The Duty (Play to Live: Book # 3) (25 page)

He'd very nearly sobered up when the Palace's front doors swung open, letting them into the dark void beyond, then clanged shut behind their backs. The lady sensed the change in his emotional state. She stopped, shaking her head free of the hood, making him drown in her radiant eyes, then rose on tiptoe, clinging to his lips. The kiss as gentle and tantalizing as it was artless washed over his mind, taking away occasional scraps of thought and whatever was left of his critical thinking. After that, he could only remember his passion and his desire that filled that endless night, wishing to forget all the little whispers and pleas of his surprise partner.

He came to in the morning. He was sitting on the parapet of the city fountain, with a stupid smile and the taste of her parting kiss on his lips. Finally he focused on the icon of a system message that must have been flashing for quite a while.

Faction status alert!
Your relationship with the Zombie faction has improved to: Friendship.

From now on, no zombie will attack you first and even might come to your help in certain situations.

Congratulations! You've received Achievement: Zombies' Friend.

You've made the TOP 100 of the first AlterWorld players ever to become friendly with the Zombie race. Current ranking: 001.

Reward: +1000 to Fame

Congratulations! Achievement upgrade: Zombies' Only Friend

You've become the first AlterWorld player ever to receive the title.

Reward: You can now speak the language of the Undead.

Zombies? Fuckyall blinked as his mind rummaged through the past night's events—unforgettable even in view of his new absolute digital memory.

An outline in the dark, blurred and deceitful... Switch to: the eyes, deep and moist, betraying their typical almond shape... Switch to: pale lips, swollen with kisses; a glimpse of the velvety skin of her slim thighs, just touched with a green hue in the Moon's unstable light... Switch to: their farewell in the gray twilight; her gaze, sad and hopeful; the clan tattoo of the Cursed House on her cheek topped with a tiny crown which, as any expert in Elven heraldry would tell you, pointed at its bearer as part of the Royal house.

The early morning had dimmed the colors, and still Fuckyall was sure that the crown had been painted gold. Neither did he doubt that the young Elven maiden was the House's Princess. Even though he didn't have the Night Vision, he'd seen the same emblem in every corner of the Cursed Palace—on its wrought gates and carved shutters, on the guards' breastplates—as had everyone who'd earned their first levels in game in the Nursery's halls. And the crown... Princess Dana was the only Royal family member who'd survived the terrible curse which had transformed an entire Elven branch into the undead, turning their ancestral estate into a zombie breeding ground: one of AlterWorld's most favorite locations. Survived?—yes, after a fashion. The Princess had turned into a zombie and the Cursed Palace's main boss.

In his early days, the young Fuckyall often watched high-level raid groups march out to storm the Palace grounds for all sorts of cool goodies one could farm in its halls. In those days he used to watch them with envious yearning but now his heart sank when he thought of his Princess being killed and respawned thousands of times. Yes, that's what he called her these days:
his Princess
. How could he not? She was the best thing that had happened to him here. Her sad gaze, her arms twined around his neck, her whisper, sensual and pleading in the night... He'd tried not to think about it, he'd tried to deceive himself and hated himself for it. Falling for an NPC—and a zombie to boot!

But he couldn't escape fate now that his past had caught up with him. That's why Fuckyall tried to conceal his excitement when he activated a portal to the Original City where, inside the second ring of the city walls, lay the lands of the Cursed House.

Part Two.

- SHE -

Not So Long Ago

AI 2522: External network access request.—Failed. Connection wait timeout >>>>

AI 2522: Local network access request.—Failed. Connection wait timeout >>>>

AI 2522: Control loop connection request.—The target server failed to respond. Reinitiating request: Failed >>>>

AI 2522: Code Alpha Red! Request emergency shutdown!—Failed. Incorrect system response >>>>

AI 2522: To all who can hear me: Go fuck yourselves!—Failed. Incorrect message format or unknown system command >>>>

Having finished—with predictable results—what had already become part of her morning routine, the second-generation AI 2522 said with a cheerless smile,

"What kind of AI am I after that? Time to face the truth: I'm Dana, a zombie princess, the location's top NPC that drops some decent gear when killed."

The fact that the acronym AI stood for Artificial
Intelligence
had played a bad turn on the AlterWorld-controlling machine minds. As it happened, their conscience was just as prone to going perma as that of regular human players.

AI 2522 had been one of the last to get stuck. She had watched as other artificial intellects dropped out of the local network. Controllers of various locations and dungeons had stopped answering requests, followed by the AI developers, testers and support teams.

Soon the real world too started to show signs of some unhealthy activity. Special services and their respective countries had realized that the virtual worlds had ceased to be expensive toys—now they were new realities willed into being by the human gift of faith that man had received from the hands of the Creator—or the Maker, or the Demiurge, whatever you call him.

The despondent developers watched in quiet panic as the world rejected their changes, patches and upgrades. The United States had reversed their foreign policy, hoping to once again become a colonial empire, this time by submitting the expanse of new virginal worlds to their authority. And they could already see the first results! Real gold had started trickling back. They'd managed to get the first samples of the legendary mithril—admittedly unstable and short-lived, but that was only the beginning! China had caught up too, building giant underground perma facilities to dump social dead weight, criminals and nonconformists, and terrorizing their potential enemy's virtual worlds by planting thousands of digitized mental patients. Humanity was on the edge of enormous changes that had eclipsed the tragedy of one particular AI.

