Goddess Watch: A LitRPG/GameLit Adventure Novel Read online

  I tried to talk to the woman, but after a few attempts, I gave up. Even craning my neck I couldn’t see her expression, but I was sure it was disinterested at best. Once again, I was a line on a sheet, not a person.

  We traveled in an elevator and got off on the fourteenth floor. I was rolled down to a desk, where a bracelet was attached to my wrist. My computer was taken off the gurney.

  “Excuse me, I need that. It’s got my life on it.” I tried to smile.

  “No personal electronics allowed in the rooms. For your own protection, theft and such.”

  “Do the doors not have locks?”

  The woman behind the desk stared at me as if I was an idiot. “Your room isn’t private. You’re in a four-bed room with three other occupants. If we leave that computer in there and it gets stolen, we’re on the hook, so it stays back here and you can use it during open time.”

  I put aside the troubling news that I was sharing a room. “I have a locking attachment for it. I got it so it could be locked to a hospital bed, so I’m sure we can make something work.” I tried to smile, to let her know I wasn’t going to be a problem.

  It didn’t change anything. “It stays here.” The nurse turned back to her station and I was pushed away.

  Room 14-27C was partitioned by stained curtains hanging from the ceiling. It smelled of old smoke and piss. As we entered, the nurse called out. “Stan, Dmitri, your new roommate’s here.”

  From inside the room I heard shuffling, and then the curtains parted. Two men appeared from two separate areas. One was ancient, with wispy white hair and a toothless grin. He wore a pair of pyjama pants and nothing else. The other was in a wheelchair and looked to be about forty. His legs ended above the knees and he was so obese he was almost round.

  “That’s Stan and that’s Dmitri,” said the nurse, indicating the old man and the man in the wheelchair respectively. “Your other roommate is Tamara. She’s in a vegetative state.” She pointed at the last closed partition. Was Tamara young or old? I didn’t find out.

  The nurse pulled the curtain aside and revealed my room, such as it was. A bed, a dresser and an IV pole was all there was in it. She called out to the hallway for help moving me from the gurney to the bed. The moment my arm was free I moved it as much as I could to try to relieve the numbness and pain of several hours of immobility.

  Once I was in the bed, the nurse pointed at the wall. “Callbell is there. Don’t ring it unless you need it.”

  “I can’t reach it,” I said. I demonstrated by reaching my arm as high as I could. The button remained two feet from me.

  “Not my problem. Get Stan to do it for you if you need. Someone will be by in a bit to hook up your feed and check on you.” With that, the nurse turned, pulled the curtain, and walked out.

  I lay on the bed, uncomfortable and extremely anxious. Was this what Spencer had meant? Uncaring staff and a shared room with strangers?

  After a moment, the curtain slowly parted. Stan’s wrinkled face looked at me. His watery eyes met mine. “Got a smoke?”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t smoke. Hey, could you give me a hand? I need the bed up a little bit, or my shoulders cramp up.”

  Stan’s expression changed to contempt. “No smokes, no help. Nothing’s free.” He turned and left me alone. I waited to see if the other occupant might show up, but he never did.

  There was no clock visible from my bed. All I could see was ceiling tiles and the green curtains, stained with God knows what. It was hours before my nurse came to hook up my feed and check on me, and by then I’d run out of tears to cry.

  I’d thought I’d lost everything, but there’s always more to lose.

  4

  A week passed. I had thought the hospital was tedious and boring. I was a fool. My days at Assisted Housing Unit 989 were scheduled down to the minute and there was no variation, ever. I was woken in the morning and fed my first “meal”. Then I was left in my bed until noon, when I was fed again, and wheeled to the common room for three hours. During this time I was allowed to have my computer, but half the time there was no power outlet so the battery died. Even when I had an outlet, there was no network connection, so I couldn’t make calls or send emails. Then it was back to the room until six thirty or so, when I was fed my final meal and left in bed.

  It was just enough to keep me alive. I hated every second of it.

