Chapter 97: Chapter 97 – The Greatest Game

“I hope it’s clear,” I say into the silence of my living room, “that there are some things I didn’t mention, and why.”

“Oh! I mean, sure, of course. Anything I know, the Temple sort of knows, ‘cause I’m an Imprint. I mean, it’s not like just me knowing it means it’s been spoken on the winds of the world,” and she says that as though it’s a ritual invocation, “but I’m not gonna try to puzzle out your secrets till after you reach the surface. Sed’s honor.”

We lie there, content in the quiet, for what seems like a while and yet no time at all. She’s incredibly… fluffy, among other things, but also soft and warm and silken-fine to the touch. She’s got four tails out, however that works; one each wound around each of my legs in loose coils, one wrapped around my chest, and one forming a pillow for her head on my shoulder, which she uses when she’s not propped up on her elbows, talking excitedly.

There are a thousand ways things could be going wrong, a thousand productive things I could be doing with my time; I wrap my arms around her instead, and the story of my life flows until it’s down to a trickle. There are a thousand things I could be learning, from runes to Systemic magic to ancient histories; she asks me questions instead, piercing and trenchant and heartfelt, and that trickle gets wrung out for every drop available.

We lie there in silence afterwards. Her warmth suffuses me and pushes away that hollow, empty feeling that comes whenever I think or talk too much about my past, and she doesn’t seem to have any desire to do anything other than cuddle, so I just drift for a while.

“I know you said you didn’t want Mama cause you didn’t wanna risk your group dynamic.” Her voice is a rumble across me as she sort of slides sideways onto the couch, propping herself up on her elbow. “But why are you so confident?”

“Eh.” I grin at her. “I only have to win one fight. I guess I should be more worried than I am. Should definitely be practicing more than I am. I’m just… not, I guess.” I let my voice trail off, trying to find the right words. “I lost forward momentum. Now it’s like my strings are cut or something; I just can’t take this whole Temple thing seriously. The life-or-death battle I still need to fight, combat magics, none of it sticks in my mind half as much as wondering what we’re going to eat for dinner or where the Temple gets net-new energy from, whether it’s Cador or somehow the Void. Are we looking at a zero-point energy siphon of some sort?”

“A zero-point—no, Vonne, focus. One fight? What about the Lord Mayor?”

“That one’s handled.”

“Handled? What do you mean, handled? He’s a surfacer, it’s not like he’s going to go easy on you for Lily’s sake. And he’s gonna have the strongest fifth he can find!”

“Handled.” I smirk at her. “Not a problem.”

“Not a—fine,” she huffs adorably. “Fine! It’s not a problem. Obviously we should talk about something else.”

“Sure!” I make my smirk fade into a more even grin. “Got anything in mind? Puzzles, games, riddles, math?”

“I’m not really into games.” Vonne frowns pensively. “I mean, I’m into Only, kinda, but only because it’s so big and complicated it’s basically a puzzle? It’s got so many levels. It’s a war game, a big one, not as big as Lily’s Tournament but big. Sam runs it once every four cycles.”

“Only. Huh. There’s a big interstellar-empires game that people get super into on the Spirit called Raq, which is cognate. I think it’s based off of an old game, like seriously old, called Fractalia? Back from the Early Space epoch, maybe a… hundred years before First Jump.”

“Ashef always said that Only is a game that exists everywhere you get kindred. They think that it’s like a kind of virus, an idea that propagates itself. I think that’s silly, but if it’s the same game, maybe it’s not!”

“Even if it is, it’d be more likely to be, I dunno, convergent evolution.”

“Evolution?”

“A process by which animals drift apart over time. Well, not just animals; plants and bacteria and whatnot too.” I snort in amusement at myself. “It’s not the most relevant of things to the Fleet-borne; we actively manage our environment way more than grounders do.”

“I,” Vonne says with a quiet munificence, “am going to pretend any of that made sense and move on. So! What was… Rahck?”

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“Raq.”

“That.” She waves a hand in dismissal of her inability to pronounce it, which I guess is fair; she doesn’t have Omniglot and she didn’t grow up speaking Fleet. “What’s it like?”

