1.

Ident.i.ty: Bobby Baxter I AM TEMUJIN, great warrior of the Mongol clan of the Ong Khan. The year is 1198 and the heat of the summer solstice has baked the steppes dry and cracked. We will soon replenish Mother Earth and soak Her with the blood of our enemies, and I will rise to my rightful and G.o.d-given place among my people as the Universal Ruler, the Ghengis Khan.

Opening my eyes slowly, I listened to the crisp snapping of our banners flapping in the breeze and watched the Tatars ama.s.sing in the dusty distance on the plains below. Sitting outside the royal yurt with my trusty saber balanced on my knees, my body was flowing and pulsing with the power of my ancestors.

Today would end in victory, or in glorious death.

"Bob, do you ever get the feeling none of this is real?" asked Martin, sitting over to my right with a great wad of half chewed venison dripping from his mouth. His eyebrows were c.o.c.ked high as he leaned towards me with the question, waving the rest of the b.l.o.o.d.y deer haunch around in circles for emphasis.

While my brother had always scored great in logic and linguistics, he'd just as consistently scored extremely low 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 the urging of our mother, but I was feeling like I'd live, or die, to regret the decision. A sinking feeling settled into my gut.

"Yeah I know, but, you know what I mean," he continued, enthusiastically diving in to rip another hunk of meat off the bone. "I mean, how can I know that I really exist?"

I studied him carefully, deciding 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 nutsh.e.l.l, 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 philosophically as he looked skywards. "So how can I be sure that you're not just some gameworld zombie?"

"Again, my friend, you can't," I replied. "Although 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 rather 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 my best friend Sid's proxxi. A seventies British punk rocker, in his best pasty whiteness, looked awfully comical with k.n.o.bby knees poking out from under Mongol battle armor. The leather helmet must have been h.e.l.l on his spiky hair.

A big smile spread across my face.

Vicious could sense my amus.e.m.e.nt and grimaced, but gamely soldiered on. Trying to keep in character, he leaned towards Martin and said, "Sire, Master Sid asked me to bring you your mount and...ah...ah f.o.o.k it, mate, yer horse is 'ere."

Right behind him rode up my proxxi Robert, also bringing my mount. Wisely, he said nothing as he tossed me the reigns, looking towards Vicious and smiling. Vicious scowled back, 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 mean, I know this is a gameworld," said Martin over the top of his horse, "but don't you ever get the feeling, 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 sp.a.w.ning our own infinity of digital universes. Collectively, they'd begun calling the whole jumble the multiverse, on the a.s.sumption 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 to create portals into parallel universes?

Perception was reality. Was therefore, reality equivalent to perception? A slippery slope if there ever was one. Thus the question of this world being real or not was rather more troubling than it may have 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 b.l.o.o.d.y. Taking a grip on my tall wooden-framed saddle, with 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 towards him as I swung up onto my horse.

"Look, I'm not stupid, I know all the stuff about the infinite number of alternate bubbly universes, this one springing from that, all sp.a.w.ning into each other," replied Martin. "Whatever. It still doesn't answer my real question."

I settled comfortably into my saddle and we started off. The Mongolian saddle was designed to allow the horse to choose 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 had been 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 often with him, to wear thin. Why was it that human beings had this G.o.d-shaped hole in their heads that needed to be filled when the mind grabbed at straws? G.o.d certainly 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 G.o.ds as we began trotting through the yurt city.

Rising smoke from the cooking fires enveloped us, and the place was thick with the tension of the coming bloodshed. I raised my fist in a show of power and victory to those that turned to watch me pa.s.s. I felt suddenly angry.

"Do you know how stupid it is that you'd believe in G.o.d?"

Martin shrunk away at the criticism. "What, just because you don't, you think everyone else is stupid? So you think mum joining the Eleutheros is stupid? Sid is a member, do you think he's stupid?"

I sighed. It wasn't his fault.

"No, that's not it. Sid's different. And don't drag mum into this..."

Our mother had been disappearing further and further into her religion, even as the technology had sped further ahead. The Christian Eleutheros 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 Eleutheros hacking community, a somewhat different side to the sect than my mother. I didn't quite understand it all.

"You always treat everyone like they're stupid," he interrupted, shaking his head. "Anyway, that doesn't really answer anything, it's just replacing one non-starter for another." Martin shrugged. "It's kind of giving up, religion, isn't it?"

We trotted along for a bit. I said nothing, letting him finish his thoughts while I calmed my own down.

"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," I replied.

c.r.a.p, he was all over the place and I needed his head in the game, not distracted with metaphysics. He'd been terrible in the gameworlds lately, and I could see why with all this stuff floating around in his head.

I checked my dimstim stats and my fans weren't digging the philosophical talk. I'd better 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."

He shrugged and smiled as we bounced up and down. 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 ama.s.sing 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," I continued, "and don't let anyone tell you any different."

Martin considered this, nonplussed 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 ident.i.ty 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 towards 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, right?"

