John Wright - The Golden Age

This year, popularity was to be determined by a novel method.

Participants in the dream would be under full amnesia, actually believing themselves to be the characters with which the dream weavers had peopled their universes. Their emotions and deep-structures would remain untouched. A certain amount of artificial memory, to give them the language, background, and customs, would be permitted after inspection by the judges. But they would be allowed to hear rumors and myths of the other universes, to reincarnate and emigrate. The emigration would be free and open "voting with their feet" as Aurelian called it. Whoever attracted the most people away from his competitors would win the popularity ranking.

The contestants, in bright costumes, plumes, and gaudy skin tones, some in human bodies, others in many-headed

Harmony forms dating from the Regrouping period of the Fourth Era, stood in a circle around the living-pool, waiting for Aurelian's signal. All threw aside their garbs and stepped down, naked into the waters.

Daphne sank. Adjustments in her lungs drew oxygen from the medium. Microscopic assemblers built contacts to the nerve-interfaces she carried beneath her skin. As she drifted into the far, deep dreamspace, Daphne felt that moment of pleasant terror as her personality slipped away.

In the next moment, she was no longer Daphne, she was the Queen-Goddess of her universe. Her mind, assisted by the Sophotech interface, expanded to encompass every element and aspect of her reality, till she could count the hairs on every head of her characters; and not an invented sparrow fell but that she could work the trajectory into the destiny web of her plot.

The players came on-line. It was frightening—even the Daphne-Goddess was frightened—to see her characters come to life in the million dramas she simultaneously spun. Because, deep down, the Goddess still knew that this life was false, an illusion, and that these character lives would end with the end of the drama, their memories reabsorbed back into the people playing them.

It occasionally happened in such games that a character pondered enough questions, brought forth original thoughts, defined himself, and became self-aware, thinking thoughts independent of the mind of the player portraying him.

There were, to be sure, safeguards in the dreamware meant to prevent this from happening; and, if it did happen, there were even more safeguards to prevent the newborn personality from being murdered unintentionally when the player from which he sprang woke up.

(In the eyes of the law, those players stood to those emancipated characters as parent to child, and had an inescapable duty to provide for the child until he was old enough to fend for himself, either by earning enough to rent the computer space in which he lived, or to buy a physical body into which his noumena could be downloaded.)

Daphne's dream sprang to life, and the competition began. Her universe spun like an orrery beneath her hands, like a jeweled toy, and the plotlines of her characters were woven of a hundred thousand colored threads.

During the first four hours of the competition, forty dream-years went by in her universe. Most of her dramas dealt with simple things: young ladies trying to choose wisely when they wed; temptations to their fidelity; misunderstanding, discord and reconciliation; or a surprising reverse when the man everyone condemned as a rogue turned out to be the girl's true love. There were few adventures as such, except for the occasional shipwreck or Turkish kidnapping (intended usually to force the bickering lovers together, rather than to show the dangers or bravery of the ancient world.) There were hints that the war with Napoleon, or the Dragon-Magi of Persia, might resume, but this was done usually to call young soldiers away overseas, in scenes of heartbreak and promised faithfulness, not to portray wars as such. Daphne hated war stories, especially ones where cavalry officers' mounts were hurt.

Not much action-adventure, no. But there were marriages. Plenty of marriages.

By the sixth hour of competition, half a dozen decades of dream life had passed. And Daphne was ranked in thirty-fifth place, getting somewhat low marks for her lack of realism. Some universe made of diatonic music was in front, unfolding a vast drama as intelligent song-scores ranged across a universe of staffs, discovering new harmonies, fitting themselves, not without pain, into a cosmos-sized symphony. The Daphne-Goddess was irked: that dream weaver was letting his players do all the work!

Well, two could play the game that way.

Daphne-Goddess relaxed her hand at the loom of fate, and began to let the plotlines follow their own natural destinies. She allowed the Sophotech to explore more realistic outcomes, and removed restrictions on character types. "Giving the horse his head," as she called it.

Events took new turns, and now she had a million tangles to contend with. Everything (almost!) flew out of control. Rail

lines and factories and steamships sprang up across her pastoral landscape, and suddenly her heroes were not rakish officers in the Queen's Own Grenadiers, nor stern aristocrats in cold mansions needing a woman's love to melt their icy hearts: no. All her heroines were falling in love with a new type of man: young inventors with a dream, steel kings and oil barons, self-made men: thinkers, doers, movers and shakers. The same type of men who had always been the greedy villains in earlier parts of her work. What was going on?

Daphne-Goddess saw warning signals from some of the underjudges, reminding her that, since she started with her plotlines as romances, she would lose points for coherence if she switched to another genre of drama. She ignored the warnings. At thirty-first place, what had she to lose?

Wait. Thirty-first? Had she just jumped ahead four slots?

Daphne ignored that and concentrated on salvaging the tornado of her unraveling plotlines. It was as if an invisible force or an unseen hand were helping her; certain resolutions naturally suggested themselves; and natural events were punishing wicked characters without any intervention on her part.

She wanted to make the factories scenes of pathos and cruelty, but no. Widows and women without support, as wage earners, no longer starved if they did not marry well. Some of her characters became suffragettes. Laws were agitated through Parliament to allow wives to buy, sell, and own property, without the consent of their husbands.

Less romance? There was more romance here. A new type of heroine was appearing now: independent, brash, inventive, optimistic. Just her kind of woman! She had no need for action or bloodshed in such times as these; life was an adventure. Daphne-Goddess laughed at the judges. Let her come in last if she must. This was a world she liked: it roared onward toward its own self-made future.

She almost intervened when she saw the older forests of Germany being felled, and dragons being hunted down by squads of dragoons and aeronauts. But the hoarded gold the were-worms stole was returned to its proper owners, the men who had earned it; and the dark wasteland was now sunlit

farmland. It was beautiful. The population grew.

Overseas to the West, the dashing prince of Hyperborea built an airship larger than any that had ever been, aided by two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio. In a series of three magnificent expeditions, he rose higher and higher into the atmosphere, and on the second voyage passed the orbit of the moon, taking pictures with the new kinetoscope of the workings of the crystal gears and epicycles.

The moon in her universe was only ten miles wide, and turned through the aether a few thousand feet above the mountaintops. Daphne-Goddess began to fret. Was the universe she built too small for the spirit of the men who now possessed it?