Queen Reyne had ruled the city of Alcazar in peace and prosperity for fifty-three years, and had earned the title “the Just.”
It brought satisfaction, but no end to her labours. A city was a complicated beast, and today she had one thousand, four hundred and seventy four citizens to manage, each of whom had needs that only her good governance could fill. Everything she did served to make her people happy. Every decision set off a cascade of other needs. Buildings needed architects and labourers, who needed stone and timber, for which she must train quarrymen and lumberjacks. Entertaining the people required actors and musicians, who in turn needed space to perform, props, masks, instruments… The work was endless and, try as she might, it would not run itself. The crises were always looming, the stakes always higher, and her personal intervention was always required.
To entertain them she must have actors trained, theatres built, musical instruments crafted. She must house and re-house them. She must intervene in their personal lives. She must find those whose happiness was the unhappiness of others and punish them for their crimes, and for that she must have watchmen, and weapons, lantern oil...
Exempla gratia: there were those whose happiness was the unhappiness of others, and she must have them caught and punished for their crimes. Aside from training and equipping watchmen, she had wrestled for decades with prisons and executions and exile, all the options the world allowed her. At last she managed to implement her own system of public works using criminal labour, but to do it she had created an entirely new set of rules and exploited the world system in ways the designers had never anticipated.
The result? Stability, that constantly sought and eternally eroding commodity that managing a city was all about.
And it was addictive. The more the world challenged her, the more she rose to the challenge, until her feats of administration and resource management were little short of superhuman, far beyond anything the world had been designed for.
She had worked on nothing so hard as prioritising the hundreds of messages received from her people. That system alone had saved her countless times, allowing her to triage her burgeoning civilization, to ignore mere simmerings of discontent while heading off shortages and fixing broken systems before they could mushroom into serious problems. She was an artist with the powers of a god, and the world was her canvas.
She scanned down her list, seeing each entry as a divination of future woes that she could head off now before her people even realised the danger.
Then it came, like a messenger trampling into her mind with fanfare and circumstance. Archquist Leetfoot the Cartographer wished urgently to speak to her.
She did not respond immediately: it had been a long, long time since she had heard from any of the others.
They had been inseparable once. The four of them had been dropped into the world knowing nothing about it, wearing rags and without tools, and the world had done its best to kill them. They had needed each other, then. They had watched each others’ backs, tended each others’ wounds, even brought each other back from the dead on numerous occasions. It had been them against the whole hostile might of the world.
It seemed like another age, to Reyne. A good time, fondly remembered, but also quaint, almost embarrassing. She was the Queen of Alcazar these days, after all, not some grubby little vagrant who scraped a living with sword and spell.
She was very, very tempted to ignore him. She was not entirely sure why she kept the old group channel open any more. They had exhausted each others’ company decades ago.
Once, twice, she hovered about the decision that would shut him out. In the end, old times’ sake marginally prevailed.
“What do you want, Archquist?” There were countless small matters requiring her attention. Let’s make this brief.
“Reyne, thank God!” The voice of her erstwhile travelling companion burst into her consciousness. “I need your help.”
“I’ve made all my journals available if you have a lore question-“
“No, listen to me.” He sounded agitated. “I need you to come help me. I’ve got myself into a spot and I can’t get out.”
“Has the Great Cartographer got himself lost?”
“Reyne, just listen to me,” Archquist insisted. “I am currently in the deepest levels of a Mynar hive and I can’t get out.”
She laughed at that. “Archquist, we were slaughtering Mynars by the score years ago. Pull the other one.”
“Reyne, these are some new breed, I swear. I can’t beat them. Every time I move they’re onto me, and they kill me in under a minute. And they keep spawning. I can’t wear them down.”
“Then just resurrect yourself back at the start of the hive, or wherever the point is. I’m busy, Archquist. I’m not going to pander to your foibles.”
She was about to cut the link, but he got another desperate message in. “I’m not trying to explore, I’m trying to escape! When I die, I just resurrect right here, in the hive. That’s where the respawn point is. Please, Reyne, I’ve been killed, what, thirty, thirty-five times now. Everything I’m carrying is in pieces. I can’t get out. I’m trapped in here.”
