The Starfighter Invitation

51 packet loss

If you wake without a soul, surely you should be able to tell the difference.

I had expected to be a remnant of myself, acquiring a zombie-like shuffle, a hollow gnawing at my insides, something. Instead, I was as refreshed as ever. My conversation with Dio was a tear-filled yesterday, and I felt fine.

What if none of it had been true? No end of the world, no time-travelling Cycogs, no galactic collective? Dream Speed revealed as a vast psychological experiment to discover how many people would join a Chocobo future.

That would be the best possible news.

But perhaps the transfer had failed? The lifeboat had left without me. I would die in the bombardment, or struggle through thirty years of disaster, only for the ships to come.

After staring at the ceiling for at least ten minutes, working through practical steps for facing a chain of disasters, I decided that maybe there was something wrong after all. I’m not an overly dramatic person, but nor am I so even-keeled as to picture the slow starvation of my parents without a little internal shrinking.

Standing was an experience. It wasn’t difficult, and my limbs had lost no energy, but they felt disconnected, as if the ground did not stay firm beneath my feet. A nebulous sense of time limits pushed me along. How long had Dio said we had? With the distortion of the game, I could have only minutes left. Whether I was a remnant, or the whole of me in a state of shock, procrastinating in my room did not seem to be the way to deal with it.

The scent of fresh coffee sent me searching for my parents. The living room was silent, the TV turned to an early morning weather report with the sound muted. Did my mother have work today? I checked their room, found no-one, and returned in confusion, only to spot them dozing on the couch.

"Morning," I said, and my voice sounded so odd I said it again with more strength. "Morning."

My mother shifted slightly, but didn’t wake. My father was very still. I put my hand on his shoulder. Warm.

Talking to Dio, I’d kept cringing away from the question of whether my parents would be candidates, but there was no reason not to think it. They hadn’t trained as devotedly as I had, but they’d still made it to space, and they met all Dio’s other admittedly vague criteria. No young children. Considerate. Probably able to recover from grief.

Because I’d been busy with the System Challenge, it was likely most candidates had accepted their offers long before I’d returned to my Snug. Were these remnants of my parents, shells running short of energy, dying before my eyes?

I decided not to know. Let them sleep. I could only hope they’d be able to stay together, whatever happened.

The weather report had been replaced by an image of Arlen, head thrown back, the whole of his body expressing song. Would Dio allow Imoenne and Arlen to travel as a pair, even though they weren’t a couple? Was Imoenne, so brilliant and so shy, what the Cycogs were looking for with their inoculation?

I considered the rest of my guild. Silent would surely be a candidate, and Nina Stella. Perhaps they’d meet again, in a distant future. And Far was a survivor—he’d not hesitate. What about TALiSON? Or Tornin and Amelia? Surely—but then there was Sprocket.

I found I could feel sad. It was a distant, scratchy sensation, but there. Sprocket’s real name was Dylan, and he hadn’t been quite twelve when I joined the guild, and he’d grown from a funny, eager kid to a brash, faux-confident…kid, and even if he’d been in a politer phase, he hadn’t been strong at the lan parts of the game

Not wanting to grade the survival chances of all the people I’d ever known, I buried myself in a coat and went outside to the pale pastels of an unseasonably cold dawn.

The road felt soap bubble light beneath my feet, and I thought not about my guild, but all the people who had never played Dream Speed. Those who would most appreciate the fantasy of benevolent support offered by The Synergis were least likely to have had a steady internet connection, a GDG cowl, or even somewhere safe to sleep. They would all die now, gamers and non-gamers, all but the tiny percentage who would survive the fall, and the infinitesimally smaller number who, unknowing, had played for their lives and won.

Won.

Beating the System Challenge would have been the hollowest of victories. Just content to keep us occupied while the Cycogs observed how we behaved, making no difference to what happened next. Perhaps I felt so disconnected because I still couldn’t rid myself of the conviction that coming first would have made a difference, that there had existed some way to save us all, and I’d failed to find it. I hadn’t even yelled at Dio, or tried to change ter mind. Change the future, undo ter species' creation, sacrifice everything for the Bios of the past, instead of the ones te knew.

The world had grown lighter around me, but still had not thrown off shadow beneath the pearling sky. Ahead I could see the shape of my Oma’s house, and I wondered if I was walking there, for a moment of reconciliation that would be some sort of achievement to balance out devastation.

Where did Oma stand against the Cycog’s criteria? I would never associate her gruff resolution with polite, but her curt nods and grim reserve had at their core a system of stripped-back courtesy. I liked the idea of her striding regally through The Synergis. I walked past her house.

Overhead, white lines made truth of doom. Three, no four, arcing almost horizontal. More behind me. Dio hadn’t lied. Life as we know it ceases to be.

The sky was falling.

The road no longer felt like soap bubbles. Legs heavy, I crossed a stile onto what had once been my family’s farm, and followed the fence line to an old stone bench that had sat outside a shed that no longer existed.

I’d wanted to win. I’d been ready to save everyone. But Dream Speed was an MMO, designed to keep people occupied. There never had been a way to win. The point had simply been to play.

To be a Chocobo.

A canary.

To be saved.