Charlie stepped through, and the world was black and starlit.
The true lights in the hallway switched off the moment he went in, leaving only the light of the Aziteks, which placed him in an abyss of stars rotating above him.
The ground below was an expanse of desert, windswept and barren. He could hear the soft thrum of water in the distance and saw the Nile, lush on either side for a few feet before the crops gave way to sand. Insects buzzed quietly in his ears, locusts and crickets.
Even though the ceiling was above in realspace, he saw in the darkness through his Aziteks constellations from his childhood, more vivid and jarring than they’d ever before been.
Leo, the Lion.
Cancer, the Crab.
Cassiopeia, the Queen.
A path lit up before him, a soft silk indication in the sand, guiding him where to go. He had no choice. Vanhi was missing, and there was no other way. He was tired of pretending there was always a clever solution to every problem, a way out that dodged the moral morass. Sometimes the only way was through, coming out bloody and tarnished on the other side.
Above, Perseus, the Hero.
Taurus, the Bull.
Libra, the Scales.
He followed the path as it went upstairs, in gamespace a soft dune that rose, rose, rose, to a higher plane of desert.
Above, Lupus, the Wolf.
Scorpio, the Scorpion.
He came to the third floor, clearing the top of a sand hill to see a pyramid rising above everything else in the distance, an illuminated eye at the top, a beacon, beams in the night. The desert was broader and wider than any school, but the path in realspace was the hallway stretching in front of him in pitch-blackness, lit in the Game as a walkway between two rows of miniature sphinxes facing each other in pairs, a flickering torch below each stone face.
It brought him to room 322, which appeared as a door in the pyramid.
He wondered, Maybe the Game hadn’t been onto them? Where are you? What are you dooooooooing? Maybe it had been excitement—it was promoting him to a new level, it was eager to give him his reward. Maybe that’s why it sent those texts only to him.
Or not. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was Vanhi.
Inside, he came into a stone temple with a great golden scale, and ideas began to click in his head, fragments of conversation with Tezcatlipoca. A great experiment whose end we don’t know. The oldest question on earth. The Golden Algorithm. An algorithm for God.
A book containing an infinite number of names was open on an altar before him. As he put his finger on it, the names began to flow by, ink scrolling across the ancient parchment.
Every moral system failed.
Maybe we could build something smarter than us to crack it.
Charlie touched the first name he recognized, Mr. B.
The scale moved.
In one tray were Goldz, in the other Blaxx, coins piled on both sides.
The Goldz sank lower, a slight surplus of goodness.
As with the Eye of God that Peter had shown him, Charlie could see things from Mr. B.’s life, down to his sad current moment sitting in a robe alone, watching TV as the TV watched him back. But what was new, what was available to Watchers, was the scale. The judgment.
A creeping suspicion hit him, and he reached out and tilted his hand in space over the balance, and it deposited Goldz and that side sank slightly lower.
I’m a guinea pig in a fucking morality play that stops when I’m dead?
Of course! Who else? Lab rats?
But why could he move the scale? Wasn’t God supposed to be the judge here? Something smarter than us to crack it? A neural net? A deep Boltzmann machine? A tangled hierarchy?
“Why do I get to decide?” Charlie asked the Game aloud.
For the first time in this place, the Game spoke:
God is invisible.
Man is created in God’s image.
Ergo, the only way to see God is to see man.
It hit Charlie then, the brutal simplicity of the recursive loop he was caught in. The desperate failed experiment that was ruining his life, an algorithm tasked to find God that couldn’t. Feed it a bunch of contradicting myths and ask it to spit out the answer, man creating God creating man creating God … morality was outsourced to the Game, and the Game had outsourced it back, crowdsourcing the question of decency to the hive mind. It was as inevitable as it was hideous.
“You can’t see yourself,” Charlie said softly. He almost felt sorry for the Game then. “You have no idea who you are.”
The Game didn’t respond, if it heard him at all.
“Show me Vanhi.”
The Game was silent.
“Show me Kenny.”
He is offline.
“Show me Peter.”
He is offline.
A sudden panic shot through Charlie—had he just given them away? Tipped it off to their hiding together off-line? Had he just plucked the needles from the haystack and shoved them under the Game’s nose?
Why are all your friends offline?
Charlie ignored the Game and asked, “Where is Vanhi?”
I am sorry. She is with me.