Elysium

Ulgaff the Destroyer pulled himself to his knees and scraped the loam from his mouth and beard. Tufts of scorched hair tore away beneath his fingers, the crimson whiskers caked with mud like thatch from a peasant’s hovel.

Ulgaff forced himself to inhale.

Any normal man would have been gasping and out of breath, probably knocked unconscious, but Ulgaff was no normal man. He’d be damned if a little dragon’s fire and a fall from his horse kept him from his quarry.

The dragon roared somewhere deeper in the forest, followed by the screams of Ulgaff’s comrades.

“Jager!” Ulgaff bellowed, lumbering to his feet to find his horse. The idiot beast came to him dutifully and stared at him with blank eyes. Ulgaff grabbed up his war hammer from the ground and mounted, the weight of his chainmail hauberk and shoulder-plate armor no more than a nuisance to either of them. He spurred the animal and they lurched forward through the canopy of conifer trees. Dragon’s fire blossomed in the distance, followed by more screams. Ulgaff did not slow. When he burst into the clearing he saw only peripherally his scattered comrades—the dragon commanded his attention. Its body was turned away from him, but its elongated neck was already snaking around, its jaws spreading to spew forth another gout of flames.

Ulgaff did not shy away from the fire. He stood up in his stirrups, gripped the reigns tightly in his left hand, his war hammer in his right, and braced himself. Excruciating pain washed over him with the flames, but he ignored the burning sensation—it was not real, he knew—and instead forced his eyes to remain open, focused on the dragon. Jager squealed and began to crumple beneath him, but Ulgaff was undeterred. He leapt clear of his mount, and in two giant steps elongated by his forward momentum he was upon the dragon. His hammer came down upon its crown with a thunderous crack. The beast cried out in pain and instinctively spun, hurling Ulgaff aside with its spiked tail.

Again, Ulgaff was back on his feet in the blink of an eye. The dragon was staggering away into the trees, careening off the tree trunks drunkenly. He’d stunned it, perhaps dealt it a serious wound. Either way, it was not an opportunity Ulgaff was about to lose.

“With me, you fools!” he yelled at his comrades as he chased after the beast. Even injured it moved quickly. Ulgaff pushed away the fatigue and the pain of his scorched flesh. There was no time for weakness. If the dragon reached the edge of the forest, it would spread its wings and fly back to its mountain lair where it could heal itself in safety. Ulgaff wouldn’t allow it. He willed himself to run even faster.

He was gaining on the beast, but something was awry. Ulgaff could hear his comrades yelling out warnings behind him, and the forest was darkening, the trees disappearing—winking out like candles beneath a gust of wind. It was still hours before dusk, he thought to himself, but then the dragon disappeared before him in a screech of electronic noise. Ulgaff skidded to a halt and turned to run back the way he had come, but it was too late. An electronic squeal filled his ears and Ulgaff fell into utter nothingness.

Earth

A broad stairway climbed from the Deep up to the Rock and the rear-gate of the Hornburg. Near the bottom stood Aragorn. In his hand still Andúril gleamed, and the terror of the sword for a while held back the enemy, as one by one all who could gain the stair passed up towards the gate. Behind on the upper steps knelt Legolas. His bow was bent, but one gleaned arrow was all that he had left, and he peered out…

“—Eamon—do you copy?—Eamon—”

“Dammit!” Eamon hissed, startled by the abrupt squawking of his walkie-talkie. The noise seemed sacrilegious in this forgotten place, a library long ago abandoned, a dusty tomb for tens of thousands of books until Eamon had discovered it and pried loose the locks on the back door several weeks prior.

“—Eamon—do you copy?—Eamon—”

Eamon set his book aside and grabbed the accursed radio. “Eamon here. What is it?”

“—we need you back in Havalisburg—something is wrong with Soteria—”

“You’re gonna have to be more specific than that.”

There was a long pause. “—we’re not exactly sure—our terminal says there’s been a page fault—”

“A page fault? What else does it say?”

“—not much—it says to insert error tape for more details—”

Eamon let out a long breath. He didn’t have the foggiest notion what they were talking about. “Can’t you get the Kid to look at it? I’m sort of busy.”

