I had a little too much birthday yesterday, so this story didn’t get out on time, but here it is and I hope you enjoy!
Infinite Frontier
“It’s a game, Michael! Don’t tell me I might lose you to a game! You’re all I have left!” His mother is red-faced, screaming. He had expected her to cry, or run from the room, or beg, but he hadn’t expected the instantaneous rage that he got instead.
“You don’t get it, Mom, it’s not just a game. It’s a new world and I’m gonna be the first one to—“
“It’s a fucking game! Don’t give me that shit!”
She never cursed, and it threw him back. But what threw him back even more is that she was right. Not about it being a game; for him, it was a reality far beyond the petty world of nights and days, with its unsatisfying limits and fuzzy relationships. But she was right that she might lose him. He was going to a place she could not follow, and would not if she could, and from which return was uncertain.
*
Ataraxium is generated in real time by a massively parallel game design A.I. housed in a series of siloed server farms at elevation in the Colorado Rockies, where the cold air helps keep them from overheating, and an onsite nuclear microreactor provides the massive amount of electricity the farm requires, more than used to power a low-tech city of fifty thousand people.
Michael Derottia had been one of the beta players, before anybody knew what it really was. A friend from Reddit had gotten him an invite, and at first he hadn’t been a fan. He booted up his headset, slipped on his tac-gloves, and stepped into what looked and sounded and felt like a typical medieval village he might find in any random period game. The graphics were great, but all the top games had photocell graphics these days.
“Hi!” One of the villagers approached him, a plump and motherly woman with long hair pulled up in a complicated bun. “Welcome to Ataraxium! You can do whatever you want here. Every time you log in to the server, you will begin right here, in the town of Atarax. But, your game won’t reset, so you can return to whatever you were doing and it will be there waiting for you.”
“What’s the object of the game?” Michael spoke to her confidently, much more so than he ever spoke to women in the real world, even ones he wasn’t interested in. This villager was just as vivid and nuanced as a real woman, but somehow she didn’t make him feel self-conscious.
“It depends on what you start doing,” said the villager. “Most games you have to follow a predetermined track, or at least pick one of several tracks that all lead to basically the same destination. Ataraxis isn’t like that. The game builds itself around your action.”
“So, no matter what I do, it becomes part of the game?” Michael took a wider look around and saw dozens of villagers, bent over rows of crops or shoeing horses or walking along paths or minding children.
“That’s right,” she said brightly. “If you ask a farmer for work, you’ll create a farm simulator. If you want quests that involve fighting, just ask around, especially at the Black Brier Inn. Or you can do strange things, things I can’t even think of now, and the game will respond with new rules, new characters, and new spaces to explore. Whatever you want to do or see or play, just ask around, and it’ll appear. The only limit to the game play is what you can dream up to try!”
*
“1890. 1890! Can you believe that? They closed the frontier in 1890! That’s so damn long ago,” says Michael to his mother. She is calmer now, dissociated in fact. Her anger did not move him, and then ran its course as anger must, and now she is hollowed out. He knows that his words are useless at the moment, that nothing he says will even penetrate the wall of her disconnection, but he cannot stop talking.
“Is it time for Mad-Dog yet?” She cranes her head towards the kitchen as she asks. There are lots of twelve ounce bottles of Mad-Dog 20-20 fortified wine in the refrigerator, but they have agreed that she won’t have her first one until at least two P.M.
“Life meant something back then. We had a sense of the unknown. Danger wasn’t a swear word. People were willing to give their lives to things they weren’t sure of, couldn’t be sure of.”
He pauses for her to respond but she doesn’t. She can’t. She woke ashen grey that morning. He helped her from bed, as he always did these days, but for a long moment he couldn’t rouse her, and he thought she was dead. Then she came awake, gulping a sudden breath as her unseeing eyes peeled open, the irises ghostly in the post-dawn glow leaking in around the sides of the curtains.
“By now, everything’s mapped, and what’s not mapped a satellite can see in a few seconds, close enough to read a playing card on the ground. There’s not a single outdoor spot on earth that’s not catalogued and categorized and inspected. There’s no frontier at all anymore, open or closed.”
“Michael, is it time for Mad-Dog yet?” She cranes her head again, and again he doesn’t respond. It’s not time, but saying it’s not time prompts an argument and demands for proof, and is in general a suboptimal way of deal with her repetitious demands.
“They said the internet was the new frontier, but that’s such bullshit. The internet is a neutered dog humping a sofa cushion. It thinks it fucks, but there’s no balls on it at all. It’s mapped just like the earth, and indexed, and searchable and you can point your browser satellite at any part of it in nanoseconds and see everything that’s there.”
