Aaron Jay's Blog

Thank you to everyone who has waited so patiently as I wrote this next volume.  I am really happy with it.  Hope you will be too.  Releasing New Years Day.  Available for pre-order now.

Gathering Strength (Character Development Book Two)

CHAPTER 2
    The last time I had walked these streets with someone, it had been with Jude, my ex-best friend. One upside of going to my father’s was that I could avoid heading back to my apartment, where I half hoped and half dreaded I might run into Jude. He had betrayed me. I had killed him. Given that he had betrayed me in reality and I had only killed him in the Game, I think he was still the son of a bitch between the two of us. So, even finding out that the world might be ending again has its silver linings. It is the perfect excuse to avoid unpleasant social interactions. On the other hand, some self-destructive part of me wanted to confront him. He had been my best friend.
Setting Jude aside, I thought of another happy aspect to GM Pulling’s revelation. If we all died, I thought I could also claim to have won my bet with Maya. I wouldn’t have lost anyway. I could claim I went out a winner.
Our journey through the empty city was quiet. Both of us were consumed with our own thoughts. She had refused to tell me any details, saying that she would only tell the great man himself, my father, Numitor Boone. An incursion was about the only thing that would have made me interrupt my father’s self-chosen isolation. If you are only going to tell one person about feral AI and wild nano breaching our safety, my father would be the guy. So we walked on in silence through dead streets. After a few blocks, it suddenly struck me that walking with her without speaking didn’t feel awkward.
Even before we made it up to the top of the steps of my father’s house, ArchE, my father’s AI assistant, had opened the door. He was one of only a handful of such beings allowed inside humanity’s last bastion.
“Miles. GM Pulling. Is Miles an object of official interest again?” he asked.
“No. No, he isn’t,” Pulling reassured.
“Hi ArchE. I’ve brought GM Pulling here to see my father,” I said.
He pretended to be surprised and take a moment to think about how to handle the situation. Not that he hadn’t been surprised or hadn’t needed extra cycles to decide how to handle the situation. Only we wouldn’t have been able to perceive the delay, which could reasonably be measured in Planck time, without his pretension.
“Numitor Boone is not home to visitors. He most especially is not home to visitors wearing GM white and blacks,” he began.
“It’s important,” I tried to interrupt while Pulling nodded in agreement.
“But come in,” ArchE continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Miles can talk to his father. You can wait in the parlor, GM Pulling. Some aggravation might do him good.”
He led us inside. Instead of heading into my father’s room he took us into what we called the parlor. I knew that this room was shielded and had a bevy of hidden devices designed to vet visitors. It also had some comfortable chairs and a small sofa. Giving Pulling a nod, I left her with ArchE to keep an eye on her and made my way to my father’s room.
Entering, I saw my father propped up in the purpose-built bed that took up most of this rather large room. I looked him over, which takes some looking given his massive size. As far as I could tell his condition was stable and there had been no overt changes or growth since the last time I saw him. His mutation might not be acting up, but his mood definitely was.
We hugged because that is our ritual, but I knew that my father was irritated with me.
“Have you decided on the name for the baby?” he growled at me.
Here we go.
“Excuse me?” I responded.
“I assume that the only reason you would disturb my retirement and bring a GM to my home without permission or notice is due to the application of official sanction. Yet, ArchE informs me this is not the case. If her visit isn’t professional I must assume something personal and profound. You know I despise unannounced visitors of any sort. A representative of what we could laughably call our government most especially. GM Pulling is attractive and of an age for you. So, I put the most acceptable spin on your disturbance that I can. You have decided to present me with a grandson and the next heir to our noble lineage. Frankly, I might have wished that you were under official compulsion and brought her here against your will.”
He really was irked. Part of me couldn’t blame him. He hadn’t wanted me to play the Game. I had moved out and jumped into the game despite his arguments against it--one of which was that he would be dragged back into dealing with the rest of society if I did. Here I was interrupting his solitude yet again. Still, he should know I wouldn’t do such a thing lightly.
“We were thinking an old Testament name like Shadrach or Abednego. If not that then Gygax Asimov Robinson Pournelle. We could call him GARP for short,” I said blandly.
“Gygax was a genius but a terrible author of anything other than games. Gerrold or Gaiman would have been more appropriate,” he corrected. “But, you clearly have lost your wits and have brought her here for reasons of business. I refuse. You are not compelled, traduced or under duress. My paternal responsibilities do not run to constantly holding your hand as you play the Game and the games surrounding it. Your filial responsibilities most especially do include respecting my preferences as to who I allow in my home. Get her out!”
The more my father yelled and indulged his theatrical and dramatic impulses, the more I had learned to respond with aplomb and a bit of snark.
“I’m sorry. Were you about to step out and do a bit of gardening? Some shopping errands?” I asked my bed-ridden father.
“Miles. If you think you can pester and needle me into submitting, think again. It has been some years since you were small and cute enough to get your way with such tactics.”
“Well, now neither of us is small or cute. Seriously, father. I’m sorry to disturb you. Truly. You may recall but I have a bet I need to win, yet here I am. I can’t afford to waste my time any more than yours. You need to talk with her.”
“There are only a few scenarios under which I would agree that I need to speak with a GM.”
“Well, there is no baby. So, it is one of the other ones.”
He looked at my face. He is so large that sometimes being examined by him is what I suspect people felt when a whale or other large cetacean took a gander at a deep sea diver intruding on the denizens of the ocean. A massive intelligence that doesn’t look much like us but holds some bit of the human soul. My father put his bluster and irritation aside and looked at me and used his big brain. He realized what kinds of scenarios would make me bring Pulling to see him. Irritation was replaced with wariness, weariness and sadness.
“Alright, Miles. Bring her to the office.”
I left my father’s room, went across the hall and back into the parlor where Pulling was chuckling about something ArchE had said to her. For an aged and unknowably foreign intelligence housed in a synthetic shell, he was really a funny and charming guy. When she had come into the house she had been obsessing about the world ending and about meeting a man who I got the feeling she both admired and feared. Despite that, within a few minutes ArchE had her chuckling.
