The Source Code

The beetle got away.

Gesbiek was not proud of this. He had gone back for it with every intention of being efficient, and had discovered that four hours of being chased across a ravine by a goblin who wanted him dead had taken something out of his hands. The flint went in at a bad angle. The beetle objected and left.

So he was still hungry, and the cooldown from yesterday's nine cores had not run out, and the ambient mana of the Blue Zone came in through his skin and kept him upright without doing anything else useful at all.

He went deeper because there was nothing else to do.

And then, walking, he noticed that the forest had stopped.

* * * *

It did not thin out. It did not die back. There was no boundary of struggling plants giving way to bare ground, because that would have been a thing the world was doing, and this was a thing the world had failed to do.

One step the ferns were glowing and swaying. The next step there was a tree in front of him with no bark on it.

Not stripped. Not dead. There had never been bark. It was a smooth grey cylinder coming up out of the ground, perfectly circular in section, without a knot or a branch or a mark anywhere on it.

[OBJECT: PLACEHOLDER_TREE_04]
[TEXTURE: MISSING | COLLISION: ENABLED]

The mana stopped at the same moment. Not fading. Stopping, the way a sound stops when someone shuts a door on it. All the background pressure that had been leaning on him since he came out of the cliff simply was not there.

And with it went every other sound in the world.

No insects. No wind in anything. No small movements in undergrowth, because there was no undergrowth.

Gesbiek stood at the edge of it with his heart going hard, and understood that he had walked off the finished part of the map.

He put a foot forward onto the grey ground and nearly went over backwards.

There was no grip at all. His claws found nothing to hold, because there was nothing at that scale for them to hold, and his foot simply continued in the direction he had sent it.

[TERRAIN: UNRENDERED]
[FRICTION COEFFICIENT: 0.00]

He got his balance back through a sequence of movements he was glad nobody witnessed, and after that he did not walk. He skated, shifting his weight in small careful increments and sliding to a halt against whatever was available.

Off to his left, a hill went up at an angle no hill has ever gone up at, made of flat triangular faces that met at hard edges, a shape that had been described but never softened.

To his right a stream was not moving. It was a rectangular block of blue with a flat top, sitting in a channel, going nowhere.

His stomach turned over, which he found interesting. Something in a goblin evolved for beetles and wolves had looked at all this and lodged a complaint. Zog had taught him a great many rules about the natural world and not one of them had allowed for the possibility that the world was constructed and the construction was visible from certain angles.

Things floated as he went. A patch of grass ten feet up, swaying in a wind that did not exist here. A rock hanging at eye level, rendered in beautiful detail, perfectly motionless. A root reaching out of nothing and ending mid-reach.

He put his hand out to the rock and his hand went through it.

No resistance. No cold. It was a picture of a rock, with nothing behind the picture.

Gesbiek stood in the middle of it all and felt something he had a great deal of practice at.

In the clan he had been an outcast because of a stone in his chest. Here he was something worse and much smaller: an intruder in a room that had not been finished, in a house nobody had known he could enter.

He went on, because he had been going on for some time now and had got into the habit.

* * * *

The cube sat in the middle of a grey expanse with nothing else in it.

It was black. Not dark. Black in the way that a hole is black, taking in light and giving none of it back, so that looking at it produced the sensation of a piece missing from the front of his eyes.

Six feet on every side, and every edge exactly as long as every other edge, and it hovered three inches off the ground without any visible interest in doing so.

The System put up a notification, and the notification was gold, which was a colour Gesbiek had not seen it use.

[DISCOVERY: SOURCE CODE NODE]
[CLASSIFICATION: TERMINAL ACCESS POINT]

His chest began to shake.

Not pulse. Shake, hard enough that his ribs registered it as a complaint, and the silver in the cracks came up so bright that it threw his own shadow out behind him across the grey.

Whatever lived under the grey shell had recognised the cube. It had opinions about the cube. It wanted to be closer to the cube, and it was expressing this by trying to get out through the front of him.

He walked the last twenty feet with a hand pressed flat over his own chest.

Snarl could not have seen this. That thought arrived very clearly and very calmly. Neither could Grolm, with all that red burning in him. They would have walked across this ground, if they could have reached it, and seen nothing at all, because whatever sorted the world into things worth noticing had never included this in the list.

Only a mistake could see the door.

Gesbiek reached out and touched it.

There was no surface. His fingers went in, and then his hand, and then something took hold of him and pulled.

* * * *

He came out standing in white.

It went in every direction without ending. No walls, no ceiling, no floor, and yet there was something solid under his feet that his eyes refused to admit existed. The air smelled of ozone and lightning, which was the smell of the beetle, which was the smell that had been coming off his own skin for three weeks.

In the middle of it stood a silver pedestal ten feet high with an interface floating above it, and streams of data pouring down through the air in green and blue and red and gold, too fast to follow.

Gesbiek walked toward it and his footsteps made no sound.

The data went past in fragments he could half catch.

[WEATHER_SYSTEM: RAIN_SCHEDULE_NORTH]
[TEMPERATURE: 14.2C | WIND: 3.7 M/S]

[GOBLIN_POPULATION: 432]
[RED_TOOTH_CLAN: 431 | GREY_VARIANTS: 1]

[NEXT_BEETLE_SPAWN: 00:04:37]
[BEAR_RESPAWN_COOLDOWN: 7D 02:14:53]

Gesbiek stopped walking.

Rain schedule.

Zog had prayed to the Cloud Spirits. Every dry season, for as long as Gesbiek had known him, the old goblin had dragged that bad leg out to the edge of the camp and cut his own palm and let it drip into the dust and asked, politely, with the correct words in the correct order, for rain.

Gesbiek stood in a white room and looked at the Cloud Spirits.

