The Elias Anomaly

Eight

Except the viewpane said he was. More hacking? She intended to find out. With a couple of swipes across the viewpane Sidon's Mercy found itself gauzed. The fun and games for this oddball were going to end now.

"Okay," Dulcie said. "What's going on?"

The oddball stared at her, like she was an alien, looking for all the world as if he was having difficulty processing her question.

"You tell me," he said eventually, a perfect note of sardonic despondency in his voice.

Although it was quite brilliant the man's act was starting to grate on Dulcie. He had used unauthorised code which he would have smuggled into the cluster, to redesignate his game tag to mimic an asset. Using this he had broken into the Architect sub-network. He'd undertaken a passive-aggressive romp through at least two worlds. During his rampage he'd broken other players immersion. He'd also upset the bots and abused the system in a general manner.

This system, the cluster, this was Dulcie's life. It was an artifice, of course, but it was also a rare and precious kind of art. To do this, to upset the balance, to break the immersive quality was a mark of deep disrespect. The architects had poured centuries of man-effort into crafting these experiences. To see someone break and twist that work made Dulcie quite angry. It was like painting a moustache on a portrait of Venus or something.

"Give it up," she snapped at the player. "You fooled Mister Berrow with your weird act but I'm an Architect, I helped build this system, I know everything about how it works. So just quit... this. It's really irritating."

The man looked about, his eyes wide, the corners of his mouth turned down. He looked at the frozen crowd again. His focus shifted over the buildings at the opaque edge of the gauze sphere. He examined himself and then turned his attention back to Dulcie.

"Are you... a ghost?" he asked, he inhaled sharply and his face stretched into a comic mask of shock. "Am I dead? Did that guy kill me? Is this what death is like?"

Dulcie, despite herself, was taken aback by this completely insane barrage of questions. It wasn't the questions per se, it was more the tone of sincerity with which they were posed. Dulcie could follow the implication of this freak's questions. He wanted her to believe that he was wandering around the Cluster completely unaware of where he was or what he was doing. This was ridiculous. Even so, he embraced the lunacy with such passion.

"Sorry, ridiculous questions," the man said, as if reading her mind. "Obviously not dead... or maybe death just isn't how I thought it would be. I don't know. I don't feel dead. So I guess I'm not. Unless that's how it works. Is it?"

"I... I don't know," Dulcie said. Her thoughts scrambled to reassemble from confusion into righteous indignation. "I mean, you're not dead... which, of course, you know, because how could you not?"

"Because I don't. Nothing since I got into work this morning has made much sense," the man said. "I've been seeing things, having black outs. Then, for no good reason that I can, with hindsight, identify, I climbed into that glowing tunnel. After that, madness, insanity, robot beetles, bizarre pirates, weird highwaymen, minotaurs, cowboys... I mean, Greek mythology and cowboys. What kind of lunatic puts together creatures from Clash of the Titans and characters from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly? Seriously."

"Eno Koney," Dulcie said.

"What?" the man asked.

"Eno Koney was the chief architect on Nonem," Dulcie said. "He developed the main cities and the core boss bots and factions."

"Factions?" the man said. His eyes, which had settled down, now slid down and to the left before scanning over to the right. His lips moved and he made little noises under his breath. "Bots? Factions?" He stopped mumbling and raised his eyes to lock with Dulcie's once more. "Are you telling me that this is some sort of game? A simulation?"