“He has agreed to talk with you. I can’t promise he will help,” I said sitting down in the chair across from her. Pulling gave a short sharp nod. She started to get up.
“Not IRL. Virtual,” I corrected her. She eased back down, relieved, I think, not to do this in person.
ArchE presented two red pills for us to take.
“He will need to see these,” Pulling said presenting something sealed in what looked like crystal to ArchE along with a data stick. ArchE took the stick and the crystal doodad with his impossibly deft hands. In turn, Pulling took her pill with hands that seemed to have a slight tremor to them. Nerves. I took my pill.
If it wasn’t for the fact that ArchE was now absent, I wouldn’t have thought anything had changed after taking the red pill. The parlor was for company. There he abided by the convention of having a smooth and undetectable transition into the socially virtual. He himself thought we should always be very aware of whether we were in reality or not, but this one room that he would likely never see again in his life was a nod to social norms.
“Come on. Let’s go see him,” I said to Pulling.
Leading her across the hall, we stepped into my father’s office. His office was just as it always had been. A large desk, a giant globe in one corner and an even larger man who looked like my father if his features were symmetrical and his mass hadn’t been transformed into blubber. My father didn’t stand or offer to shake GM Pulling’s hand. He gave her a minuscule nod and gestured to the yellow seat in front of the desk. I pulled a chair from against the window nearer to Pulling.
“You wished to see me?” my father asked.
“Yes, I did. I well… it’s hard to just say it out loud,” she began.
“Truths unuttered don’t go away or disappear just because one lacks the courage or wit to articulate them,” he stated.
“Yes. Of course. Pardon me,” she said.
My father looked at me. He isn’t a patient man to begin with. I knew that Pulling had better start unloading or my father was apt to log out of the conversation and the room. I gave her shoulder a small pat to reassure her and she cleared her throat and began again.
“I have reason to believe that there has been an incursion. Possibly more than one.”
“Indeed, why are you telling me? Surely the vaunted White Tower should be handling such a dire circumstance,” he said using the GMs’ nickname for both their headquarters and organization.
“They don’t believe it is an incursion.”
My father huffed.
“I am no admirer of the White Tower. Yet, even with my critical view of them I believe they are competent to discern an incursion.”
“They… I was told by a friend unofficially that there are considerations they are keeping in mind. They insist that there is no incursion. I don’t really know what the tower thinks. I am low in the ranks and the higher-ups think I may be… unreliable?” she said, her shoulders slumping. This admission cost her something. “I can’t tell if this is their actual technical conclusion or a fiction to make handling the situation less costly. Officially there has been no incursion.”
“Perhaps we should approach this from the other end. Why do you believe there has been an incursion? Most of the time the dissolved corpses, zombified people, and other unspeakable horrors don’t leave much room for interpretation,” he said.
“For most incursions, yes. But there was that other kind, wasn’t there?” she said nervously.
My father stilled. He and I carefully did not look at each other for fear that the other might say something, anything about my mother, his wife.
“There was only ever one of those and that matter was handled. I believe permanently,” he said.
“Yes, of course. Look, let me just tell you what I know.”
“I wish you would.”
She nodded her head and began.
“The people who come to public pods, well, there is almost always something off about them. I mean except at roll ups or other times like that where you necessarily need a GM and a public pod. Everyone else is there because they are trying to get away from somebody or something, or somebody or something wants to get them away. Maybe they have lost more nano than they can afford to make the game work well in their home setup. Maybe they are doing something they don’t want anyone who has access to their pod to know about. Maybe they were pathetic at playing the Game and are desperate. Something.”
She looked at me. I had just left a public pod.
“What? You think I’m going to get offended?” I said. “I agree.”
She turned back to my father.
“There was a regular at my old station before I was reassigned. James Eggbert.  He seemed like a nice enough old guy. He had obviously been a grinder for a long time. By his age he should have had time to earn a decent enough home setup. But, well--lose a few too many crucial fights, make some bad moves in the game or out… We would say hi on his way in or out of the game. Make some small talk. Discuss some of the places in the game we both liked. We had both been to K’veer, Rook Island, The Planes of Telare. For a regular player, never been with the Party or a clan or anything, he had gotten around. He’d worked the fields of Mulgore and the Hills of Sovngarde. He’d been around. Had a nice way about him. I liked him.”
My father grunted, perhaps also remembering some of those places. Goddamned Maya and Jude were likely off enjoying the best that the Game had to offer. Meanwhile, I was stuck in the ass-end of Quartzite.
“And then?” my father asked.
“And then he started to… to change,” she replied.
“Change how?”
“He started playing more hours. He started playing more, I don’t know, hungry? When I first met him, he would tell me some of the best places he had found to harvest or places that had good loot. The kind of hard-to-find little tricks you only know by spending a lot of time nosing around an area. Valuable. Not worth a ton but valuable for regular players. He was always happy to tell me where to find some of those. He was proud that he had found those spots and it was worth more to him to brag a bit to me than to horde it for himself. That’s it. He had pride. Wanted to show me that he may be using a public pod but he was a good player.”
“Then what? You say he became… hungry?” my father prompted her.
“Yes. He started seeming furtive. Greedy. He might say hello, but it wasn’t the same. He got angry when I asked him how his latest playing session had gone. Asked me why I thought it was any of my business. He acted like I was after his secrets. I swear, I’d never even used the information he had given me before.”
“People change, GM Pulling. Not often for the better. But for the worse? You say you weren’t close with the man.”
“Close? That depends on how you look at it. We had never been to each other’s homes. We weren’t family. But I saw him a few times every shift I had at my old public pod station for years. We weren’t close but I knew him. Do you understand?”
“Yes, indeed I think I do. Before the troubles people had neighbors, someone who delivered their mail, people who sold them food. People they saw regularly for years even if they--as you put it--were never intimate enough to visit each other’s homes. Technology had been eating away at such bonds between us even before all that led to the Game. The fraying of such bonds was no small part of how the troubles came to us all. You are lucky. You had a vestige of what we used to call community. Please continue.”