They were a list. They ran on a schedule that had been decided somewhere else, and they had never once heard anything, because there was nothing in them capable of hearing.

It explained a great deal about the quality of divine intervention in his life. The spirits had never answered because they were not spirits. They were a function, and the function did not accept requests.

He found he could not decide whether that was better or worse than being ignored on purpose.

Further down the column, one line sat on its own.

[PLAYER_001: GESBIEK]
[LOCATION: SOURCE_CODE_NODE_04]
[THREAT_LEVEL: MINIMAL]

He looked at that for a while too.

Minimal. He supposed he could not argue.

* * * *

The pedestal was ten feet high and built for something considerably larger than a goblin, which struck him as an oversight given who was standing in front of it.

He got his claws into seams that were almost too fine to exist and climbed, and hauled himself over the top edge, and the interface bloomed open in front of him as he came within reach.

[WORLD PARAMETERS]
[ENTITY MANAGEMENT]
[SPAWN CONTROLS]
[ENVIRONMENTAL SETTINGS]
[PLAYER DATA]

Gesbiek knelt on top of a silver pedestal in an infinite white room and understood exactly what he was looking at.

He could delete hunger. Not find food. Delete the thing itself, the parameter, out of the world, so that no goblin anywhere ever felt it again.

He could reach into Entity Management and find one entry among four hundred and thirty-two and remove it, and there would never have been a Grolm.

He could give himself a Red Shard. He could give himself three.

His hand was shaking when he put it on the surface.

The data stopped scrolling. The white dimmed to a soft blue, and something spoke, and it came from every direction at once and had no voice in it at all.

[USER DETECTED]
[INITIATING BIOMETRIC SCAN]

A grid of light came down over him and went from his skull to his feet, and Gesbiek held absolutely still and thought, with great clarity, that he had watched this world delete a tunnel while he was inside it.

[IDENTITY: GOBLIN_GREY_VARIANT]
[SPECIES: COMMON_MONSTER]
[EXPECTED_CLEARANCE: NONE]

[ANOMALY DETECTED]
[ADMIN SIGNATURE FOUND: SILVER_CORE (FOREIGN_OBJECT)]

The interface went from blue to green, and more of it opened, unfolding outward.

[WORLD EDIT MODE]
[ACCESS GRANTED]

Gesbiek reached for it.

His fingertip touched the surface.

The whole thing went crimson.

A padlock came down across the interface with a sound like a very heavy door closing in a place with no echo, and every green menu shattered into red.

[ACCESS DENIED]
[REQUIRED CLEARANCE: LEVEL 100]
[CURRENT LEVEL: 5]

The rejection came out of the pedestal as force. It knocked him off the top and he fell ten feet onto a floor that was not there and hit it anyway, and lay on his back with no air in him, looking up.

The number hung above him, enormous, pulsing gently.

One hundred.

The key was real. The System had checked and confirmed it and said so out loud. It simply did not consider him strong enough to be trusted with what the key opened, which was, he was forced to admit while lying flat on his back, not an unreasonable position for it to take.

Ninety-five levels. He had spent three weeks and a hundred and twenty-six kills clearing four of them, and the fourth had taken longer than the first three combined.

Something came up out of his chest that he had not known was in there.

"I have the key," he screamed at it, in goblin, his voice going ragged in a room with nothing to carry it. "I have it. I have it. Let me in."

He hit the invisible floor with both fists, and the impacts made small dull sounds and went nowhere.

[ACCESS DENIED]

He lay there until he stopped.

* * * *

Then the red faded, and something amber came up in its place, and locks began to click somewhere in sequence.

[ADMIN KEY: VALID]
[INITIATING BACKGROUND INSTALLATION]

A line of gold light came off the console and went into his forehead.

It felt like something molten being poured directly into the space behind his eyes. Gesbiek got both hands around his own skull and screamed again, and data went into him in a torrent, instructions and protocols and pathways he had no framework for and would be finding for months.

Then it stopped.

Something settled permanently into the corner of his vision, and he knew without being told that it was not going to move again.

[QUEST: ASCENSION PROTOCOL]
[OBJECTIVE: REACH LEVEL 100]
[REWARD: FULL ADMIN ACCESS]
[STATUS: 5/100]
[THIS QUEST CANNOT BE ABANDONED]

The voice came one last time.

[ADMIN TOOLS: TIER-1 UNLOCKED]
[REMOTE ACCESS ENABLED]
[YOU DO NOT NEED TO RETURN HERE]
[YOU ARE NOW A WALKING TERMINAL]

The white folded in on itself, and the pedestal went out, and something took him by the whole body and put him back.

* * * *

He was standing on frictionless grey with the black cube in front of him, sealed, showing no sign that it had ever done anything else.

Gesbiek's balance went and he caught it, sliding, and stood there breathing.

His chest had gone quiet. The silver in the cracks pulsed once and settled to a steady low glow, and for the first time since the pond it did not feel like something straining at a shell. It had been given what it came for. Not all of it. Enough.

He brought up the numbers without needing to think about how.

[LEVEL 5 | XP 28.5% | CLASS: ADMINISTRATOR]
[ASCENSION PROTOCOL: 5/100]

Ninety-five levels. Thousands of cores. An exponential curve he had already run the arithmetic on once and had not enjoyed.

At the end of it, a console that could delete hunger from the world.

Gesbiek turned his back on the cube and began the long careful skate toward the tree line, where the blue was glowing and things were moving and something out there had a core in it worth fifteen percent.

He had been hungry his entire life, and for five years of it that had been the only thing in him at all.

Now there was a number in the corner of his eye that was not going away.

It was, he thought, a considerable improvement on hunger. It came with directions.