Chapter 49. Euphoria and Pain

  “Stop!” I screamed.

  “Why don’t you trust me, Warren?” Janica said. “I’m your companion. I protect you. We’re a team.”

  I groaned, recovering from the pain. I ground my teeth.

  “Answer her,” Moni said, looking up from her clipboard.

  “You lied to me on the first day,” I said. “And you used me to get what you wanted. I’m starting to trust you, but it’s hard for me.” I breathed hard, waiting. But no shock came. The seconds ticked by.

  Moni nodded at Janica to continue.

  “What was it like growing up?” Janica read from the script.

  Was it too late to back out of this? Probably. I paused to think about it. I didn’t want to get shocked again.

  “I was happy,” I started. “My family lived in a big apartment in a nice part of Detroit. I was good at school. I loved math and coding. I had good friends. Things were… easy. My parents were computer scientists. They worked for an organization that regulated the use of Artificial Intelligence. They were really smart. And so nice. And loving.” My throat felt heavy. I swallowed. My eyes got watery. I hadn’t talked about this stuff in years, really. Not since I dropped out of therapy. Sofia had said that I was ready to be done with it, but I knew the truth was that we couldn’t afford it any more. “Then some politician shut down the funding for the AI regulation, and my parents lost their jobs. Things got tougher after that, but we were a family. Not at first. But it took them ages to get new jobs. They wanted to continue their work. To protect our country from misuse of technology. But there wasn’t any funding for that. They were the type of parents who were honest with their kids, who discussed adult problems with us. We moved to a small apartment across town. Away from my friends. Away from the safety of our easy life. Then…” I paused and wiped a tear away. “An AI company asked them to interview for positions within the company that would allow them to start an ethics department. They were so excited. Hopeful.” Botcorp. “They went to Chicago to interview. It didn’t go well. At all. They told us over the phone that the company had no real intention to be ethical. They said it ended in a heated argument. They told us they loved us. That was the last conversation I ever had with them. They died in Chicago. A freak accident.” I paused. Why was I saying all of this? “Then it was just Sofia and I. And things got bad. School didn’t seem to matter so much. Other students bullied me. Sofia wouldn’t let me drop out, so I kept to myself and graduated. Then I got any job I could where I didn’t have to talk to people. So, yeah. That was growing up.”

  Janica rewarded my truthfulness, the euphoria that the wires provided. But I felt more. Catharsis, maybe. It felt good to say all of that out loud instead of pushing it down. The organic feeling was so relieving that I barely even noticed the artificial stimulus.

  “Oh Warren,” Janica said, sympathy in her tone. “I didn’t know.”

  “Please stick to the script,” a scientist warned.

  “This is the last question,” Janica said. “What is your greatest fear?”

  I answered without thinking. “That I’ll disappoint Sofia and she will leave me.”

  A warmth filled my body again, a sense of love. Could the game directly manipulate my serotonin levels?

  Somehow, without endangering my life with dangerous enemies and traps, this floor had been the most difficult that I had faced. The most threatening.

  They removed the electrodes from my legs and moved me into Janica’s position. She took mine. Through the two-way mirror, I could see her small frame, wires attached to her legs. Her wings lay on her back but twitched. She looked side-to-side, anxiety clear in her face. I had never seen her like this.

  I asked her the questions. As she answered them honestly, the glass changed in hue from clear to a pastel yellow. The color of truth. She moaned in ecstasy as the machine rewarded her, like she was nibbling on tiny dragons. The color reset between questions.

  “What was growing up like for you?” I read.

  “I was born in the Eastern region 118 years ago,” she started. “In Fairy society, we have biological parents but we are raised by everyone. Fairy children live a carefree life. We are encouraged to play, explore, and harvest food for the hive. Young Fairies are tricksters, often getting into and creating mischief. The adults encourage it. I got into perhaps the most trouble of all. When I was six, I captured a small snake and snuck it into the Queen’s bed, then hid in her closet for hours waiting for her to return. I ended up falling asleep, but startled awake hours later when the Queen screamed. I rushed out of the closet to find her panting and laughing. That’s how I became her favorite niece. Most Fairies grow out of their mischief, but the Queen never did. After that incident, she concocted elaborate schemes to get revenge on me. Once, she ordered the entire hive to look at my forehead instead of my eyes for an entire month. At the age of thirty, we choose a path. Warrior, Worker, Politician, Hunter, etc. I could not decide, so the Queen allowed me to train as a Warrior and a Hunter. But once a week, she brought me into her rooms and we would plan pranks on others. But this evolved and, after some time, I became her confidante.”