He shrugged his 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 s.h.i.t out of the Tatars. That is the G.o.dgiven 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 G.o.d and his plan intimately." I raised one hand into the air and wagged my finger. "So to answer your original question Martin, this is real."

Martin smiled ever wider. I was enjoying it, too, and our audience stats began to gain. My body surged with excitement, and my disbelief melted away into this reality. Sid, Robert and Vicious joined us at the center of the ma.s.sing troops as I finished my monologue.

"This is not just an escape my friends, this is not just a game!" I shouted. "This is not just 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?!"

I raised my saber and bow, reaching skywards into the early morning sunshine. A flock of birds took to wing far in the distance.

"Are you going to kick some existential a.s.s with me today?"

"I'm with you Bob!" Martin screamed.

The warriors around us roared, and with that, we galloped off towards the ma.s.sing Tatars, surging once more unto the breach.

"Today, we ride with G.o.d!"

My army thundered across the steppes and into destiny.

2.

WHAT WAS I AGAIN? I felt funny, disconnected, discom-BOB-ulated. Giggling, I looked down at myself, trying to focus my meandering mind. I had the shape of a giant yellow blob...wait, more like a giant yellow BOB...heh heh heh...with plastic skin, floating amid other aimlessly drifting blobs. Taking a deep breath, my blobness expanded and then contracted.

That was very satisfying, I thought, so I did it again, and a sense of relaxation began to soak through my membranes. My consciousness slipped backwards and sideways through time and s.p.a.ce.

Another smaller blob, blue, collided with me, interrupting my introspection. The blue blob took a liking to me, and like two oil drops meeting on a watery surface, it began to merge into me, its blueness fusing with my yellowness to produce a bulging green smudge on my side. I tasted fresh blueberries in the back of my mouth.

Reaching out to the other blobs nearby, I discovered that I could swim through the goo and sweep them aside or towards me with some phantom telekinesis, tasting them as I went. And so began the game of collecting the tastiest blobs towards me, generating a flurry of savory color that mottled into my body as I twisted and spun through the rainbow rain.

After frothing things up so much, I couldn't see anymore, so I stopped to let things settle. And the tiny blobs tickled all over as they floated up past me. I shivered. But these weren't blobs, they were bubbles, and everything smelled so suddenly salty that I realized I was actually in the ocean.

Shafts of sunlight were stabbing down from the airy world above, to fade into the watery blackness below. I looked down at myself again to jiggle my newly hatched tendrils, and with an excited rush began wriggling off at full steam towards a ma.s.s of phosph.o.r.escent creatures dancing nearby in the voluminous darkness.

A translucent worm popped into view beside me so I halted.

Both of us were frozen amid specks of slowly sinking organic detritus that hung soundlessly in a stopmotion cloud around us. The worm snacked on one of the specks, and then another, watching me sideways. Curiouser and curiouser.

"Bob," said the worm. "Bob, hey buddy! Is that you?"

Yes, I thought, I am Bob.

"Yeah, I'm Bob. I mean, yeah, it's me," I replied, dazed and confused in a happy sort of way.

"Bob, it's me, Sid. Where have you been? It's been crazy down here. You should have been there for the last set! It was freaking intense. Things got a little weird for a while there and then I suddenly thought, jeez, where's Bob? And so I came over here to clear my head, and whammo, there you were. Crazy, huh?"

I giggled as my mind seeped into the here and now. That's right. I'd come here with Sid, out to Humungous Fungus beyond The Looking Gla.s.s. We'd dropped into this chillworld to watch the slingshot test fire as part of the sensorgy party that'd been going on for a few days.

Memories oozed into my amoebic brain.

"Hey Sid, wazzzzzup?" was all I could think to say.

"Not much, man, not much at all," Sidworm giggled back. "Hey, they're about to start the slingshot test, you ready to go?"

"Giddy up."

The sensorgy transmogrification of the slingshot weapons test was still resonating hard as we relaxed at the peripheries of Humungous Fungus. The fiery might of the weapons demonstration had been funneled into a multisensory party mash-up that all the pssi-boys and pssi-girls had been waiting weeks for, but now it was over and a post-party depression had begun to sink in.

Most of our friends were emo-p.o.r.ning their way down from their highs, but I preferred to stick with the old school process.

"That was intense, man!" glowed Sid-worm. We were floating through a patch of dimensionless deprivation s.p.a.ce, trying to cool off our nervous systems.

I munched on some mouth candy at the edge of the dimensionless s.p.a.ce, trying to think of what I was trying to think about, and then, sudden clarity as the lost idea reformed itself. My disembodied mind latched firmly onto the thought like a drowning man at sea finding a life raft, my consciousness pulling itself up for a breath of fresh air.

"Oh yeah, hey, Sid, so do you really think I should talk to him? I mean, it's not going to make a difference anyway."

"Absolutely my friend, I think this is more about you, about your experience. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah, I guess so," I replied, unconvinced.