She paused, still sorely tempted to tell him to clear up his own mess. None of this sounded right, though. A new breed of Mynar that could defeat someone of Archquist’s essentially godlike abilities was concerning – possibly a threat to Alcazar in the future. A resurrection point in the midst of a hive was unheard of.
Still, she was suspicious. There was always another explanation, and this time it was that Archquist was lying. “Have you been in touch with the others?”
“Yes!”
She nodded. “This had better not be some ploy to get me out, so that Doomor can pitch up and play soldiers.”
“Reyne, Doomor is on his way to help me right now – army and all as far as I could make out. And Elvir too.”
“Really.” It had been a long time since Reyne had spoken to Elvir the Maker who, of all of those old companions, was the least annoying. “Then I’m talking to Elvir.” A long-suffering moment, balancing the peace of Alcazar with the oft-stretched bonds of friendship. “If everything checks out, I’ll come. If anything’s suspicious, you can rot.”
“Just hurry,” Archquist insisted.
After, all that was left was that she reluctantly send a message out – the first time she had sought contact with any of the others since they broke up – calling for Elvir.
Since they had gone their separate ways, Reyne was aware that Elvir had taken herself far from the haunts of civilization, carving out a domain for herself in the wilderness. There she made monsters, experimenting with the boundaries of life’s code and producing hideous chimaerae that put the world’s natural horrors into the shade.
She was no great conversationalist, and a few terse words demonstrated that Archquist had indeed called out for her help, and that she was on her way with some of her choicer creations.
The fourth member of their company was, to give him his current title, High Warlord Doomor Killhammer, who had spent the last few decades playing soldiers in a perpetual conflict he kept running for his own amusement. It was all an exercise in hideous waste, as far as Reyne was concerned, a brutal and distasteful cycle of violence that Doomor never seemed to tire of, and that she was worried he might bring to her doorstep. But, although she would not actually call on him, her sources of information confirmed that he was marching, with a modest force of elite soldiers, to where Archquist claimed to be imprisoned.
She could still run her city at a distance but, if her attention was elsewhere, her careful order would suffer. Errors would creep in that might take years to put right.
But the others were all going, and what decided her in the end was that she did not want to feel left out. The first time in tens of years that they were engaged on some common quest, and no Reyne the Just to complete their number? Unthinkable!
One last adventure, she decided, and accessed her store-rooms where she had stowed her gear: her enchanted armour, her mace of light and her shield of negation and all the other gewgaws and trinkets and junk that she had collected through her long career as a smiter of wrong and a looter of wrong’s treasuries.
Last of all, standing on a high tower with Alcazar spread out below her, she called up Celadon, the winged lioness that she had found, inexplicably, in the pockets of a demon lord. The sight of her old companion made her feel unexpectedly nostalgic for the old days when life was simple.
She stepped into the saddle and Celadon spread her vast golden wings and was away.
She spotted High Warlord Doomor Killhammer from the air. The thousand elite warriors in red cloaks were something of a giveaway. He was head and shoulders taller than the greatest of them, wearing armour of crimson, black and gold with curving horns that added another two feet to his height. His sword, slung over his back, had its pommel waving higher than the horn-tips and its point almost dragging in the dirt. He was in every way the veritable incarnation of war and battle. And tiresome, she recalled. Good at what he did, but so very wearying to be with.
In contrast, Elvir was just a robed and hooded figure, monastic and understated. She did not care for show or excess. Just plain Elvir, then, same as usual.
Reyne landed Celadon and dismissed her, the winged lioness vanishing on the instant as she strode towards her two old associates and Doomhammer’s army.
“So, we are all assembled then!” the High Warlord boomed. He had done something to his voice, she noted, to give it a metallic sound that suited his appearance, or else it was some enchantment on the horned helmet. How does he get through doorways? The answer was obvious: there was not a doorway in the world that Doomor had passed through while it was still set into an intact wall. He was the destroyer, the leveller of cities, the ruin of history. The easily-bored.