  The mirror glowed yellow, allowing me to reward Janica for her story.

  “What is your greatest fear?” I asked.

  “After the world changed,” Janica started, “the Fairies were blamed for ruining the mana channels of the world. We were conscripted to 100 years of service. But we also lost our home. The Fairy hives are— were located far to the east of Central City, on the border between allied lands and Udesh, the place where real monsters roam. Level 100 Chimera, Hydra, Gorgon, and Basilisk. Undead outcroppings. Goblin settlements. Minotaur. A place that does not believe in civilization. For hundreds of years, Fairies held the border between worlds by protecting the mountain passes that allow people to move between. And while Fairies are a powerful force with hundreds of fearsome warriors, we relied on magical barriers and spells to keep our hive and children safe. In causing the Great Mistake, we also caused the downfall of our hives. We had to retreat hundreds of miles back, resettling in the Northern zone. Today, monsters roam the Eastern region where we used to live and threaten to overtake Northern and Southern peoples. I told you that I became the Queen’s favorite niece. Her most trusted servant. She sent me on a quest to discover a way to bring the magic back. Not just to return mana to the world, but to help us reclaim our home. Failure in this quest is my greatest fear.”

  Congratulations, you completed the psychological experiment.

  You earned 500 experience points.

  You earned 500 reputation with Edreru University.

  A door opened at the opposite side of the room. I stood from the chair and bolted for it. I hurried down the stairs, Janica close behind me.

  “I didn’t know,” she said after a moment. “Sorry for calling you out all those times and giving you such a hard time.”

  I shrugged. “It’s alright. We’ve all been through stuff.” I sat down on the stairs. “What I’m more worried about is this game and this dungeon. It’s almost like it's trying to get into my head. Is that normal in this world?”

  “No,” Janica said. “Not really. Something’s going on here. Maybe it has to do with that server-wide announcement that they were shutting this place down.”

  I wanted to tell her about the AI, but wouldn’t that just be confusing for her? There are limitations to what any person can conceptualize. Especially with technology. Arthur C. Clark once said that Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. To Janica, an idea that machines were pretending to be Visitors might be so far-fetched that she would laugh at the idea. Or think me crazy. I let it go, for now. “Janica,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “I didn’t know that you lost your home. I think I get it now. Why you didn’t tell me the full truth before and why you guided me toward the elemental. If I had known that beforehand, I think I would have helped you.

  “We didn’t know each other,” she said. “That’s a lot to put on somebody that I thought I’d only be working with for a day.”

  “Why am I just hearing about how a large chunk of the world has been invaded by monsters?” I asked. “You’d think people would be talking about that everywhere. Or that people would be scared of invasion.”

  “We’ve spent most of the time in the West,” Janica said. “Think of our land as a giant cookie. Monsters took a big bite out of the East side of the cookie. That’s where our hives were. The elves and Fairies defend the top part of that bite from spreading further. The dwarves defend the south part of that bite, with the aid of mountain ranges. The people that we’ve interacted with don’t live on the border. They’re hundreds of miles from the war zone. And the borders haven’t moved in twenty years. People get caught up in their daily lives.”

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  I supposed that made sense. And I could also see why gamers weren’t talking about it. We were only six days into the launch of the game and I doubted anybody was ready to take on level 100 mobs. But in the coming weeks, those war zones would become a hotspot for every gamer looking for battle and glory.

  I stood up. “Come on. Two more floors, then a safe area.”

  “The middle floor last time was a gauntlet,” Janica said.

  The eighth floor of the dungeon was clearly a puzzle room. Even with my love for math, puzzles, and patterns, I couldn’t stand places like this. Any video game that I had ever played with rooms like this felt like a chore. You either had to pull levers in a certain order, memorize some pattern, or do something tedious. Either way, it would require backtracking and trial and error.

  I stood on a platform. Across the room was a door. Between me and the door, thirty yards of green liquid sat bubbling and churning. Some kind of poison, to be sure. I looked around, my Perception taking hold of me. Three unlit torches hung on each side wall with extra platforms below them. A control panel, to my right, had about fifty buttons.

  I sighed.

  Janica chuckled.

  “What?” I said. “You like puzzle rooms?”

  She didn’t answer me. Instead, she flew across the room, overtop the pool of poison. She stopped at the other end and waved at me.

