Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

‘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.

‘The Absolute enjoys originality; violence can be a short cut. If you were to duel Scoular or assassinate him, both of which are beneath you, then you would need to do so in an original way.’ Even to Dracup she would not admit how she had distilled her views of what the Absolute wanted down to pure sensation – after all, he was another player. She had no doubt that the Absolute enjoyed good gamesmanship, but he/she/it must have seen it all now in the thousands of years of Game’s existence.

‘I… I am trying to learn,’ he said haltingly.

She turned to look at him. ‘There’s nothing attractive to either the Absolute or myself about weakness, do you understand?’

Dracup nodded. Like everything in the Game, she felt like she was playing out a scene, but she had worked hard enough for the Absolute this night. She wanted something for herself just now . Do you hear that, Absolute? Ride me if you will, but I need to let go. Maybe this is what he wanted, less artifice, more feeling. No, she didn’t want to think like that.

It was bad form to reward an underling with something he wanted after he had disappointed you. The problem came when you wanted the same thing. Zabilla grabbed the back of Dracup’s head and pulled him closer into her, exchanging a long kiss that became more urgent as it went on. She felt his hands sliding her skirt up and she jumped up onto him, wrapping her long legs around his waist.

With a thought, the baroque luxury G-car rose into view at the end of the jetty. It bobbed slightly on the four ball-mounted AG motors at each of its corners before docking. With another thought, the doors to the car split open. Another thought turned the plush interior red like her thoughts in the arena.

Dracup carried her, mostly blind, mouths meshed together, to the G-car, falling onto the soft carpet. The door closed behind them as the G-car took off, the AI pilot banking the vehicle towards Zabilla’s abode.

Zabilla wriggled out from underneath. Dracup’s hand snagged her underwear and dragged it down. She pushed herself onto one of the seats, spreading her legs, hunger written over her normally emotionless face. This was for her, to forget herself, the Game, the Absolute, the audition. This was for her only. Later she would test the limits of the heightened nerve endings she’d had grown in Dracup. Later she would feed the Absolute, later she would play the Game, lose herself in it, but not now.

In a distant chamber something started to pay attention to one of its favourites. Again.

The ride home had been sublime – dangerous but sublime. She had let herself go when her Game play was about control. She knew that many were good at feeding the Absolute sensation with abandon. Zabilla had always found the need to work at it.

When they arrived home they had worked at it, each little act designed to maximise either pain or pleasure, the whole thing designed as a beacon for the Absolute. She thought she had felt it in her experiential ware but the scientist in her knew that was her imagination. The Absolute was a silent ghost in their pain and pleasure centres. If people knew when the Absolute was present, then the heads would not be as effective as they were at rooting out the anti-social losers who played against the Game itself.

Like most players she’d had her rebellious phase when she had been a student. She had sworn that she was never going to play the Game, engage with it, never earn her second name, and like everyone she found herself inexorably drawn into it. Then she found that she understood it, found that she was good at it. Now she realised that rejection of the Game was just an excuse that losers made.

Zabilla had studied biophysics, specialising in Seeder biotech, how it interacted with Quantum phenomena and how it applied to Red Space and exotic entanglement. Though she had to be careful studying Red Space applications because anything that even remotely looked like research into bridge technology was heretical. The Church audited her research on a regular basis and she had received more than one censure. On one occasion a line of research she believed had been encouraged by the Absolute his/her/itself had resulted in a threat of excommunication. It was a serious threat. She had wondered why the Church felt they needed the Seeders as a religion. Progenitors they might have been, but their time was gone, and now they had the Game and the Absolute. The Absolute had the powers of a god, and after victory in the Art Wars the Absolute even had god-like killer angels to do his/her/its bidding.

Zabilla’s apartment was a handsomely appointed three-storey nook high enough for her to make out stars through the canopy of bioengineered leaves. The bottom level was her lab, steel and glass, the wood grown around it and redesigned to be non-porous and support a sterile surface. The upper two storeys were open plan, a catwalk running around the top floor. Through the large window opening in the wall she could see the light-speckled shadows of the other trees. The bed was on a raised plinth that grew from the floor and the wall. A small waterfall and pool provided a water feature/bath/shower combination. Discreet sound-dampening projectors took care of the constant noise of water.