She took a breath.
“Yes, he was part of my… my community. I was part of his. And then he changed. He seemed angry. More aggressive. I… I’m a young woman.”
“Manifestly. And?”
“Well, I’m used to every man noticing that I am a young woman. Although you don’t seem to,” she noted in surprise.  I laughed and she blushed after she realized what she had just said.  My father waived it away.
“I’ve managed to put such idiocies behind me. Or maybe my idiocies have put such things behind me. Please, continue.”
“Right. Well, most men notice. Not typically in an awkward way. Just that it is noted. I think that this was part of why James liked to brag a little about the places he’d found.”
GM Pulling reddened once again, her embarrassment at such bragging derailing her again for a moment. My father sighed.
“It is a function of the species. Men have always liked to show off a bit for a young and attractive woman. A useful instinct that women have used to make men invent most things of use and kill most things that needed killing for millions of years. Go on.”
“Huh,” she replied, “Well, the way he looked at me changed. A little admiration and interest kept in check is fine. Flattering and sometimes useful, as you say. I’m not weak or scared. I can handle men and keep my interactions with them on my terms. You all aren’t, well, present company excluded, all that bright most of the time. Sweet. Useful. But not often bright.”
At first I wondered if I was “present company.” I was certainly present. Thinking about it some more I decided I probably wasn’t. From her perspective I was likely sweet and had been useful. Bright? I had been jumping from one hot mess to another since she met me. Even from my perspective I don’t know if I could claim to be very smart.
“He began looking at me differently. Creepy and hungry,” she continued. “He was aggressive in other ways too. He became rude and abusive to the male GMs. He got into a fight with Arneson.”
“That shouldn’t count against him,” I chimed in.
She flicked me a look and decided not to bother responding. She was here for my father not to drag up old drama between me and Arneson.
“So, this James started looking at you as if you were a piece of meat to be eaten rather than a flower to be admired. He got into fights. It sounds as if he was becoming less a man and more a brute,” my father said, trying to get Pulling back to her story.
“Yes. I did a good number of the scheduled maintenance checks on the pods. I started to notice irregularities on the pods he used. The baselines for interacting with players’ limbic systems were pegged to the high end of normal. I had to reset them almost weekly.”
Up till now my father had been vaguely listening but at the mention of pods--pods he had helped design--generating irregularities, he was now totally focused. I doubt anyone who didn’t know him as well as I did could tell but Pulling had his complete focus.
“Indeed. That is irregular. What did the White Tower say?”
“The readings were still in the normal range, weren’t they? They said that across enough pods and enough weeks some irregularities were bound to cluster together. It was just an epiphenomenon of random chance.”
My father grunted and leaned back.
“Possible,” he said after a moment.
“That’s what I thought too until James died.”
“Tragic. But you had mentioned an incursion.”
“James Dallas Eggbert was killed by breaching the barrier.”
Silence fell for a moment.
“That is impossible,” I couldn’t help blurting out.
“Not impossible,” my father huffed. “Merely extremely difficult. I could do it if I set my mind to it. Of course, a locksmith should be able to pick a lock he himself built. Was James Eggbert a cryptoanalyst or nano-engineer of any sort?”
“No. Also, when I say he breached the barrier I should say that… parts of him breached the barrier. He was found plastered against the barrier with large parts of his body ruptured and missing. It looked like… it looked like something had sucked large chunks of his body out of… himself and out to the wild nano beyond.”
“Indeed. Do you have recordings of the site?”
ArchE entered from the hallway and handed over some manila file folders. He must have been waiting to hand over the data that Pulling had brought with her. ArchE also carefully placed a crystal box on a corner of the desk as far away as possible from my father while still being in reach. My father opened the files while glancing at the crystal box. His eyes flicked from the box’s placement to ArchE.
“Be careful with that, Numitor,” ArchE said tersely and then went to his chair across the room with no further explanation.
After an almost imperceptible pause my father decided to ignore the box for a moment. He started looking at the records in the file.
“Gruesome. You did an admirable job describing such an odd and disturbing death scene,” my father complimented. I stood and looked over my father’s shoulder and wished I hadn’t. It looked like something had sucked the brains and various other bits out of a man like someone sucking the head and meat out of a crawfish. Thank goodness I had just spent weeks becoming ever more desensitized to gore by hacking up humanoid creatures by the dozen. Otherwise I’d likely have thrown up.
The file contained an image of James Eggbert. He looked like a salty old guy. Pale like most of us are these days but somehow weathered anyway. He had a faint bristle of a beard and similarly short hair on his head. He was smiling a wry grin. An old grinder who was still sharp enough to play the Game.
My father continued to peruse the files. He then began tapping on the desk idly. In reality, when my father thinks deeply he has a number of ticks. He often repeatedly jerks one of his hands up next to his ear. This can be accompanied by atonal nonsense sounds. It was dead annoying to try to read a book or anything like that near him when I was a child and he was immersed in some problem. His tics were distracting as hell. Numitor Boone was certainly an odd duck. Yet, why would anyone expect a brain capable of his feats of genius not to have its odd necessities? Luckily, here in VR, such unconscious instincts were translated into some idle finger tapping. Tap tap tap.
“Yet, nothing from beyond the barrier breached to our side,” he finally said, mostly to himself.
“You are sure?” Pulling asked.
“If your files are accurate, yes.”
She relaxed slightly.
“What is this?” My father made a small wave of his fat hand in the direction of the crystal box.
“I decided to check the last pod James had ever used. I found it there, Mr. Boone.”
“And the nano did not assimilate this? Obviously not. Dangerous indeed. Sealing the item in diamond was a judicious idea, GM Pulling. Insufficient for some eventualities but the best you could do for transporting such a possibly dangerous item without attaching a large power source to your containment protocols.”
He slid the box in front of him. For such fat hands, they were capable of graceful delicacy. I knew we were just watching a VR stand-in for my father accessing another VR that attached to his lab. He opened the box and placed the item inside onto a handkerchief he spread across the green desk blotter. It was small and orange. It iridesced slightly, the light shimmering across the pattern covering it. It was a small scale from some sort of animal. A fish or lizard or snake. He brought a jeweler’s loupe to bear on the item and moved the scale this way and that with a pair of tweezers. Who knows what diagnostic tools he used in reality. He relaxed his face and the loupe dropped from before his eye, disappearing before it hit the desktop. He put the small orange scale back in its diamond case.
