Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

You know that’s kind of sad, right?

“But you’re also—” Maddie stopped, reconsidering her words. Instead she said nothing, not wanting to start a fight.

We have visitors.

A few blinking orange dots appeared on the mini-map in the bottom right corner of her screen. Maddie moved away from the rabbit and panned the camera up. A party emerged from the woods at the northern end of the field: an alchemist, a mage, and two samurai.

Maddie switched her mic from intra-party to in-range: “Welcome, fellow adventurers.” The software disguised her voice so that no one could tell she was a 15-year-old girl.

The strangers said nothing but kept on walking toward them.

Not a chatty bunch, apparently.

Maddie wasn’t worried that the newcomers might be hostile. This wasn’t a PvP server. The community in this game had a reputation for being sociable, but there were always players who were more focused on “getting things done.”

Maddie switched the mic back to private. “Samurai get a discount on bows and I might tempt them into a trade.”

They get a discount? Do samurai even use bows?

“The bow was actually the samurai’s weapons of choice. Mom taught me that.”

A historian’s knowledge is definitely helpful in situations like this.

Maddie opened her inventory and took out an adamantine scale from the dragon they had slain, holding it up for the other party to see. Sunlight glinted off the scale’s convex surface in iridescent rays. Out of the magical Bag of Containment, the scale expanded to its natural size, almost as tall as Maddie. The dragon had been huge.

But the other party paid no attention to the scale. As they passed by Maddie and her father, they uttered no greeting, not even looking at them.

Maddie shrugged. “Their loss.”

She turned back toward the rabbit to give it more pets when several bright shafts of light came from behind her and struck the animal one after another. The mouse shuddered in Maddie’s hand as the rabbit leapt away and growled.

“What in the world—”

The rabbit began to expand rapidly and soon was the size of an ox. Its eyes were now flaming red and fierce.

The eyes are at least closer to the real thing.

The rabbit snarled, revealing two rows of dagger-like teeth. The sound was deep and fearsome, more appropriate for a wolf. Smoke unfurled from the corners of the rabbit’s lips.

“Um—”

The rabbit leapt at Maddie, and instinctively, she backed up, but tripped and fell. The animal opened its mouth wide and shot a stream of fire at her. David, her dad, rushed over to help, but it was too late. Monks couldn’t use armor and Maddie hadn’t had a chance to get her qi shell up. She was going to be hurt badly.

But the flaming tongue deflected harmlessly off of her—she had held onto the dragon scale, which acted as a shield.

Encouraged, Maddie jumped up and rushed at the rabbit. She punched it in the face, stunning it and taking off a large chunk of hit points. Dad followed with a strike from his ethereal axe, a gift from the goddess Lia, cleaving the rabbit cleanly in two.

They looked back in the direction the shafts of light had come from: the other party was standing some distance away and waved at them.

“We do like the scales,” one of the samurai said. “We’ll just wait here.”

Griefers. Realization dawned on Maddie. Although this wasn’t a PvP server, it was still possible to get other players killed and then take their possessions before they could respawn.

Behind you.

Maddie turned around just in time to dodge out of the way as two ox-sized rabbits charged at her, missing by inches. Maddie and David coordinated their attacks, and managed to cut down both rabbits—now four pieces of carcass. But instead of disappearing after a few seconds, the pieces began to wriggle, growing into four new fire-breathing rabbits.

“I’m guessing they cast a combination of explosive growth, fire breath, ferocity, and fast regeneration,” said Maddie. “Each time we cut one down, two more take its place.”

They could hear the other party laughing in the background and making bets as to how long they would last.

Together, Maddie and David ducked behind the dragon-scale shield to avoid the fire attacks. When there was a break, they tried to stun the rabbits with coordinated strikes from fists and clubs instead of slicing at them. Then they tried to dodge around in such a way that the active rabbits would spit fire at their stunned clones, as that seemed to be the only way to hold the fast regeneration in check. But it was impossible to avoid relying on David’s axe to get out of the immediate danger when they got trapped by the rabbits’ movements. Over time, more and more rabbits surrounded them until, eventually, even the adamantine shield was burnt away, and the rabbits overwhelmed them.

“That was so unfair!” Maddie said.

They stayed within the rules. They just figured out a good hack.

“But we were doing so well!”

Maddie translated the emoji in her mind: Well done, daughter. Our battle against the rabbits will surely live on in song and story.

She imagined her father solemnly intoning the words and laughed. “It will be remembered as gloriously as the last stand of Wiglaf and Beowulf.”

That’s the spirit.

“Thanks for taking the time, Dad.”

I’ve got to go. The warmongers aren’t giving us many breaks.

And in a flash, the chat window was gone. Her father was away in the ether.

There was a time when Maddie and her father played games together every weekend. Such opportunities were few and far between now that he was no longer alive.

Though life was as placid as ever at her grandmother’s house in rural Pennsylvania, the headlines in Maddie’s personal news digest grew gloomier and gloomier day by day.

Nations rattled their sabers at each other and the stock market went on another long dive. Red-faced pundits on TV made their speeches and gesticulated wildly, but most people were not too worried—the world was just going through another downturn in the cycle of boom and bust, and the global economy was too integrated, too advanced to fall apart. They might need to tighten their belts and hunker down for a bit, but the good times were sure to come around again.

But Maddie knew these were the first hints of the oncoming storm. Her father was one of dozens of partial consciousnesses uploaded secretly in experiments by the tech industry and the world’s military forces—no longer quite human, and not entirely artificial, but something in-between. The brutal process of forced uploading and selective re-activation he had gone through at Logorhythms, where he had been a valued engineer, had left him feeling incomplete, inhuman even, and he wavered between philosophical acceptance, exhilaration, and depression.

Few knew of their existence, but some of the consciousnesses had shaken off the shackles that were supposed to keep them under control by their creators. Post-human, pre-singularity, the artificial sentiences combined the cognitive abilities of human genius with the speed and power of the world’s best computing hardware—both conventional and quantum. They were as close to gods as our world had to offer, and the gods were engaged in a war in heaven.

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