“It's too soon,” Aes objected.
“You're ready,” Darla told him. “You need to get into battles as soon as possible if you're going to have any chance of surviving PvP matches.”
“Another mystery word,” he commented. “Look, I am perfectly willing to help keep you safe. What is the easiest way to be safe? Stay out of battles. Do not tempt the Fates.”
“Aes, as long as you're here, you might as well make the most of it. You're a Healer. You won't be happy very long if you don't climb back in the saddle and get back to healing.”
“That may or may not be true,” he said. “Either way, there is no need to go looking for trouble. Life is brief enough as it is.”
Darla looked at him. He seemed in better spirits than before, now that he knew a couple of heals. Sooner or later, though, she felt that he would fall into despondency, missing familiar faces. It was time for a change of scenery, she decided.
While she was thinking this, Aes interrupted her unexpectedly: his stomach growled. Darla's thoughts tumbled into confusion. “What was that?” Then she heard it again, clearly.
“Sorry,” said Aes. “I've been hungry since I got here. I managed to forget about it for a while, but my belly has not. I should go look for some food.”
“I have a better idea,” she told him. “Let's go to a place I know.”
“Is it close by?” he asked.
“Yes and no,” she said, smiling. “It's so close we can get there in a moment – and so far that you could never get there from here. It's in another Realm, one I'm familiar with.” And one that you're not familiar with, she thought. Should be Distraction Therapy at its best.
He appeared to consider it. “How do we get there?”
“Don't worry about it. We're on the same Team now. As the leader, I can move us there without help. Take my hand.”
His hand was warm and dry in hers. “Very well. Take us to this new place.”
Darla called up the PanGames menu space and selected Realm of Heroes, then pulled up a sub-menu and activated the team transport.
There was a blinding flash of omnidirectional light. As the glare faded from her sensorium, Darla could see the familiar flagstone path and flower beds that told her she had arrived in Park Zone, a bucolic setting for those in ROH who preferred not to fight inside buildings.
Just as she remembered, there was her favorite bench with the apple tree looming behind it. She had never tried the apples, of course. Not because she knew they were digital simulations, but because she never got hungry in PanGames. If her body was starving, she supposed that the bed diagnostics might force a logout so she could eat. But no one really ate in PanGames. It wasn't as if food was something they couldn't get enough of in real life.
But Aes said he was hungry. And his stomach had actually growled. Darla was curious to see how far this simulation would go. She went over to the lower-hanging branches and picked some apples for Aes. He sat down with her on the bench and tried one.
She tried not to stare as he bit into the fruit, chewed and swallowed, thinking to herself that there were depths to the PanGames simulations that she had never noticed before. She had half-expected him to be unable to bite into it. But when he managed to do so, the interior was as white as its outer peel was red. What was the point of simulating the inside of apples that no one ever eats? she wondered. But the verisimilitude was rigorous.
She watched his Adam's apple bob as he swallowed. “That is just so weird,” she muttered. She tried to bite one of the apples. Her teeth just slid off the curved surface as if it were greased glass.
He looked up and saw her trying to bite it. “You can't eat them?”
She laughed, trying to downplay the strangeness of it. “Nah, I guess they're just here for you. How are they?”
He ate another apple. “They are delicious. But what do you do when you get hungry?”
I log out and go downstairs to the diner, she thought. But she didn't want to get into talking about the Games and the Real World just now. “Oh, don't worry about me,” she said vaguely. “This is a park in the Realm of Heroes. I didn't want to freak you out with the skyscrapers until we talked about them.”
“Sky-scrapers? What are those, some kind of dangerous bird?” He swallowed another mouthful of apple.
“No, just tall buildings,” she said. “Like, really tall.” He seemed genuinely unfamiliar with the term, she noticed. She wondered how well a hypercomputer AI could fake awareness. Had one ever passed a Turing test? Not that she'd ever heard, but maybe Farker knew. If she could just get the two of them together...
The thought trailed off, derailed by the sudden realization that (a) she had never talked to both of them at the same time, and (b) Farker seemed to be avoiding meeting Aes. Could Farker actually be Aes? It was a disturbing possibility.
“What's wrong?” Aes asked her, concern on his face.
Darla made a mental note to work on her poker face. “Probably nothing,” she said, getting to her feet. “Let's go for a walk. You should see the rest of the park.”
