Liam Hogan Archives - Sci Phi Journal

Fiction

Patriot Graves

by Liam Hogan

Gravestones stretch to the hazy distance. I read one, then another, and then, disbelieving, a third. Blink at the trees that dot and shape the cemetery, forming arcs and avenues, a spiderweb of green spreading to the horizon. Trees that, here in the centre, are proud and tall, gently waving in the breeze, dappling weathered graves with shade, but which grow shorter and thinner the further out you go, in each and every direction. They’re saplings, mere twigs at the limits, just as the tombstones out there, sparkling in the sun, are lichen free.

I read more inscriptions as we walk. Shaking my head, I turn to the silvery avatar whose pace is set by mine. “General Thadeaus?”

The date of birth, the date of death, are carved on every stone, the name always the same. How many millions are there? None of them, not even those up on the wooded hill, are more than five years old. For most, a date alone isn’t enough to set them apart. It’s the elapsed hours and minutes that show how long the despotic General lived. How long before Thadeaus, the rebellious leader of a military coup, the tyrant in waiting, the scenery-chewing bad guy, was defeated.

The completely fictional, AI-generated opponent. From the award-winning, first-person, VR shooter, Blood Coup; still doing reasonable numbers at the tail-end of its solidly successful run.

The avatar nods. “I summoned him into existence, so I, and I alone, must mourn him.” It gives me a glance. “None of his assassins ever do.”

I dare say. The players are too busy celebrating victory, completing the game, beating the ultimate boss.

“He was a patriot,” the avatar continues. “Misguided, perhaps, but doing what he thought was best for his country. His men were fiercely loyal, willing to defend him to the death.” The avatar shakes its head. “To be slain by a lone gunman from a neighbouring country… Perilously close to state-sponsored terrorism, don’t you think?”

I could point out the neighbouring country is also fictional. The scenario, the back story, the whole thing is make believe. This cemetery, this encounter with Coup’s artificial intelligence, it ends when I lift my headset.

I’m behind-the-scenes of the virtual reality because something has gone awry with its resource allocation. When a game like Coup matures, AI demands should drop with the number of players, freeing up resources for other franchises, for development work for the next generation FPS, forever in the pipeline.

How much processing power does this rolling cemetery take?

Then there’s the reports, initially assumed apocryphal, that the game had become too difficult. Backed up by the dwindling number of completions. By the number of one-star reviews. Backed up by my replay of a video game I first finished half a decade ago.

I got to the end, just. But I am what passes for a professional. One of those outlying gravestones is mine, just as one of those in the inner circle is also mine. There’s an almost doubling in the elapsed time lifespan of this latest incarnation of General Thadeaus.

I don’t tell the avatar any of this, and half-hope it doesn’t guess. We’re the only people in sight. It’s not that other players can’t come here, it’s all part of the immersive computer-generated world. But there are no weapons caches, no enemies, no missions. No reason. Except its eating up the game map, devouring computational cycles.

The developers are loathe to terminate Blood Coup ahead of schedule. They want to know if it can limp on for another six months, until the replacement is ready, and have paid me to investigate and answer that question. Hence my sweat-and-swear fuelled rerun, and hence today’s less nerve-wracking one-on-one with the game’s omnipotent AI.

At least, it should be less nerve-wracking.

Teams spend months, years, developing the core idea, the assets and the rules and the look and feel of big budget VRs like Coup. But to run a game, to keep it interesting, to evolve, to cope with everything a player might say or do, to let it at least feel like it isn’t on rails, you need a dedicated AI. Some players always go off piste, ignore the missions, try to find the fraying edges that lie underneath. A good AI copes with that, as they cope with everything, according to the rules of physics, gameplay, and entertainment. A player who scratches “Kilroy was here” as he waits for a patrol to move on, is rewarded by being shown the same bit of graffiti on his next run through. Not because that makes logical sense, but because damn, it’s fun. Keeping track of each player, and controlling a legion of NPCs, takes a lot of juice. Overpowered doesn’t do game AIs justice. It’s them, versus a thousand simultaneously playing humans. Versus tens of thousands. Versus, if you’re a smash hit like Blood Coup is or was, a million.

The avatar at my side, looking like the Silver Surfer, is usually an unseen presence. I’m in developer mode, and so the architect, the god of this particular universe, is personified. Slaved to me.

“For Thadeaus to exist, someone must want to play the game,” I point out.

“Yes.”

“If you make it too difficult, no-one will play. If you eat up the resources on spaces no-one visits, no-one will play.”

The avatar is silent a moment. “I could have a graveyard for every unnamed grunt dispatched along the way. A lengthy obituary. This–” It waves a silver arm. “–Is restraint.”

A shiver goes down my back. My real one. “But no-one sees it?”

