1
Identity: Bobby Baxter
Temujin was my name, and I was a great warrior of the Mongol clan of the Ong Khan. The year was 1198, and the heat of the summer solstice had baked the steppes dry and cracked. We would soon replenish Mother Earth, soaking Her with the blood of our enemies, and I would rise to my rightful and God-given place among my people as the Universal Ruler, the Ghengis Khan.
Opening my eyes slowly, listening to the crisp snap of our banners flapping in the breeze, I watched the Tatars amassing in the dusty distance on the plains below. Sitting outside the royal yurt with my trusty saber balanced on my knees, my body flowed and pulsed with the power of my ancestors.
The day would end in victory, or in glorious death.
“Do you ever get the feeling none of this is real?” asked Martin, sitting over to my right with a large wad of half-chewed venison dripping from his mouth. His eyebrows were cocked high as he leaned toward me questioningly, waving the rest of the bloody deer haunch around in circles for emphasis.
While my brother always posted impressive scores in logic and linguistics, he just as consistently bottomed out in existential intelligence.
I groaned. “Dude, you are totally ruining this for me.”
I’d asked him to be my partner in the gameworlds today, at our mother’s urging, but I was starting to realize I’d live, or die, to regret the decision. A sinking feeling settled into my gut.
“You know what I mean,” he continued, diving in to rip another hunk of meat off the bone. “I mean, how can I know that I really exist?”
I studied him, considering what to say next, but right now I needed to prop up our audience stats. Sid and the rest of the guys were counting on me.
“In a nutshell, my friend, you can’t,” I replied, working up an angle to get his head in the game. “I think, therefore I am, as Descartes famously put it in 1644. Since then, really no progress.”
“Mmmmm,” was all Martin could add as he looked skyward. “So how can I be sure that you’re not just some gameworld zombie?”
“You can’t, but from my point-of-view the issue is rather more about you.” I laughed and he joined in. “But if we’re worrying about whether people around us are mindless zombies, then the question is moot, no?”
Martin smiled at that, wiping his greasy face with the back of one hand. Before we could continue, Vicious rode up. Vicious was the proxxi of my best friend, Sid. He looked comical—a seventies British punk rocker, all pasty whiteness and knobby knees poking out from under Mongol battle armor.
A smile spread across my face.
Vicious grimaced, but gamely soldiered on. Trying to keep in character, he leaned toward Martin and said, “Sire, Master Sid asked me to bring you your mount and…ah…ah fook it, mate, yer ’orse is ’ere.”
Robert, my own proxxi, rode up behind him. Wisely, he said nothing as he tossed me the reins to my horse that followed behind him, but just looked toward Vicious and smiled. Vicious scowled, and they both trotted off to get Sid and themselves ready.
I sheathed my saber, Martin dropped the remains of his meal on the floor, and we stood to get ready.
“I know this is a gameworld,” said Martin over the top of his horse, “but seriously, don’t you ever get the sensation, back in the world, that all of this is impossible?”
I laughed.
Back in the world—now there was an idea fraught with complications. In a cosmos already sporting an infinite number of universes, in just one of these we’d begun spawning our own infinity of digital universes. Collectively, they started calling the whole jumble the multiverse on the assumption that infinity and infinity overlapped somewhere.
If there were an infinite number of universes, then logically one of them had to have exactly the train of events that an arbitrary gameworld, like the one we were in now, had going on. So when we flitted into a gameworld, in a sense we were creating windows into the parallel universe the simulation was tracking.
According to some, there was an equivalency of actually being there if a conscious observer couldn’t distinguish the difference. So the question of the day was this: Were we just creating simulated worlds, or were we actually tunneling past the event horizon of our own universe, creating portals into parallel universes?
Perception was reality. Was reality, therefore, equivalent to perception? A slippery slope if there ever was one. Thus the question of this world being real or not was more troubling than it may have at first seemed.
I leaned forward to pat and stroke my horse’s neck, calming it as it strained around to look at me. It knew today was going to be bloody. Taking a grip on my saddle and putting one foot in a stirrup, I returned to Martin’s question. “So what exactly do you mean? Is all of this impossible?”
I knew it would be impossible to win this battle without settling whatever was on his mind. I looked toward him as I swung up onto my horse.
“I’m not stupid, I know all the stuff about the infinite number of alternate bubbly universes, this one springing from that, all spawning into each other,” replied Martin. “But it still doesn’t answer my real question.”
I settled onto my horse and we started off. The Mongolian saddle was designed to allow the horse to find its canter, leaving the rider free to deal with other tasks. It was more of a platform than a saddle, a fighting platform. These guys were way ahead of their time. I twisted around to check my quiver of arrows. “Which is?”
