Mars. The red seemed to have diluted, just a little, but I could now see the sphere shape more clearly, and make out craters. My heart fluttered, and I sat down and breathed until my tendency to grin hugely had eased off.
"Does it ever get old, Dio?"
[[Not for me. Not ever. Worlds like yours are an endless delight, but even among the countless featureless rocks out there are, oh, halos and hidden gems, and that moment of descent, the sense of sinking from the vast to the specific. It is among the greatest joys in existence.]]
Insensibly comforted by the knowledge that my virtual alien overlord found pleasure in things that did not involve the screams of other species crushed beneath intangible feet, I gazed at Mars again, then checked the time left until arrival.
"Can people do virtual Challenges when they’re en route?"
[[Yes. It’s a limited selection, but enough to keep most Bios occupied.]]
Settling down to my tablet, I ignored the Challenges in favour of trying to come up with a new design, but there was so much of The Synergis, and it was hard to find the precise spare, striking image I wanted. I’d come close with that first design, the variations of which were selling even better than I’d hoped for, out in the world. "My Core Unit is a Lie" was the most popular, but the full image by itself was also doing well, which pleased me. I sketched out a series of cartoon strips of The Hare character I use as a signature as he booted up Dream Speed, and for the thousandth time toyed with the massive commitment of a daily webcomic. It would certainly be easier to manage with almost five times as many hours in the day.
Pencilling in potential dialogue, I heard a hint of musical laughter. Dio.
"Are these drawings just mist to you too?" I asked, firming up lines. "Or, no, you must see the way we do to read this."
[[Our sight is more complicated than yours. But we can equate default Type Three vision. Think of it as applying a filter.]]
"What about the other senses? Taste, touch, hearing, scent?"
[[Hearing is not dissimilar, although with a wider range. Taste, touch and scent are very nebulous concepts if we’re not wearing a modal. We do have a sense of the environment we are in, in terms of magnetism, radiation, gravitational waves, and so forth.]]
I tried to picture myself as a ball of light, drifting through mist people, surfing gravity. "Are there simulations that let Bios experience being Cycogs?"
[[To a degree. We can’t make your minds as wide as ours, but we can approximate our senses. Most Bios dislike it very much.]]
"It does sound—" Glancing up from my drawing binge, I stopped to stare at a vivid blue-green stripe edging around the curve of a much-enlarged Mars, and abandoned all thought of simulating Cycogs.
"Then that was Mars I saw in the opening cutscene. I thought it must have been something else. I guess that doesn’t count as terraforming?"
[[The largest biodome in this system.]]
I sat silent, comparing the shape and angle of the section I could see to what I knew of Mars, and then shook my head in astonished admiration. Valles Marineris was thousands of kilometres long: a continent-sized crack in Mars' crust. To turn that vast expanse into a biodome was enough to make me believe that The Synergis really did have ringworlds.
When selecting [Valles Marineris], I’d been offered a whole second series of options, and I’d picked [Noctis Labyrinthus], because who could resist that name? That was on the westernmost end of the great tilting horizontal of the Valles Marineris, and the last thing that rotated into view with the slow spin of the planet. By the time I’d reached the point where I could see it all in detail, I had discovered a map overlay, and there were names I’d seen on maps of Mars before: Chryse Planitia; Coprates Chasma; Tithonium Chasma; Hebes Chasma. All painted in vivid blues and greens. On the planet surface to the west of the vivid biodome were a little scatter of ancient volcanos, including Mons Olympus, glimmering with lights. To these names, hundreds of new points had been added. I picked out the Styx. Lethe. Acheron. Eridanos. Elysium. Erebus. Tartarus. Asphodel Meadows.
"I’m starting to wonder if I should expect a theme park," I said, working out how to change my course so I could fly quite low over the main body of the rift, even though this would add another half hour of travel time.
Dio laughed. [[No, although there is a level of appositeness to some of the names. Before we reach atmosphere, go into your Tier 2 Tools options and select [Renba].]]
That was easy enough. The first Renba I looked at was a silver sphere, featureless and completely lacking clues to its purpose. The description was simply "Sphere", followed by some stats about speed and durability. The next was a stylized metal bird, all black and platinum, very Art Deco. Then something that looked like two scallop shells, set around a pearl.
"Are they drones? Or is this what you meant about Cycogs liking to have transport that’s not their Bio?"
[[No, Renba are Bio portable backup. Now that you’ve reached Skipping levels, you’ll begin on lan-based Challenges. Since Core Units can be fatally injured in lan-based Challenges, Bios are rarely willing to risk them without a Renba accompanying them. When a Bios' Core Unit becomes non-functional, they must transfer to another Unit as quickly as possible—the longer they spend unbodied, the greater the chance of dissipation. Some can only survive seconds. Renba are dedicated bio-synths that can preserve your current memory data, and provide an anchor for your lan.]]
"So they’re like Save Points? Better than having to find a typewriter, I guess." I considered all the other death and save mechanics I’d experienced over the years, most of which had involved respawn points. "Do we then run around as Renba, or do we get another Core Unit at the next vendor?"
[[Renba can be very limited in functionality, so it’s rare that Bios want to remain in them. But your Core Unit is a special pattern, one not retained in public systems, and for security’s sake your Cycog would not use a public vendor to create it. Copies of your Core also represent one of the larger costs we impose in The Synergis. We make it possible for anyone to maintain Renba or transfer to a new Core if theirs is destroyed, but we impose a cost that involves a percentage of accumulated points, or a loss of patterns, to ensure that Bios don’t throw their Cores away meaninglessly. While they are only a little more difficult and time consuming to generate than a standard suppression modal, Core Unit replacement is not something we treat lightly.]]
I digested that. Most MMOs had negligible death penalties. You died, and maybe your stats were reduced for a couple of minutes, or you had to spend some virtual money repairing your gear. The kind of cost Dio described was more in line with earlier MMOs, where you could lose everything you had carried, or hours—days—of levelling progress. And I was beginning to understand what a loss of patterns could mean, especially for food. Only having a handful of options would get old very quickly.
"You could transfer to a Suppression Modal if you didn’t have enough to replace your Core, right?"
[[If you have a Suppression Modal, yes, of course.]]
"What do you—?" I broke off, because something was above my Snug.
I’ve always loved that opening of the original Star Wars, with the massive star destroyer passing overhead. The sense of scale makes me shiver every time. The ship that overtook me, and left me in its blue glowing wake, wasn’t nearly as big as a star destroyer, but it could easily have swallowed dozen of Snugs whole. In shape, it reminded me of the old Concorde style of airplane: long, and rather skinny up the front, with a flaring end.