Hours after this, Ember or Shiver as she was known in the real world, was lying in her virtualiser castle bed with the lovely four-poster above the snow-white bedding and the smoky, built-in fireplace. She thumped on Felton, or more accurately Mist's, wall, with a relative vigour for one so fragile-looking.
“Hey, come on and get in here your Majesty,” she called. Mist grumpily heaved himself out of bed and entered her bedroom. Painted a vivid, dark blue-green perhaps best described as like the sea, it had dark blue silk curtains and a flagstone floor.
There were seven, artfully-chosen, classic paintings; four in the room and one directly adjacent. The same ones Shiver had back at Aryan’s manor.
The room also encompassed a distinct air of cleanliness due to a meticulously thorough hired help. Mist noticed Shiver’s feathery, white wings were now midnight blue with a lighter, purplish, dawn's light hue.
“Yes Shiver,” he whispered quietly so Jacob wouldn’t hear. “What is it?”
“In the morning, we should test him with one of our riddles.”
“You mean your riddles,” Mist corrected cuttingly and with contempt. “Which suck anyway.”
Shiver reddened slightly with anger. “They do not, anyway which should I use..."
I must kill my environment to stay alive
I am of miniscule size
Or
When you have me, you want me
When you don’t, you don’t
I can bring you great joy and even greater pain
But lose me and all your worries will be assuaged.”
“What are the answers again?” Mist frowned, "virus for the first one, and life for the second, isn’t it?’
Shiver nodded “Yeah, that's right and do you suppose he will get them... I rather hope he does I quite like him.”
Mist shrugged. “Possibly, he seems quite bright for a human and the only reason you like him is because he is so good-looking, what with the paleness and slender, V-shaped, subtly muscular figure, big, deep-blue eyes and the thick, straight, chestnut dark-brown hair and all. The deeper red and bright-gold highlights in his hair are nice. You wouldn't guess your feelings though, from the way you kept glowering at him at dinner.”
“I did not glower,” said Shiver. I held myself with quiet poise and queenly dignity.”
“Your singing and violin solo on that track from your symphony performance was amazing; Jacob seemed rather disturbed by it though,” Shiver noted; nodded her fair head.
“Good we were going for awe-struck not apathetic tedium,” Mist replied.
She and Mist then fought over who got to dip their fingers into her left-over, chocolate pudding from dinner and Shiver suddenly laughed.
“Wait till we tell him Holo-realm exists here in our little fantasy world and that before the beast came, all the little inhabitants here used it to act out fantasies and play virtualiser games. Will tell him tomorrow he can use it from here,” Shiver said.
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“He'll get such a shock, he thinks this is some completely primitive medieval game. When actually, we have spas, zoos and electric cars driven by computers like the Monovalent wireless-operated ones, Aryan’s company made and marketed recently, and that Aryan wants to replace all gas-guzzlers with.”
“Bathrooms with fully-fledged hot water and piping systems, fast food-serving cafes with virtual realm hook-ups and several of the servants here are robots though ironically, the human ones are nothing more than virtualcoms anyway,” she continued. “He would never fathom I imagine the concept of an underground road and train system; everyone’s cars here and the railway are all kept in tunnels below the city. Not to mention all the underground factories that makes a lot of the technology.”
“Do you reckon he was surprised by the fact that our communist former utopia, with as he shall soon discover its reasonable technological advancement is so grounded in religion,” Mist pondered.
“Fundamentalist religion usually goes with more backward nations”, Shiver agreed “but this is a totalitarian regime at heart, despite its technology. Besides here magic and creators are real so it’s different,” Shiver said. “The universe works a different way here, so the rules of societal structure are different.”
“Did you consider changing the ending this time, Shiv?” Mist inquired of her. “We could maybe have the Shiverla God be nothing more than a computer entity created by scientists working for the Shiverla family for generations to keep them in power. The Shiverla God could itself be a holographic, visual projection created by the Artificial Intelligence.”
“What about the shadow beast though?” Asked Shiver. “It has to have a corporeal body after all its attacked people.”
“Not necessarily,” said Mist. “It could be a hologram too, but the twist is, after it’s been projected into the minds of both the witnessers and the attacked, and they think it’s torturing and taking off with them or someone else, the AI entity could send electrical signals to interfere with the attacked one’s brain waves and patterns, really killing them. The images everyone else would see however, would simply be the phony projections of those people dying by being clawed to death,” Mist finished.
“The exotic animals can all be chimeras,” Shiver said nodding enthusiastically. “Engineered in secret science laboratories by combining the genetic material of various animals. That would be how the fennec fox/bat/ flying squirrel/ small cat Siberia and the fox-cat a combination of several small-medium wild cat breeds and a fennec fox and red fox were made. The silver farlen, is a white wolf, a silvery-white fox, and a jackal all mixed and mingled together and has the ears of a floppy-eared bunny.”
“The sealien is a cat-seal chimera and the unicorn-like creature a deer, horse-alpaca mix. They have bright colours from the DNA of snakes, birds and fish and air dwellers have the wings from birds. No magic just combining genetically manipulated animal foetuses together and allowing them to develop into chimeras.”
“As for flying,” Shiver continued, playing with a silky, red-gold lock of hair, well you know that when we fly in the game, we become clouds of mist, and can transport from one place to another. Well, that could be that our bones, muscles, and tissue could have been genetically altered to be lighter so that we can become airborne.”
“Our cells let’s make it are during transportation broken down by the AI into atoms then the AI instructs the cells and DNA and our memories to be instantaneously copied and reconstructed at a different location letting us vanish. All royalty have this ability. The rain-mist is another illusion of the AI. A select group of people are involved in the genetic engineering. They manufacture the technology for us, the Royal Family, to help keep the citizenry in line, but keep it from the masses under penalty of Shadow Beast a.k.a, AI-induced death,” she suggested with a final snigger.
“As long as they don’t tell anyone they can live safely underground, and the Beast won’t attack them.”
“Well Shiv, Aryan if you recall, did say Monovalent is configured to be able to kill via brain wave interference as another way of eradicating our enemies,” Mist said. So anyhow, all we need is for the Monovalent-equivalent here to be able to transmit a signal to the target’s brain waves patterns to alter in such a way the brain tells the heart to stop beating and they're dead in minutes.”
“That means my idea of killing off all the city’s inhabitants via electrical signals that interfere with brain waves is actually, scientifically possible. Aryan apparently, used reptile man, Emanuel, the famous software engineer and your greatest fan and who helped commission us and Monovalent, to create brain wave electrocution.”
Shiver grinned “Hey Mist yes, I really like all that!” “ Yes, we should make sure all the human players find out, we could make the announcement before we ascend to heaven (which just to screw with things even more, is real) and I come back to the game as Adora my daughter.’
“No, don’t announce it,” said Mist. “That would ruin the game and the people's faith in royal rule just in time for when you return as Adora. Set it in motion as a preposterous rumour instead, spread by the free-market, capitalist heathens to sow the seeds of doubt in everyone.”