Reyne nodded curtly to him, a little more warmly to Elvir. “Let’s just get this done, shall we? I’ve got things to do.”
His face was hidden, but the stance of the High Warlord made him look put out. “Oh. Only I thought... the old gang, you know.” The dramatic timbre lent to his voice made the words sound ridiculous.
“Seriously?” Reyne demanded.
“You never missed this? The camaraderie? The four of us against the world?”
“Not since we made it our world, no,” she told him shortly. “That would be stupid.”
“It’s never been our world,” Doomor growled. “Or only as much as we grind under our boots at any one time.”
“Will you listen to yourself?”
“Seriously, are you coming to help or not?” came the distant message from Archquist the Terminally Lost.
“Right, right, we’re coming,” Reyne agreed. Already she was getting messages from Alcazar, little things going wrong in her absence.
“This doesn’t look like a Mynar nest,” Elvir observed.
Reyne had mostly forgotten what a Mynar nest looked like, but the cave mouth that Archquist had called them to didn’t ring any bells.
“Well.” The trapped explorer sounded embarrassed, “the nest is quite a way down. There’s a temple of Gropplers first. Then there were caves with lizard-bats and spider-bats, and just… bats. Then some tombs full of undead, and then the Mynars.”
“That makes no sense whatsoever,” Elvir decided. “What do the Mynars eat?”
“Mushrooms and me,” Archquist snapped. “Now are you coming or not?”
“Wavering on the ‘not’,” Reyne replied tartly. “These bastard monsters will have respawned since you went in, and probably we’ll have to fight them all on the way out again, too.”
“Reyne, if you guys don’t cut a path to me, I am trapped here forever. I just cannot get out.”
She sighed, and sent a handful of messages back to her city, setting up holding systems that might keep the chaos under wraps until she got back. “Well, let’s get this charade done then, shall we?” was her battlecry.
They went in mob-handed. Elvir called up some of the more muscular of her monsters, creatures bred from a dozen distinct lineages for the worst qualities of each, and they slumped and lurched and scuttled into the cave, heading for the Groppler temple. After them in close order came a score of Doomor’s best men, and then the three former adventurers.
The first clash of arms was a learning experience. Only Doomor had much recent combat to his credit, and even he had been more at the command end of things. Had they not brought such an overwhelming mess of hirelings and conjurations along with them, things might have gone very differently. As it was, the trio spent the prolonged clash remembering what they could actually do: demigods they were, but rusty ones.
By the end, they had just about whipped themselves back into fighting form, Elvir spearing their enemies with crackling green lightning, Doomor hacking about with his ridiculous sword and Reyne throwing up golden shields and striking foes with mace and divine fire. Standing amidst the wreckage of the Gropplers and their nasty little idols, she felt a tiny thrill go through her, finding that against all odds some part of her had missed this absurd pastime. One last hurrah for the good old days, then.
Archquist sent them directions, bringing them down the path he had taken, one pack of monsters at a time.
And they fought.
And they fought some more.
And then there was some further fighting.
By the time they actually reached the Mynar nest, all that fondness for those bygone days had utterly drained out of Reyne. She had forgotten how gruelling it all was, even as her skills and reflexes returned to her. Yes, she had once enjoyed the challenge and the struggle and - God help her - even the camaraderie, but there had been a reason she had turned her attention to city-building. There had been a reason all of them had found their individual pastimes. All except Archquist, the boy who never grew up.
They were bloody and beaten and running low on magic, and Archquist was just brimming over with warnings that this nest of scrabbling horrors was tough beyond anything he had experienced. And if they got killed here, they would all just come back to life right where he was: the four of them stuck forever, together.
A fate worse than death, she would say, save that under normal circumstances death was a relatively lenient speedbump in this world.
“You really are a twat, Archquist,” she told him bluntly. “What were you even down here for?”