“Just this side of illegal. Just this side of feral,” he pronounced.
“What is it?” Pulling asked.
“A sub-processing unit from a larger nano construct. It pushes the boundaries of what the Game and our protections allow. Suggestive. An inspired piece of craftsmanship,” he said.
“What does it do?” Pulling asked.
“Without more to examine I couldn’t say what she designed it to accomplish.”
“She? You know who made this?”
“Yes. It is obvious. Lilith. Which you already knew, Ms. Pulling. I do not appreciate being gulled.”
At my father’s accusation I stood from my chair and moved to one side of the desk, putting myself between my father and the GM. I made sure it was the opposite side from ArchE. Honestly, I doubted that this was the precursor to some sort of virtual hack or attack. But in any event I wasn’t stupid enough to be anywhere between ArchE and a possible target. Since starting to play the Game, even my trust issues had started developing trust issues.
“Mr. Boone, what makes you…” she began.
“Pfooey! I am not a simpleton. The Tower is familiar with her work. Also, as much as I believe they are corrupt to a civilizationally suicidal level, I don’t think the GMs have fallen to the point where this item wouldn’t have been found and analyzed. What is your game, Ms. Pulling?” my father growled.
She sagged back into her seat.
“My game is exactly what it looks like, Numitor Boone. I want you to help me figure out what happened to James Eggbert.”
“You knew who had designed this item before you ever crossed my threshold. You could go and ask her. Why bother me with this?” he said.
“I didn’t know who designed this. I expect it makes sense that the Tower knows. I am not the Tower. We all wear this uniform, but I don’t know everything the Tower knows.”
“So you are, what? Freelancing?”
“My bosses had all the information you have. They told me to drop the matter. Frankly, I am not really sure whether I was reassigned from my old post because of Arneson’s attempt to sabotage your son or because of this.”
“Large institutions hardly ever behave out of a single clear set of motivations. No reason it couldn’t be both. Miles, sit down. I do not believe Ms. Pulling is about to attack and my defenses should be adequate beyond your abilities to support.”
I sat down and Pulling continued. “Yes. Officially the Tower has asked and received answers it is fine with. But not everyone inside the GMs is fine with the way things are being run. Some of us want to do our jobs the right way. We want reform. I represent a faction of the Tower who wants to clean things up. At least a bit.”
“Possibly admirable, if true, though naive and doomed to failure.”
“Not completely naive. We know what we are up against. But this case is different. You are right. Bribery. Corruption. Fighting those won’t make enough waves to change a damned thing. But an incursion? Experimenting with banned nano? Covering that up? If there is one thing that could rouse the people to righteous anger it is this.”
“And so you want to pull me into your political games? No! You say with a straight face, ‘rouse the people to righteous anger,’ and claim you aren’t naive? You are either too naive for words or cynical enough that in either event I’d be mad to work with you. On the off chance that you are just stupid and naïve, let me tell you that if you want to make the world a better place you have to do it yourself. Rousing up ‘the people’ just leads to mobs, and all mobs are good for is hysteria, blood and fire. The average intelligence of a group of people goes down the more people join it. I’ll ask you to leave.”
“Please. Whatever you think of me--there is still something dangerous happening. I did know James. He was a good man. Someone needs to do something.”
“I am a private citizen, GM Pulling. Lilith has been out there meddling with things she shouldn’t for a long time now. Her solutions are too… final for me. Go.”
“I see I have made a mess of this. But what am I supposed to do? There are a handful of us in the Tower… maybe naive. Maybe not cynical enough. There are problems. Real problems that are beyond me. Beyond us. You yourself told me that my bosses aren’t any help. You are right. But I’m trying, Numitor Boone. At least I’m trying. You mentioned I’m a young woman. Emphasis on the young. What am I supposed to do about this world you handed to us?”
She turned to me. Now I was of interest to her.
“You have to get him to help me,” she begged.
I could see that her emotional outburst was making my father distinctly uncomfortable. For almost as long as I have known him, he has had no patience for anyone else’s feelings except mine and my mother’s. He found them frustrating to be around. We young men really are stupid and useful to young women. For reasons that probably had to do with a few million years of evolution, I put the conversation back on a footing that my father might engage with.
“Do you have a theory of what happened to this Eggbert fellow? Who is Lilith?” I asked. Asking my father to give a theory is one sure way to draw him back into a conversation.
He knew that I was managing him. Despite this he settled back into his chair. He closed his eyes for a minute and then sat up.
“A theory, hmm. My best guess is a form of osmosis. The barrier is designed to sort and separate nano. Feral on one side. Tamed on our side. If you had grown up in the old days, you may have had the cruel childhood pleasure of pouring salt onto a slug. Osmosis draws the water out of the slug. The poor creatures seem to melt as the water inside of them streams out in an impossible hope of equalizing the water and salt content on both sides of its cell walls. Our poor Mr. Eggbert is our slug. The barrier began sorting nano from feral to tame. Whatever he had gotten from Lilith was feral enough that, well,  that what happened to him happened. A theory not a fact, but the mostly likely scenario given the data you gave me.”
Turning to me he continued. “Lilith has an establishment called Pitts Web Design. You’re old enough that I’ll assume you may have heard of it. If not, GM Pulling can fill you in. It should make for an awkward enough conversation that I will be glad to miss it. Lilith… A brilliant woman. Idealistic. Dangerous – not that there is much difference between the two,” he stated including Pulling in his description. “If my theory is correct then we are not looking at an incursion. This matter is of no interest to me. GM, I will offer no advice on how to proceed in any of your quests. Quixote must tilt at windmills but I am not obliged to give jousting tips. Goodbye.”
He raised his bulk and walked towards the door to the hallway. He stopped and turned to me before he left.
“It would be pleasant, Miles if you came to visit me without being compelled by dangerous forces. I realize that Maya Eastman has put you in something of a scheduling bind. Still, I miss you. You will always be welcome. Try to choose your companions wisely.”
All parents can deploy guilt. In this way my father was as conventional as any.