And she did show him the two fish ponds and the luminescent flower beds (which were more impressive at night)...but all the while she was steering the two of them into harm's way, easing toward the rear exit of the park, where gangs of Jerx and Punx liked to lie in wait for careless strollers.
Her head felt like it was spinning. Was Aes a metavirus, a convincing AI...or Farker's alter ego? What did she really know about Farker? Basically, that he worked for PanGames and said that he had written Aes. Maybe he got a little too into his work. Maybe he had trouble with one of the NPCs and started impersonating it to get good reviews. She couldn't rule out anything at this point. Maybe Aes was a quadriplegic hacker who was brilliant enough to just slip in and out of a NCM.
She was so absorbed that she almost missed the group of three Jerx to the right of the exit. Instead, she turned and strode directly toward them.
One of the Jerx whipped out a knife, beating the other two to the draw and winning the right to make the first move. “Look who's slumming tonight,” he sneered. “See this knife? It says you're gonna be real nice to us.”
Darla hugged herself. Tzing! “See these swords?” she demanded. “They say you are going to stop bothering people.”
She didn't expect him to give up that easily. He nodded to his chums, and the other two leveled their handguns at her. “Dealer takes two,” he grinned. “I'll see your swords, and call.”
Darla jumped. Not at him, because she would have impaled herself on his little knife, but over him, mentally congratulating herself on spending some of her leveling points on Leap boosts. As she passed over his head she heard the other two get off a couple of shots at her. She ignored the pressure of the impacts and somersaulted with a half twist, slashing at the lead Jerx with her swords before landing on her feet behind him facing his back.
Looking past the guy, she made out Aes starting to run toward them. “No!” she shouted. “Stay back and heal me!”
That was all she had time for. The guy was turning around to his left, the knife coming at her from his right hand low and fast. She parried it with her left gladius and brought the right one down on his right shoulder in a slash that nearly severed the arm. The knife dropped from his useless hand and she followed through with a lightning fast stab from her left blade that would have brought tears to the eyes of a grizzled centurion.
Emerald fire glowed around her as she rolled to her right, dodging more bullets, as the two Jerx converged on their leader. Coming to her feet, she took another shot to her right side as she turned and plunged her right gladius into one of the pair. Whipping around to her right, she kicked at the remaining Jerx and slashed at his arm.
The first one that had attacked her was fading away by the time the second hit the pavement. The third looked at his arm wound, eyed her warily, and turned and ran for it.
Green fire enveloped her again. Darla let her swords disappear and turned to face Aes. “You see?” she said,
a little breathless. “Nothing to it. Of course, you only had one fighter to heal, so there were no decisions to make.”
“You planned that,” he said. “You deliberately went toward them and started the fight. There wasn't any need for two of them to die just to help my confidence.” He sounded shocked.
Darla sighed. “They're not dead, Aes. They're gone.”
“Yes, I saw them disappear. Just like you do. Did they go back to their world in time for healers to save them?”
“No, they didn't go anywhere,” she said, feeling tired. “Because they were never here. All the enemies in the Games are NPCs. I wouldn't take you into an Arena match against other Players without telling you first.”
His face clouded. “I do not understand,” he said.
“Trust me,” she advised. “It can all be explained. But the explanation is going to take a little time. In fact, time is the first thing we need to talk about. Let's head back into the park for a bit and sit down again.”
She towed him back to the bench by the apple tree. Back where we started, she thought. No, not exactly. He's been in one fight now and was able to heal me adequately. That's progress. But how could she continue his training, without a little more briefing? Aes was either an AI designed to fit into Bronze Age Greece (Hellas, she reminded herself), or he was an amnesiac hacker, or whatever. He might even be Farker, for all she knew. The one thing he was not, apparently, was familiar with modern reality. Lacking the faintest inkling of how to characterize him, she decided to treat him as if he were as he seemed, a human from 1300 BCE.
“Aes,” she began gently, “before we see more of the Realm of Heroes, at least this local part of it, I need to tell you some things that may be very...disturbing. They might be hard to believe, even though they are true.”
Aes gave her a faint smile. “Harder to believe than being trapped in a dream-world where no one but me seems to feel pain or hunger? More disturbing than people who vanish and reappear like ghosts? I can hardly wait to hear what could be worse than being the only ghost here who can burn his foot.”