“Please don’t leave me, Michael. Please. I’ll die without you.”
“I won’t, Mom.” He wants it to be a lie, but he’s afraid it might be the truth. This morning, when she’d awoken ashen grey and he’d thought she was dead, a part of himself that he’s too afraid to acknowledge had wished she was dead. Then he would have been free. But now she is alive, and the knowledge grips his heart like the fist of a god that he may not leave. He may stay and let somebody else go and live his dream, so that he can take care of this dying old woman who isn’t dying fast enough.
*
He’d never been that into political games. More of a hack-and-slash RPG kind of guy. He favored barbarian types, rage-fueled brawlers with max hit points and the biggest sword the game had on offer. He thought that’s what he’d do with this game, so he headed first for the blacksmith shop to see how much a great big fuck-off sword cost, intending after that to start figuring out how to farm gold, or whatever the in-game currency was.
But when he got to the smithery, there was a crowd already gathered outside, which prevented him from going in. More of a mob than a crowd to be honest, surrounding a hulking, almost gigantic teenaged boy with a vacant look in his eyes, who was sputtering sentence fragments trying to explain himself about something that he wasn’t even being clear enough about for Michael to understand the problem.
Something in the boy’s eyes, though, reminded him of himself. Something in the sputtering aroused his pity, for Michael too—though he read often and was articulate to a fault—often struggled to speak when made the center of attention. And almost before he knew what he was doing, he interposed himself between the mob and the boy, realizing only too late that he had no weapon at all, and was badly outnumbered, and as a neophyte within the game probably didn’t have enough levels yet to beat even one of the mob constituents in a straight up fight.
He could have just walked away. He knew that. They wouldn’t follow him. The game would let him go and do something else, and this boy—who was definitely not real—would disappear from the game and never trouble him again. It’s just that there was something different and subtle and real about these characters, something he couldn’t quite name but also couldn’t deny. And it wasn’t just the sputtering boy, it was the mob, their anger, their hurt, their gathering violence, it seemed real in a way he’d never quite experienced before, because he wasn’t particularly supposed to be doing this.
Yes, that was it. It was that this all seemed incidental. He had chosen it. No dragon-riding big bad had descended upon the town and forced his hand, it was just some boy who was about to get hurt or worse by a mob for—now the story was becoming clear as he spoke with the mob’s leaders—a series of mysterious animal deaths and crop fires that was threatening the town’s livelihood.
And so he found himself making peace, and promising to investigate, and even agreeing to a timeline for his investigation, after which the boy—who was to be held in custody by the local sheriff pending the investigation—would pay for the crimes if no other suspect was forthcoming.
He spent that day and the next several exploring the town, talking to villagers, getting to know the area, and investigating various leads, although this was decidedly not the sort of thing he enjoyed in games. There wasn’t a single fight to be had all week! Somehow this game where you could do anything you wanted had hooked him into trying something new.
After days of investigation, he figured out who was behind the attacks: A jealous lover of the wife of one of the town elders, captured the man—finally, a fight!—and presented the suspect and his evidence before the town council. The boy was released, and tears streamed down his face, and he told Michael that his name was Ruck, and promised to work for Michael and do whatever he could to help him, and Michael realized he had accidentally acquired a sidekick
Somehow in the week Michael had acquired a sword, and some leather armor, and new clothes, and a room at the inn, all without really realizing it. He knew the name of almost everyone in town. And when he walked down the streets, all heads nodded with respect, and it made him feel good in a way that no game had ever made him feel good before.
“You should run for Town Council,” said Ruck one day while they were eating breakfast.
“Yes,” said Michael, who never cared much for political games. “I should.”
*
Michael is painting his mother’s toenails while she sips a bottle of Mad-Dog and watches meme compilations on YouTube. He finds feet disgusting, but she says it makes her feel pretty, and there’s precious few things that make her feel anything happy anymore, so he’s holding his breath and doing a terrible job of it.
To take his mind off his work, he counts votes for the next Atarax Town Council election, scheduled for three days hence in the game. If he really does go on his proposed mission he will have to resign his seat, but he’s holding onto it for now. Plus, he’s got friends and allies on the Council now, and he needs to make sure they win too.
“I can’t wait until your father comes home,” says his mother, snapping him out of his counting reverie. “I’m glad my toes will look pretty when he does, he likes them painted.”
“Me too, Mom,” says Michael. His father has been gone fourteen years, quite possibly dead by now, and his return is not imminent, but Michael has learned the fruitlessness of argument on this topic. It only upsets her, and even the time he convinced her that her husband was not on his way, she forgot by the next day.