Thank you all for your patience.  The book is done and almost finished in editing and the cover is being refined.  I should have it out on Amazon in the next few weeks.  Here are the first chapters for you in the meantime.


CHAPTER 1
    Behind me was the hidden entrance to my old home, a brutal instance I had been trapped in for weeks. In front of me was an unexplored savage wilderness.
Whatever you tell yourself, home is where you spend most of your time. If it is at the office, that is home. If you spend your life with your nose in a book, then books are your home. It turns out that my home had, until just a few minutes ago, been the Mines of Madness! Or, as I often thought of it, that stinking prison where I had murdered my best friend.
I hated that pit, but a lot of people hate it at home so that doesn’t change anything. Lots of people also can’t escape their home situation so that didn’t disqualify my dungeon for home status either.
Before the world ended, video games were home for lots of people: they spent as much of their lives in them as they could. People used to fantasize about actually living in a video game.
Fantasies are never as good in reality as you thought they would be. That is why they are called fantasies.
If you haven’t much experience with humanity let me clue you in. It turns out people are idiots. Not that I am any better. I’m people too. Look at where I was. I was living the dream that millions held before we broke the world. I don’t know who was stupider, them for thinking life in a video game would be great, or me for actually living in a video game.
The Mines of Madness! was in Professor Brady’s territory.  Given how he ran his turf I was probably the only person ever to come to this slice of the Crib.  Thank God for that.
Wiser heads have said that an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. My head is ok, but not one of the wiser types. I was having trouble considering my inconveniences to be adventures. I had to admit it felt great to be out of the mines.
Remus, my wolf-brother, was lolling around waiting for me to decide what to do next. Wolves don’t worry about much. He’d use the time I spent philosophizing licking himself and know that he spent his time more wisely.
Me, I had about thirty weeks left of my year and a day bet with Maya Eastman. First prize if I win the bet is a bunch of nano. Second place wins a lifetime of slavery. All I had to do was finish off four more of the five beginner’s quests. Everyone left alive is issued one -- one of them -- when they grow up and get to start playing the Game. I had to finish all five.
Well, now you are all caught up on my situation.
In the months I’d been playing, I had finished the Trade Quest and that’s it. At this pace things weren’t looking good. Especially since it had been a fluke that I’d finished that one. I could do enough worrying for both me and Remus.
On the positive side, for the moment I was safe, at least from my human enemies. Slavering monsters hopefully abounded down there in the valley. I needed the experience. You can see that I embrace the optimist’s view of life since I noted being alone, surrounded by monsters that wanted to kill me, and cut off from any civilization as a check-mark in the plus column.
I pulled up my quest log and focused on the Beginner’s Quests:



