. Maddy had watched her fold over her husband in a wagon. You don't fake that. The system couldn't fake that, shit, the system couldn't keep a dungeon's own name straight, Weaves or Webs, it sure as shit hadn't authored that woman folding over Mike in the cart.

"Mike…was real," Maddy said. Ben looked up for the first time in an hour.

"Probably," she said.

"Mike was probably real. He had a wife. The system doesn't do wives like that. I think I knew. I think I just—" she turned the pendant against her chest, "—I said NPC because I didn't want a dead guy on me. And then I made you say it too."

"I already said it," Ben said.

"I'd been saying it longer than you."

"Yeah, well. We were both wrong." She looked at Alice, who was still patiently offering duck to a spider that didn't want it.

"She wasn't." The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. Alice blinked.

"Wasn't what?"

"You always thought they were real. The NPCs. You kept going everything's real, the system's just a help guide, they're just dumb and nice, at the bar, on the road to the…Just. The whole time. And me and Ben kept looking at you like you were the simple one for believing it." Maddy heard her own voice go uneven and pushed through it.

"You were just right. Fuck."

"Oh." Alice put the duck down.

"I don't think I was being smart. I just—they have faces. When something has a face I kind of can't not believe it. That's all. I just—""That's the whole thing, though," Maddy said.

"That's the entire thing you got right that we got wrong." And then there was the part Maddy could not file, the part with no drawer for it. The system itself. Because she'd built a model. That was what she did, she built working models, and over these days she'd built one: the system was the operating system of the world. A UI bolted onto reality, annoying and total and fully in charge.

It gave quests and class menus and rank reads and it wouldn't hand you directions but it knew everything, it ran everything, it was the thing the world ran on. And then in that cave Ben's system had gone flat and grey and frightened and said this location has destabilized into a true space, system influence here is reduced, and it had said it twice, the same words both times, because it had nothing else to say. It hadn't been in charge in there.

Something had gotten loose inside its own world, killed every spider, ate three Earth kids, hollowed out a whole dungeon, and the operating system, the thing that supposedly ran the place, had put up a containment notice and stepped back. You don't step back from your own house. So the system was renting. A program laid over the top of a real place, and the real place underneath went deeper than the program could reach.

Deep enough to grow something the program couldn't kill, couldn't even name, could only back away from with a small grey advisory and a proceed with extreme caution. Maddy had spent four days certain she was inside a game. She was starting to think she was inside a place, with a game stapled to the front of it, and the staples were working loose. She hated that. An uncontrolled system was the single worst thing you could hand an engineer.

An uncontrolled system was how people ended up in walls holding hockey sticks.

"…we should've done Brian's rats," she said. Ben made a sound that was almost a laugh. The first one of those all night.

"Yeah," he said.

"Five silvers."

"Brian's stupid normal rats." Maddy pushed her plate away. Her hands had mostly quit.

"Okay. I can't be in here anymore. Let's go back." Alice paid, because Alice was Sugar Mommy now and waved the gold off like it weighed nothing, and the three of them walked back through the dark city to the Bronze Lantern with the little spider riding on Alice's shoulder, and nobody said anything else, and the lavender followed them the whole way.

The girls fell asleep fast. Alice went first, same as last night, out inside two minutes, the little spider tucked somewhere in the blankets up near her neck. Maddy lasted a few minutes longer, flat on her back with her eyes open at the ceiling, and then her breathing went deep and even and she was gone too. Two of them in the one bed. Ben in the other. The window had real glass in it and the two moons threw a thin pink-ish stripe across the floorboards.

Ben lay on his back with his hands folded on his chest and did not sleep. He'd been a guy who didn't take things seriously. That was the whole deal with him, if he was being honest, and lying here in the pink dark he found he wanted to be honest. He'd built an entire person out of not taking things seriously: a literature degree of it, a thesis of it, an apartment full of it. He could one-star anything. He'd died one-starring something.

His actual final act as a living human on Earth had been typing i hope your laptop gets stolen at a webnovel, and then he'd walked off a curb into a Cybertruck, and the joke, the enormous stupid cosmic joke, was that he'd opened his eyes inside the exact book. And he'd kept doing the bit. Four days. Five, whatever, time was garbage in here. He'd walked through a whole world narrating it like a review. Obsidian hair. Sparkle emoji.