“When we’re all together again, I want to go to the rose garden,” she muses. “When spring comes around. What month is it right now?”
“It’s December,” he says without affect.
“Oh that’s good timing,” she says brightly. “He’ll be home soon and we’ll have time to get him settled in before spring, and then we’ll go see the roses.”
“Sounds good, Mom.” A flush of hatred for her rises in his chest, and he feels a pang of guilt about it, but it always happens when she acts out the part of a tired old woman losing her marbles. The characters in Ataraxis never do that. They are always subtle and specific and almost hyperreal, providing sharp contrast to how often merely real humans embody trite cliches.
He finishes her last nail, takes her foot in his hand, and blows on the toes to dry them. A pair of mismatched fuzzy socks waits to be put back on her feet once the polish is dry.
“Are you thinking about your game?” She is suddenly lucid, staring right into his eyes. She has these moments, where the mother he remembers surfaces, often after a bottle or so of Mad-Dog. He starts to lie, but then lets out a sort of ‘heh’ sound and glances down, trying to think of how to respond.
“A mother knows,” she continues. “Michael I want you to have a real life. I want you to stay here with me and find your way in the real world, not disappear into that game forever. Promise me.”
He hesitates. He knows that if he promises, she will forget. The moments of lucidity never last. He won’t be held to anything. But he worries that he will hold himself. He worries that if he promises now, that will be the excuse his brain needs to forego the mission he has set for himself, inside Ataraxis, where he feels most real, most alive. It frightens him, this mission, in a way that nothing out here in the so-called real world frightens him.
“I can’t promise, Mom. I’m not leaving tomorrow, and I’m not leaving the next day, but I can’t promise I won’t. I wish you understood.”
A tear falls down her cheek, but she turns aside without saying more.
*
Every time he enters the game and wakes up in Atarax, in the house he has acquired there, it feels like waking up from a dream. He can hear Ruck out in the yard, singing tunelessly to himself while he chops wood and does other chores. He can hear the chickens they’re now raising together clucking, and the townspeople moving to and fro on the street outside. He can feel his body, stronger and fitter than in the real world. Strong enough to take on anything, even a mission that seems like a death sentence.
Once he’d acquired a seat on the Town Council, the political games were just starting. There were an endless series of balancing acts within the community, with residents coming and going all the time, squabbling and wedding and offending and grievancing. And of course, the moment he asked if there were other towns around and if Atarax ever had problems with them, there were and they did.
Michael was unsure whether all the other characters were A.I.-generated, or if there was a player-versus-player aspect to the game, like were other town councils stocked with other real humans, or was he in his own version of the game, and every other player had a completely different one? The computer characters were so good and so real now that he couldn’t tell for sure, and he made a point of not finding out.
He introduced a motion in the Town Council to propose the formation of a Regional Council, in conjunction with the Town Councils of the nearest five town to Atarax. When his motion was accepted, he formed delegations to those other councils to inform them of the opportunity. He investigated relationships and family connections between Atarax citizens and members of those other Councils, then stocked his delegations with promising allies who could make personal pitches and receive favorable hearings.
The delegations went out, and he monitored them, and waited, and supported his fellow Town Council members through the anxiety the project caused. He displayed a level of emotional intelligence he’d never evinced in the outside world. He realized that he had started to call it “The Outside World” and never “The Real World” anymore, though he wasn’t sure when that happened.
His proposal was accepted, and he became the first representative from Atarax to the Five Mountains Regional Council, named for the five peaks that surrounded the group of six towns on the council.
At the first meeting of the Regional Council, Michael started to wonder if there were other regional councils from areas beyond their five mountains.
Outside the game, he lays awake at night, and wonders how far the map in Ataraxia goes.
When he wakes up in Atarax, he steps out of his house and looks to the horizon, to a point beyond the horizon that he cannot see, that he is not sure yet exists, will not exist until he arrives there.
He wonders, if he simply started riding his horse in any direction, and never turned from his course, would the game-creation-A.I. create an infinity of towns and regions and nations in that direction? Would he reach an impassable sea? Would he arrive at the edge of a disc world and stare over its edge into an infinite blackness? Or would he eventually approach Atarax from the opposite direction and arrive once more where he first began?
*
Michael and his mother are laughing together. It doesn’t happen much anymore, but they have a similar sense of humor, and it used to happen all the time. They would watch absurdist sketch comedy together when she was putting him to bed and they would howl until tears streamed down their faces and his father was standing outside in the hallway shaking his head at them.