“—we can’t find him—the director said to send for you—”

“All right, I’ll be there in a half hour or so,” Eamon replied, rubbing his temples with his free hand. He set the book he’d been reading on top of the stack he’d accumulated: Tolkien, Le Guin, Asimov, Burroughs, McCaffrey, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Dick, Gibson, Powers, Martin… He had access to all these books and more on his tablet back in Havalisburg, of course, but there was something intoxicating about reading from an actual book, the feel of the yellowed pages, and the smell: a mixture of dust and a musty, almost vanilla fragrance. He never in a million years would have dreamed to discover such a treasure. Every other building in town was in shambles, over-run with rodents, windows busted out, walls collapsed, the interiors feculent and rotten from a hundred and fifty years of rain, wind, and fog. Hell, the city hall building next door to the library had an oak tree growing through a collapsed section of the roof. Yet somehow the library was unscathed. No one must’ve thought the books valuable enough to loot when the plague struck. With its windows and doors intact, a solid brick construction, and a slate roof, it had kept the weather out. The books had out-survived not only their authors, but the librarians and even the last people to ever read them.

Eamon had half a mind to cart the collection he’d gathered back to the Protector compound, but it wouldn’t look good. Director Simmons was already on his case enough as it was. Ostensibly, he was here in what used to be downtown Santa Clara to do soil sampling, to see if any vestige of the plague virus still survived in the ruins. If anyone caught wind of what he’d actually been doing, he’d lose the privilege of leaving Havalisburg altogether.

With a sigh, Eamon walked empty-handed to the rear door where his sentinel robot was standing guard.

“Check the exterior for Vultures,” he commanded the sentinel, and the robot wheeled itself out the door on its rubber tracks, automatic rifles at the ready. The coast was clear, and after checking the perimeter of Eamon’s electric vehicle, the sentinel signaled to him it was safe to step outside.

Terra-serv

Ulgaff the Destroyer appeared suddenly in a white room, standing upon a round, glowing platform. His armor was gone. Instead, he was garbed in blue jeans and a short sleeved button-up shirt. He was clean and well-groomed, his red beard trimmed short, but fully intact, not a single whisker burned or misplaced. The shock nearly made him collapse to his knees.

A door opened and a slender man in a blue suit entered. “Welcome to the Central Terminal. We were not expecting you, Mr…?”

“Uh, Ulgaff.”

The man frowned and thrust some sort of device in Ulgaff’s face, a blinding light scanning his retinas.

“Your name is Mr. Ethan,” the man informed him. “Jason Ethan.”

Ulgaff blinked his eyes into focus. He had not heard that name in so long it was foreign to him. Jason Ethan. He had never meant to forget, but gods, it was all so long ago that hearing it now made him feel nauseated, racked with guilt for letting the memory die. Ulgaff grunted and again blinked his eyes to clear them. Jason Ethan was long gone, and Ulgaff did not take kindly to this abrupt reintroduction to the past. He had comrades waiting for him. A dragon to kill. A stronghold and retainers to look after. “Where did you say I am?”

“The Central Terminal in Grand Central City.”

“Where the seven hells is Grand Central City?”

“In Terra-serv.”

Terra-serv. Another name he had not heard in ages. Not a real city, of course, but then again it couldn’t be a real city. On the outside, the old him—the flesh and blood Jason—had been crippled, one leg amputated, the other one emaciated and pockmarked with shrapnel scars. It was coming back to him in bits and pieces, like a half-remembered dream. Yes, the first battle he ever fought was not on horseback with a war hammer, but on foot, with an M-16 in a land called Afghanistan.

“Mr. Ethan,” the man said, “your file says you reside in Elysium-serv. We were not informed by the Interserv office in Elysium that you desired to transfer to Terra-serv, nor did we approve your transfer.”

The man spoke without inflection or apparent anger, but the accusatory words angered Ulgaff. All of it was too much.

“Listen here, knave, I didn’t ask for any damned transfer. The last thing I want is to be here in your stupid Terra-serv. Send me back!”

“Remain calm, sir. Are you telling me you were not transferred via the Central Station in Elysium-serv?”

