Preface
The Acropolis, or even this virtually real representation of it, was not the setting Ward Shull expected for a meeting of the senior officers of the Greater Glory of Sif Organization. Nor did he expect to see those officers in ancient Greek attire or, as ancient Greeks sometimes preferred, wearing nothing at all. But, then, the Greater Glory had never been interested in historical accuracy. About the only thing in common between the goddess they pretended to serve and the ancient deity from Norse mythology she was named after was the gender.
Ward sent a mental message to the computer to dress him in something that would not be unusual in such a gathering, other than nothing, and found himself in a toga.
He was inspecting his the computer’s selection when a booming shout announced, “Ward! You’re here! Good.” Looking up, he saw a naked man coming at him with long strides. The man’s fit body and curly black hair reminded Ward of a statue of Zeus he had recently seen in his supervisor’s virtual office. The computer confirmed his guess by whispering into his thoughts that the naked man was Chad Thompson.
The real Chad Thompson looked nothing like this image. Chad had no physical body, other than his brain, which floated in a vat of organic fluid. Two-thirds of the officers, Ward guessed, were nothing but vatted brains. Everything they saw, heard, and felt came through computer stimulation of their sensory nerves, which could transmit images of real events picked up through countless sensors or were virtually real images such as these.
Ward remembered getting rid of his own body with a sigh of relief. His mother — he had a real mother who had birthed him the old-fashioned way — disapproved of vatting. She thought that it reduced humans to mere machines; something of the soul was lost when the brain did not exist in the physical body. When Ward was ten he sued her for his liberty, arguing that keeping a child’s brain in a physical body counted as endangerment. In a vat, a brain could be better protected from accident and disease, and the chemistry of the fluids that surrounded it could be much more efficiently regulated by machine than through the physical body’s process of consuming food and drink. The courts agreed.
Once vatted, Ward swore that he would never even represent himself as having a virtual body again, he found the idea so loathsome. But Chad required it. As Chad reached out a hand, Ward sent mental instructions to the computer. “Make the body act friendly and pleased.” He sensed the body reaching out its own hand and smiling and felt Chad’s warm and squishy flesh. Ward had already instructed the computer that the body was not to display any of his revulsion at the sight, smell, or feel of flesh.
Chad gave him a heavy slap on the back that forced Ward to step forward or fall. Pain, though only a slight sting, made Ward curse his physical form anew.
“Everybody, listen up.” Chad shouted in a voice that, with the aid of the computer, boomed unnaturally loud. “Before we start today, I want to introduce a new senior vice-president; or, as many of us prefer, our new archangel.”
In a heartbeat, Ward found himself sharing a meter-high pedestal with Chad, looking looked down on the corporate officers. “Ward, here, was one of the first people to buy into our offer to play one of Sif’s angels. We gave him guardianship over the Eatten Islands, a small chain ten thousand kilometers west of the twin continents of Midway in the Greater Pacific Ocean. A couple of months ago the people of these islands were officially recorded as worshipers of only one deity, our goddess, Sif.”
There was applause and a few loud whoops from the crowd of about a hundred and fifty. They made far more noise than the announcement deserved, Ward thought. He felt the body’s face flush and the skin tingle.
“Ward deserves high praise, not only because he has cleared a section of land of all competing deities, but also because of the strategic importance of these islands. They are so far from any other land mass that no other player will find it easy to establish a beachhead there. Even if, by luck so bad we can not imagine it, or by the other players uniting against our Sif as they have threatened, we lose all worshipers in those lands our sheep share with those of other deities, we shall always have the Eatten Islands for ourselves.”
Chad waited through another cheer and wished he had not come.
“Ward has shown great talent in guiding the people on Greater Earth towards accomplishing our objectives, and we plan on exploiting that talent. Along with his promotion to archangel we are giving him authority over the continent of Truk and its surrounding territories.”
Ward turned to Chad with open mouthed shock. He had expected his promotion to come with an increase in responsibilities, but Truk was orders of magnitude larger than his last assignment. A quick thought sent to the computer brought him the fact that Truk, barely fifty kilometers in diameter on Lesser Earth, formed a super-continent a million kilometers wide on Jacobson’s manufactured planet. The population of this continent numbered in the billions, and over three dozen major deities and countless minor cults had influence there.