·        Settlement Building
·        Crafting/Gathering
·        Trade (completed)
·        Problem Solving
·        Combat
Settlement Building and perhaps Crafting/Gathering seemed like the ones to tackle. I opened Settlement Building and a Blue window popped up:






Settlement Building

“Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.” –  R. A. H.

“A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain.” - Player Marx

Humanity needs you to create safe spaces for the people! Develop settlements that meet the needs of the people and keep them safe from the monsters of the wild. Recommended minimum number of players 18. You must increase the settlement quality or capacity by a minimum of 10 times the size of the party used to develop the settlement.





The Party had this quest locked up just like all the others. They had claimed all the land and controlled all the settlements. A new player would have to come to them, cap in hand, and at best get permission to work on further developing towns and hamlets the clans owned. Pretty good deal if you can get your laborers and contractors to pay you for the privilege of remodeling your castle or enhancing your walls.
I decided to make a quick check and stacked together some of the loose timber around the mine entrance. Even this crude effort should be enough to trigger the building menus. After the third beam I received a message:






**Temporary Encampments Only**

This territory is claimed by the Goldman Sachs Group*

Building, agricultural cultivation or permanent enhancement is prohibited without permission.

Development inquiries contact: Professor Brady, Room 3, Town Inn, Quartzite.

*a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast





Brady was the gray market crime boss who sold me off to the Eastmans and threw me down a mine shaft. He had no love for me. That wasn’t personal to me. He universally had no love for people. He had no hate for people. Just uses for people.
He had offered me a job in order to ingratiate himself with my father. But it was clear that once he made use of you, you stayed his. I already had someone I was in a desperate struggle to avoid being enslaved to. One should be monogamous with that kind of thing. I was old fashioned that way.
Part of me had hoped that my time in the Mines would qualify as completing the Combat or Problem Solving quests but no notices had come when I finished soloing the end boss. Well, by process of elimination, Gathering was the quest to focus on.
The mine exit was at the top of a bluff overlooking the valley floor. Looking over the edge, there didn’t seem to be a decent path down. Descending looked like a scramble at best. The cliff-side was mostly packed earth and rock that looked like it could just as easily come loose as support my weight.
Remus cocked one brow as he waited for me to decide what to do. My large-scale Lincoln Log game hadn’t interested him enough to do more than the aforementioned brow cock.
With a gesture, a length of rope I had brought into the dungeon and never gotten the chance to use came out of my inventory. I tied it around one of the well planted beams framing the entrance back into the instance and threw the rest of the coil over the side of the bluff. This caused Remus to lazily get up from his flop and sniff along the edge of the cliff-side.
As soon as I grabbed the rope and started backing down towards the valley floor, he started working his way down on his own. Four legs and a lower center of gravity made it a piece of cake for him. He didn’t seem to care that he was causing lots of dirt and loose rocks to fall on me as he made his way down. Thankfully after a few switchbacks above me he got bored of kicking dust into my face and sped down below.
Slowly but surely, I scaled down the cliff. I couldn’t tell if or how my Beginner Spelunking skill was helping. I was only 177 skill points away from Journeyman status.
Most of the time the Game was attempting to create a rule-set that simulated real life. But reality is endlessly more fluid and subtle than any artificial set of rules can ever be. The more explicit the rules, the more the Game could be bizarre compared to reality.
I wasn’t in a cave, so technically I was rock climbing not spelunking. Did the game care one way or the other? Clambering down a cliff was the same inside or outside a cave. Why should it matter if I was in a cave or not? Even more oddly, some skills in the Game might trigger depending on proximity to things. So, since I was climbing down a hillside filled with mine tunnels my skill boost may have been in effect. I was cave-adjacent and that might be good enough for the Game.
My father had made a better simulation of reality than I was giving him credit for. Inside or out of the Game we are always impacted by rules, forces and influences we have no idea about.
The sun beat down on me, creating shadows so black that I couldn’t make out details of where to find footholds, so I ended up mostly using feel to work my way down. I found that if I leaned out from the wall it was easier to use the cliff face to brace myself but it also gave me a huge sense of vertigo. I wanted to hug the cliff but that was bad technique. Maybe my skill was working.
Beyond spelunking, I had other skills. Just before she dropped the dime on me to Brady and the Eastmans, my master in the arcane arts, Maddie the Witch, had given me some scrolls, one of which increased my Wildlife Knowledge (local).
I was counting on this skill to give me a shot at beating the Gathering Quest. It was also Wildlife Knowledge (local) that allowed me to properly identify the hissing giant spider as an example of Menemerus bivittatus (Gray Wall Jumper) when it came out of its burrow to see who was clambering around in its territory.





Gray Wall JumperMenemerus bivittatus

Found almost exclusively on the exterior walls of cliff faces, dungeons, abandoned buildings or other structures, this is a common example of a monstrous spider.
All monstrous spiders are aggressive predators that use their poisonous bite to subdue or kill prey.
Monstrous spiders come in two general types: hunters and web-spinners. Hunters rove about, while web-spinners usually attempt to trap prey. Hunting spiders can spin webs to use as lairs but cannot use their webs as weapons the way web-spinners can.



It would have been nice if the blue box had told me whether I was facing a hunter or a web-spinner. I must not have had a high enough knowledge skill. In the end it didn’t really matter as I only had one plan either way. I started what someone might charitably describe as a controlled fall down the cliff side. As I tumbled down I’d tighten down on the rope now and again, creating rope burns but getting my speed down to something I thought I’d survive when I ran out of rope.
The spider aggro’ed in on me and gracefully made its way towards me. Its hairy legs had no problem finding purchase, and despite me tumbling downward at near freefall it was closing fast. It was a hunter. If not, it would have already spat webs at me.
At just over ten feet from the bottom I ran out of rope. I was going too fast to stop and free climb the rest of the way down. Instead I dropped into a roll. It hurt like a son of a bitch but I received no damage notices. Another sign that those spelunking skills might be in effect.
I got unsteadily to my feet just as the spider also decided to forgo climbing the rest of the cliff and launched itself at me from about twenty feet up.
There was just enough time to pull out my Spatha, Wyrmmdigger’s Bane, and get it between us. The rime of icy magic that gave my blade an impossibly sharp edge shattered. The blade itself felt like it was covered in cold oil and even before the spider hit me I could barely hold onto the thing. Right. Wyrmmdigger’s Bane was specc’ed to be one specific tribe of kobold’s worst nightmare. Without it I’d never have made it out of the Mines of Madness! Fighting anything else I might as well as be wielding a wet noodle.
Ever have that dream where you are attacked by a giant spider and you can’t keep hold of your weapon? I hadn’t until then either. Now it was part of my nightmare pantheon for the rest of my life. The hilt wrenched itself free from my grip as I was smashed to the ground with the Spider on top of me. One of its forelegs pierced all the way through my shoulder and its mandibles were inches from my face.
I ignored the damage notice and the pain to focus on the mandibles twitching and lunging for my face. Poison was expressed out of glands that lined the mandibles, coating them like snot. As the thing got more excited at the idea of eating my face it pumped the poison out in small spurts. The venom’s smell competed with the sight of the poison-covered mandibles straining towards my face for pride of place in my future nightmares. Arthropods are horrifying.
You may be judging me harshly for lack of proper preparation leading to my poor performance. Guilty as charged. No excuses. Not swapping out my weapon once I exited the mines was stupid. I hope it redeems me a bit in your eyes that I remembered the spell cached in my recently acquired Ring of Spell Storage and unleashed it into the Gray Wall Jumper’s thorax.
“Maijika Misā'īla!”
Three tiny comets of arcane force flew from my ring, made a short u-turn, and hit the spider one after the other in the exact same spot. The gray hairy body deformed at the first strike and cracked on the second. The third entered the wound and the creature stopped trying to close in for the kill and just twitched randomly as its life drained away. The loot from the Mines of Madness end boss really was the perfect item for me. Yay, Ring of Spell Storage.
As I scrabbled out from underneath the dead spider, adrenaline from the sudden attack allowed me to pull the leg out of my shoulder with a short sharp yank. Pain is odd when you know your wounds aren’t real. I was learning to handle it under the rush of combat. I had no idea if I could do as well getting pierced through the shoulder in real life, and had no plans to find out.
I spun around and searched the cliff face to see if this was part of a swarm. Nothing else seemed poised to attack me. My breathing started to calm and I quickly found one of the least crappy swords looted from the Wyrmmdiggers in my bag of holding and equipped it.
Looking around I found Wyrmmdigger’s Bane lying where it had been flung, covered in dirt and dust. I put it in my inventory on the off chance I ever ran into more of the tribe.
Remus wandered over, gave the spider a sniff, moved away till he was far enough that the leaking body wouldn’t bother him and flopped down again.
“Some help you are,” I said.
All I got in return was a yawn.
It took me a few tries to reload the spell ring with another Magic Missile. Then I pulled out some tools and went to work harvesting what I could from the spider. Dissecting a giant spider is not the easiest of tasks. I had damaged one of the claws pulling it out of my shoulder. So, from this battle I had gained a chunk of experience, a shoulder wound and these items:



