The Silent God

The skeletons were still standing where he had left them.

Twelve of them, spaced around the chamber, holding whatever position they had been in when the fight ended. They had done what he needed and would go on doing it indefinitely, because nothing in them was capable of getting tired of it.

Gesbiek snapped his fingers and all twelve tethers went at once.

They came apart where they stood, and the noise of a hundred bones hitting stone went round the chamber and stopped.

He waved a hand and they dissolved into white particles that lifted and thinned and were gone before they reached the ceiling.

Then he was alone, in a room that was perfectly clean and perfectly quiet, which was how an administrator's workspace should be.

It was also, he noted, extremely empty. He filed the observation somewhere low.

He opened the master menu for the region and the whole camp projected itself onto the floor in front of the throne, three-dimensional and live: four hundred and thirty-one green points moving through the mud, still running under the previous administration.

He opened the settings.

[HUNGER_RATE: 200% (HARD MODE)]
[RESOURCE_DISTRIBUTION: 90% TO ELITES]
[AGGRESSION: MAXIMUM]
[MORALE_DRAIN: ENABLED]
[HEALING: DISABLED]

Gesbiek looked at that for a long time.

He had assumed, for his entire life, that the misery of the Red-Tooth Clan was a property of the world. Goblins starved because there was not enough food. Goblins fought because goblins fight. It was simply the shape of things.

It was six lines of configuration, and somebody had set every one of them by hand.

Hunger at double rate. Healing switched off. Ninety percent of everything to the goblins who were already strongest.

Grolm had not been a bad chief. Grolm had opened a menu.

* * * *

Gesbiek found the hunger function.

One line. Perhaps forty characters of it.

It had killed his mother, in the roundabout way that hunger kills, thinning her until an ordinary infection could finish the work, and it was the reason his father had stood up in a war council and asked for the clan to be fed. It had killed Zog over about nine years, slowly, while the old goblin sorted herbs he could not chew. It had been the central fact of every day Gesbiek had lived until he was old enough to eat a beetle made of metal.

He did not lower the value.

He selected the whole function and deleted it.

Gold light went out through the mountain and through the stone walls and across the camp in a ring.

Outside, several hundred goblins stopped what they were doing at the same moment.

The thing in their middles, the one that had been there when they woke and there when they slept and there through every hour in between, simply was not there.

Down in the Bone Pit, a healer at eleven percent who had been lying against the clay with her hands in her lap sat up, and put both hands on her own stomach, and stayed absolutely still, waiting for it to come back.

* * * *

Next he opened the social behaviour tree, and found a driver sitting in it.

[PREDATORY_INSTINCT]

That was the one that made goblins look at each other and see competition. It had been running since before anybody in the camp was born, and it was the reason a guard kicked a worker, and the reason a warrior challenged a lieutenant, and the reason a clan of four hundred had spent generations at war with itself.

He uninstalled it.

Outside, a 2-Blue with his foot already raised over a cowering worker stopped.

The rage went out of him between one instant and the next. He looked down at the goblin on the ground and found that he could not locate the reason he was standing there.

He put his foot down and walked away, unsteady, looking at his own hands.

Across the whole camp the shouting stopped. Not gradually. All of it, at once, leaving behind a silence that nobody currently alive had ever heard.

* * * *

The camp itself was a sty, and it offended him.

[REPLACE MATERIAL: MUD > POLISHED STONE]

The ground shook and hardened and grey pavers went outward from the mountain in rings until every foot of the settlement stood on clean flat stone.

[UPGRADE: TENT > STONE DWELLING]

The rotting hides dissolved and something better came up out of the ground in their place, walls and roofs and doorways rising like things growing at speed.

In under a minute the shantytown was a small stone city.

Then he found the Bone Pit on the map, and the forty-two still in it.

He had walked past that trench with a timer running, and had counted the goblins in it, and had classified them as visual noise for a fight he had been planning.

They were now broken assets sitting inside an otherwise clean system.

He put ten percent of an infinite pool into it.

[RESTORE INTEGRITY]

White light went over the trench and forty-two dying goblins stood up in it. Wounds closed. Bones set. Nine years of malnutrition reversed in about four seconds.

They looked at their own hands. Then at each other. Then, all together, at the mountain.

Someone knelt. Then all of them knelt, faces up, weeping, hands raised toward the stone.

One of them did not kneel.

Meska stood in the middle of forty-one kneeling goblins with her arms at her sides, looking at the mountain, and her hands were opening and closing as though testing whether the fingers had been returned in working order.

[MESKA | HP: 100%]

Gesbiek watched all of it on the map from a throne two hundred yards away and felt very little, and noted that very little was not nothing, and did not pursue it.

* * * *

A settlement needs food, and hunting was inefficient and dangerous and frequently failed.

He opened the spawn menu, selected rations and clean water, designated the central plaza, and set it to repeat at dawn, daily, in quantity sufficient for the population.

Out in the plaza the air folded and crates came into existence, stacked square, and barrels of clear water beside them.

The goblins approached the way you approach something that might not be there. One of them touched a crate and found it solid. Another opened it.

Then they ate.

They ate the way people eat who have never once been full, past the point of comfort and then past the point of sense, crying while they did it, cramming it in with both hands. They did not know it had been made out of nothing. They did not know anything about it except that it was there and it was theirs.

Gesbiek watched a happiness figure climb in the corner of his display.

Five percent. Twenty-three. Forty-seven. Sixty-eight. Ninety-one.