It took a while for his mind hear the applause. Somebody added the roar of a large crowd to the noise, adding to Ward’s discomfort at the same time. He commanded the computer to end the physical symptoms of stress that afflicted the body, only to discover that Chad had blocked all such commands. “Then, I don’t want to experience those sensations. Transmit nothing but sight and sound,” Ward commanded. The computer obeyed, and Ward relaxed.
The pedestal vanished, and Ward was once again level with the other officers. Many came forward with quick congratulations, then returned to conversations that the announcement had interrupted. The body reacted from the computer’s programmed instructions with his input limited to providing the briefest answers he could think of to the questions asked.
Somebody broke the routine. The man stepped forward and said, “Chad has a lot of confidence in you, Ward. I haven’t been able to look into the full report. Exactly what miracles did you pull to make Sif the one and only deity for — what was the name of that place?
Ward saw the body hesitate from the confused signals his mind sent when the computer identified the speaker as Paul Marshall. He was another of the founders of the Greater Glory. “Eatten Islands,” Ward answered, buying time to consider Paul’s real question.
“Yes. Eatten Islands.”
It was better, Ward decided, to lower their expectations now than to have them angry at him in the future. “There was only one race on these islands besides humans, a race of mountain trolls. It was easy to focus the humans’ attention on fighting the trolls; history tells us how easy it is to impose restrictions on humans at time of war. I had our prophets fight for laws against dissent and ‘subversive ideas,’ which included anything said or written in support of any other deity. I told them that the worship of any deity other than Sif upset the goddess and made her less inclined to help them in their struggles. We were already the most powerful sect on the islands, otherwise we could have easily been the victim of these restrictions rather than the beneficiaries.
“It won’t be the same on Truk.”
“I know. I’m looking forward to the challenge. I think that being archangel over Truk will make the game a lot more exciting.”
“Genocide,” said a rough voice; the slurred word almost unrecognizable. The speaker was a balding, short, pot-bellied man whose stained and wrinkled robes barely concealed the bloated figure underneath. The speaker seemed to be having as much difficulty standing as he did talking. Ward wondered what kind of malady afflicted this man, and the computer answered that he was drunk. What kind of person would represent himself at a business meeting as a virtual drunk? Ward thought. The computer answered that the drunk was David Valance, the third founder of Greater Glory.
Paul offered Ward’s defense. “Jacobson had his genetic engineers make trolls so that they crave human flesh the way humans — at least those primitive humans he used to populate the world — have for sex. There can be no crime in ridding the world of such monsters.”
“Monsters.” Dave grunted. “We made these monsters. We, with our genetically enhanced, computer-linked brains, can make just about any type of living creature we can imagine. We can build a planet for them to live on, create night and day, build the mountains and the oceans, and that, you say, gives us the right to command how they live and who shall die. Even those primitives that supplied the genetic raw material for the humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls, and most of the other intelligent races, were advanced enough to make genocide a crime. We make it a game.”
With a smile, Paul said, “I find your selective use of historical facts amazing. True, primitive humans made genocide against other humans a crime, but this did not stop them from practicing ‘racial cleansing’ when it suited them. And look at their literature. The very pages that inspired Jacobson to create trolls and orcs portrayed these races as fit only to be slaughtered. The characters in these stories never speak of taking prisoners or of doing anything but killing those orcs and trolls wounded in combat.”
“Primitive humans did outlaw dog fighting, cock fighting, and other fighting sports between lesser beings,” said a woman who the computer identified as Brenda McDermott, the Archangel of Southern Greater Madagascar.
“As well as other forms of cruelty to animals.” David added.
Paul batted the objection aside with a wave of his hand. “They never made it a crime to pull the wings off of flies, nor were they too concerned with the pain caused by the poisons and traps they used on household pests. They still tortured millions of animals just to make their hair shinier and their underarms smell better. Their protections extended only to `higher life forms;’ meaning, of course, those nearly on the same level as themselves. Our laws are the same. Moral protections extend only to higher life forms, and primitive humans are simply too far beneath us to be of legitimate concern.”
“We evolved from them.” said Dave.
“And they evolved from sea slime, that doesn’t mean that sea slime has rights.”