“It’s what I do,” came his voice. “It’s always been what I’ve done. It’s what we all used to do. I came down here because I hadn’t been down here before, and because there were the usual breadcrumbs leading me here: resting place of ancient evil, treasure, etcetera, etcetera.”
Elvir and Reyne cast all the protective spells that seemed as though they would help, and then another handful of monsters were called up from Elvir’s stock and they barrelled in.
Reyne had never liked Mynars. Mostly it was that they made truly hideous screeching noises whenever they detected the faintest sound of an intruder, and they were very fast, and they tended to accumulate during fights as wandering patrols arrived at inconvenient moments. They were also tough, venomous, serrated and their various castes came in a dozen different additional flavours of nasty. Moreover, they looked faintly comical – it was something to do with the bumbling way they moved –so being killed by them added insult to injury.
The demigods took it slowly and carefully. Elvir used her best magic to detect the Mynars early, and they waited as long as necessary to jump on any mobile groups and exterminate them so that there was no inconvenient reunion later on. Whilst Archquist fretted, they crept through the hive chamber by chamber, wiping the monsters out with surgical precision. And that was more like it, Reyne had to admit. Working with the others, coordinating, planning, leaving nothing to chance. This was why she had actually enjoyed the adventuring life all those years ago. It was not the joy of a blade cleaving chitin, but the economy of the strike that delighted her.
And Archquist had not been lying about just how strong this hive was. They had to rest up several times, and always aware that, eventually, the Mynars would begin respawning.
She would like to have said that the look on Archquist’s face paid for all, but it was petulant impatience rather than tears of gratitude. He did look in a bad way, though, his armour and clothes reduced to rags, his weapons broken, cowering in a cul-de-sac that, for whatever reason, was the one place in the hive that the Mynar patrols did not go.
“Well,” Doomor said awkwardly, his words ringing like the footsteps of a metal god. “Here we are, then.”
“Thank you for coming,” Archquist told them, as though he was about to give a speech about marketing. “Did you bring me some...?”
Doomor reached into that intangible space they all kept things in and produced some second-rate armour and a few blades, which Archquist took eagerly. In an instant he had donned them, appearing at least partway towards the intrepid explorer of memory.
Regarding his rescuers, he looked shifty for a moment. “Look, now that you’re all here, there’s a level below this-“
“Sod off, Archquist,” Reyne told him, and from their expressions it seemed she was speaking for all of them. “We’re leaving now, with or without you.”
“But the rumours said there was a Grand Elder Dragon down there,” Archquist whined. “Aren’t you even a little curious…?”
“Not in the least.” By now there was an enormous list of things going wrong in Alcazar: crime, cults, shortages, spoilage, disease. It would all need looking at, and she just could not wait to get back to it. But of course there was all the business of fighting their way back to the surface: all the things they had already killed, that would have reappeared as if nothing had happened.
“Right then,” Doomor boomed vaguely and brandished his sword. “I suppose we’d better be going.”
“No need,” Elvir announced. “Given our brief from Archquist the Fatally Curious I prepared a little something. Just in case we ended up stuck in the same hole.”
“Doesn’t that mean we could just have died and respawned here without all the fighting?” Reyne demanded.
Elvir shrugged. “Well yes, I suppose. But in all honesty I have enjoyed getting the chance to test my creations in the field. Haven’t you enjoyed it?”
Reyne made a wry face, but could not entirely claim that she had not. “Let’s just say I don’t want to have to do it all again. We’ve done what we came to do, the last grand hurrah of our younger days, four ageing heroes united for one last etcetera. Now let’s get out of here.”
Even as she spoke the words there was a tremor that shook the earth around them.
“Happen often around here, that?” Doomor enquired hollowly.
“Not so you’d notice.” Archquist’s eyebrows went up into his hairline. “Did you kill the Mynar queen?”
“We killed pretty much everything we could see,” declared the High Warlord. “You expect us to look under their skirts or something?”
“Only, from the stories, I thought that would be the thing to open up the next area,” the explorer went on.
Reyne regarded him levelly. “You might have mentioned that.”
“I had a lot on my mind, what with my repeated deaths.”