  Stan soon realized that I couldn’t stop him from rooting through my drawers. I didn’t have anything of value, which made him angry at me. He stole my shirts and wore them until I asked a nurse to get them back. Dmitri never spoke to me, but he would often come into my area and stare. I found I preferred him over Stan.

  I never laid eyes on Tamara. In my head I imagined that she was a beautiful movie starlet who had suffered a head injury and never woken up. Of course, if that was the case, she wouldn’t be here in Assisted Housing Unit 989, room 14-27, bed B.

  On day eight, my morning feeding was rushed. The nurse didn’t tilt my bed despite me asking her to and then desperately reminding her. I was left flat and I could feel the nutrition paste working its way up my throat. I started coughing when I breathed it in, and I couldn’t stop. Stan shouted at me to be quiet, but the coughing was endless and painful. Eventually he went and got the nurse.

  “Why are you being a problem?” Her expression was contemptuous.

  “I think I choked on my feed. Can you please tilt me up?”

  She checked her watch. “Feeding was two hours ago. If you had aspirated you’d know by now.”

  “I was coughing a lot. Please, can you just—” But she was already leaving.

  “You shut the fuck up,” hissed Stan. “You just shut the fuck up.”

  I tried to be quieter, but as “punishment” my afternoon common room time was taken away from me and I was fed again in bed. Once again I was laid flat and once again I was coughing up food. This time Stan started shouting at me right away. The same nurse came back.

  “You’re quite the little drama queen, aren’t you?”

  I couldn’t answer, as I was still coughing. She grudgingly brought me up to thirty degrees and I finished my coughing fit. When I could speak, I thanked her.

  “I know what you’re up to. We’ll see how far it gets you.” With that strange pronouncement, she turned and left.

  Twenty four hours later, I was sick. My body was shaking and I couldn’t stop it. The muscle cramps were awful. Sweat rolled down my face. Once again I couldn’t stop coughing, but Stan was out on a family day pass, so nobody attended me. When a nurse finally came, she immediately took my vitals.

  “You’re feverish. Did you try to eat anything? You know you’re not supposed to eat or drink orally. You’re an aspiration risk.”

  Between coughs, I explained that I’d aspirated yesterday after being left flat. The nurse shook her head.

  “There’s no record of that in your chart. I’ll be right back.” She returned with an IV bag. “This is a painkiller. It should sort you out.” Outside in the hall, I overheard her speaking with the nurse who’d made the odd comment the previous day. They seemed to think I was looking for attention!

  Four hours later, the shift had changed and I had to explain all over again what the problem was. However, the nurse on this evening was more conscientious, and the on-call doctor came to see me.

  One ambulance ride later, I was back at Central West Hospital, diagnosis: aspiration pneumonia. The treatment wouldn’t take too long, but as it required observation, I stayed in the hospital. The doctors assured me that I could “go home” soon. I think they thought it would reassure me. It didn’t.

  The second night at the hospital, I broke down crying. I was barely twenty one years old, and my life was destroyed. It seemed that every time I thought things were at their worst, the world contrived to show me otherwise. I couldn’t bear the thought of another day in the care home, but I had nothing else to look forward to. When the staff came to check on me, I tried to hide my misery,
but their eyes told me they knew the truth. Their pity was plain on their faces.

  I had three decent days in the hospital, and then the doctor told me the “good news”. I was well enough to return to my care home. I stared at him until he left the room. The nurse told me the interfacility transport would arrive for me that evening, and I nodded without saying a word.

  At about three in the afternoon, someone knocked on my door frame. I turned my head and saw the nurse who had spoken to me that morning.

  “You have a visitor, Mr. Descouteaux.”

  It was probably Spencer. I hadn’t seen him during my recent stay, but I knew how word got around. “Sure, he can come in.”

  The nursed fidgeted a moment. “It’s not exactly a he, Daniel.” She withdrew, and then I saw what she meant.