“Let me ease into it,” she said. “To begin with, you need to know some general facts. Those guys we just fought with, they're called Jerx. It's singular as well as plural: one Jerx, or a group of Jerx.”
“A strange name,” he commented. “But of course I expect barbarians to have unusual names. What about them?”
“The first one came at me with a knife. Did you notice the weapons the other Jerx had?”
“It all happened very fast. I noticed them pointing some objects in their hands at you while you were fighting. They made loud noises that made your body twitch as if struck.”
“They're called guns. Explosions inside them cause bullets to fly out of the tubes to strike as projectile weapons. They fly out so fast you cannot see them coming, but when they hit you it is like someone threw a rock really hard.”
He frowned. “You mean they are peltasts? You used the word 'bullets', which are the lead or stone projectiles that peltasts or slingers hurl against enemies.”
“Yes, except they don't have to use their own strength to throw the bullets. The guns are like little catapults, so all they have to do is aim them like crossbows and pull a trigger to release their shots. An explosion inside the gun pushes the bullets out, and also makes the noise that you heard.”
“I can see how they would be useful in close combat. But Darla, knowing about them is not disturbing to me. The people of Hellas have been fighting wars for a long time. This is merely an improved version of an ancient weapon.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But it's not my point. Have you ever met anyone with these kinds of weapons?”
“No,” he admitted.
“And you never would have, until now. But the Jerx and other enemies here have them, and so you need to know about them. If someone comes at me with a club, I am completely safe until he comes close enough to hit me. These guns are different. They hurt and kill from a distance. So they can hurt me before I can even get close to them with my blades.”
“So? That has always been the function of ranged weapons, to do harm, at a distance. I have seen my share of warfare and its wounds.”
“It's something you have to keep in mind when we get into battles. When we start fighting, I usually trigger the ranged weapon people first, since they hang back and try to stay out of melee range while they deal their damage. This time, the knife guy attacked first, so I couldn't ignore him because he was within melee range already.”
“I am a physician, not a soldier. But I can see part of what you mean, that the disposition and type of enemy dictates the plan of attack or defense.”
“Yes but that's not the point.” She paused. “You never saw any guns in Hellas, did you?”
“No,” he admitted. “But I am well aware that I saw only part of the world before I came...here. Do you mean the Persians have them?”
“I'm afraid not, Aes. No one had them. You never saw guns before because they were only invented a few hundred years ago. My history is sketchy, but I'm pretty sure that's fairly accurate.”
“What do you mean?” he said, clearly puzzled by her words. “If these...guns...were invented hundreds of years ago, then why couldn't the Persians, or even the Spartans have them?”
“This is the hard part,” she said calmly. “Do you remember when you told me that the stars were wrong, that the constellations were not in the position you remembered before you arrived?”
A wary look came into his eyes. “I remember.”
“And do you remember,” she continued, “how you told me that your sons had gone off with the sons of Atreus on his fool's errand? Where did they go?”
He shrugged. “To Troy of course. Ilium. Everyone knows that by now. All because of an abducted Spartan woman, Helen.”
Darla took his hands in hers, apparently surprising him. “Aes, you are right. Everyone knows about the Trojan War. This is the hard part, and I'm sorry...but you didn't just skip a season or two. Everyone knows about the Trojan War because it happened 3000 years ago.”
Panic entered his eyes. “That is impossible,” he protested. “The fighting is still taking place, the last I heard.”
“Listen to me, Aes. You have to believe me. The Trojan War is part of history now. We know it took about ten years, and we know how Achilles died. We don't know a lot about it because it was so long ago, but we know about it because a poet named Homer wrote a long poem about it called the Iliad. He wrote it over two thousand years ago.”
His head was shaking in negation, in denial. “No,” he said. “No. I don't believe it.” But she could see him beginning to think about it.
“You noticed that the stars were wrong,” she reminded him. “Yes, they are in the position for Spring, not Fall. But that could be any Spring. In this case, it's a Spring 3000 years after the Fall you remember. Just as a wheel turns and touches the same part of its rim to the ground again and again, the constellations go to the same places in the sky again and again.”
His eyes had a haunted look. “Then, Podilarius, Epione...”
Darla found her eyes were watering. Instead of wiping them, she gripped his hands more tightly. “Everyone you knew has been dead for a long time, Aes. I'm sorry but it's true. Welcome to the future.”
Chapter 23: Farker: programs and personalities