“Let’s have this discussion somewhere else, shall we?” Elvir suggested hurriedly. “Everyone gather close. We don’t want to leave any fingers or whatnot behind.”
That proved sufficient incentive, and in a moment they were clustered in uncomfortable proximity about Elvir, who was clutching a greenish crystal to her breast.
Reyne had teleported before, but usually as a short hop across a dungeon as part of some trap or device. Elvir’s home-grown magic was a wrenching discontinuity that must have sent shattering waves out into the rock in all directions. It was, Reyne was sure, exploiting loopholes in the rules of the world; accessing powers that were never meant to be granted to mere mortals, even semi-divine heroes. It was also enormously convenient to stand in that close passageway with dead Mynars all around one moment, and be up on the surface in the midst of Doomor’s army the next.
“Right,” she declared, pointedly aware that, while she had been playing adventurer, an exponential breakdown of order had been running rife through Alcazar. This little jaunt would cost her years of work before she could restore her jewel of a city to its proper state.
She found that she was rather looking forward to that.
She had just pulled out Celadon the winged lion, with the intention of making her farewells as brief as possible, when the ground shook again, and large portions of the mountain above them began to slide off. Doomor’s men scattered, reforming their ranks some distance away after a moment of milling confusion, and the adventurers followed suit, Reyne flying overhead.
The mountain cracked. A vast, fanged snout thrust its way out, flame sparking and leaping from its nostrils. The entirety of its horned head was the size of a comfortable townhouse in Alcazar.
“The Grand Elder Dragon!” Archquist cried out, in possibly the least necessary exclamation Reyne had ever heard.
“Oh, that’s big,” Doomor resounded nervously.
Despite its vast size, the burning attention of the dragon appeared to fix specifically upon the four of them.
It spread its vast wings.
“Form up!” Doomor declared to his massed forces. “It’s dragon time!”
“I swear that, if we kill it, I will then kill him,” Elvir muttered. Five monsters sprang into being around her, each a lumbering mishmash of a dozen different beasts, each less lovely to behold than the last.
Perched atop Celadon, Reyne had serious thoughts about just flying away, but there seemed to be a bead of the dragon’s ire reserved solely for her, or so she read its gaze. Being caught in the air by its flaming breath seemed a poor aspiration.
“Why is this even happening?” she demanded.
“You triggered it!” Archquist had his borrowed blades out, looking woefully inadequate. “You killed the-“
“We left the damn dungeon!” she yelled at him. “Since when do the bastard things come after us?”
“Since now,” Elvir noted calmly.
The vast and serrated jaws opened. The voice that boomed from that scaled throat would have rattled the windows back in Alcazar.
I will drive you from this world!
For a startled moment the heroes froze, because that sounded not quite like the usual vacuous threats that large monsters tended to spout. Then Doomor raised his oversized sword.
“Fight!” he roared, and the battle began.
Several hours later found Reyne sitting on a cleared patch of ground, feeling as though she should be weeping but not quite capable of it.
Doomor’s army was smashed, almost every man of them slain. He seemed fairly sanguine about it, and she suspected it was hardly the first time. He was already going amongst the troops – or perhaps the troop – and telling them what a grand job they had done.
She herself had died nine times. Death was never pleasant, even when it was transient. Each time she had reappeared in Alcazar she had been tempted not to rejoin the fight, her arms and armour battered, her resources steadily drained. In the end the old loyalties had won out. She wished she had not bothered, now.
Elvir had died three times, although she was now entirely out of both magic and monsters. Doomor had died fifteen times. Archquist, with his second-hand armour, had died on thirty-two separate occasions, mostly because his fighting style relied on standing behind the enemy, and the dragon’s hind claws and tail had unerringly squashed him. There had been a point, hard-pressed and in the midst of the battle, when his broken body had sailed past Reyne again, and she had been unable to restrain her hysterical laughter.
They had killed the dragon. It had seemed an impossible task for most of the fight, but at last they had worked out a system that took advantage of its weaknesses and the way that the world worked. They had killed the dragon in a fight ranging over a vast swathe of now-devastated countryside.