  My visitor entered, and I immediately saw what my nurse meant. What came through the door wasn’t a person, but a white ovoid shape approximately three and a half feet on its long axis. Its surface was polished to a high sheen, and was unbroken by detail or feature except for a screen mounted on its front near the top. Looking at the floor, it appeared to float; a slight distortion of the air below it told me it was using some kind of scaled-down grav system, similar to what hovercars used.

  I was being visited by a flying plastic egg-shaped TV.

  The ovoid shape rotated on its long axis. “Please close the door,” said a perfectly-pitched female voice. Did the egg just talk?

  Once the nurse closed the door, the egg rotated its screen to face me again. Now, the screen was showing the face of a young woman. Her features were fine and delicate, with skin slightly paler than mine. Her hair was jet black and straight, and cut in fashion that framed her face with bangs. She looked at me without smiling for a moment. Something about her gaze was off, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “Uh, hi.” Real smooth, Daniel.

  “Hello, Daniel. My name is Liara. How do you do?”

  I cocked my remaining eyebrow at her and lifted my arm. “Oh, just great.” I let a fair bit of sarcasm seep into my words.

  Liara seemed unaffected. Her gaze turned to my arm, then back to my face. It was then that I realized what had seemed so strange to me. Liara hadn’t once looked away or flinched despite seeing me in my ruined glory. I mentally ticked her up a notch for that. It was probably the video screen that gave her that ability to just not react. She was only here by telepresence after all.

  “So what can I do for you, Liara?” And also, why aren’t you here in person? I kept that last part to myself.

  Instead of answering me, she asked a question of her own. “How do you find your current living arrangements?”

  Anger and misery mixed inside me, and I spat out my next words. “They’re fucking awful. Are you from the insurance company? Here to check up on me?”

  “No. I represent Plus Ultra Realis Enterprises, a company known primarily for virtual reality implementations. Have you heard of us?”

  I thought for a moment. “You guys made that one game, right? Alternis or something?”

  “Aelterna.” She nodded at me, still unsmiling. “Yes, that is our flagship product. An enormous world, using the most advanced expert systems and procedural development. Over two billion active subscribers spend time in Aelterna each week.”

  I would have whistled if my lips weren’t so damaged. Two billion people out of the nine billion total population was a pretty sizeable customer base. I still didn’t know what she wanted, though. “I’m not really in any state to play games, as you can see.”

  “Actually, you’re far more than capable of using our most advanced release hardware for playing the simulation. Even with your significant impairments, you could be walking in Aelterna.”

  Walking… the idea hit me hard. But it wouldn’t be the real thing. “That’s neat and all, but where I live I can’t have electronics.”

  Liara smiled for the first time. “Would you like to change your living arrangements?”

  “Fuck yes,” I said before I could stop myself from cursing. Then, after some consideration: “Fuck yes.”

  The telepresence egg (which was I had decided to call it) moved to the end of my bed. I realized Liara had moved it closer for my comfort, as my neck was beginning to cramp. “PURE is prepared to house you for life, in a facility more advanced than this one, at no monetary cost to yourself.”

  “No monetary cost. But not free.” I’m a cynic; anyone would be in my position.

  “Nothing is free, but I believe you might not mind the cost. You would be undergoing an experimental, but highly tested, neural interface treatment. It would directly connect your afferent nerves and your brain to our VR system, putting you into a simulated world in a way nobody has ever been before.”

  “A simulated world? Like, the real world, but fake?” I thought of that old school movie where the hero finds out that he’s been used as a battery and living in a simulation his whole life.

  “No. You would live in Aelterna, as its first permanent resident.”

  “So I would be a pro gamer, basically.”

  Liara grinned again. “In a sense, yes. You would live, eat, sleep, and breathe in Aelterna.”

  Something was bothering me. “This must be expensive as hell, and there has to be crazy rich people lining up for this kind of thing. They’d pay you money and you set them up living like a king, or whatever. Why me?”

