Jacob watched yet another famous player win a virtual championship with a mass of awed onlookers and prepared himself for another practice run of the game. Finally, after six months of preparation, he felt ready to join the Grand Virtual Tournament and compete for all-star status. Something achieved by only ten people in its fifteen-year history. Then and only then, could he move on to trying his hand against the supercomputer to solve the Theorem of the Merlaid.
As he walked outside, the little, roaming nano-eyes buzzed around his head surveying the area for any criminal activity as they always did and finding none. This was a peaceful neighborhood after all. Beside all the almost treeless, white pavements and red brickwork and sunlit sills with just one sad, solitary flower, he took a hearty breath of air. It tasted a little polluted. Though it shimmered quite prettily in the gentle light of noon. With a speckled gold that sparkled amidst all the pink-and-silver crepes of cobwebs. Ones hung creepily upon the last of the willow branches that house and play sweet haven to all the summer spiderlings. He returned to his room with reluctance and booted up the system.
Large, skulking, man-faced bugs with eyes the colour of icicles roamed about a street. A couple of military personnel were urging a few raggedy-looking children to flee into the nearby, imposing government building. The half-human creatures had shifty, little legs that raced faster than lightning and their compound and near-colourless eyes dripped with cold.
Jacob was about to vaporize some of them when he noticed a little cat following him. He moved a step forward and the feline did too. Yet when he stopped moving so did she, darting behind a half-dead bush or hiding behind some rubble.
The slinky Siamese with the loveliest and most familiar, paired eyes, gazed at him. While they were not usually blue, he recognized them even if their dusk wood had been turned into the blue of heaven or sea.
“Shiver, I know it is you.”
“Jacob,” the feline arched its snowy back, purred pleasantly then leaped onto his shoulder.
“I cannot solve the puzzles for you only give you advice. The more you learn to do on your own the better too,” she said licking a dainty, white paw. Soon a great, golden insect with silver feet flew past. It made right for Jacob’s face and opened its repellently pretty maw to devour him.
Jacob, blessedly, recalled the technique to tame it; crushing one of its many flittering legs to establish dominance as it cried out in protest. He proceeded to then agilely climb upon its back with a vaporizing device held aloft to threaten it into submission. Though at its sheer size, it could only stun the beast. Temporarily.
“Poor thing. You’re a bully,” Shiver, the cat-virus-princess thing, commented in immense distaste.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Seriously…Jacob tried to ignore the absurdity of such an accusation as they flew off together to take out the hoard that was its nest.
Later, he found himself trying to figure out how to convince a ten-foot, fleshy monster with an elephantine hide to attempt to feast on one of the myriad, wing-faced seraphs drifting about so he could make his escape while it was distracted. Shiver the Siamese had left his side and begun leaping from the tops of buildings in some showy act of grace.
She returned however with a horned, Godly trumpet which Jacob proceeded to play, and as the haunting music rang throughout the land, the beasts driven mad by its holy sound reached all their gnarled fingers toward the floating angels; who proceeded to burst their bodies and digits into violet pustules with a single angelic gaze.
“Soon, comes the Theorem of the Merlaid, " Shiver said dreamily.
Jacob shuddered.
Later that evening, Shiver watched happily as a fair, handsome boy with muscles and fluttering brown hair, with shaggy ends like that of a Viking, won yet another virtual game. Beating out all the top players.
“Our boy wonder calling himself simply “The Infiltrator” has taken the supreme rank in the virtual dreamscape of Monovalent again and again.”
“Defeating myriad, many-armed beasts and ghouls, sending worlds to their doom with beautifully-crafted space armies.” Or so proclaimed yet another media commentator covering the news on their virtual gaming stream.
She was even further elated when the commentator moved on to mentioning the previous night’s scandal where a major, pharmaceutical CEO had got drunk and spilled all the company’s deadliest secrets from studies showing side effects being hidden from the public to denial of medicine to many in need in America. That was a neat, little shift. Although I really didn’t like turning into someone quite so old, gross, and pinch-faced, she thought. She soon drifted into the strangest dream; one full of creatures with half-budded lips made of plants of violet and green. With poorly-formed, metallic tentacles. A place of folksong-singing birds with human hands straddled to their wings. The beasts' faces often sat atop great, loose, hanging necks, and great, glittering red gems were embedded in their malformed abdomens. She saw all their great, flytrap maws full of honeyed teeth.
She then half-awoke and recalled the time when Emanuel had first discussed The Therom of the Merlaid with them. Originally called In God's Image.
“ I feel I must explain the origins of this entire thing; as a fair founder of The Shiverla Project and its predecessor “in God’s image.” Emanuel had informed them.
“We must welcome health with a cheer. Grow the good of the uniting will, the grand collective.”
Mist had soon spoken up from where he’d been seated next to her.
“That’s that game you invented. Shiv and I played it. It contains a God similar to the Old Testament’s and an eventual Judgment Day and you’re the Nephilim. Don’t wish to share the earth with humans. Yet you cannot banish or cause them injury or incite battle under His law. So you must figure out a way to make them destroy themselves, without causing any direct harm. Thus bars all obvious mechanics such as viruses, nuclear war, hostile takeover, etc.” Mist had run an elegant hand through fair locks and had gotten a considering look on his face. He had looked so very handsome. Or so the girl recalled.
“I remember hearing that people couldn’t figure out a way to win against the AI who would counter you with as much human survivability and ingenuity as it could muster to spare them. No one could succeed for ages until someone uploaded themselves playing it; you I presume..."