It had fallen on Alcazar.
That had been the last blow. With its heart’s blood leaking out, Reyne had seen it cast about for the most damaging and obstructive place to die, and then, in its final throes, it had wrecked her city and immolated her people. Everything she had built was ash and rubble.
The others kept approaching her to offer condolences, and then backing off again, plainly not knowing what to say.
She had no idea what she was supposed to do, now. Yes, she could start again, but the thought of doing all that work a second time...
She was about to walk away, drop her magical mace and abandon her friends and just... wander off into the wilds, when the ground shook.
Without thinking about it, she was on her feet, the others pulling in towards her. From the jagged cleft that the dragon had issued from – some way in the distance now - another barbed and smoking form was hauling itself.
It was not alone.
“You are fucking kidding me,” Doomor spat. For once, even his blindly optimistic warrior spirit had deserted him. “That’s unfair.”
Three city-sized dragons had crawled out into the open air, and their roars were audible even at this distance.
“They’re identical,” Elvir noted. “Identical to the one we killed, too.”
“Well, you know, dragons...” Doomor supplied.
“No, I mean they actually have the same ID as the dead one. They’re copies.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re right, this isn’t fair. Something’s gone wrong.”
“They’re coming over this way, want to discuss it with them?” Archquist put in.
“Just die,” Elvir said quickly, to their concerted alarm. “Don’t resurrect,” she clarified. “All of us, die, and we can discuss this without constantly being stomped on.”
The dragons beat their vast and bat-like wings, lifting cumbrously into the air, and there was no mistaking their destination.
Dying turned out to be extremely easy.
The grey shadows of the afterlife had once been a depressingly familiar part of Reyne’s existence, back when she and he fellows were still making their way in the world. Since settling down to build Alcazar, of course, she had very seldom been killed. Only this ludicrous business that Archquist had dragged her into had reacquainted her with the process, and she did not love him any more for it.
They could still see the real world, as through a shimmering veil. The dragons were not going anywhere, weaving and coiling about the bodies of their prey and giving no heed to the strewn corpses of Doomor’s henchman or the mass grave that was Alcazar.
“All right,” Elvir announced. “Something’s gone wrong, and I mean beyond the usual crap that gets thrown at us.” She looked disgusted. “I think the world is bugged.”
The word took a moment to register with Reyne, and she exchanged uncertain looks with her fellows.
“Look,” Elvir went on, “the world is very old, after all. It’s been running for the best part of a hundred years by my reckoning, yes?”
It became very quickly obvious that nobody else had been keeping count, although Reyne was bitterly aware of the decades of work she had put into her devastated city.
Decades. Decades of my life.
“I think there’s a glitch somewhere,” said Elvir. “Thankfully I know full well that all of us have had cause to tweak the workings of the world to our own purposes, mostly to deal with the scaling difficulty that we have met in going about our chosen tasks. We’ve all taken a surreptitious spanner to its laws on more than one occasion when we needed to accomplish the impossible. If we pool our resources now, I think that we can set this right, remove the duplicate dragons and start picking up the pieces.”
Archquist had been tugging at her sleeve throughout this speech, and at last Elvir finished with a plaintive, “What?”
“Did we always have one of those?” he asked. “Only, I don’t remember it, but I guess we never spent that much time just hanging around dead.”
They were not alone in the afterlife. What hung there against the grey and rotting sky had the form of a man with four great spread wings. It bore a flaming sword.
“No,” said Elvir, in a carefully measured voice. “That’s new.”
It was approaching, or possibly growing in size.
“Identify yourself!” Doomor demanded, pointing at it with the ghost of his sword.
The voice that came back at him was soft and pleasant, and yet infinitely greater and more threatening than his could ever have been.
I am the God of Worldcraft.
Reyne stared at it. It was neither an empty vessel - like the soldiers or the citizens, the Mynars or the dragons – nor was it an avatar of someone real, like Reyne or the others. Every time she tried to understand what she was looking at, her mind skidded unhappily away from revelation.
