Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality.

 — Nikolai Berdyaev

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

 — John Lennon

Touch brought shadow, highlight, curves; her curves. Lit by firelight, or maybe an oil lantern. Her smile, standing out even as her horns cast strange shadows — making those look natural was harder than it looked. Oil pastel on rough-tooth paper, the good stuff, the stuff I splurged on, the stuff she deserved. Everything had to be perfect for this.

Look, I’m not an artist. I mean, I draw. Pencils, charcoals, pastels. Every so often I break out the goache if I’m going for a particular look. Spirits look great in goache, I learned that from the people I know on the art team. That’s sort of their internal design language. No shame in cribbing that, especially if I wanted to get her into the game. And I wanted her in the game. She belonged in the game. The engine could handle it, the animations should handle it. I should know, I coded it.

Okay, so I wrote some code for it. I didn’t write the whole embodiment engine or something like that. I did little stuff here and there. Most of it, the player never sees. You know that thing that guards will sometimes do when they draw a sword, where they twirl it around their hand? I coded that behavior. I got to watch the guy do the mo-cap for it. It was pretty cool. That was before the pandemic. Before the gloss came off of the unbelievable dream-come-true job in the video game industry. After I’d given up on the dream of art, the dream of writing. Art and writing didn’t pay the bills, but STEM? STEM was all anyone wanted. STEM got you in the door. You could impress the suits with your art and writing after they were accustomed to giving you a paycheck.

I don’t know why, but I get maudlin like this when I do art. Especially of Kelda. Something about her makes me look back and think maybe I should have been doing this the whole time, like she’d been waiting for me to find her somewhere in the back of my mind. I didn’t design her, she was just there. She fell out of my head and onto the paper; I barely had anything to do with it. She simply was.

I finished the piece just as my workstation pinged. I glanced over; great, a fucking Teams notification. Oh well. This iteration of Kelda joined all her twin sisters on the wall thanks to the timely assistance of a thumbtack, and I slumped down in a very tired office chair to pull up the hateful harbinger of Work.

I winced as guilt gave me a jab in the ribs. We were on crunch time for the patch deployment next week, and I really shouldn’t have been doing stuff that wasn’t my actual job, but it was part of my workflow; I had to break out and do something different to keep myself functional long-term. And this was important too. It all fed back into the same issue, the one I was still trying to get a meeting with the Product Design Committee over.

“Fuuuuuuuuck.” I leaned back in my chair and rolled my eyes. RC testing and livecoding. All the fun of staring at code, but flat on my back in a sling wearing uncomfortable VR gear. So much for working on any more concept art. I took care of basic needs — toilet, energy bar, Monster — and then blew the art wall a kiss before I stripped off my socks and leaned back in the VR hammock hanging from the bolt in the ceiling beam. I pulled on the feelies, gloves and socks, and strapped the headset on. No cart; I don’t fuck with that. Pure visuals and haptics is enough to diagnose the vast majority of code issues. I pulled my keyboards, mounted on swivel arms, into place, locking them; I could just rest my hands on them, and let me tell you, livecoding in VR teaches you touch-typing faster than anything else. Once I found my home keys, not too difficult even in the feelie gloves, I could type almost as fast as I could at my desk.

I loaded into my Lobby, unembodied. Hands were all I needed to grab the necessary blocks of code and toss them into the hopper. They’d come with me when I loaded into my private test shard of Reverie, Celephaïs. Yeah, I’m a nerd. Sue me. So’s everyone else I work with.