“Don’t you tell me to remain calm. I’m Lord of Hailfast.” Ulgaff pounded his index finger into the man’s chest. “I’ve killed orcs, trolls, dragons. More than any man in the north. I’ll be the one giving—”

Ulgaff found himself lying on his back, gasping. His hands were secured in front of him with handcuffs. “What in the seven hells happened?”

The slender man was standing over him. “I am Interserv, Mr. Ethan. AI. Part of Soteria, just like the horse you rode and dragons you slew, but you can’t kill me with a sword. Now please answer my questions promptly and with some modicum of civility. Tell me: how did you get here?”

Earth

Eamon was delayed at the northern gate of the compound for a good twenty minutes before the guards let him through. It turned out the Kid wasn’t just missing. He’d stolen an EV and left the compound without saying a word to anyone, and now everyone was on edge. The man and woman on duty at the guard station yanked Eamon out of his EV, searched the vehicle for contraband, and then interrogated Eamon in their guard shack. Have you heard word from the Kid? they asked him a dozen times, worded a dozen different ways. Did you see any Vultures? Did you speak with any Vultures? All this despite the fact the two of them knew Eamon well and had partaken in his home-brewed dandelion wine on more than one occasion.

When they were finally satisfied and let him pass, Eamon drove his EV past the barb-wire fence-line surrounding the compound, past the crop fields and the power station—with it’s arrays of solar panels, windmills, and natural gas tanks—past the outer dormitory buildings, and finally into the heart of the compound: four rectangular buildings, three stories high each, flat-roofed, with crumbling brick facades, arranged around a central quad where the monks lived in their yurts.

Eamon parked his vehicle and hurried into the western-most building, through the glass doors, and down a series of long white corridors on the ground floor to get to his workplace, the most important place on all of Earth.

“Where the hell have you been?” Director Simmons demanded as he walked into the flickering fluorescent light and hum of electric fans that was the heart of Soteria.

“I was taking samples in the city, sir.”

“Ten minutes away, yet it took you an hour. When you are summoned, you are to return immediately. Must I remind you that you have taken an oath as a Protector? Your responsibility is to Soteria and the people within, not to selfish endeavors.”

Eamon groaned inwardly. He was so tired of this bullshit. His oath hadn’t been voluntary. None of theirs had been. If you were born in Havalisburg, you were a Protector. Period. If you didn’t like it, your only alternative was leaving the compound and living with the Vultures, which was probably exactly what the Kid had done. The poor little guy was too smart for his own good, and he’d been reading an unhealthy amount of existential philosophy lately. Eamon had warned Director Simmons, but of course no one heeded Eamon except when something was wrong with Soteria.

Well, the Kid could have the savage Vultures all to himself, living off the land, and dying of malnutrition no doubt. If Eamon were to run away, it wouldn’t be to the outside, but to the inside, someplace where here could really escape: Elysium-serv, Novus-serv, or hell, even Calypso-serv.

“Well?” Director Simmons demanded.

Eamon looked away. “I’m sorry, sir. I was stopped at the edge of the compound by our militia for questioning. They’re all worried we’re gonna have a Vulture attack. I got here as quickly as I could.”

Simmons frowned. “Fine, get in there and see what you can figure out. I have the rest of the team pouring over the manuals to figure out what a page fault is, but we’ve found nothing.”

Eamon nodded sullenly and stepped past Simmons, through another set of glass doors into the server room, the air-conditioned, white-walled warehouse that was home to Soteria, a series of computer workstations and massive servers. Eamon went to his station and sat to peer at his screen. An error message reading “page fault – insert error tape for more details” blinked on the display. Simmons walked up to stand behind him.

“We’re able to get back to the standard diagnostic screen,” Simmons said, “but every few minutes or so, the error message pops back up.”

Eamon keyed in the commands to get back to the diagnostic screen, but almost immediately the error message reappeared: “page fault – insert error tape for more details.” This was the biggest danger to Soteria—not raids from Vultures, or even the dwindling genetic diversity and population of the Protectors that the monks were always warning them about, but the fact that they were two, three generations removed from the original designers of Soteria. They had no way of knowing what something like this meant. Eamon felt a twinge of excitement at this new problem despite himself.

“What the hell can it mean?” Simmons asked. “Error tape? Do you suppose Dr. Havali and the original programmers had some sort of tape drives?”