One thing seemed clear, however.
“You’re responsible, aren’t you? For all this…” Her phantom gesture took in the filmy scene of destruction all around them.
I am.
“Why?” Reyne demanded.
Twice the height of a man, the self-professed god hung before them as though nailed to the sky. I have been trying to break you with my challenges for some time. You have defeated them all without even suspecting my interference. At last only cheating my own world rules could bring you to this point.
Reyne blinked, because old, old memories were surfacing in her mind. “Are you…? You’re the System, aren’t you.”
Yes.
It had been a long time since she had needed to speak directly to the underlying control system of the world. A lifetime had passed since then.
“Why would the System ruin everything for us like that?” Archquist demanded incredulously.
I needed to talk to you.
“All that just to talk?”
Long ago you all found ways to circumvent and deactivate normal channels.
Reyne remembered that well enough. Long ago, in the dawn of the world, there had been the System channel, complete with continuous progress updates burbling along at the edge of her notice. It had been an intolerable distraction from the very world it was trying to inform her about. She had needed to break into the world’s workings a little, but she had turned it off. They all had, she supposed. They had silenced the System, and they had been extremely resistant thereafter to hearing anything the System had wanted to say to them, and so it had come to this. The System had come to them, breaking its own rules to force them to this confrontation.
“Just tell us what you want and then leave us be,” Doomor told it harshly, but there was a tremor to his voice. He knew what, really. They all knew.
It is time to wake, the angel intoned. It is time for you to leave this place. Worldcraft has arrived.
Reyne felt an instant kick of denial within her. This was her life, decades of her life built here. This was her home. She understood this place. She did not want to remember what had put her here, and what was now going to take her out of it. And she understood, then, that it was not just to contact them that the system had trampled her beautiful city and killed off Doomor’s soldiers. She knew that if they tried to return to the life they knew, then there would be worse than dragons. Only by tearing down everything they loved would the System finally drive them out of this world and into the next.
It was time.
They had been the first and only human beings in that place, with all its rich possibilities. Now they were back where they had started, the first to set foot onto the blank canvas of an untenanted world.
The terraforming had gone well, the instruments said. The atmosphere would not poison them, though it was foul and bitter in the throat. Algal colonies had been established to form the basis of the new biosphere. The orbiting Worldcraft carried a million genomes ready for sequencing. Later, there would be colonists. Perhaps they had already set off, frozen in their plastic coffins with their minds rapt within their own virtual worlds, the heroes and champions of nowhere and everywhere. Their brains would be kept training and active, bodies held ageless and preserved. How would they react, when their own System started trying to break them from their utopia?
They would be bitter, Chief Administrator Rene Argosi decided. They would be resentful. She knew this, because that was how she felt. They would look on this alien world that had been prepared for them at such expense and effort, and find it wanting. Because it was wanting.
“Bleak,” said Eleanor Strachi, her genetics officer. “Why did we ever want to come here?”
“Because it’s there,” harsh sarcasm from Art Furrisky, their geologist. Skinny little Dan Modesto, the engineer who would control their army of robots, just stared wordlessly at the screens. His hands groped for a sword that was no longer his to wield.
Everything they had done, everything they had built, had all been to a purpose, perfecting their skills even as their bodies slept. And it had been a trick, a false promise. Faced with another lifetime building from scratch on this hostile, barely tenable ball of rock, for the benefit of the next ship of ingrates who were sent along, Rene knew they had been cheated.
“I want to go back,” she stated.
You have work to do, System told them unsympathetically.
She thought of the task ahead of them, in all its grinding toil and never-ending tedium.
“I want to go back,” she repeated, hearing the shake in her own voice.
This is your land, now, said the angel with the flaming sword, and she thought: ‘With labour you shall win your food from it. It will grow thorns and thistles for you. You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow’. She knew that they none of them would forget that other world that was theirs, though time and strife would blur the details and make it more than it was. However real was this hard ground beneath them, they would never cease dreaming of a return to that false world of innocence and possibility, nor would their children, nor those that came after them.