Chapter 31: The Lord Lucky’s Feast

Cass was led into a vast hall bathed in a delicate breeze. Ghostly curtains revealed the joyful bustle of the capital. At the far end of a ridiculously long table sat Lucky, a smile on his face and a cup in hand. Cass sat at the nearby corner.

“Two days where I would’ve taken six. I find you sublime, Stella.” “Grant me the courtesy of honoring your part of the deal, Lucky,” she replied, folding her hands.

Child-servants, almost dancing, set down plates of shellfish and warm bread. The shellfish were unknown to Cass, even when she queried support AIs through her Armor: round, with flesh curled into a spiral like a worm inside.

“On the seventh day, we eat from the sea and rivers. These are marine galaxies from the Great Blue Bay, which belongs to some son-of-a-bitch baron named Matthieu. Matthieu? Seriously? What a dumbass name.”

“I’d like to skip the tasting and the onomastics and get straight to the point and learn the rules of the game.”

“The ono ... what? Fuck’s sake. Just eat! It’s part of the learning.”

Lucky didn’t look Cass in the eyes; he slouched in his seat like a teenager. He had removed his turban, revealing a mop of messy short hair. Cass sniffed, chewed, and swallowed a spiral, then took another. First a hint of iodine, then a deep flavor of ripe fruit, tobacco, and wood.

“Trust, like many video games, doesn’t just offer us new visual concepts-like rainbow turkeys or rivers that flow backwards. It offers, extraordinarily, the experience of tasting substances that exist nowhere else in the universe.”

“The rules, Lucky.”

“I’d like you to relax. This meal is going to be long, and you’ll get more than your fair share.”

Lucky’s tone had turned cold and serious. His eyes, which sparkled like silver, became steel. There was, Cass thought, a brutal hardness inside him that could erupt at any moment.

“But I feel like I need to get your attention, so ... Falco?”

A steward in blue bent forward.

“Bring in Lady Cassandre.”

At the name, Cass stiffened, and Lucky didn’t miss it. Falco slipped away, and after a silence that stretched far too long, the doors opened again to admit Lady Cassandre.

She was similar to Cass, save for a few features. The uniform was the same, which added to the confusion, but the face-especially in profile-was truly identical. Not a clone, but more like a twin sister who didn’t smile quite the same way.

Lady Cassandre approached, bowed before Lucky, and asked if he needed anything. Her voice was markedly different. Cass spoke in a low, slow tone, while this Cassandre’s voice was warm, like that of a barely grown teen.

“Yes, Cassandre. Tell me, how long have you been in my service?”

“It’s been six years now, since you founded the fief, my lord.”

He dismissed her. Lucky turned to Cass:

“So, do you want us to talk about those damn rules, Stella, or would you prefer I tell you a little story? Admittedly long, admittedly a bit self-centered, but one that will shed light on the little mystery of Lady Cassandre?”

“You have my attention, Lucky. I’m putting your little story on the agenda. But I’m not the kind to trade substance for shadows. Give me the rules. Leave nothing out.”

“Stella, you’re a glorious bitch. You’ve got Ariane’s obsession and her tits. You’re every inch an empress ... except for the patience. I think I like you. I’d love to fight with you. All right then, let’s follow the agenda.”

Lucky was a smarter guy than his vocabulary and nonchalance suggested. He had started Trust about ten years ago, out of boredom, after a stay on Pax he hadn’t enjoyed. Trust was designed as a negotiation game. You grow villages and have the option to build a variety of structures that grant powers to players. For instance, an Exploration Guild would reveal nearby available hamlets. A barracks could dispatch soldiers within a certain radius to reserve a hamlet until a player arrived. These buildings created balances of power that prevented negotiations from stalling. Some buildings, like the Meditation Hall-Lucky pointed at it behind him, cup in hand-had no apparent or known use.

Half of the buildings, however, existed purely for player enjoyment: weavers and mages that altered appearances, restaurants of varying prestige, cinemas, and even procedural video games, each a unique instance in its city. Many players succumbed, as Lucky himself admitted to having succumbed, to the delights of Capua: they achieved such a high level of power and quality of life that they stopped progressing in the game.

“The delights of Capua, fuck,” added Lucky. “I don’t know who that Capua chick was, but among players we also talk about ‘Capua affairs’. Trust isn’t just a grand-scope game, as I’ll explain to you. There are a million fascinating, exciting, beautiful or hideous characters who drag you into their adventures, people you can court and bring into your circle. And if you like eating these unknown shellfish, just imagine the quality of the sex you can have here. Makes you go nuts.”