The clap that landed on Ward’s shoulders shocked the breath out of him. He recovered to see Chad beam a too-friendly grin down at him, then waive his goblet in Dave’s direction as he said, “Ward has only just arrived and you’re already trying to corrupt him.” He turned back to Ward and added, “Pay Dave no attention. I think he got some drain cleaner in his brain fluid. No doubt, he raised some objections to your tactics.”
Ward wanted to fade away, but with Chad’s arm across his shoulders there was no escape. There were two stories about the founding of the Greater Glory; an official story that appeared in the published company history, and another spread in confidential whispers. Ward believed the second story, and what it said worried him.
Three hundred years ago, Chad, Dave, Paul, and a fourth person, Sandra Renkin, were close friends. All of them wanted very much to play in Jacobson’s game, but none of them had enough money to make even a minimum bid. They agreed to pool their resources, then raise additional money by creating the stock company Greater Glory. Each founder kept a fifth of the stock; the rest they sold. Their corporate laws required a three-fourths majority vote to expel any founder, which meant the unanimous consent of the other founders. When Sandra had financial difficulties, she put her stock up on the market. The others exercised a first-buy option, and each ended up with more than a quarter of the total stock. That guaranteed their safety as a permanent member of Greater Glory for as long as they wanted.
Shortly after Dave vatted his brain, his perspective on the game changed dramatically. He called it wrong. The other two protested that if he found the game objectionable he should quit and sell his shares, but he refused. Some of the players shared his sentiments, but Dave lacked the numbers to offer them much more than token protection; he bought favors when his votes were needed to decide some controversy, where his principles did not dictate his vote. Ward, so far, had kept out of their feud; he wanted nothing less than to be pinned between them.
Dave brushed spilled wine from his robes. “Ward, imagine that you were not born in this place and time but, instead, you were born a resident of Jacobson’s game world. What rules would you adopt to govern how gods treat their subjects?”
“Of course.” Paul interrupted. “`Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ If I was a cockroach I would not want people to use roach poisons, and I should treat cockroaches as I would want people to treat me if I was a cockroach. So, the use of roach poisons is immoral. Remember that, Ward. It’s a valuable lesson I’m sure.”
“Jacobson populated his world with more than insects.”
“They’re all pretty much the same.” Paul answered with a smile. “Compared to us, I mean.”
“Paul, why persist?” Chad said. “We’ve said everything that can be said. Something short-circuited his brain; he can’t reason any more. Leave it alone. We have a meeting to conduct.” He released Ward’s shoulder and appeared again, alone, on a pedestal. Ward took a half dozen steps toward freedom, then turned back as one of the audience. Dave floated to the back of the crowd and conjured a couch to lay upon and a boy to keep his wine glass filled..
“Godlings and archangels,” Chad said; the computer altered his voice into a thundering rumble that easily carried through the Acropolis. The noise of people shifting into comfortable positions died down and Chad captured their attention. “Minions of Sif, we called this meeting to debate an issue which Archangel Emory Smith petitioned to bring before us. Archangel Smith, you may address the assembly.”
Another pedestal rose from the floor, this one supporting a man who took Sif’s Nordic origins seriously. The tall man wore his long blond hair in braids and dressed himself in furs against an imagined cold. He had a nervous energy about him that drove him to pace, but his pedestal gave him room only to walk a tight circle near the edge.
“I was one of the first to join the Greater Glory,” he said, somehow looking at each person in the audience in turn. “I purchased some of the first stock in this organization from its original release, and bought with it the right to play one of Sif’s godlings. I was at the first meeting, with less then a dozen others, where we decided on a strategy for the game; one that has since made Sif one of the most powerful and widely worshiped gods on Jacobson’s world. We had learned that humans made up 80 percent of the intelligent population of Greater Earth. A look at human history suggested that we could seduce them into Sif’s flock by making Sif, not a Norse goddess of combat, but a goddess of humans. We named humans the chosen creatures, around which all else revolves. With humans under our control, we anticipated no trouble in seducing the remaining population.
“That was long ago, and though we have not voted on a formal change in policy, applications to play Sif’s angels are not evaluated with the same diligence that they once were. It seems that anybody with the money to pay our standard price can get into the game, regardless of their willingness to abide by the Sif’s Official Doctrine.