Poison Sac x 2
Spider Claw x 7



I had thought I’d start working on the Crafting/Gathering beginner’s quest when I got down to the valley, but the spider had given me some points even before I hit the valley floor.
The Crafting/Gathering beginner’s quest was the simplest and the most commonly given.






“Labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother. A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” - Player Marx

Humanity needs materials and items crafted from them to survive! Collect or craft items and donate them.





Seems simple right? You could donate just about anything. Anything you made or looted: potions, weapons, armor, devices, scrolls, anything. Any base materials could be donated: herbs, ores, monster parts, eggs, tamed creatures, captured creatures, gold--anything.
This was the quest that almost everyone received. This was the quest that most everyone worked towards. The Party didn’t control access to working on this quest. It had the fewest seeming barriers to entry. In fact, it had only one. But boy was it a doozy. The proof of this is that most people never left The Crib.
With some manipulation of my game interface, I was able to “donate” the Gray Wall Jumper’s loot towards completing the quest. I was rewarded with a completion bar. As far as I could discern my donation had no effect whatsoever. That was how little the loot I had just donated counted towards finishing. With some further manipulation of my interface I was able to figure out that the items I had donated counted .00357% towards finishing the goal.
The number of items I needed to donate was massive. That wasn’t even how the Party screwed people though. They screwed you because the total donation points you needed to complete the quest would change. The total was a moving target that changed depending on how many people currently had the quest and the general level of productivity in the Game. Worse, it also went up with your level.
You could increase each donation’s impact by refining items. Iron ore was worth less than iron ingots. Iron ingots were worth less than iron items. Iron items that were smithed to higher levels of craftsmanship were worth more again. Some people went for quality to finish the quest, mastering different crafting skills. Others went for quantity, harvesting anything they could, anywhere they could, donating it all without slowing down to alter it. Despite all the debates over which approach was superior, the question remained unresolved. Bottom line, no one of either persuasion left the Crib in large numbers.
And it wasn’t like the Clans didn’t get their cut. Want to focus on crafting? They controlled all the settlements where you could safely do things like brew potions without having a giant spider leap out at you. Also, you are going to need someone to collect the materials. That will cost you. Want to wander around collecting mats? You are going to need to get new equipment, replace your potions and scrolls, find food, a place to sleep. Safe places to trade and resupply were all in settlements owned by some subsidiary of the Party. They used to say nothing was certain except death and taxes. Well, we respawn now but taxes are still certain.
It usually took players years to finish this quest, if they ever did.
Sighing, I wondered if maybe it was time to head back to the real world. I had been stuck in that damned dungeon for weeks and I had one of four more impossible tasks in front of me. I needed to figure out how I was going to beat Maya and our bet.
Also, I shouldn’t forget that my actual body was in a public pod station controlled by the GMs. Who knew how long GM Pulling was on shift at the station?
Looking at my quest completion bar, I felt like I was accomplishing nothing here at the moment. Scratch that. I was accomplishing .00375% of my goals. So not quite nothing, just almost nothing.


Taste of a bugle’s call.



The feel between my shoulder blades of the varied reds in a bowl of cherries.



Tiny fireworks popping in and out of existence as I saw the sound of glass shattering.



