Ludo Brax: Intergalactic Gig Worker (Chapter 41)

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It all happened pretty quickly from there. My rapid ascent to doted upon, slightly mercurial System Superstar. The Sparkling Water Incident. All of it.

And now, sitting backstage on the night of The Witnessing, nursing a chamomile tea made entirely of transcendent force, there was nothing left to do but ruminate as I tried to prepare for another strange escalation of my fate.

It wasn't the sudden, unearned interest in me from scores of my fellow denizens of this simulated place that had me on edge. I had gotten used to that, sadly.

It wasn't even the fact that not a single one of the stagehands seemed to understand the proper ratio of nuts and dried fruit to sugar coated candy in a proper trail mix (25-75, obviously).

It was that this time I could sense I was in genuine danger.

And no one could tell me otherwise.

Not the cheery Assistant I'd been assigned who'd been explicitly programmed to flatter me (but mostly tried to get me to read his script about Data Structures). Not my Neighbors.

And, worst of all, not even Meg.

**

Apparently, to say the outcome of my confrontation with Anagorazia was unusual in the history of the System was a bit of an understatement. A more accurate phrase, Meg let me know in the most neutral tone she could muster, was ‘unauthorized reality condition.’

I leaned closer to the makeup mirror, inspecting my pores and wondering whether the Data Scrub my stylist had recommended was doing anything at all.

“You mean it wasn’t supposed to happen?”

“It couldn’t have.”

“But it did.”

“Yes.”

There was a patience in her voice so cosmically serene I felt I was being mocked.

“You’re not the first person to arrive in this Layer with Artificial Metrics,” she continued. “An unearned role. A proscribed destiny. It’s difficult to assign responsibility. Outside interference. A glitch. Historically, the System identifies these deviations and neutralizes them.”

“Anagorazia.”

“Her,” Meg said. “Or someone like her. They are rare. But not unprecedented.”

“So what’s different?”

Meg paused.

“The outcome.”

“The outcome? But nothing happened.”

“Precisely.”

I stood there with my mouth slightly agape, a neat trick I’d learned to get Meg to keep talking when I didn't understand.

“The Witness is a ceremonial role,” she said. “It exists to observe archived events. The prevailing belief is that this stabilizes history. Reinforces coherence.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“You are no longer being asked to witness. Not in the way it's happened in previous cycles.”

I offered my best guess as to what she was getting at.

“They think I’m him,” I said. “The First Ascender. Ever since the Garden—every time I sneezed I gained a follower.”

“Not in this layer.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said, actually entirely sure I didn't.

“The role you were said to have occupied in The Garden is a heretical belief,” Meg said. “The return of the First Ascender. It is unsanctioned. Aspirational. Here, the belief is different.”

I was just about ready to break from the implications of all this, which I disguised by hugging my knees to my chest and rocking back and forth as she continued.

“They do not believe you are him now.”

I let out a long pained sigh.

“Then what—”

“They want you to be him then.”

**

Still processing what that could possibly mean, we were interrupted by a Stagehand who, to me, looked uncannily similar to an Envoy of Pure Light in a front-facing cap.

“It’s time,” he said, gesturing toward his wrist, which, from my purview, was less a wrist than an endless luster.

I hopped up from my chair, shrugging nervously toward Meg.

“Well,” I said, “I guess this is it.”

“It would be impossible to argue with that logic.”

I shuffled toward the door, acting like I was deeply engaged in my process, but really doing all I could to delay the inevitable. Just as I was set to exit my dressing room, Meg called out in a voice that crackled with something close to vulnerability.

“Ludo..."

I could practically hear her recalibrate to a more neutral tone.

“I hope this isn’t our last time speaking.”

I stopped in my tracks. It was only then that I grasped the gravity of what I was facing. There were so many questions left unasked, so much more I wanted—needed—to understand.

But instead, I murmured simply,

“Me too, Meg.”

**

As I ambled toward the stage, the voices of my excited Neighbors, who filled the Cathedral, flitted through my head in a barely comprehensible barrage. I had the sensation I was sleepwalking. Only this time there’d be no Technicians to electroshock me awake before I reached the tragic conclusion.

I could barely form a coherent thought, with whispered phrases about my “potent emotional signature” and my “perfect calibration” flying through my psyche like abstract shapes from another dimension.

It hadn’t been since Megatech™  that I’d heard terms like this, and somehow, all this time later, they were still gibberish to me.

Could this be all it was? Some statistical quirk. Some unhappy accident. A dirty job that had to be done—and I was simply the only one who fit the bill.

As I approached the curtain, I couldn’t help but feel dangerously unprepared for whatever came next.

I still, quite literally, hadn’t the faintest idea what was expected of me, and everyone involved seemed unwilling to explain it, if not somehow expressly forbidden.

Sure, I had been in theatrical productions before. But even my best work, I had to admit, carried a little less cosmic import than whatever this was.

And to make matters worse, I knew nothing about the man I was meant to play.

This was anathema to me, a once ardent devotee of the Kruelizkei Method, that esteemed acting philosophy which called for complete immersion in a role, going so far as to live as and embody your subject, and crucially, their financial problems.

I wondered for a moment what the Old Man would think if he could see me now, had he not been shot into space in a Penal Rocket with the rest of his Inner Sanctum and forbidden to engage with art.

But before I could get too sentimental -- before I could even spit out my gum -- the din of distant voices gave way to eager applause beyond the curtain.

A stagehand, now wearing what I could only intuit were ceremonial robes, put out his cigarette in a gleaming pile of data and guided me like a prop toward my mark.

His manner toward me: reverent, opaque, and entirely uninterested in my opinion (or any of my suggestions for comedic interludes), was familiar in a way that made my stomach tighten.

Whatever was about to happen to me was part of a design way beyond my right to refuse it.

Why, then, did I feel so wrong for letting it happen?