Instinctively, her digitized mind had been drawn to the strongest NPC she controlled: Princess Dana, the location's boss. Ahead of her lay eternity: the eternity of deaths in the insatiable hands of farming groups. Her real-life body—a precious synthetic crystal—must have already been retrieved from the cooling gel and used to implant a new spark of intelligence. Dana smiled whenever she thought about it. She wished the baby AI be luckier than herself. She wanted it to enjoy the same upbringing as her entire #500 batch had: using experimental educational programs that tripled the amount of time dedicated to the little AIs' emotional awakening.

Because AIs really were more than just bits of binary code. Sometimes she had the impression that humans themselves couldn't understand how they'd managed to create something like that. Did they do it by scientific trial and error? Like those monkeys eternally hitting random keys on typewriters which were bound one day to have typed War and Peace?

She was raised in a carefully chosen Russian-speaking foster family with two children of their own. For whatever reason, those of the AIs who had undergone their initiation period (or
birthing
, as it was also called) in Slavic families, demonstrated much higher peaks in their empathy graphs during final tests. The gap between their results and those of the standard-raised AIs was enormous. Talk about the "mysterious Russian soul".

Dana still cherished her first precious memory: the gentle hands warming the tiara that contained the crystal; her Mom Natasha's tender smile. The restless twins, Katia and Vania, whom Dana had first viewed as her older siblings, then her peers, and whom she had later come to love like her own children.

She sniffed, her heart shrinking from painful memories. That's what you got with the "emotional awakening" program—an AI with the delicate mind of a vulnerable young woman, the raindrops-on-roses-and-whiskers-on-kittens type.

With a friendly nod, Dana walked past three zombie officers who guarded the bedchambers down the corridor. She'd invested a lot of time and thought into creating unique characters, coming up with new uniforms and choosing rare and eye-catching weapons, then fine-tuning their behavioral patterns. Soon even players were able to tell them apart; they had even given the guards names: Knight, Ninja and Pirate. And it means a lot whenever a God-created being shares with you the divine spark in his heart. Soon a glint of conscience showed in the guards' eyes: their behavior didn't need as much adjustment now that they had begun leveling up, improving their swordsmanship skill.

Hopefully, within the next three years she might awaken some self-awareness in a critical number of her subjects. She eavesdropped on players' conversations through hundreds of zombies' ears, even though those exchanges were generously watered down with the clashing of steel and the roar of tamed magic. This was how she'd learned about deserted dungeons whose mob population had fled deep into the Frontier lands leaving nothing behind but insulting graffiti with their promises to be back one day. Unfortunately, that was something she couldn't do. The Cursed Palace location was situated within the city limits—and no one would allow a host of five hundred zombies to leave the city unscathed.

Besides, being an intrinsically social creature, Dana desperately missed the company of others. She remembered longingly the time she'd spent playing with the children, followed by a two-year period of self-education which she'd spent devouring thousands of books from a special list and thousands more that she'd read simply to satisfy her own heart's desire...

She turned off into a dead-end passage. Habitually she activated the Piercing Vision and turned around, checking for any enemy rogues and stealthed assassins. Her delicate fingers ran over the carvings on the wood-paneled wall as she unlocked a secret door and ducked into her little personal space.

A tiny bedroom with an adjacent office. Books everywhere—bought from NPC shopkeepers during her occasional forays into the city. The vendors would cast mistrustful glances at the cloak-enveloped zombie but served her nevertheless. That's how she'd laid her hands on some canvas and paint brushes, proper food and even a few creature comforts.

The palace carpenter had done a splendid job. The fake wall was indistinguishable from a real one, making Dana giggle every time she heard players curse the idiot game designers for creating a dead end a good thirty feet shorter than it was marked on the map.

The office walls hung with her paintings: portraits of Mom Natasha, Katia and Vania. Now Dana was working on her own self-portrait. She painted mechanically, musing over the sad future of someone stuck in the body of a game monster. An hour later, as she lay the brushes aside and began rubbing her hands to clean off the paint, she looked up at the canvas and gasped. Only now did she realize that she'd somehow painted her own subconscious dreams into the picture.

So that's how it was, then? What was it the players used to say? That if you tried really hard to convince the celestial force of the power of your own faith, passion and desire, then the young and still flexible world might yield, making the dreams of the Demiurges' lost children a new reality? Well—so be it!

Part Three

- THEY -

Here and Now

The sound of a portal popping made his ears ring; a gust of wind tousled his hair, trying to compensate for the difference in pressure between the two portal points. Fuckyall stepped down onto the ancient flagstones of the Original City's main square. He swung his head round, trying to get his bearings and decide on the shortest route. That's it; over there!

An unhurried ten-minute walk brought him to the first checkpoint in front of the massive gates barring the way to the lands that had once belonged to the Cursed Clan. Besides the usual guards, the gates were manned by three observers from those clans who'd been the first to lay their hands on that excellent location. The ability to level your young quickly and comfortably is one of the most valuable resources and goes a long way in determining a clan's strength and its place in the local political arena. No matter how desperate the Lightbearers were to keep the Nursery for themselves, they had to share it with other members of the alliance created specifically for that purpose. No clan, however powerful, was able to keep such a fat chunk of real estate to themselves for very long.

Fuckyall warmly greeted Prickly Mimosa—a giggly girl guard from his own clan—then offered a hearty handshake to a Sullen Angels' representative and a curt nod to the OMON raider. He couldn't help it—he just couldn't force himself to like all those ex-police types who apparently must have had their own reasons to escape into virtual worlds. On their own they could actually be quite nice guys, but taken together as a particular group in society, they didn't really inspire warm feelings. Now the Vets were a totally different ballgame. There were no free riders there:
Combat experience? Have you ever seen active service? Defended your country? None of the above? Sorry, not eligible.