“Why something and not nothing?”
My patience was beginning, as it often did with him, to wear thin. Why was it that human beings had this God-shaped hole in their heads that needed to be filled when the mind grabbed at straws? God wasn’t a part of my life, not anymore.
“What’s going on, you caught religion or something?” I asked, catching glimpses of the Mongol warriors praying to their shamanistic gods as we began trotting through the yurt city.
Rising smoke from the cooking fires enveloped us, and the place was thick with anticipation of the coming bloodshed. I raised my fist in a show of power and victory to those that turned to watch us pass, feeling suddenly angry. “Do you know how stupid it is for you to believe in God?”
Martin shrunk away at the criticism. “What, just because you don’t, you think everyone else is stupid? So you think Mom joining the Elèutheros Christians is stupid? Sid’s a member. You think he’s stupid?”
It wasn’t his fault. “That’s not it. Sid’s different. And don’t drag mum into this.…”
Our mother was disappearing deeper and deeper into her religion, even as the technology here sped further ahead. The Christian Elèutheros sect had gained an incredibly strong following on Atopia, pitching itself against the libertarian ideals that Atopia was founded upon, against what they perceived as the ultimate decay of society. Sid was a part of the Elèutheros hacking community, a somewhat different side to the sect than where my mother was involved.
Honestly, I didn’t quite understand it all.
“You treat everyone like they’re stupid,” complained Martin. “Anyway, religion doesn’t really answer anything; it’s just replacing one nonstarter for another.” He shrugged. “It’s kind of giving up, isn’t it?”
We trotted along for a bit. I said nothing, letting him finish his thoughts while I calmed my own.
“I guess it would be comforting, though, to give in to faith, especially if you really believed in some sort of supernatural evil,” Martin said reflectively as we reached the outskirts of our camp. “But really, what’s it all for?”
“Now you sound like you’re talking about the meaning of life.”
Crap, he was all over the place. I needed his head in the game, not distracted by metaphysics. He was terrible in the gameworlds lately, and I could see why with all this stuff floating around in his head.
I checked my dimstim stats—my fans weren’t exactly digging the philosophical talk.
Best to cut this short and get to the blood and guts.
“Martin,” I said, turning to him and smiling with brotherly love, “I will share with you my personal philosophy on the topic.”
Bouncing up and down in our saddles, I began my performance. “First off, you can’t answer the creation question. You need to double-think it out of your brain.”
We trotted along the front line of my amassing warriors while I let this settle. Martin took out one of his daggers to inspect it.
“Second, the only meaning to life is the one that you give it, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.”
Nonplussed, Martin considered this as he tested the edge of his dagger. I’d saved the best bit for last.
“Finally,” I opined grandly, “we will never resolve our existential angst in our identity world, and this is why we play out here.”
“What, like an escape?” he said, crinkling his nose, rubbing the dagger against his stubble.
“Not just an escape, my friend. It goes much deeper than that. Out there, at home,” I said, pointing toward the sky as if we’d descended from it, which in a sense we had, “you can’t get a satisfactory answer as to whether there is a Creator or if there is a meaning to it all. If you really sit down and think about it, it’ll just give you a headache.”
He shrugged in amiable agreement.
“Here, though, in the gameworlds, in this world—there is a definite Creator. Whoever built this game, they are the Creator here,” I explained. “And there is a purpose—whatever it was they designed the gameworld for. For instance, today, we kick the shit out of the Tatars. That is the God-given purpose of existing here today, and I know this for an indisputable fact.”
A smile began to creep across his face. He put the dagger away in his vest.
“The kicker, my friend, is that this isn’t just a game. If you believe, if you truly believe, then this place becomes real, and we know God and his plan intimately.” I raised one hand in the air and wagged my finger. “So to answer your original question Martin, this is real.”
Martin smiled. I was enjoying it, too, and our audience stats began to rise. My body surged with excitement as my own disbelief melted away. Sid, Robert, and Vicious joined us at the center of the massing troops while I finished my monologue.
“This is not just an escape my friends, not just a game or entertainment! This satisfies and solves a deep-seated existential pain that cannot be answered in any other way!”
The excitement grew in Martin’s eyes.
“Martin!” I cried. “Are you with me?!” Raising my saber and bow, I reached skyward into the morning sunshine. A flock of birds took wing far in the distance. “Are you going to kick some existential ass with me today?”
“I’m with you, Bobby!” he screamed back.
The warriors around us roared, and with that, we galloped off toward the massing Tatars, surging once more unto the breach.
“Today, we ride with God!”
My army thundered across the steppes and into destiny.