“What’s it like? Jeeze.” I lay back and close my eyes, thinking, trying to remember. “So, okay, bear in mind that this was like… ten years ago? And I only played it once, which is to say I played it nonstop for one interval, a little more than six megaseconds before I had to drop out and focus on jump prep.

“Raq is… it’s everything. So was Fractalia, I guess, but Fractalia was speculative and deliberately unrealistic. Raq is grounded in the realities of the Age of Wormhole Travel, the itinerant Fleet and the maybe one per system jumpnav if you’re lucky who you don’t want to risk but even a megacarrier needs a nav.

“You’ve got a hundred systems in a standard game of Raq. Each system has a hundred players. That’s a standard game; a mega game is a thousand players for each system plus instead of ten Itinerant Powers you’ve got twenty five, and each IP has a hundred players instead of ten. You maybe see a mega game when you get a Conclave, multiple Fleet ships meeting up at the same star, but not necessarily even then.” I frown, lost in reverie for a moment before I shake my head and collect myself. “Right. So.

“Each system has, you know, stuff. Agriculture, industry, logistics, politics. Planetary, orbital, beltane, far-flung, ringers, siphoners on their gas giants, research stations all over the place. Negotiation with Itinerants, spying on everyone else, diplomacy, trade. War and conquest, if you can manage it.

“The byline is Everything Counts, Nothing Matters. You optimize every bit you can because it just might make the difference and the challenge is fun in its own right, and then it all turns on a strategic decision five levels above you that can’t be optimized out of.”

Vonne has at this point rolled away in order to make full eye contact, which is a shame, but it does make conversation easier. “In Only,” she eventually says, “you do only the one thing, and it affects only your one thing, that’s sort of the joke. I never liked it all that much but it is interesting as a puzzle. But you can’t win by treating it like a puzzle; there’s too much diplomacy and people and favors-trading in the end, maybe you can take on two peers but three? Not even me.”

“Huh.”

“And the one thing is… it does sound a lot like your game. Farming, or building things, or doing magic, or managing Firstborn, they’re like moving cataclysms and nobody plays as them, or managing the rebellion in all of its moving pieces. But it’s all done in little pieces. Not like real life, where there were people like Mama Vix and Auntie Zka who led in the shadows.”

“No real leaders in Raq, either. Just a weird blend of politics and diplomacy and military movements and trading, and hoping you didn’t entrust command of the megacarrier to a spy.”

“That sounds…” Vonne tries to fight down her giggles. “... awkward?”

“It was hilarious. He powered off the ship post-jump, shut down every reactor and locked every bulkhead. Basically nobody suspected a damn thing except for some of the engineers who were seventy-thirty he was worried about a mutiny from his XO, he’d played it so perfectly. They got enough running to scramble a short flight and open up the armory before the boarding party landed, but nobody had enough time to get in place and it was a clean sweep for pretty moderate losses.”

“What happened afterwards?”

“Well, the neighbors were pretty worried, since sniping out a megacarrier is one thing, but stealing one is another…” I tell the story of how the offending polity had been wiped out entirely and their victim vassalized but given the other system to take over in an act of cruel mercy, and how none of that had wound up mattering either, because someone half of Known Space away had synthesized an exotic form of matter that could destabilize suns. The resulting war had turned dark a quarter of Known Space before another, entirely unrelated system wound up on top of the coalition to end the war, only to fall victim to four out of their five near-peers burying knives in their back… and then fighting amongst themselves, the four and the one, until the five finished eating all the small fry and came back for the traitors.

Vonne has her own stories, games of Only that went sideways; instead of it being competitive, it was notionally cooperative but with extremely limited communication, a game largely of manipulating the Firstborn while brewing a rebellion behind their backs. Push them in too many directions at once, due to poor coordination or miscommunications or simply bad luck, and you could get early Cullings… or, rarest of all, alliances, either representing those very few Firstborn who turned against their kin in the days between the Iron Wars and the Days of the Storm or those even fewer Firstborn who saw the coming tribulation with clear sight and laid aside their grudges and swore oaths of cooperation with even the maddest among them.

We keep telling stories until my companions start trickling back, and then wind down by mutual, unspoken agreement.

It will soon be time, alas, for more serious work; but first, dinner.

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