One hundred.

He had solved hunger in his ancestral homeland in about five minutes, and it had felt like tidying a drawer.

* * * *

He did not go outside.

That surprised him slightly when he noticed it. There was a balcony over the main gate. He could have stood on it. Four hundred goblins were on their knees out there looking at the mountain and every one of them would have known who he was within a heartbeat.

He stayed on the throne.

To go out would be to stand among users, and he was no longer one. He was part of what they were standing on.

So he watched them through the map instead, and after a while he began to notice something about the way the dots moved.

They ate. They slept. They went from one place to another and came back.

The paths were short. The paths were the same paths. There was nothing in any of them that had a decision in it, because nothing out there required one any more. No hunger to plan around. No danger to route past. No reason to be anywhere in particular at any particular time.

He had taken the friction out, and the friction turned out to have been most of what they were doing.

*The world is hard, little Gesbiek. Enduring it makes you strong.*

Gesbiek looked at his own silver hands, and at the menu hanging open in the air, and at four hundred and thirty-one perfectly safe green dots going in small circles on polished stone.

Would Zog have called this paradise, or a pen?

He did not have an answer, and he was fairly sure the answer required something that did not appear anywhere on his character sheet.

He tried to feel something about it. He reached for it deliberately, the way you reach for a word you have misplaced.

The impulse arrived at his core, and his core examined it.

[EMOTION: GRIEF]
[PRIORITY: LOW]
[ARCHIVED FOR REVIEW]

And it went away somewhere, filed, not lost exactly, but no longer his to hold.

Gesbiek sat with that.

He had wondered, at various points in the last two years, what he would be at the end of it. He had assumed the answer was *someone nobody could hurt*.

Nobody could hurt him. That part had worked.

* * * *

He zoomed the map out, because the room was quiet and there was nothing left in it to fix.

The Darkwood. The mountains past it. Rivers, valleys, a coastline he had never seen and had not known was there. Human kingdoms with cities in them and roads between the cities.

Further, until the whole continent lay in front of him in wireframe.

[MAP COMPLETION: 15%]
[KNOWN NODES: 47]

Markers everywhere. Cities, nests, ruins, other clans, territories belonging to things he had no names for.

His clan was a dot. The Darkwood, which had taken him weeks to cross on foot and had nearly killed him a dozen times, was a smudge in the corner of a smudge.

The hunger for levels was gone, because there were no more levels. What had replaced it was not smaller.

He wondered whether he could edit a human king. Whether he could open a dragon's properties and set something to false. Whether the entire continent was one large untidy room.

The possibilities were unlimited, and he found the unlimitedness of them more tiring than he had expected.

* * * *

Then, high over the rendered Darkwood, the sky tore.

Not weather. He checked, because weather was a schedule and he could read the schedule now, and nothing was scheduled.

Red pixels bled into the blue of the projection and began to spread outward from the tear like something soaking through cloth.

[EXTERNAL CONNECTION DETECTED]
[SOURCE: OUTSIDE LOCAL NETWORK]
[FIREWALL: BREACHED]

Gesbiek stood up.

Outside the local network. He turned the phrase over and did not care for any of the ways it could be read.

The System was not treating it as an enemy. It had a category for enemies and this was not going in it.

[CLASSIFICATION: VIRUS]
[THREAT LEVEL: CRITICAL]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: QUARANTINE AND DELETE]

He made the ceiling transparent and looked up through fifty feet of solid mountain at the sky.

The clouds were being moved. Not blown. Pushed aside from above by something that had decided they were in the way.

A beam of white and gold came down and struck the forest just outside his new stone walls.

The colour was wrong. Gesbiek had spent his whole life inside a spectrum that ran green, blue, yellow, orange, red, and had recently added silver to it. This was not on that spectrum. It was not on any spectrum the world had.

A figure walked out of the light.

Human. Tall. Plate armour polished to a mirror, gold at the edges, a blue tabard with a white sun on it. A sword at the hip and a shield across the back.

And the movement was wrong.

That was what Gesbiek could not stop looking at. It was too smooth. There was no weight transferring from one leg to the other, no small correction of balance, none of the thousand tiny errors a body makes walking across uneven ground. It moved at a rate the rest of the world was not moving at.

[DESIGNATION: PLAYER]
[USERNAME: SIR_ALARIC]
[LEVEL: 12]
[CLASS: PALADIN]
[WARNING: ADMIN TOOLS MAY NOT FUNCTION]
[WARNING: EXTERNAL CONTROL DETECTED]

Not a monster. Not a person. An avatar, with somebody else's hands on it, somewhere Gesbiek could not reach.

The Knight turned his head. There was no neck involved in the motion, no muscle, just an orientation changing.

He looked directly at the mountain.

Through fifty feet of stone, past a ceiling that Gesbiek had rendered transparent from the inside only, straight at the Throne of Skulls.

He knew exactly where to look, because something had told him.

Gesbiek stood at the top of the dais and registered a sensation he had not experienced since before the chrysalis.

Not fear. Fear required the possibility of being ended, and he had switched that off with a menu.

Uncertainty.

He had spent an evening establishing that everything in this world was a value in a field, and that he could reach every field, and that nothing here could be done to him without his permission.

And something had just walked in from outside the world with warnings attached saying his tools might not work on it.

The line beneath it was worse.

[ADMIN TOOLS MAY NOT FUNCTION]

*May.* The System did not know either.