The system's a clanker, Gerald's an NPC, the names are slop, the quests are slop, all of it generated, all of it fake, all of it beneath him. And he'd been so busy being right about the prose that he'd never once stopped to check whether the people bleeding in it were people. He'd killed some of them. He let the thought come all the way in, for the first time. The road. The half-light. The thieves with the bad capes.

His wax knife had gone through a man's arm above the elbow and the arm had come off, and the man had screamed in a register Ben's ear had filed, in the moment, as getting the shit out of your arm cut, and Ben had stood there reading a panel. Critical hit. Level up. Sparkle. He'd let the panel carry it. He'd let it turn a man into a number.

He'd cut a person in half at the waist and watched the two halves land separately in the dirt and he'd told himself, somewhere he never even had to say out loud, that it didn't count, that they were spawns, that the system had made them to give him XP. But they'd had faces. Alice's whole thing. When something has a face I kind of can't not believe it.

They'd had faces, and arms that came off, and blood that came out in pulses with a sound to it, and they'd been men, real men, on a real road, men who'd woken up that morning somewhere and gone out to rob a caravan because that was the life this place had dealt them. And Ben had ended them and let a clanker file the paperwork with a little blue sparkle. And the woman. The one in the cave.

Four eyes, red silk, the one who'd dropped through the ceiling and asked, before anything else happened, before a single web, where are you from. She'd asked it. Quietly. Like she wanted to know. Why do you keep coming in. Her hand going up to her head. The red pulse, and the cry that came with it, the one with pain folded all through it. Please stop coming. You'll only die. She hadn't wanted them there.

Whatever she was, whatever had been done to her or had gotten loose inside her, she'd stood in her broken room bleeding and asked them to please, please stop, and they'd taken her arm off, and she'd dragged herself into the dark. Her confusion was real. Her fear looked real. Her anger looked real. And Ben had walked into her house calling everything in it fake. He thought he had the shape of it now, lying there. The system was a thing laid on top of the world.

He didn't know who'd put it there, or why—maybe nobody, maybe it was as arbitrary as everything else here—but it was a layer. A program. A tutorial bolted onto a real place for the sake of people who fell into it from somewhere else. Him. Maddy. Alice. The hockey-stick kid. It leveled them up. It handed them weapons out of their own pockets and named their classes and put confetti on their kills so they'd keep moving, so they could maybe survive a place that would otherwise just eat them. A help guide.

Alice had said it on the road and he'd half-listened. A help guide, for a real place. A real place where the grass was pink because the grass here was pink. Where two suns crossed the sky at speeds that didn't match because that was just the sky. Where a man named Gerald carved his daughter a wooden horse because she'd lost a tooth. Where a woman with four eyes was bleeding alone in a cave right now, tonight, while Ben lay in a bed under a glass window listening to two girls breathe. It was real.

And Ben started to cry. It came up quiet, because the girls were asleep and some last working part of him didn't want to wake them, and it was stupid, it was so stupid, and the worst of it, the part that was almost funny, was that even now his brain wouldn't shut off and let him just feel the thing. His brain was narrating it. There's the lit major, crying in the dark. How on the nose. The ironist gets his act-three comeuppance. The detached one learns the world is real and weeps about it.

You couldn't even publish it, it's too neat, Sarah would circle the whole paragraph and write show, don't tell— He put the heel of his hand over his eyes. The tears came, around the hand, down the sides of his face into his ears, and he let them, because his stupid narrating brain could say whatever it wanted and it didn't touch the thing underneath, which was plain, which had no irony left in it at all. People had died. People had died because he had killed people.

The world was real, and he'd spent every minute he'd been in it pretending it wasn't, because pretending was the one thing he'd ever actually been good at. It's dumb. The crying, the realizing, all of it, a week late. It's so fucking dumb. He lay there in the pink light with his hand over his eyes and the two girls breathing in the other bed and a small grey spider asleep somewhere in their blankets, and a long time later, without deciding to, he slept too.