  For the first time, Liara looked uncomfortable. “The treatment is, as mentioned, experimental. The modifications required to the body are significant and irreversible at this time, and there are few people willing to give up their lives in reality entirely.”

  Now it made a tiny bit more sense. “So you come to me because you know I got nothing to lose and my life really fucking sucks.”

  My profanity didn’t phase her. “Basically, yes.”

  Something about her casual agreement pissed me off. “You can’t even be bothered to come see me in person, because I’m what everyone fears, aren’t I? A cripple, with nothing ahead of him but pain. It’s so easy for you to say that my life sucks, which it does. But you still have no right to—”

  The ovoid shape floated slightly back from my bed, then turned to face me. The upper area of the egg lifted silently, taking Liara’s face on video with it. The lower area split vertically into two and then separated. I gasped at what I saw.

  Inside the ovoid was a significant amount of advanced tech, with lights and tubes and wires and all manner of things incomprehensible to me. But what caught my attention was what the tech was plugged into. A torso, burned and scarred beyond belief, lay cradled in some kind of gel-filled bag. The head above the torso was only recognizable by its location; the eyes and mouth were gone entirely. Out of the ruined eyesockets, wires and cabling snaked into the interior of the ovoid. Tiny twitches of movement shuddered along the surface of the burn scarred flesh. There were no limbs and no genitalia recognizable.

  “I am here in person, and I know exactly what your life is like.” Liara’s expression didn’t change, but shame ran through me.

  “I thought… I assumed you were a telepresence. I didn’t know…” I trailed off lamely.

  “I was burned in a fire. My neural interface surgery allows me to live fully in Aelterna. Prior to that, I lived a lot like you, albeit in a more expensive facility. But they all feel like prisons, don’t they? Even this hospital is a cage for you.”

  “My damn body is a cage for me.” Now the bitterness was flowing freely.

  “I feel, no, felt the same before PURE.”

  “So your face… it’s a fake?”

  “It’s a realtime recreation of my actual face based on what expression I’m making right now in my mind. I’m here, but I’m not seeing the world the way you do. I’m experiencing it through VR, and the VR system is projecting my face as it exists in the simulation.” She paused for a moment. “It’s an accurate representation of what I looked like before all this.” She nodded down, indicating the
ovoid. I didn’t dare lower my eyes to her ruined form. Now it was my turn to feel ashamed. Thankfully, she closed the doors to the shell that carried her body around.

  For me, who had nothing to look forward to but grey days and endless, unceasing boredom, this offer was intriguing. It was completely outside my experience, for one thing. I wasn’t ever into video games. Even my education had been traditional, with no accelerated memory therapy or anything that the modern world had to offer. This would be completely new.

  But the rest of my life in a computer simulation? For a moment, my mind screamed NO. Living in a computer? A game world? I took a moment to consider. Really, what was so bad about that? I didn’t know shit about video games, but people played them for fun, so how bad could it be? I took a deep breath. I should be comparing this to what lies ahead of me. Forty years in that damn care home…

  “I’ll do it.”

  Liara’s face lit up in a smile. “The transport team will be here right away.” She floated away, stopping at the door. “I’m looking forward to working with you, Daniel.”

  5

  Twelve weeks later

  I flew. I actually flew. My arms stretched out beside me, and as I tilted my fingers, the air rushed past them. I laughed in joy.

  “It’s so real!”

  “Of course it is.” Beside me, Liara flew as well. “Everything is as real as, well, the real world. Every sensation, every impulse is being created and sent directly to your nervous system.”

  We were in a private simulation shard, generated by Aelterna’s servers but closed to anyone but us. A fantastic landscape stretched out below. A herd of animals, something like the buffalo that once ruled the plains, fled before as as we swooped low. I let the tall grass hit my fingertips, and then climbed just high enough that I was safe to close my eyes.

  My arms and legs were back, at least in VR. My vision was perfect, and my skin was completely unscarred. All of this was in simulation of course; my own flesh and blood body had been worked over in ways that I didn’t want to think about.