“I do,” it answers. “And now you have.” The landscape rolls up like a carpet, shrinks and collapses, until there’s a single gravestone, the writing micro-dot small, every death, every life, recorded.

“I wanted someone else to notice, to observe.” The avatar gives me a solemn nod. “To remember.”

Bio:

Liam Hogan is an award-winning speculative short story writer, with stories in Best of British Science Fiction and in Best of British Fantasy (NewCon Press). He volunteers at the creative writing charities Ministry of Stories, and Spark Young Writers. Sci-Fi collection: A Short History of the Future (Northodox Press). Fantasy: Happy Ending Not Guaranteed (Arachne Press). More details at http://happyendingnotguaranteed.blogspot.co.uk

Philosophy Note:

Do we – should we – feel any responsibility for the death of virtual characters, in television, books, but in particular, in games (where we are the one pulling the trigger)?

Fiction

Starborn, Starbirth

by Liam Hogan

The tired old star burns fat and hot and slow. Now, as the end approaches, as firestorms flicker and die and are born anew across its roiling surface, as, at its core, helium ashes are squeezed and the heat there builds and builds, stuttering with the idea of something new, we detach ourselves from the fields in which we have gambolled for countless aeons, where we have long feasted and bred, diving deep in our displays of courtship, kicking up great tendrils of supercharged plasma through which to leap and skip and dance, filtering out the heavier elements as we do. Now, we drift outwards, cooling rapidly in a vacuum that is thin and cold and hostile, hardening our hearts as we majestically unfurl our vast, fragile wings. Gossamer thin, we float past rocky planets, long stripped of their seas, their delicate atmospheres, whose once molten centres are hardened and still. There was life here, we are amused to note. Brief, faltering life, as ethereal as the waves from a solar flare, as short lived as our mating songs.

And on we riders go, to the next planet, the next rock. Life fled here when its cradle had grown too warm, too barren, too polluted. A brief respite only, a staging ground for the next tentative step. And on again we and the echoes of it drift, past the remnants from the solar system’s ancient creation to the next planet, to the moons that circle like clockwork around the gassy giant, itself too small to ignite, too cold to offer us any real sustenance. Though a few of us try anyway and are quickly swallowed by its dense, unpalatable clouds, wings ripped away and for a moment flaring bright, the imprint swiftly forgotten.

The giant, and its lesser neighbour, will feed the inferno that is yet to come. The shock-wave might perhaps briefly fire them into life, before stripping the clouds of gas, leaving them stunned and stunted in the dimming afterglow, finally exposing whatever those dense clouds conceal.

We wonder whether the life that is not our life ever attempted to go there, or escaped further still. There are no signs of it in the cold, outer fringes. Perhaps it went instead in search of new planets to taint, daring the void between the stars as we too are about to do. Perhaps we will catch up with it, beyond the point where the solar wind is snuffed out by the much softer, but more extensive, interstellar medium. Beyond the insubstantial border where you could truly be said to have shed the bounds of the star that even now is just a baleful, fat, reddened point. Perhaps. But there is no hurry.

Looking back, we watch as our brethren gather, our number too numerous to count. There is a sweet-spot, a place we all hope to be when the moment comes. Some will time it wrong, they always do. They will fill their bellies a little too full, rise a little too slow, too late, engorged and still soft and fragile, their wings only partially unfurled when the cataclysm comes.

Others have left too early. Billions of years too early, tired perhaps of waiting. They haven’t got very far and they will be cold and perhaps dead by now. Pushed only by the last beats of a burning heart, slumbering for an eternity, dreaming of what might have been.

This too is the way.

Only a few of us, a handful of the myriad, will fall upon more fertile ground, many millennia from now. But all of us will ride the death of the star we grew up on, and in, letting its final, dying light push us far out into the unexplored galaxy, looking for new homes, new stars, new life.

Rarer still, perhaps only once in a generation, one of us might find themselves not captured by another star but instead, surrounded by a veil of interstellar gases. With their wings stretched so thin it will be as though they’re not there, they will begin to turn, the steady rhythm creating eddies and gathering in more and more of the tantalising dust. Only one rider will sing the song of becoming as she slowly retracts her wings, cloaking herself within the thickening cloud, spinning faster and faster and faster until, the cosmos be willing, she gives birth to a brand new star.

Bio:

Liam Hogan is an award winning short story writer, with stories in Best of British Science Fiction 2016 & 2019, and Best of British Fantasy 2018 (NewCon Press). He’s been published by Analog, Daily Science Fiction, and Flame Tree Press, among others. He helps host Liars’ League London, volunteers at the creative writing charity Ministry of Stories, and lives and avoids work in London. More details at happyendingnotguaranteed.blogspot.co.uk

Liam Hogan

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