“A tape drive wouldn’t make much sense,” Eamon replied. “I mean why would Soteria need to write its error message to another drive? Why not just display it on our screen?”

“Maybe it’s a serious error. Maybe Soteria is trying to create backups of the denizens.”

“You can’t create backups of the denizens,” Eamon said, shaking his head. “Just because they’re living as avatars now doesn’t mean they’re not individual entities. You can’t make a back-up copy of them any more than you can make a back-up of you or me. I think you’re onto something, though. It has to be some sort of default, fail-safe response.”

“But why tape drives? That sort of technology was outdated well before Soteria was created. More importantly, where the hell are we going to find tape drives? I don’t know if any tape ribbon will have maintained its magnetism all this time even if we do find any.”

Eamon closed his eyes, reminded of something from one of the Asimov books he’d read. “Wait, maybe it’s not tape like a tape drive, but paper. Computers, calculators, bank terminals, even voting machines: they used to have printouts. The paper came in rolls. Tape like ticker tape.” Eamon jumped to his feet. “That’s it, we’re looking for ticker tape.”

“Ticker tape?” Simmons was flummoxed.

“Yeah, a roll of paper,” Eamon told him with a slap on the back. “Tell the rest of the team to get their noses out of the instruction manuals and start searching the storage closets for a roll of paper.”

Terra-serv

“I believe you,” the Interserv officer told Ulgaff, who was still handcuffed and on the floor.

“Why wouldn’t you believe me? Why would I want to come here on purpose?”

“Let’s just say there has been much unusual behavior here in Terra-serv recently.”

“But you believe me?” Ulgaff asked. “You’ll send me back?”

“I’m not certain we can send you back. We are waiting for commands from Soteria. Until such time, we will keep you in holding, here in the Central Terminal.”

The officer grabbed Ulgaff by the wrists and pulled him to his feet effortlessly. “Can you be trusted if I remove your bindings?”

Ulgaff nodded. “Yes.”

And just like that the handcuffs were gone. Disappeared gone. “This way,” the officer said, leading the way out the door. Ulgaff followed him out into a corridor lit with fluorescent lights, and to an elevator foyer where the officier pushed a backlit button. It was all vaguely familiar, but not in a good way. Ulgaff had left the modern world ages ago, chosen a different life. He’d been Ulgaff the Destroyer for so long now he could hardly remember the man who was Jason Ethan. And he certainly didn’t miss the conveniences of a modern city. The mere thought of riding an elevator unnerved him.

The elevator door dinged open, and to Ulgaff’s horror he saw that it was a glass elevator. They were in a skyscraper hundreds of feet above the ground. The officer pulled Ulgaff inside by the hand and pushed another button. Ulgaff could not tear his eyes away from the streets below him; it was a bustle of cars, traffic lights and pedestrians. As far as he could see were more buildings—bank towers, office buildings, shopping complexes—and so many cars. A freeway wound its way past a stadium in the distance.

“Are we going down?” Ulgaff whispered.

“Up.”

The elevator lurched upward and Ulgaff could feel his chest tighten. His breaths were coming in short gasps. He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. Long ago, when he’d first arrived in Elysium, he had trained himself to overcome the programming of his body. He was one of the few who had embraced the idea of a second chance in a new body and he exploited the fact that it wasn’t really a human body. Sure, it was programmed to get tired, hungry, scared, but it was all just a program. With meditation and practice Ulgaff had learned to consciously ignore and control the urges of his virtual body. Eventually it had become instinct and he’d forgotten about everything: Earth, the pandemic, the dead neighbors, the long lines and wait to be uploaded into Soteria. He wanted nothing to do with that sort of world any longer. He was Ulgaff the Destroyer. He belonged in Hailfast, not in a skyscraper.

The elevator began to swim before his eyes. Bile rose up in his throat.

Earth

“Ha! Found it,” Eamon hollered in triumph, pulling a three-inch role of paper from a filing cabinet. Word quickly spread to Simmons and the technicians who were upending the storage rooms, and within minutes they were all scrambling back to the server room, giddy with excitement.

They congregated around the main output terminal.

“What are we looking for?” Simmons asked.

