This is for Chuck Wendig's Flash Fiction challenge, A Second Game of Aspects.
In case you're curious, I rolled three ten sided dice (3d10 for those of you who speak RPG nerd) to generate my aspects randomly. The subgenre was Cyberpunk, the Setting was Inside a Massively-Multiplayer game, and the Element to Include was Cloning.
Enjoy!
"Doppelganger"
Is
it murder or suicide to kill your doppelganger?
I’m not normally the philosophical sort. I leave the
heavy questions to the n00bs in Nixeroth tavern who gather to flame each other in
between quests. But I’m in a mess for killing my doppelganger, so it’s worth consideration.
“Do you understand?” The Night Elf chick asked me.
I wanted to ask her if she wanted to cyber, but now wasn’t
the time. She must be trying to make a name for herself, by volunteering to
talk to me. I didn’t have to check her character stats to know her alignment
was True Neutral. They like to fancy themselves arbitrators of justice. I called
them fence-sitters.
“What crime? My doppelganger is me, uploaded and
imprinted into EverWorld of Dungeons. We’re the same person. I even chose to
look the same in cyberspace as I do in the meatspace.” I flexed my muscles.
“That’s not the point.” She frowned. Her face showed faint
lines in between her eyebrows. It was amazing how far technology had come.
“I’m the real victim here.” I looked down at my hands. Better
play remorseful. “I watched myself die. I watched the light leave my own eyes. I
didn’t sleep for a week.”
Some of the lack of sleep was because my guild raided the
Flame Dragon of Ooga’lith’s Lair for some epic loot, but still.
“You still killed someone. Even if that person was
yourself.”
“So it’s suicide then. It was a cry for help. Someone
should have saved me from myself.” I couldn’t help but grin at my own
cleverness.
The elf chick looked at me like she wanted to use her
wand of Flame Strike to cow me into submission. “It can’t be suicide. You’re
still here.”
I
wondered if her meatspace counterpart was this hot. Probably not. Double D’s
were pretty standard in EverWorld of Dungeons, along with super revealing
armor. For women the more revealing the armor, the higher armor bonus you got. She
must have a +30 to her armor class, at least.
She
might not even be a she. It wouldn’t be the first time a guy went home with a Level
20 elf in a +25 flaming chainmail bikini only to find out her meatspace
doppelganger was a dude. Some guy actually sued when he found out the she he
cybered with was a he, but the courts threw it out. The laws haven’t quite
caught up to the technology yet.
“It’s not murder, either,” I said. “I’m not dead. Completely.”
She sighed.
I had her, and she knew it. It was illegal to kill
someone in meatspace; it was illegal to True Death someone in cyberspace. But
there weren’t any laws saying you couldn’t True Death your doppelganger in
cyberspace, or kill your doppelganger in meatspace.
“Do you know what this means?” The corners of her mouth
turned down slightly. “If other people figure out how to you did it, they can
True Death a doppelganger from the meatspace, or kill someone from cyberspace.”
That really wasn’t my problem. “And? I doubt
they’ll be able to kill other people. It’s doppelganger versus doppelganger
that people need to be worried about.”
I caught a look of fear before her face smoothed back
into True Neutrality. I would have been scared myself. My meatspace doppelganger
had been intimately connected to me. Before I offed him, we shared the same thoughts
and feelings. I knew him like I knew myself--and I was an asshole.
Maybe she had something to worry about too. Maybe the
worse thing about her meatspace counterpart wasn’t that she was a he.
It
was just the two of us. People were still talking outside in the marketplace about
bringing charges against me, but on who’s authority? The people in the
meatspace? We’d already set precedent that meatspace laws could not be upheld
in cyberspace; that would lead to chaos. And in EverWorld of Dungeons, there were no higher authorities. It was just
player versus player in the purest sense.
She
leaned in, her chair scratching against the wooden floor of the Harpy’s Nest
tavern. I got a much better view of her cleavage. “How did you do it?”
I
grinned. Ahhh, the real reason why she said she’d talk to me privately. True
Neutral my dancing Dwarvish butt. “Why do you want to know?”
She
looked over her shoulder, like someone I couldn’t see was watching her.
“Is
your doppelganger logged in?”
“Not
yet.” She shivered. “I’ve started to
move. Even when she’s not online.”
“Were
you created at the start of the server?”
“Yes.”
My
theory was right. A handful of us could move around without our doppelgangers
signed on. We’d all been around since the start of the server. The amount of
hours spent logged on had aggregated into something resembling a soul.
Some
of them had already been True Deathed by their own doppelgangers. I know my
doppelganger certainly freaked out when he realized I ran the Shards of Destiny
quest without his clumsy fingers tying me down. He’d considered deleting me
too, but I was in a top tier guild. I was too valuable to delete.
“I
think she’s going to delete me.”
“Bummer.”
“Tell
me how you did it. Tell me, and I’ll make sure you don’t get into trouble.”
I
wasn’t going to be in trouble anyway. I guess I’m just a sucker for a damsel in
distress. “A virus. In his headset. It went straight into his brain when he was
imprinting his memories for the day.”
“That’s…brilliant.”
“I
know.” I stretched. “Maybe we should go back to my place. I can show you the
particulars.”
“Sure.”
I
brought her back to my mansion to show her a thing or two about downloading.
I
was free. No more cancer, no more dying, just me, in cyberspace.
Forever.