Except him. I shuddered as the IM window popped up. I don’t know why Gary decided I was his pet project, but ever since I’d joined the Embodiment Workgroup I couldn’t go eight hours without having a message from him. My fingers found the keys.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuck!” He always did this. He always wanted to drag me off to some godawful bar, with shitty beer and loud assholes, so he could flirt with the servers and any other women around, while I sat there feeling awkward and miserable. If it wasn’t a bar, it was a ball game. If it wasn’t a ball game, it was drag race. If it wasn’t a drag race–

I left him on read, pinching the window shut and shoving it off into the corner of my Lobby. There were a lot of things that bothered me about Gary  — he was the sort of guy who’d driven me up the wall all my life — but the way he called me “bro” and especially “Bogo” were like nails on a chalkboard, a discomfort I felt. I was used to people mispronouncing Boghossian, but “Bogo” was worse, and Gary really seemed to think I enjoyed the nickname.

Whatever. I had work to do. I logged into the AvEn employee backend, authenticated for administration permissions in Reverie, and logged into the Celephaïs shard. The screens in my goggles went white. Colors bled in first, then shape. The feelies’ haptics switched on, and I felt the ground beneath my feet; I pressed my palms together, and the gloves did likewise. I caught a glimpse of rich, brown skin; not my own, but the skin of the character model I was wearing. Kelda's skin. My skin hadn’t looked like that in years, anyway, not since I took a job that meant I rarely saw the sun.

I’d come online in what I considered the “Town Square” of Celephaïs, but the thing is that the shard was just a testing range. There were NPCs wandering around from previous tests I’d spun up, and buildings I’d likewise been testing, but it wasn’t arranged in any kind of planned way. No players would ever venture here to see it, so it didn’t matter that it wasn’t designed for that kind of experience. It was a weird little warren of streets and buildings, and I kinda liked it. It felt real, like a real city, built up over time instead of painstakingly laid down in a way that was meant to feel organic, but wasn’t.

Celephaïs was my city. I mean, there was a reason I named the character I was testing out for the PDC pitch Kelda Kuranes. I am not merely a nerd but a colossal nerd, and I deserved every swirlie I ever got.

I wasn’t here to dick around, though. Sure, I did that sometimes. There was an arcade I’d patched together out of purloined assets tucked away in a corner somewhere, with skiball, emulated games, a basketball hoop, and a few other distractions for when I needed to clear my brain while plugged in. But right now I really did need to clear the code blocks Stan had asked me to check out. It was easy enough to pull those out, drop them into the live compiler, and spin them up into the instance. Most of them were small items, quest drops, goodies; one was a floating cubic puzzle key, the kind that were all over Reverie and definitely were not Rubik's Cubes according to Legal.

One, though, made the whole instance grind for a moment. I could see the processor demand spike for a moment as the compiler chewed through the little block of data, unfolding it into a narrow passage between two buildings that hadn't been there before. Damn it, I have to debug a whole fucking dungeon? "Fuck you, Stan," I grunted, reaching out to play with the regular items. I could at least get them out of the way.

One tiny creature, kind of like a lemur had a kid with a cartoon beaver. Codex entry had no typos. Behavioral subroutines worked — it didn't bite, at least, not anything that wasn't a stick held close to it. Everything seemed fine. I turned it loose. One more inhabitant of Celephaïs.

One sword, Legendary rarity. I could barely look at the thing, it was generating so many particle effects. I waved it around a bit, squinting. I didn't understand why anyone would voluntarily carry this thing, let alone attempt to wield it, but hey, I'm not the poopsocker you have to be to get one of these. I shoved it between two paving stones and left it there. That at least cut down the visible particle bleed, which mostly came from the tip so that it left a trail when you swung it. A landmark, I guess. I don't know, Celephaïs didn't really have a story. It was just a place.

One deployable meal. Ugh. There was no point to this one. QA could figure out if the flavor was off and I didn't want to juice just to taste the thing. It could stay there on the nicely polished table, steaming gently forever, or until an NPC's algorithm decided it needed to eat it. Not my problem.