“Why do I protest this? Since I have been made Godling over Greater South America, I have ended up spending most of my time, not taking worshipers from other deities, but resolving disputes between Sifian worshipers themselves. Twice, disputes between Sifian angels with different ideas on how Sif is to be played generated full fledged civil wars on the planet. A waste, people. It is a tragic waste. These battles took place in countries long under Sifian control. The situation can only be worse when different Sifian realms grow to border each other, unless those realms share not only service to a common goddess but the same set of beliefs about that goddess. Instead of united under the name of a common deity, as we had planned, they will war over their differences — unless they have no differences.
“My petition, then, is to establish a committee to go through Sif’s Official Doctrine, revising it as they see fit to create a set of ideas which has the best chance of carrying us to victory on Jacobson’s world. And I petition the officers to establish some mechanism to make sure that all of Sif’s godlings, archangels, and angels adhere to that doctrine.
Ward looked around to measure the reaction. Most of the listeners looked uneasy; some shyly shook their heads, but all of them were trying to read the founders for their reaction.
“There is a reason for this new policy, as unofficial as it may be,” said Dave. The words startled Ward, who thought Dave was paying too much attention to his drink to listen. “Allowing our angels some discretion allows them to make Sif more appealing to more people. How many of us have lost worshipers because we were too inflexible and somebody else was allowed to seduce potential worshipers away from us?” A murmur of agreement supported his claim.
“Short-term gains, sir, bought at too high a price I’m afraid,” answered Emory. “Eventually, followers of compromised doctrines will meet, their doctrines will not match, and they will go to war. Having a consistent doctrine will have its costs; everything we do has some costs. But it will allow us to present a unified front against our opponents everywhere. Ward himself has shown the power that is ours when we unite humans under a single banner.”
Paul grinned. “Perhaps you should know a little more about Ward’s victory before you hold him up as a shining example of conformity. Ward, how closely did you follow Sif’s traditional doctrine?”
Dave thought to himself, I didn’t hear them right. He didn’t call on me.
“Come now, Ward,” Paul coaxed.
Ward’s body swallowed to regain its voice; he cursed the computer for the realism it built into these bodies. “I was competing against Mars. The man playing him accepted the idea of playing Mars as a god of war. Next to him, Sif’s doctrine that females were given a superior moral sense, while violent male urges are a corruption, was encouraging most of the males to worship Mars. They gave him the larger armies and the better soldiers. So, I told them that male aggression is as much good and right as female compassion; they are two halves of the same coin, and they must stay together to win Sif’s victories on Greater Earth. It worked. I won over enough men that, supported by the women I already controlled, we were able to defeat Mars’ worshipers in battle.”
“I have not denied that flexibility is useful from time to time,” said Emory. “My complaint is that these gains will come at too high a cost in the long run. What happens when Ward’s civilization come into contact with the South Americans that I control. His men will be demanding a rightful place for themselves, while my followers will seek to subjugate them. There will be war, and while we fight the other gods will win back all that we have gained through flexibility.”
“Let’s embrace a little reality here,” said Brenda as another of Chad’s pedestals raised her off of the floor. “Emory, your worries seem to be on the effect flexibility will have on the end of the game. Face it, there is never going to be an end to Jacobson’s game. Ward’s people have to be over a hundred million miles away from yours. They are never going to meet. There are countless intelligent beings down there, and their population continues to rise. In nearly three hundred years of playing, only five players have been eliminated for having no worshipers; and, of those, two were resurrected when waves of nostalgia swept lands they once controlled. A full fifteen percent of the population worships deities of their own construction; myths who aren’t even players. We can never get so many people, scattered over so much land, to worship the same deity. There will never be an end game.”
“Who even wants the game to end?” asked another voice. It’s owner was a teenager by appearance, though the person representing himself as such was probably centuries old. The computer identified him as Vance Gillard, archangel of New Zealand’s southern continent. “The Founders are making money off of this game. They certainly have no reason to see it end. As for the rest of us, what would we do if somebody wins—even if we win? The game will be over, and what else waits for us? We have a choice between living in a virtually real world where our whims are answered at a thought, or a real universe where engineers can do almost as well. What else is there that can really count as being fun?
“I care about winning,” said Emory.