My senses reconnected to the places where they were supposed to go, and I was back inside the pod at the public station. Kinesthesia used to be a sign of neurological dysfunction. Now it was just a game-loading screen.
The cover slid off and I was out.
“How did it go?” asked GM Pulling.
She was as attractive as I remembered but she looked like she could use a good night’s sleep.
“Ok. Good even. Sort of. The Eastmans can’t get at me for the moment,” I said. I thought of Jude’s dying smile and shook my head. “Have you been watching over me the whole time?”
She grunted noncommittally and gave me room to clamber out of the pod.
“I didn’t want to leave dealing with you to anyone else. Too much temptation to do something unethical about you. Dealing with a Boone is apt to get you fired or exiled to a post like this,” she said.
She really did look almost as tired as I felt. Her brown hair wasn’t messy but somehow it didn’t look exactly as put together as I had seen it in the past. It was pushed back and I could see her ears. They were small and delicate looking. I think I had been alone in a mine for a bit too long since I was finding her ears kind of endearing.
Shaking my attention away from her ears, I thought about what she had just said. Her ex-partner had gotten fired after trying to fit me for a slave collar. He made his choices and got in bed with the Eastmans and it had bitten him on the ass in the end. She had gotten stuck in this dead-end station.
“Sorry you are having some career setbacks,” I said with just a trace of edge.
If she heard that slight edge she pretended to ignore it.
“Yes. My career seems to have led me here,” she said sweeping in the empty public pod station. “Not a lot of opportunity for career advancement or meaningful work.”
A tingle of fear went up the back of my neck. The easiest way for her to get her career moving in the right direction again was to put a quiet word in the right ears.
“Uh huh.” I said.
“Hungry?” she asked offering me a meal pack.
“No,” I fibbed. I was hungry but I needed a few more minutes to readjust to being back in the real world. Eating food was too visceral after going straight from battling giant spiders through the sensory weirdness of log out.
“Can I have some water, though?”
She handed me a water cannister. Which I started draining.
“So, I thought of a way you could help me out with my career problems.”
Water sputtered as I coughed.
“Sorry. What?” I asked once I had gotten my throat clear.
“I thought you could help me out with my career problems,” she repeated.
Looking around I didn’t see any GMs or Eastmans lying in ambush. I could only think of one way I could be of help to her, and asking my permission to inform the Eastmans seemed an unlikely way to go about cashing in that particular lottery ticket. Still, just a minute ago I had been ambushed by a giant spider. I had been jammed into a pit by my best friend and a cabal of the most powerful people in my world. My social interactions were apt to be a bit muddled. She picked up on my heightened anxiety level.
“I’m not going to turn you in to the Eastmans. And why would I tell you if I was going to do that?”
“Sorry, trust issues. I don’t know you that well and your uniform throws me,” I said.
“You want me to take off my uniform?” she asked with 99% deadpan rejection.
Startled, I met her eyes, which startled me even more. Was there 1% something else in what she said? Life and death struggles, even virtual ones, get your adrenaline pumping. Whatever was in her eyes I couldn’t suss it out in the brief amount of time I managed to look before chickening out and looking away.
“What? No. Sorry.” I said reflexively.
“You know you have apologized like four times since we started talking.”
Using all the willpower I had developed in the mines I somehow managed to not say “Sorry” in response. I took a deep breath.
“GM Pulling, it strikes me that among all the other reasons that people don’t typically use the public pods to play, a huge part of it has to be how hard it is to be fighting one second, then logging out and making polite conversation right after. Can you give me a little space for a second?”
“Yes. We are actually counseled to keep that in mind when working these positions. Let me apologize. You Boones just seem tougher than most. Sorry.”
Ah. A glimmer of what she wanted came to me. I stretched a bit and just looked around at this dumpy little section of the real world while I mulled the idea over.
“What do you think I can do for you?”
She sucked in her breath.
“I was hoping you could introduce me to your father,” she said.
I had guessed right. Nice to know my father wasn’t the only one in the family with a few brain cells to rub together.
“No,” I replied.
“Hear me out.”
“We haven’t known each other for very long. And looking over our relatively short acquaintance I can’t see how you figure that I owe you anything.”
“I watched over you. Kept my mouth zipped about where you were. I’ve taken overtime and swapped shifts to keep your playing here confidential,” she argued.
“Things are pretty screwed up when you not abusing your uniform or stopping your colleagues from doing it means I owe you.”
She smiled. It really was a nice smile.
“Hello. We live in a postapocalyptic hell hole. Things are screwed up.”
“You don’t know what you are asking,” I said turning away.
“This isn’t just about my career. You are right. Things ARE screwed up. Me not abusing my uniform shouldn’t be something you owe me for. But I didn’t. You want only those who play the Party’s game to succeed? If I do the right thing as a GM, don’t you have some sort of obligation to help?”
“You brought me in with Arneson. You walked me into that jail pod,” I reminded her.
“I did as much as I could within my orders.”
“Just following orders, huh?”
“Yes,” she said earnestly.
Goddamn no one knows any history anymore.
“’Just following orders’ was an excuse that the… never mind. I was wrong to say that. Damned Godwin’s Law,” I muttered.
She clearly didn’t understand what I was on about but my trailing off gave her an opportunity to keep making her case.
“Wait. Just wait a second.”
She was weighing something in her mind. Her lips pursed around words she was holding back for some reason.
After giving her a moment to decide one way or another I gave up and started to leave. I had a bet to win. I just wanted to get back to my apartment, have a shower, sleep for a bit and hope my unconscious could help me figure out some new strategies to get back in the game and win my bet.
Now that I had finished off the instance I thought I could play at my place without being interrupted. At least until Maya and her mom figured out a new line of attack. Endearing ears or no, I needed to stay focused.
“I think there has been an incursion. For all I know, maybe more than one,” Pulling said to my back as I walked to the exit.
My eyes whipped around to hers. She met them levelly--anything humorous or flirtatious was long gone. We hadn’t had an incursion of wild nano past the barrier since I was a child. Over a decade without anyone being disintegrated or even more horrifically consumed and… and altered into something… other. My mind couldn’t help but bring up a flash of the last time I saw my mother. I put that image back in its box and sealed it away.
“The GMs and the Party are keeping this hushed up but I think the barrier was breached. I think wild nano is inside the walls. You have to let me talk to your father.”
Damn it. I really didn’t have time for the world to end.

No word for months and then two updates in a row.

So if you are looking forward to Foundation's Strength I am sorry you will be disappointed.  It will be a while till you can read that.  Because I have changed the title for book two!  Release date plan unchanged from last update.

New title: Gathering Wisdom.  Try and guess what that means for the story... 
If titles are fun to keep you intrigued for what will be coming as the series progresses:
Foundation StrengthSocial Intelligence

UPDATE!!!!

Thanks for all the patience folks. I am over 85K words into my first draft.  I expect the book will be around 95K so I am soooooo close.  Just two more sequences and a bit of denoument and it will be ready for you all.

I have some editors on deck and started the process of getting a cover done.  So, I think by the end of the summer - possibly September.  Got some family things eating up much of my August.

This book has lots of intrigue,  new antagonists, the old antagonists, and crafting for all you who dig that.  Miles has to be quick on his feet to overcome all that is trying to take him out.

You have found your way to the blog of Aaron Jay.  Therefore, you likely have read and enjoyed this book:




Thanks very much for wanting to know more about the book and series.  I am currently hard at work to get the next book in the series out.  It is tentatively titled Foundation's Strength.  The clever among you may have noticed a pattern here.  If you didn't, don't feel bad as discerning a pattern from only two examples isn't easy.  The titles for this series will all have an attribute or stat in the title.  And I have a broad outline that should leave enough books to get through all the main stats of a character.  It is this super clever word play that has made you come on over, I'm sure.

Anyway, if you want to help me out please link my book to anyone you think might enjoy it and leave a review on Amazon.

Thanks