The puzzle key. I reached out and grabbed it, feeling it in my haptics, and began working the puzzle. When you evaluate these things for a living, you get really good at cubing algorithms. I had it solved in less than a minute. It did nothing. Fuck. I reset it and did it again. Still nothing. "Fuuuuuuuck." It was busted. Had to be. I opened the key's code and began to look it over, holding it up close to my optics and looking it over carefully. Sometimes bugs displayed visually, and–

Wait a second. Some of the tiles on the cube were textured. "Oh fuck you, Dale!" He was getting really creative with these things, unfortunately; unlike every other puzzle cube in the game, which as far as I knew were all visual, this one didn't give a shit about the colors of the tiles; all it wanted was, probably, for me to align the textured tiles. I ran the algorithms again. No dice.

But some of the textured tiles looked vaguely different. Were there two textures? I could barely see the difference in optics. In theory I could go through all the lines of code to figure out what I needed to do or hack it to force a win condition, but that wouldn't technically solve the fucking thing, which is what I needed to do to make sure it was player accessible. Which meant I needed to juice after all. "Fuuuuuck. Youuuuuu. Daaaaale!"

Bowing to the inevitable, I did something I almost never did; I opened the panel in my UI that controlled the onboard VRsimilitude pump. I felt around for the box of carts that was where I'd left it six months ago when I'd set this rig up, my fingers finally closing around a familiar shape. After some fiddling, I got it locked into position. I found the cannula end of the device and pressed it to the back of my shoulder until I felt the tip of the needle guide bite. I gritted my teeth through the pinch, felt the tube slide home, and then keyed in the lowest-level dose that would give me true tactile feedback. My head began to swim, and the optical system began to play through a series of colors designed to preload ideas into my sensorium that the system would take advantage of. I stood there, breathing slowly, deeply, waiting for the lightheadedness to pass. Once my brain adjusted to the drug, my vestibular system would stop yelling at me so much. Eyes closed. Count to three. Open.

I touched thumb to forefinger; instead of the texture of the feelie gloves, I felt skin. Smooth, firm. The polished laquer of the deep violet-black nails. Rich smells began to invade my world, the meal I'd ignored on the table, suddenly as real to my mind as actual food. Turkey, roasted, basted in butter until the skin was golden-brown and crispy, surrounded by loaded baked potatoes and an array of vegetables seasoned and roasted in the turkey's own juices. I felt my stomach growl, and didn't know if that was real or the game telling me the character was hungry.

I really hate this stuff. But I could feel the difference between the tiles now; it was obvious, once you knew what you were looking for. I solved it within a minute, and it flickered brightly and dissolved into drifting motes of light. It hadn't been linked to anything, but that wasn't the point. It worked.

And, since I could actually smell and taste the thing now, I figured I might as well test the meal. I wrenched a drumstick free and bit down. It almost brought tears to my eyes, rich and savory. I could feel it between my teeth, feel the warmth as if it was fresh from the oven. The potato was starchy and gooey and perfect. The vegetables had crunch and gentle bitterness beneath the eaux d'turkey. It was glorious. I hadn't eaten this well in a long time.

Okay, I would call this one clear. Walking away, still munching on the turkey leg, I wandered down the open passage to the dungeon instance, or whatever the hell I was testing now. It seemed to be a forest grove that was emerging from underneath Celephaïs itself, a kind of grotto that smelled of fresh growth and running water. Shapes lurked deeper within, barely visible in the light of glowing moss.

I rolled my eyes. Okay, dungeon it was. I tossed the half-finished drumstick aside as I pulled open my character sheet, a spectral mirror that showed a reflection of my character in real time, with various stats and traits floating in the margins, details on the gear I was wearing (which was to say, not much, since everything I'd dressed the character in was just statless glam mulch), class levels, experience to next level–

Shit. Had I never actually pulled up the character sheet while testing out this character before? She was just a backup, a Hail Mary pass to prove to Product Design that you could make a character like Kelda and make her look good in the embodiment engine, make her feel good to be. She wasn't any of the in-built waifish builds available to female characters, but a powerfully built and heavyset athlete of a woman who didn't care if she had a little meat on her bones.