“So do I!” shouted Paul, now standing on the platform that held his couch. “How dare you suggest that we are sabotaging Sif’s victory so that we can continue to make money. Damn you, Vance. If you’re not interested in winning then perhaps you’re not somebody we want as one of Sif’s archangels.”
“I didn’t say that,” Vance answered.
His voice was lost under the John’s roar. “You are out of here, Vance. It’s time to clean out your locker, boy.”
“Enough!” shouted Chad, his command stilling the air so that even those who talked made no sound. Vance continued to mouth the words, “I didn’t say that,” as he searched for sympathy. Ward had seen enough of Paul’s anger to know it would be a mistake to give any sign of alliance with the fallen archangel.
When the last person gave up trying to talk, Chad restored sound. Paul launched another stream of curses and threats which brought the silence back. Paul returned to his couch, and Chad restored sound again. This time nobody attempted to take advantage of the silence’s end.
“We are here to discuss Smith’s petition that we adopt and enforce a uniform Sifian doctrine. Does anybody have anything more to say on that issue?”
He restored Brenda to her pedestal. “I was saying that we should not expect this game to come to an end. There are simply too many people on this world with too many different ways of thinking. And, I will dare side with Vance and say that this is not necessarily a bad thing. The playing of the game is much more fun than the winning of it. Playing it, we can struggle to do the best we can while recognizing that winning is out of the question. Since there will be no end game, we should allow everybody the freedom to play their local situations as they want.”
Paul was standing again. He and Chad stared at each other for a long moment, then Chad nodded and gave Paul a pedestal. “Brenda, it’s the winning or losing that gives playing its excitement. If what you’re saying is true, that there can be no winner or loser, then we should just scrap the game and start over. What’s the use of playing?”
“Winning doesn’t have to be all or nothing. There are degrees of winning and losing. Ward has enjoyed a victory; I have enjoyed a couple. But our victories really move us only the smallest step closer to ruling the whole world.”
Several mumbled agreement, but Ward thought he might have been the only one to see the nod that Dave gave Brenda. Paul continued to stand; Chad shook his head with a sad, paternalistic ‘no.’ Votes at these meetings depended on the numbers of shares owned; but almost universal dissent could not win over the hand of two Founders in agreement.
“Brenda speaks of reality,” Dave said. “Let us look at reality. We gained a tremendous advantage for Sif when we came up with the idea of bringing angels and archangels into the game. Most of the other deities continued playing alone; some still do. Imagine how we might suffer if we should lose the bulk of our angels and archangels. Let us say that we adopt this universal Sifian policy and made those who play for us merely bureaucratic puppets. I suspect that more than a few will find the game not worth playing when they find their script written from authorities above.”
Paul asked, “What do you care if people quit playing the game? I thought you wanted to see the game ended.”
The only answer Dave gave him was a smile.
Standing in the crowd, Ward caught whispered words from people announcing they would quit, or seek a position playing angel to some more liberal deity. The murmured dissent had to be audible from Chad’s and Paul’s pedestals as well. From the look on their faces, they knew what the people were saying and were shocked by it.
“We can go back to playing Sif ourselves, just the three of us, like in the good old days,” Dave added. Murmured dissent grew louder as the crowd’s confidence grew. Rebellion; the word tested the air once or twice, and the founders did not have the power to stop them.
“I call for a vote,” Chad said in harsh, quick words.
“And I second it,” said Dave. “Furthermore, I call for a secret ballot.”
“All those in favor of secret ballot?” Chad shouted. The roar left no room to dispute the decision.
A thought projected at the central computer cast a vote. The computer tallied and displayed the result; yet, judging from their looks, neither Chad nor Paul doubted the outcome. When the tallies were posted it was clear that the will of Sif’s servants had outweighed that of the founders. The final outcome was almost unanimous against Emory.
Ward smiled; in a crowd filled with so many smiles he could not imagine his drawing special attention from the Founders who lost. He had already decided how he wanted to play the game, and it was a relief to know he would have the freedom to make and execute his own plans.
Dave’s smile was more subtle. None were bold enough to approach him to congratulate him for his victory, or to thank him for his support; but the thanks would come later. Ward could only wonder at what schemes Dave had hatching, and what doctrines archangels and angels under his influence were teaching the people of Jacobson’s World.