Now he is putting her to bed, and they are sitting on the big chair next to her bedroom window, looking out at a squirrel trying to stuff acorns into the base of a portable basketball hoop leftover from Michael’s childhood through a hole in the top intended to be filled with water as ballast. The problem is that the base of the hoop is already completely full of acorns, and there’s not room to stuff in a single acorn more. The squirrel keeps trying, and the acorn pops back out and falls to the ground, and the squirrel is screaming at it in frustration as he picks it up off the ground and returns to the hole to try again.
Michael and his mother are crying from laughter, gales of it, an unstoppable tide of mirth that neither one wants to end. There is no confusion here, no impending loss, no sunsetting, no holes in memory, just the shared love and warmth of a son and his mother, a mother and her son.
The squirrel finally gives up, and takes his acorn on his chittering way to some other hidey-hole that is hopefully less stuffed. Michael and his mother are still laughing as she climbs into bed and he tucks her in.
“I love you, Michael,” she says, without subtext. She is not asking him not to leave her, and it is the most gut-wrenching moment he can imagine. Her offering this love while asking for nothing wrecks him in a way that all the guilt trips in the world could not possibly.
“I love you too, Mom,” he replies, and it is the plain truth. He cannot leave her. He knows now he will not. He will stay with her and watch the squirrels with her until she dies, which the doctors say may be years yet.
*
Michael has become a thought leader in Ataraxis, a respected man, a honcho. Thus, when he turns his eyes to the horizon and wonders what lies beyond it, other eyes soon turn as well, and other wonderings begin.
Soon, another member of the regional council proposes an exploration party, to head West into the setting sun and not to return until they reach the end of the known world. The idea spreads through the Five Mountains Region like wildfire, a great undertaking in their own lifetime.
The obvious question is then raised: Who will lead such a party?
Michael’s name is put forward and immediately seconded. He is honored, but there is a catch. Every time Michael exits Ataraxis to return to the outside world and then returns, he wakes up in his own house, in the center of the town of Atarax.
If he is to lead the exploration party, he will have to stay in the game indefinitely.
Michael investigates this possibility in the outside world, and it does indeed seem possible. There are others who live inside alternate realities, for weeks and months on end. There are machines which can manage bodily functions and provide sustenance, and there are services which will send technicians to check in on the machines to make sure they continue to function. These machines and these services are surprisingly affordable, and Michael can in fact afford them.
Michael puts off the decision as long as he can. He stands before the Regional Council and demurs, questions whether he is worthy of the honor. Every hesitation only raises his esteem, and makes them more certain that he is the man for the job.
Finally, the time comes, and he can demur no longer. He must either accept the commission or pass it to another, and forego the most meaningful opportunity that has ever come into his life.
*
Michael and his mother are sitting in the backyard on rickety lawn chairs, watching a sunset in silence. She is babbling, as she does at Sunset. He is responding only with murmurs, as he has learned that interrupting her or trying to make sense of her raving only upsets them both.
Since making the decision to stay here in the outside world with her until she dies, he has felt peace. After she goes to sleep that night, he will enter Ataraxis and tell the Five Mountains Regional Council that the commission of exploration should pass to someone else, and when that is done, his place there will be smaller.
But perhaps that is a good thing, he thinks to himself. After all, it is only a game. The outside world is more real, more meaningful, more present for not shaping itself to his whim. The frustrations of the merely real are the anchors that keep a human boat from drifting off to sea.
“Michael?” His mother’s voice is suddenly different, directed at him rather than a burbling part of the sunset soundscape. She is speaking to him, directly, and when he looks up, he sees that her eyes are fixed on him, focused in a way he hasn’t seen in a long time.
“Yeah, Mom?” He tries to make his tone neutral, not wanting to disturb her sudden lucidity.
“You have to go.”
“Go where?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember things so good like I used to, but I know there’s somewhere you have to go, and I didn’t want you to go. I remember yelling at you about it. But you have to go. Don’t spend your life here on me, I’ll be fine. Put me in a home, or do whatever you have to do, but go and live your life how you want to live it. I’ll be gone soon enough myself, the sooner the better, off to explore the infinite. You go too.”
His pulse was instantly jacked, pounding in his throat. His hands grew numb. His tongue was heavy. All the coping thoughts he’d been thinking a moment before seemed esoteric and childish now. Ataraxis awaited. The Infinite Frontier awaited.
“I love you, Mom,” he said, with tears welling up in his eyes.
“I love you, Michael,” she says, also crying, reaching for him.
They embrace, and for one more moment he feels tiny and safe in her arms.
*
Michael awakes in Atarax, in the house he has come to know so well, and it feels like the first time he has ever seen it, for now it is truly home.
END
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interesting responses by the game to Michael