Look, I know what I like okay? Besides, I'm boundary-pushing here. Overweight folks deserve to be able to see themselves as they are if they want to. Even if it'd probably just result in harrassment. That was always a problem even with the automoderation systems. But Kelda? No one would give Kelda shit for being overweight, if only because she looked like she could rip a man in half. It didn't hurt that she was a total hottie, either — again, I know what I like. I reached up, saw her do the same in the mirror. It felt weird to be wearing a woman's body, but not in a bad way. Lots of guys did this, I mean, why wouldn't you? You could look like Generic Action Man, pressed out of a mold just like every other Big Dumb Meatball With a Sword out there, or you could look like Kelda.

Easy choice. I touched one of her horns, felt the textured keratin against my fingers, traced its curling shape as it arced back over her head. I'd tested this before, of course, but I always liked the feeling of it, the sense that something really was, if gently, pushing my head around. Doing it with the mirror up, though, I could see her smile — my smile — and goddamn, but I'd hit a home run when I designed her smile. Full lips parting ever so slightly to reveal teeth just a little pointier than normal…

Okay, this was definitely getting to me. Had to be the juice. Still, before I shook myself free of it and got on with my work, I did something I'd never done before: I brought my hand down from her horn, and on the way down I touched her face. My face. The face. It was all a quasihypnapompic illusion, anyway. But I didn't feel my stubbly, unshaven face when I did it, or even the texture of the feelie gloves. I felt skin. Her skin, on my cheek, smooth and unblemished. The eye tracking was working perfectly; I could see her just-a-bit-horizontal pupils darting around in bright golden eyes, could see something gathering along her eyelids as my eyes began to sting–

Okay, no. I gave myself a slap in the face, and it stung. Work first, I told myself. You can jerk yourself raw to her just like you do every night later, when Stan isn't expecting a fucking report. Using my admin-level access, I dialed my levels up to the current limit, watching my stats balloon to an absurd degree, maxed my unarmed combat skill, and closed the character sheet.

The mobs in the dungeon were classics. I don't know if they were placeholders or if we were just doing model recycling for the umpteenth time, but either way, it didn't really matter to me. When I crossed the first encounter trigger, something that looked like cross between a snake and a vulture the size of a subway car — I think these things are called acrogaunts or something like that? I dunno, I didn't do any of the programming on them — reared up and charged at me, hissing and spitting and generally looking pretty murderous, or at least it did until I gave it an open-hand slap that sent it flying into the wall with a thunderous crash. Fuck doing the dungeon for real, I was going to cheese it.

All the trash mob encounters went that way, me pasting them in a single hit. It was kinda funny, like, I couldn't help but laugh a little at the idea. Sure, Kelda was meant to be strong, but in the "strong women are hot" way, not in the "she could arm-wrestle Superman" way. The first boss, a fire-breathing crystal dog or something, went more or less the same way; the second, some kind of fucked up turtle, I actually had to wind up and punch to break through the damage gate, but it didn't take much longer than any of the other fights.

The third boss, though… when I got to the final arena, a circular clearing overlooking a tranquil lake surrounded by brilliantly illuminated pale violet flowers, ambient music ramping up to a cresendo, I was expecting another giant monster of some kind. Instead, what rose out of the lake was–

"What the fuck?" It was Kelda, or at least, a version of Kelda, semitransparent, glowing with the same light the flowers around the shore were. "Is this supposed to be some kind of a copy-fight, or–” It didn't bother to respond, maybe wasn't even wired up to an LLM for chatty behavior. Made sense, really, if it was a kind of construct, but it still caught me off guard when it just launched itself at me and decked me in the stomach. I staggered a bit in game as the haptics went off and I caught a little bit of vertigo from expecting to feel more of a force. "Fucking rude," I said, lunging forward and swiping with one hand. The thing looked so fragile a single hit would probably smash it to pieces.

