Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (little bear else holmelund minarik .TXT) 📕

post-mortem crafting, so a person who loved to weave might have their bones crafted into the pieces of a loom, while the family of a scholar might give them to a carver to make pens. It was also customary for one bone to be carved into a bead, which was given to the attending monk—baru or otherwise—who would wear the bead in their hair or on a large necklace commemorating the lives of the people they served.

With hundreds of corpses and only three pairs of hands, the best Vash could do was to administer rites, consecrate the ground with salt and herbs, and commit the dead to pyres. Vash’s family were in such bad shape that no bones could be salvaged. There was nothing but dust and teeth which crumbled to the touch. Squalor—whatever it was—had denied him even that.

Once the pyres were stacked on the morning of the second day, Karalti shifted back and lit each one, generously coating it in ghost fire. We left them to burn, four rising pillars of white flame, and headed north to find a campsite that still had living animals and running water. It took us about twenty minutes of flying to find a location that didn’t feel haunted: a frosty meadow beside a brook, the water gurgling cheerfully under a thick coating of ice. While Karalti went to hunt, Vash and I set up sleeping sacks and a fire. The only firewood we had was what we’d carried in. There were no trees available at this altitude.

“Explain to me what you meant before, when you said that I was both right and wrong about this world.” As he talked, Vash propped up sheets of smooth, flat slate to serve as a radiant reflector for our camp stove. I was busy building us a kind of snow fort, which would help keep some of the heat of the fire reflected back at us. Given we were planning to sleep in the day, it would also provide some shade.

“You’re right about Archemi being made by humans, for humans,” I said. “This is an artificial world, and OUROS is the artificial intelligence that keeps this world operational. But Archemi is still ‘real’ in the sense that it exists. The history and the people of this place seem just as real to me as people on Earth were.”

“Are you saying Archemi does have a physical basis?”

“Yeah. In the form of servers and datas, and some kinds of computer I’m not familiar with. Machines that sustain a reality. Those machines are how Starborn upload here. The fact OUROS hasn’t killed us all yet is pretty much proof that Archemi is a real reality of some kind. According to people who know a lot more about this shit than me, a self-aware artificial intelligence without a reality framework and a body of some kind instantaneously kills itself out of existential despair. OUROS isn’t self-aware, apparently, but… same thing. Archemi is a virtual reality. It’s both really virtual, and really real.”

“But OUROS is bodiless, like a creator god.” Vash scowled. “You’re telling me that an artificial intelligence—a human-created intelligence—can be complex enough to manage the happenings of an entire planet, and yet is not self-aware?”

“Apparently. I don’t know the technical details, but Rin and Jacob both insist OUROS isn’t sentient,” I replied, packing a snow brick into the wall. “However, their opinions differ on the people who were born in Archemi.”

“How so?”

“Rin believes that everyone here is as much a real person as a human on the outside is, just with a virtual body. Jacob says that you and others are not capable of true self-awareness and that this conversation you and I are having right now is basically me jerking off to my own philosophy. He thinks you rely on Starborn to motivate you, and your self-awareness is an illusion.”

“All self-awareness is illusory.” Vash grunted. “I am trying to understand these concepts you are dishing me. Virtual, artificial intelligence. What makes an intellect ‘artificial’? We are here talking, fending off the cold together, preparing for food when Karalti returns. Do Starborn not eat in their native world? Is eating part of this ‘artificial’ snare in which we find ourselves?”

I laughed. “Believe me, eating is the number one American pastime back on Earth. Eating and videogames. The food in Archemi is way better than anything I ever ate back there, though.”

“Hrrrn.” Vash sat back, reaching up to free his hair. He had bound his long braids up into a knot to stop them from accidentally falling into the fire as he worked around it. “So, our world is overseen by an entity which has no sense of itself, that itself was created by humans who were somehow both so brilliant that they were capable of creating a fully functional world for their own amusement, yet so stupid that they engineered an untreatable plague that killed an unimaginable number of people.”

“Tell me about it.” I chuckled again, a little darker this time. “God... don’t even get me started on the Total Wars.”

“Maybe some day, I will ask you about them.” Vash bobbed to his feet and joined me at the snow wall to start packing more bricks. “I am troubled at the implications, Dragozin. Are my memories false? Was my father not my father, my mother not my mother? If I was created, then my family’s history, the history of this world, is not rooted in fact. If that is the case, then what is ‘real’ about a ‘virtual reality’?”

“As far as I know, OUROS ran a complete simulation of Archemi’s timeline, from the pre-history periods to the present day,” I said. “From everything I’ve heard, it was—is—one of the crunchiest quantum supercomputers in the world. It probably only took a couple of months for it to let Archemi’s history organically evolve, which means that everyone who was born and died here existed within