Cass didn’t flinch, mentally taking notes. He continued, more seriously:

“There’s a micro-management dimension you could get lost in forever. The lowliest servant of this castle represents hundreds of hours of adventure-kidnapping, war, negotiations, travel, treasure maps, betrayals, love...”

“A well-lived life...”

“That’s where you can tell it’s a game. In real life, we get bored. And sometimes, we miss that boredom. Every man needs his share of it. That’s probably also why things evolve slowly. Playing nonstop dehumanizes us.”

That’s how Ariane of the Black Crow was able to build her Empire fairly quickly - also because players were curious to see what an Empire would be like - but a second Empire would mean letting Ariane or her rival win, and the game had slowed down considerably since then. The Kingdoms were expanding, negotiations had grown more intense.

As starfish sushi, roasted freshwater lobsters, and even blood-sweet mussels were brought to the table, Lucky went into great detail about the precise rules of the game, and the few possible loopholes or evolutions that might occur. He explained, for instance, that when a player arrived in a new territory and discovered, say, a new animal or a stone, there was a small chance it would have some extraordinary, still-undiscovered property. That property would lead to the creation of a new item, and the player would have exclusive rights to it for negotiation.

One day, a player named Bimbi found the famous Bimbi’s Negative Stones-stones lighter than air, which he had retrieved from a tree. With these stones, the city’s artisan guild could create a hot-air balloon that offered a panoramic view of the surroundings. The game was always under threat of being overturned by a fundamental discovery.

Lucky, who wasn’t stingy with information, concluded with a little inventory of the die-hard players who were trying to win: Ariane, of course, but also Deidre-a queen who hadn’t hesitated to resort to blackmail with spies outside the game to carve out her realm (and also sold her body for connections, Lucky added with a smirk)-and finally Yarden, leader of the 2048 Initiative, a charismatic man who had convinced a bunch of poor fools that there was room for everyone on the throne of the gods.

By the end of his tale, the sun was setting, and Lucky was glancing nervously toward the balcony with the white curtains, and the red disk brushing the horizon. His eyes rested on Cass, and he looked about to add something-but held back. Cass noted his silence.

“A question,” she said. “If I go to a hamlet that’s part of the connection base of the Black Crow Empire, and I don’t know, I burn their crops-will they starve and the hamlet disappear? And by consequence, the Empire becomes a kingdom again?”

“Not like that,” said Lucky, still watching the sunset, then looking at Cass. “First, Ariane’s a solid player. She secured all her hamlets. But yes, one or two must rely on animal husbandry. You could cancel the breeding by making sure to kill all the animals, even those outside the village that are the same species. But here’s what would happen: Ariane, or the guy who gave her the connection to his hamlet, would arrive within the hour and rebuild the structure by selecting a different animal.”

“Okay, and if I’m standing right in front of the village and block them?”

“By hand?” said Lucky, bursting out laughing.

“Have you tried fighting in this game? You can’t get hurt. Throw yourself off a cliff, try to slice a player’s head off-everything bounces off us like we’re made of rubber. Otherwise it would be survival of the fittest. You can’t even bury someone alive: they dig themselves out right away, and you get hit with a hell of a gold penalty for trying. I tried. I got screwed.”

“What if I just block her at the village entrance?”

“She’ll show up riding some monstrous creature, like one of those fucking giant desert crocodiles from Sugud. I mean a beast fifty meters long.”

“Okay, and suppose I’m stronger than the crocodile?”

“She’ll wait. She’s got six days until the hamlet disappears. You’ll sleep at some point, right? You’ll doze off, and she’ll enter the hamlet.”

“Fine, let’s say I’m a robot and I don’t sleep.”

“Stella the robot, right,” Lucky laughed again. “Let me think. If I were her, here’s what I’d do: there’s a pretty rare artifact, costs a million gold coins, and you can build it if you have a mage guild, an artisan guild, and some so-called ‘purest silk’ from the Plains of Amasya. It lets you make Seven-League Boots. One-time use, but Ariane probably has five or six. They let you fly through the sky in a single leap and land right in the center of the place you indicate; for a hamlet, that’s the flagpole. The second she touches the pole, she can reset the building.”

“So I have to see her coming from the sky and stop her, right?”

“Yeah, it’s in the bag, Stella. Just remember she’ll be moving at missile speed and the flagpole’s six meters tall. Complicated, isn’t it?”

Cass didn’t answer, absorbed in the outline of a strategy. Lucky asked for silver fig liqueur, gin, and starlight liquor to be brought. They toasted, and Cass, out of gratitude for Lucky’s information, agreed to give him some time to tell his story.