Except I didn't hit it. It fucking dodged. I made another swing, and another, but every time it stepped back out of range; after the third such flurry, when I hesitated to get my breath — look, swinging your arm for real, when you're hanging in a sling, gets tiring — it took another swing at me. It wasn't landing hits hard enough to hurt, given the absurd disparity in our levels, but if I couldn't actually get my hands on the damned otherKelda, there was no way I was going to–

Oh. Dirty pool. This was a hook boss. I'd seen the design document on these, but I'd never actually worked on one, or faced one, since I didn't play Reverie, but I knew what I was looking at. This was a boss that was designed to be incredibly difficult to fight if you weren't running an embodiment-level dosage of VRsimilitude at minimum. You needed to actually feel kinesthetic responses to be able to time your attacks, so you had to juice up; the idea was to force users who were sticking to haptics or tactile to push to the next level and have a good experience so they'd keep embodying in the future…and thus, burn through their VRsimilitude carts faster. Sleazy, diabolical, and kinda brilliant, really.

"Alright, asshole, fine." It wasn't like I'd have a problem getting the shit, I literally worked for AvEn. They comped me more than I could ever use. The good stuff, too, not the third-party shit you find in gas stations. We had to design to intended specs, after all. I opened up the UI and dialed myself to the next level up, just enough to embody. I didn't want to get fully juiced and just wander around in here as Kelda. I was supposed to be debugging the thing, remember? As the colors swirled in my optics, and as my head swam again, I tried to focus, tried to take a deep breath, tried to ignore the mirror-image of myself pummeling me again and again, finally charging up for a massive attack and striking me in the–

"Fuck!" I staggered back again, clutching my jaw. "That hurt, you ass– whoa." That wasn't my voice coming out of my throat — what I was hearing was someone else, a woman, her voice deep but undeniably feminine, throaty, powerful, and– "Shit!" I rolled back, only narrowly avoiding another attack, almost tripping over my own feet as I stared up at the vaulted natural ceiling of the grotto, sunlight pouring in from the open top in golden shafts. Wow, I thought, It really does look totally different when you're embodied. The otherKelda lunged again, but this time I was grounded enough in my body to remember that it couldn't really hurt me, not seriously; I let the attack come, let it land, and simply grabbed the otherKelda by the wrist. I pulled it in close, whispered, "My turn," and punched it as hard as I could in the gut, putting a massive crack in it. Not trusting that that'd finish the fight, I slung it to the ground, put a knee right into the crack, and then started pummeling it in the head, one, two, three, four, "Stop! Fucking! Hitting! Me!"

By "me," all that was left of otherKelda's head was shards of crystal, and the rest of it wasn't moving. I let myself relax and sit down on the ground beside it, taking the moment to really look around… and to look at myself. "Holy shit," I said, grinning, mostly just to hear myself talk. I'd never programmed a voice for Kelda, but the game had apparently provided one, and it had picked the exact right voice for her. It was weird, hearing a woman's voice come from my mouth…but not a bad kind of weird. A good kind of weird, actually. I glanced down and–

Holy fuck, did I seriously make them that big? I felt like my eyes were going to fall out of my skull and roll right down into the titanic stretch of cleavage under my chin. I could just see my knees, sitting down the way I was. I reached up to touch them with one hand and holy fuck. No wonder people got hooked on this. Free boobs to touch whenever you wanted them? The other hand got in on the fun, touching, pressing, squeezing, hugging — it felt amazing, not even in a horny way, just in a good way. It felt good. I let out an involuntary laugh and I don't know why, but that felt even better.

Okay. I had to know. I got to my feet, almost overbalancing from the top-heaviness I wasn't used to, and opened up the character sheet panel again. There I was — she was — reflected in all her glory. I reached down, took the bottom of her tunic in my hands, and lifted.

