‘No voice to your creature’s suffering?’ Zabilla asked.
Scoular said nothing. He had been overconfident. He had spied on her and created a creature to win. There was no pain reaction because he hadn’t thought he would need one. Like many who played, he understood the pleasure part of the Game, he didn’t understand the pain. It was not just about indulging appetites.
‘I hear the heads found two dead wiped pieces,’ Carinne Serano, Scoular’s fashionable arm-piece, said. She was trying, somewhat desperately in Zabilla’s opinion, to ease the conversation away from her financial paramour’s humiliation.
The wiped pieces were once people, actual players of the Game. They had been taken and all trace of their identities, from distinguishing features to personalities and memories, had been nano-virally destroyed before they were killed. It was one of the most horrific deaths a player could experience. All their triumphs would count for nothing as they were reduced to their original vat-grown templates.
Despite the fact that everyone playing the Game was sculpted with the same basic features, a template designed to reflect the Absolute’s original beauteous form before he ascended, Zabilla always found herself surprised by how much that template could differ from person to person.
Carinne, for example, was petite and pretty, while she herself was tall and striking. They both had high cheekbones, sharp features and narrow angular faces, yet Zabilla could look commanding and at times cruelly beautiful, whereas Carinne looked insipid to Zabilla’s eyes.
The same was true of Dracup and Scoular. Scoular’s obese body proudly bore the ravages of his excesses in the same way the Rakshasa bore their scars. Scoular was obese to the point where he had to use expensive miniaturised AG motors to help support his layers of fat so that he could move more easily. Whereas Dracup was whip-thin and looked like a weapon poised to strike, or some sort of not-so-patient predatory insect – but in an attractive way, Zabilla thought.
‘It’s an outrage,’ Dracup said, not without feeling. ‘It’ll be morlock rights activists. I hear they’re campaigning for sight now. It’s as if they think they have the right to as many senses as we do. I mean, what do they need them for beneath the Black Leaves? Sight would be a hindrance in the dark.’
The chimera charged through flame. Horns gouged vat-grown flesh and teeth sank into the same. The charge turned the wounded, burning, multi-limbed biomechanoid onto its back. Zabilla found herself liking the warmth of the flames on her face. She found herself liking the colour red.
‘They’re basically the same as us, you know? The morlocks, I mean,’ Scoular said somewhat distractedly as the chimera feasted upon his creation. ‘It’ll be outside forces. If it wasn’t, then the Absolute would know.’
Dracup was trying to mask his contempt for Scoular and said nothing. Zabilla watched the dragon and lion bury their heads up to their necks in the dead biomechanoid. The lion head appeared again, red, and roared.
Can you feel that, Absolute? Zabilla wondered. ‘It’s part of the Game,’ she said quietly, still transfixed by the gory display playing out on the arena floor.
Even Dracup looked shocked.
‘The Absolute said that he would never wipe players,’ Carinne stammered.
‘It’s heresy to even suggest so!’ Scoular all but shouted. Zabilla was sure that there was a degree of triumph in his voice. He didn’t understand pain and he didn’t understand daring. Zabilla allowed herself a small smile before turning to face them both.
‘What’s heresy? To suggest that the Absolute can’t change the rules of his own game or to suggest that for some reason the Absolute would have to inform you both first?’ she demanded, allowing just a hint of anger into her voice. She saw their doubt and fear, the insecurity that came from realising that the rules were not as they had thought. None of them wanted to face up to this possibility. Scoular glanced back down into the arena, his creation now just a feast for the victorious vat-grown myth.
‘Of course, you realise there’s a lot more to it than winning the battle, don’t you?’ he asked Zabilla, who nodded. ‘Elegance of design, aesthetics, things that a mere copy can’t allow for. It’s about impressing the Absolute with the skill of your design.’
‘As I said,’ Zabilla was smiling, ‘I am a mere amateur.’
He didn’t understand the Game. Scoular was right: it wasn’t about winning the fight, but it wasn’t about impressing either. It was about sensation. The bit of her design that would win the audition wasn’t the creature’s ability to vanquish its foes or the elegance and potency of the design. She would win because of the sophistication of the experiential biofeedbackware that would allow the Absolute to experience every moment of the fight from the chimera’s perspective. The taste of flesh, the feeling of breathing fire, the animalistic triumph at the kilclass="underline" the Absolute drank sensation. Scoular knew that on one level but he made the mistake of thinking that the Absolute was just a bigger and much more powerful version of himself. He would never understand the simplicity of the thirst for pure sensation.
‘You should let me kill him,’ Dracup said as they made their way along a gnarled narrow branch, grown into a walkway, towards the air jetty. They were in the upper branches so the sides of the walkway had been grown into handsome abstract patterns.
‘According to you, I should let you kill everyone. Have you ever thought that you haven’t yet earned your second name because, in the unlikely event that the Absolute focuses on you, he is party to these feelings? Subtlety, my dear, subtlety and sensation.’
‘The Absolute enjoys violence,’ Dracup said with a certainty that only the young could have. He was right. The early parts of Game history, immediately after the terraforming, were basically an orgy of violence. Despite the elegance and sophistication of the terraforming design, the roots of the arboreal arcologies were soaked in blood. Bodies had hung from some of the branches like particularly fecund fruit.
Zabilla sighed and looked out at the massive arcology trees reaching up to pierce the atmosphere. All of them were studded with dots of bioluminescence. Each dot was a window. Game had been an experiment in Seeder-derived, nano-technological terraforming. Game’s size, its 0.75G, geological stability and the abundant energy of a large, nearby main-sequence G-type star had all pointed towards the viability of growing starscraper arcologies. The wish to harness solar energy suggested to the nano-architects that trees grown from an engineered wood-analogous substance would be both practical and aesthetically pleasing.
The roots grew deep into the planet to provide stability. The roots sought out Game’s natural resources and harnessed its geothermal energy. Leaf structures in the upper branches harnessed solar energy. The black leaves in the lower sectors harnessed infrared energy from both above and from heat escaping below. The biotech machinery that provided for the needs of the inhabitants – sewage and sanitation, water recycling, food creation, etcetera – was housed in the darkness below the black leaves. The vat-grown, blind subhuman morlock servitors oversaw this machinery. Other servitor creatures, designed to look like attractive birds or small arboreal mammals, saw to maintenance and sanitation requirements in the upper branches.
The upper branches divided the light from the artificial moons into competing beams that shone through the membranous translucent energy-gathering leaf canopy. Game’s moistness meant that mist was often present, further refracting the artificial moonlight. The effect was atmospheric and to Zabilla pleasantly eerie. She saw one of the larger avian servitors take off and flap through the misty night air. Dracup came and leaned on the rail of the walkway, looking at Zabilla intensely even as she stared out into the forest of city-sized trees.