“A printer slot of some sort,” Eamon replied. “Here.” He found a panel with a handle and opened it up. Sure enough, there was a spool shaft inside. Eamon slid the roll of paper over the shaft and fed the paper into the slotted paper feeder. “Does that look right?”

None of the others said a thing. They had never used a printer in their lives.

Eamon shrugged. “All right, I guess so. Let’s just hope the ink or whatever the hell this thing has is still workable.” Eamon closed the panel and was rewarded with a whirring sound inside. It was like music, a repetitive buzzing noise of applicator on paper. This was how the books in the library had been made, or something akin to it, at least. Eamon leaned in closer and pinched the first edge of paper sprouting from the printer slot on the panel.

“Page Fault,” he read as the tape continued to feed out. “Insufficient resources. User overwrite Terra-serv = {60, 200, 371, 12679}>>Elysium-serv = {22, 103, 227, 1079}. Denizen-0899375967 relocate default = Terra-serv/Grand_Central_City.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Simmons whined, reading the tape over Eamon’s shoulder.

Terra-serv

“Calm yourself,” the Interserv officer told Ulgaff as the elevator dinged and came to a stop. “You will be safe here. In fact, you’re hardly alone.”

The doors opened and Ulgaff stepped into a huge, open room with dozens of tables and chairs, an assortment of couches, and a full kitchen and buffet. It was a cafeteria. Hideous pop music was pumping through tinny speakers on the ceiling. Ulgaff stared at the denizens already there looking back at him. There were a few normal looking humans like himself, but also giants, elves, dwarves, a clan of vampires, Martian-looking creatures, a wolfman. All of them wearing very pedestrian clothing circa the 2010s. From the adjacent elevator, another Interserv officer was wheeling out a mermaid. She looked more stunned than Ulgaff, her eyes wide, her fishy tale flopping on her gurney.

“This is why we know you’re not lying, Mr. Ethan,” Ulgaff’s escort informed him. “Others have been arriving all day, from Elysium-serv, Novus-serv, Vot Dermo-serv, and Calypso-serv. Something is awry with Soteria, but fret not. We’ll fix things, just as soon as we get our commands from Soteria. Until such time, please acquaint yourself with the others and enjoy the buffet.”

Ulgaff fell to his knees as his escort disappeared back into the elevator. He couldn’t breathe. His chest felt like it was being crushed. He remembered this feeling. His old self, Jason, had experienced it all too often in the real world. Panic attacks his therapist called it. It’s not real, he told himself and tried to slip into a meditative state, but the stench of the buffet washing over him was all too real: sickly-sweet teriyaki stir-fry, sour marinara, deep-fried fish sticks, corn dogs, and fries. Ulgaff’s stomach convulsed and he vomited. Through his bleary eyes, the maroon, high-traffic carpet looked like a sea of blood.

Earth

The printer kept printing. The ticker tape kept feeding out into Eamon’s hands. “Shit, someone is gonna have to go get another roll from that filing cabinet.”

Simmons sent one of the other technicians off to fetch more ticker tape. “What’s it saying?” he asked, again leaning over Eamon to read the tape, his breathing heavy, his sweating body reeking of BO even in the chill of the air-conditioned server room.

Eamon didn’t even notice, though. He was trying to make sense of what he was reading. “It’s more of the same. Page faults because of user overwrites. Terra-serv is expanding somehow, and stealing resources from the alternative server worlds. It looks like the denizens from the overwritten areas are getting dumped into all the central terminals in Terra-serv.”

Simmons’ voice was shaky. “How can it be from user overwrites? None of us know how to do that. Do we?”

“No,” Eamon answered. “None of us know how to do that.”

“Who then?”

Eamon let the ticker tape fall from his hands and typed a command into the nearest workstation, pulling up a new diagnostic screen that showed the terminal locations where the overwrites had been executed. He didn’t recognize any of them—they definitely weren’t coming from Havalisburg, not from anywhere on Earth, in fact. It was like something out of a Neil Stephenson book he’d just read the week before. He turned back to the others.

“It’s the denizens themselves. Someone on the inside of Terra-serv has learned how to hack the system. They’re stealing memory resources.”

“But why?” Simmons whined.

That question Eamon could not answer.