  “Seriously?” I said.

  “Good luck,” she said, then laid on her back and pretended to snore.

  “I hate you!” I yelled.

  She rose from her fake sleep and bowed. Then she turned about and pulled a lever by the door.

  One by one, the torches lit up. First the one closest to me on the left, then on the right. Back-and-forth until every one of them lit up. As each one ignited, a platform below the torch moved across the pool until it connected with the platform in front of me. Like a zipper zipping shut. A bridge formed in front of me, running the length of the room.

  I put a toe onto the first platform in front of me expecting it to sink into the poison or something. Nothing happened. I stepped onto it fully, and walked across it to the next. “Nice work!” I hollered. “You’re pretty useful after all.”

  “That’s what people tell me,” Janica said.

  I strutted the rest of the way, like the bridge was my personal catwalk. Arms to the sides, head working it from side to side.

  “What is that?” Janica shook her head.

  “You don’t have runway models here?” I asked.

  “Oh, we have models,” she said. “Just none that strut at such an amateur level?”

  “Looked pretty good to me,” I said.

  “That's cause you couldn’t see yourself.”

  We descended the stairs to the ninth floor. Instead of a single turn in the staircase, we doubled back six times. I glanced into the room at the bottom. I hadn’t thought that any floor could feel creepier than the last floor with the librarian, but I was wrong. The space was circular, with bookshelves all around the perimeter, reaching a ceiling that must have been 100 feet tall. One of those rolling ladders was attached to tracks on the wall, allowing someone to climb six or seven stories to the top shelves into the vaulted space. In the center of the room, a librarian sat on a chair that was too small for him. A harpy with slicked back hair and flat rectangular glasses on the edge of his nose.

  Bevan the Librarian

  Level 19 Boss, Harpy Undead

  HP: 285/285

  Stamina: 361/361

  Mana 380/380

  Eight children sat cross-legged in front of him, enraptured by the story that he read.

  Ghostly Child

  Level 17, Undead

  HP: 65/65

  Stamina: 120/120

  Mana 90/90

  His arms gestured dramatically. He paused at just the right moments to create drama. His voice rose and fell, eliciting gasps from his audience.

  We stepped inside the door, staying far enough back that were outside the normal range of alerting the boss to our presence.

  “Once upon a time,” Bevan read. “There was a kind witch named Clarity. Clarity lived in a tall tower where she made magical candy. Gumdrops, peppermint, licorice, and chocolates. Because she was good and kind, she gave her candy away to little ghostly children, keeping them happy and fed. Everyone was happy and well fed. One day, an evil little human boy named Warren arrived at the tower and tried to steal her candy.”

  I went flush, heat rising to my cheeks. I wiped my hands on my leather armor.

  “I don’t like humans,” one of the children interrupted.

  “Oh, me either,” Bevan said. “Little Warren was a clever little human, too,” he continued. “He brought a Fairy with him and a big bag to store all the candy. But Warren was also a liar. He pretended to be something that he wasn’t, thinking it would fool the good witch.”

  “What did he pretend to be?” One of the children asked.

  “Great question,” Bevan said. “He pretended to be kind. He told Clarity that there were other children, needy children, who needed her candy.” Bevan’s voice changed from soft and soothing to deep and scratchy. “But really, he was there to steal the candy for himself.”

  The children booed and hissed like this was a melodrama.

  I didn’t like what was happening. Bears, ghosts, harpies. Fine. But evil librarians telling allegories about me, making me into the bad guy. A dungeon personalizing its floors to me. No thank you.

  “What did Clarity do?” One of the children asked. “Did she let him steal all of the candy?”

  “Clarity is wise,” the harpy librarian said. “So she gave Warren a choice. Behind one door was all the candy that he could carry in his bag. He could do anything he wanted with it, but he could never come back again to the tower.” He paused and looked around into the children’s black eyes.

  “What’s the other choice?” one of them asked, unable to wait.

  “Behind the other door was a key to the store room where she kept all of the sweets. He could use that key to take as much as he wanted forever. But,” Bevan said with a sudden stop, “there was a catch. If Warren ever ate a single piece of this candy, his key would disappear forever.”

  “What did he do?” one of the children asked.

  “Sorry kids. We’ll have to finish the story later. We have visitors.” Bevan looked up at me and made eye contact.

  Each of the children turned and looked at us with black eyes.

  Behind us, a door slammed shut.