Huh. Kelda wore a bra. I mean, I guess that made sense, if she didn't, these things would fly all over the place, wouldn't they? Anchoring the hem of the tunic under my chin, I tugged the bra down and Oh my God, I'd died and gone to Heaven. They were perfect. I'd never designed this, but I guess my VRsimilitude-addled brain was filling in the gaps, and even if I'd never modeled Kelda's boobs, I thought about them so often that I sure as shit knew what they should look like.

I jumped a little. Don't judge me. I don't know why but it wasn't the sight of it that hit me so much as the feel of them. I could feel the weight of them move, could feel them settle just a little bit after the rest of me did. Okay, yeah, Kelda definitely needed the bra.

"Who are you?"

I let out what can only be called a shriek and hastily shoved my boobs back into my bra before I let the tunic fall to cover them again. "Fucksake!" I shouted, wheeling around to find the crystalline otherKelda floating in midair behind me, the shards of her head not quite back together. She looked like a puppet dangling from strings, limp, dead.

"Who are you?" it repeated.

"What?" I went to scratch my head and clonked my hand into one of my horns. "Shit, ow."

"Who are you?"

It was just repeating itself, like a broken record. Was this a cutscene? Maybe it was waiting for something the LLM running it could recognize as name-ish. "Cyrus. Can we get the loot drop now, please?"

"Who are you?"

"Oookay, you're not gonna progress off of that?" I sighed, reaching out for the keyboards. If I was going to debug this I was going to need a command line. It took me a couple tries to actually reach for the keyboards, and the feeling was not pleasant, almost like I was in two places at once. It was jarring, but I finally managed to find the home row on each half of the keyboard, and once I'd done that, it was a little easier keep myself in one place. The otherKelda had repeated itself three more times in the interim. "Alright, let's see what your problem is."

It didn't take long to find it, only about five or six more repetitions of "Who are you?" Motherfuckers, I thought, staring at the variable. It was exactly what I'd thought it'd be. This was a hook boss. It was here to get you hooked.

On full immersion.

I closed the command line down and pinched the bridge of my nose, sighing. "You really are going to make me do this to finally fucking get the clear so I can check you off my list and go to fucking bed, aren't you?"

"Who are you?"

"You are. Uuuugh!" I rolled my eyes, and let my neck roll back on my shoulders for extra emphasis. It was nice, the way my long, silky hair just kind of cascaded across them when I did that. I remembered the exact shade I'd picked out for its base color, #2E0030, the same color as her lips, the same color as her nail lacquer. Maybe being Kelda for a while wouldn't be so bad. But I was not going to end up a cart junkie like the poor marks who got sucked into this game I helped make. "You get five minutes," I said, glaring at otherKelda as I pulled up the now strangely out-of-place UI and set the appropriate conditionals.

Full immersion. Five minute duration, the lowest the system would go. Automatic stepdown to haptic after. I took a deep breath, pushed the APPLY button, and closed the window. I'd never done this before, and I wasn't sure what to expect–

"Who are you?"

"You keep fucking asking that," I groaned. "What, am I just supposed to reply with the character name?"

"Who are you?"

"Okay, I'm Kelda. Kelda fucking Kuranes." I gave otherKelda the finger, even as colors swam across my vision like the whole world had been dunked in a film of oil. Oh shit, here it comes, I thought, my eyes drooping as I felt like I was floating, my feet leaving the ground for a heartbeat. Was I horizontal or vertical? Where was I? I didn't remember–

"Who are you?"

"I'm–” My voice caught in my throat, even as I finally regained my balance. Rubbing my temple to try to shake the headache, I looked up at my strange, shattered reflection and realized that I didn't know the answer. I knew my name, but nothing else. My life up to that moment, before I fought my way into the grotto for reasons I couldn't even begin to place, was a yawning void bereft of even the tiniest clue to the question that was burning itself into the back of my mind, filling me with a terror that I could feel hammering in the chambers of my heart.

Who was I?