Mystic Realms and Distant Stars discussion

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Balmus shut his eyes to the sparks.

The mace sang against his helm and rung in his ears. His visor crumpled under the stroke. It was now a jagged line of light hovering over the bridge of his nose, blocking his vision. Balmus cursed as he centered his shield.

/What did you expect?/ he chided. /The Jackal Knight, the Crimson Hind, the Grim One, and the Leech… They were worthy opponents, every one. But this is the Lion Knight, the Paragon. He reads the language of the angels…/

The crowd that had gathered here for the tournament of champions roared as another impact spun his shield, stirring his heels together. He staggered for the shelter of the boundary marker. Circling back, he swung his ax across his body in a wide, desperate arc.

A dull clamor of steel, a swell of silence, and then all was lost to the thunder of a thousand voices. A smile tugged at the corners of The Wolf Knight’s mouth. At least that shot had connected.

/Just a little farther now, and this bastard has to grant quarter…/

Balmus brought his shield back into play. Motes of dusty light filtering through the air holes in his helm provided some sense of bearing. But the Paragon's pursuit was merciless.

/He's moving me back in!/ Balmus realized.

The mace's teeth shredded his guard. The weight on his shield arm seemed wrong, moved too freely. He turned the next attack aside with his bracer, panted dust, danced away…

Then he cast the worthless kindling at the Lion Knight and took a double handed grip on his ax.

Heavy footfalls to the right now. He sent out a backhanded stroke that glanced off the other champion's shield. He shifted, feinted, and doubled back to what he thought must finally be safety. His armor snagged at his knees, plates scissoring skin as he back-pedaled, but he gritted his teeth and lengthened his gait.

He lost his footing as he collided at last with the unseen boundary post.

The fading lights ceased spinning within his suffocating helm. He was certain he had lost it all—knocking himself out in a tournament, how utterly humiliating—until another stroke, a cheap shot, rattled him clear to his bones.

/But you’re the Paragon, damn you, the Paragon! Where is your chivalry now, you cur?/

Again the mace struck—a vicious, backhanded blow.

Balmus’s ruined visor streaked across the tourney grounds, its swath a red glimmer in the dusk. His nose shattered against the faceplate as it tore free, but then sight, clear and glorious, burst through its bowed hinges.

His vision centered on the Lion Knight, on the Paragon unscathed. Already the tourney grounds were framed in the blue banners of his house, the sunburst motif of the golden lion announcing his predetermined victory.

/Blue… again. It’s always blue, isn’t it? Even here…/

Balmus gasped at the vivid smears he'd left in the sands of the lists, like scarlet tracts sown into a fallow field—he had never seen so much of his own blood before.

The Lion Knight raised his visor. Their eyes locked. Balmus’s gauntleted fingers flexed over the haft of his ax. It was not the Paragon he saw in those pristine orbs, blue like the clear sky after the passing of a storm, but the thing beneath what the Paragon was…

“I offer you this, Wolf Knight,” the other champion spat Balmus’s title like a curse. “You are nothing more than a pretender. You acquired the wolf crest when you stumbled upon its true owner on the high roads and slipped a dagger between those plates you wear. Now that your stolen armor can defend you no longer, you too will be slain if you do not yield.”

“You play well to the crowd, Paragon.” Balmus managed to regain his footing. “But just for once, contend with me on a level field. Stop reading the language of the angels. He who wears that armor should be the best of us.”

“There is no level playing field for you,” hissed the thing beneath what the Paragon was. “You could never contend with me, code or no code. Not even here.” A wry grin touched his stony features, and then he lowered his visor. “No, especially not here. It’s time someone put you back in your place.”

Balmus raised his crescent ax. The amorphous crowd now chanted his name.

“No, it’s time someone finally put you in yours!”

His ruined armor snagged at the shoulder as he advanced. He flexed against the steel, raised the ax higher, tore through the leathering beneath the segmented plates like wet scraps of parchment.

His ax whirled. But the Paragon snapped his kite shield, impossibly immaculate despite the blows it had sustained, into place between them.

Balmus beheld in that blued steel the true devils with which he waged war. He pressed in, tore through the leather work on his second pauldron, relished the freedom of movement as his ax came crashing down.

“Here is your predestination! And impossibility, and arrogance, and cowardice!” His words fell in tandem with the blows of his ax. “Answer now, blue-blooded bastard, for the lies and vices holding the rest of us down!”

He caught the breadth of the Paragon’s shield under the ax-head and spun it out hard. The Lion Knight’s mace passed harmlessly overhead, exposing his left defense.

That strained silence again. Then weightlessness.

Balmus felt his stomach drop, the blood taste forgotten. He angled his ax at a hairpin gap between the Paragon's beaver and breastplate. The blue banners fell from the stands of the lists in a great deluge, the Paragon’s coat of arms lost to the heavy folds of fabric.

He released the neuroblockers so his mind could savor victory as his stroke fell true…

“Session ended.”

“Not now!” Balmus cried, but his senses had already begun the regression to data. Pain and pleasure, sight and sound, all were lost to the ascending spiral, funneling in a seemingly endless stream of code: the sequence that identified his mind. Locked into the logout window, he frowned helplessly as his extraction began.

The ash trees that enclosed the tourney grounds were the first to go, warping into stunted, lifeless polygons. The silver horns of the moon, on the rise moments before, plummeted and were engulfed by the horizon.

Now the watchtowers were pixilated partners in a wheeling dance, winding, running together until all the colors of the world were one. Only a black expanse remained, a familiar emptiness that was more his destination than his home.

“Labor commences at 2000 hours,” Victoria's monitor greeted him as cheerfully as a machine could, her monotone voice flushed with simulated sympathy. “As per my protocol, I cannot permit you to continue until 1300 hours tomorrow.”

“Give me five more minutes!” Balmus sputtered.

Only here he was not Balmus. Here he was Jaren Reese.

Balmus only existed between 1300 and 1800 hours, Reese's rationed time to remain in Cyber. His opponent was a rendering that was connected to a biological Linker like Reese, but he would never know that person here in the Meat Space. The Virtual Absolution Act prohibited the unauthorized revealing of any Linker's identity to the other users in the system.

Reese only knew the Paragon had to be either an administrator or a high level hacker because he—or she—had manipulated the language of the angels, the source code, to render his armor useless during their match. He was certain the Lion Knight would use the same cheat to officially claim the tournament victory now that Balmus was logged out, but unless there was something on the forums, he would not know for sure until he could go back.

“Five more minutes, Victoria? Please?”

“Access to the Dream Box has been denied.”

The Dream Box wasn't a place, but it was a destination. It wasn't life, but it was a way of life. Reese wasn't awake in the Meat Space the way he was in Cyber, where a billion liters of endorphins blasted through the biological wiring of his veins with every corner his mind turned, where every conscious or subconscious choice he made was infused with importance. Linked in, he could partake of the guiltless ecstasy that was up for grabs, even for people like him. Linked in as Balmus, he could be his own hero.

Even losing in the Dream Box didn't matter. Reese controlled his experience through the neuroblockers, a myriad of settings both patched and hacked, to ensure that Balmus would never know longing or frustration or despair. And so home wasn't a place for Jaren Reese anymore; it was a customized feeling, one that was too
complex for his mind to catalogue and too overwhelming for his senses to describe.

/You just know when you're there, when you're even close./ And for him, the planet Descarta wasn't within a parsec of that feeling, not on the same star chart, not within the farthest fringes of the same galaxy.

“Your time limit has expired,” Victoria reminded him when he did not move from the spot. “Please proceed to the designated consumption area to prepare for labor.”