My arrow led me through the maze to one of the containers and pointed right at the door, but I hesitated. "What’s the difference between virtual and physical Challenges, given I’m playing a virtual game?"
[[Physical Challenges take up space on the Drowned Earth, and in Dream Speed will be primarily lan-related. Virtual Challenges will place your Core Unit into Storage, and load you into the Challenge via the Link.]]
"So why did I need to travel here to join a virtual quest?"
[[There are some—the larger Challenges—where you will be able to place yourself into any Storage on the planet to join, but many virtual Challenges use a limited portal upload to restrict opportunities for interference, and to minimise any possibility of delayed communication. You would not believe the tedium of Bios insisting they lost a Challenge because of transmission lag. Besides, it makes a Challenge ever so slightly more of an event to oblige a Bio to walk here.]]
"But what happens if a whole bunch of people want to take the same Challenge?" I asked, considering the small size of the container dubiously. A fit for five people, perhaps.
[[A waiting list. Or the Bios, ever fickle, find something else they want to do.]]
My destination door slid open, revealing the mirror-shimmer of Soup. MMOs often used instances to handle complex quests, phasing players through a portal into different iterations of the same experience, but that had never involved parking a physical self at the entrance. I looked around at dozens of other doors, realising that behind them all would be the same silver shimmer.
"Are there empty people…Core Units…all around us?"
[[A mindless horde’s worth.]]
"Are they safe? From harm, I mean, not the prospect of them turning into a mind-controlled horde."
[[If this were a location where the city Cycog had some animus against me, then there are extra security precautions it would be wise to take. But I have no particular enemies here, and you are far too minor a Bio to be considered worth taking direct action against.]]
"Well, let’s change that," I said, and stepped into the shimmer.
13
instance
Paws waving, I rolled on my back in the sun.
Then, with a dizzying jerk, I came more or less upright, blinking and twitching, processing sight, sensation. Sheer physical difference. Two extra inches of leg were nothing compared to fur, four paws, and this spine, long and endlessly flexible, stretching down to an awareness of tail, waving and twitching.
With a name like The Felinead, waking up Cat was hardly a surprise, but I’d underestimated how different Being Cat would be. Overwhelming. A kaleidoscope of scent, and crisp but oddly off colours, accompanied by a knife-sharp clarity of sound. The sense of being on my hands and knees, but so much more comfortable. Claws. Whiskers.
I was not by a valley waterfall, but in every other respect I followed the outline of the countless videos from Demo 1. I gawped at myself, stared around briefly—at a grassy clearing studded with flowers and surrounded by trees—and then went back to gawping at myself. Lacking a convenient reflecting pool, I couldn’t see all of myself, but I did seem to be a house cat, short-haired and featuring grey and white blotches. Skinny.
After several yoga moves to fully establish my Catness, I tried walking. Then I reached for my menu options, since I wanted a record of how much like a pantomime horse my attempts at four legs must look.
My HUD had become a single, barely noticeable icon, and the menu options were shortened to screenshots, streaming, and [Emergency Exit]. I considered this for a while, then went back to walking. That worked better when I wasn’t thinking about it, and soon I moved on to small bounces and pounces, with only occasional awkwardnesses when I forgot myself and tried to stand up.
Stretching felt enormously good.
Basic movement accomplished, my attention shifted to the idea of a plot, and what might be outside my sunny clearing. There was no floating mote in attendance, so I assumed Dio was off enjoying perversions, and it was up to me to work out what now.
I surveyed the trees around me, and was rewarded with a strange image when I looked in the direction of the thickest trees: a vision of a tumble of earth-packed rocks, and several other cats lolling before hollows and small caves. A cat colony.
About to be invaded?
Experimentally, I gazed in the opposite direction, and another image imposed itself into my line of sight. Rock-studded earth patched with grass, with an attentive red-brown dog sitting in the shade of a round-leafed tree. Did these visions serve the same function as a mini-map? But were the images the equivalent of memories for my cat, or actual visions of what lay in those directions at this moment? The former made more sense, but it’d be wise not to rule out other possibilities.
I had no idea what was going on, and that was delicious. I even wished I hadn’t read the bare-bones description of the Challenge, because now I was anticipating an invasion, and how much better would it be to simply be here, Cat, and have adventure happen?
It took time to work through the trees that separated me from the cat colony. It wasn’t walking that gave me trouble, but dealing with a sense I didn’t really know how to manage. The complexity of pong.
Different trees had distinct flavours, and dirt was a wine bottle labeclass="underline" all undernotes of chestnut with an aftertaste of bitter melon. And that was merely the substrate, for overlaid on everything was Threat and Enticement and Familiar: the traces of at least a dozen different animals.
My modal didn’t come with a translation of which scent meant which animal, but there was an in-built reaction to types. Familiar was most certainly other cats, and Enticing things I could eat. There was a single skein of Threat, and I flinched when I ran into it, and found I could do a magnificent backward leap when I didn’t put my mind to it.
The thread of Threat was strong, but seemed to be heading north-south to my imagined east-west. Invader, or passing dog?
The possibility of Actual Pain made it easy to choose the common sense option of continuing to the cat colony. Information first, then risk.
The tumble of rocks sat bathed in sunlight atop a small rise, with easy access to the branches of a number of the surrounding trees. A single black tom sprawled on the highest rock, and a trio of lanky kittens raced past as I paused for a survey. A different enough scene from my vision that I decided that had been a memory map rather than some kind of far sight.
Options for cat communication were rather limited. Blink to indicate a lack of hostility. Touch noses in greeting. I hadn’t even tried to speak, so had no idea whether I would have more than purrs and hisses at my disposal.
Philosophically, I made my way up the mound, swimming through layer upon layer of cat scent before pausing at a respectful distance to blink. The watching tom lifted his head as I approached, and I found nose-greeting less awkward than the double-cheek kiss awarded by relatives scarcely ever met. And I could now easily associate one of the scent trails with Black Tom.
A vision of a grey and white cat dragging a dead rabbit inserted itself into my frame of view, and it was all I could do not to flinch back dramatically. But there was a weird purplish flavour to the image that reminded me strongly of Black Tom, and I realised that the image had come from him.
So cats—or, at least, these cats—communicated by telepathically sending pictures! Fascinated, I tried sending back an image of the grassy clearing, distinctly empty of rabbits. Black Tom’s ears went back, and the rabbit image presented itself to me again, this time with darker overtones of purple.