86: Despair

Despair

But just as he was about to commit an action from which there was no return, a flash of white light burst in front of his vision! Alexander flinched as his vision went black!1

For a moment, Alexander wondered if he was passing out again. But after a few moments, he realized that he still had control of his body and the rest of his senses—excluding his sight.

Alexander had gone blind.

He dropped the inhaler in panic, gasping and flailing around. His hand scraped against the nearby wall, disrupting the illusory sensation of falling into a bottomless pit!

But just as he was getting his bearings, a humanoid shape of pure light appeared in the darkness. The only features which were visible were its silvery eyes. It met Alexander's gaze and reached out a hand.

He couldn't even move, but was completely paralyzed by the magnificence of this being.

After a few seconds, the figure disappeared without a word.

Alexander's vision returned as though nothing at all had happened. His first thought was that the figure was a hallucination, but he quickly decided that it must have been real after all.

Alexander wasn't particularly religious, though he believed in God. Despite this lack of religiosity, he believed what had just appeared was a sign… a divine sign. A message not to give himself over to despair in this new life where he'd been given a second chance. Everything was starting to grow clearer. It was all connected… his resurrection, his renewed relationship with Emma, his recent successes in both Horus and in his real life...

And now this apparition had manifested at Alexander's darkest moment. It was clear that a mighty destiny lay before him, one demanding to be pursued.

Horus and the real world were connected, according to Cortana. Though Alexander had been skeptical of this claim before now, the vision he'd just received supported that idea.

Due to the incredible detail of Horus, especially regarding the human emotions and logic of NPCs, many conspiracy theories had arisen about this "linked worlds" concept in Alexander's first life. Some believed Cortana had copied the real universe. She had, they claimed, run an incredible simulation based on all the astronomical data gathered by real-world astrophysicists.

Therefore, they said, Horus was effectively a "mirror universe" of the real world, since it was based on real-world data.

Nevertheless, this didn't match Alexander's experiences in the game. There were too many discrepancies between famous galactic structures in the real world, for example.

And now… it turned out that the God-Emperor who called himself Apophis had existed long before Apophis himself had joined the game. Perhaps this was a key part of the relationship between the two dimensions.

Technology in Horus was so advanced that NPC hospitals could cure even late-stage cancer. If all the science of Horus corresponded to science in the real world, then perhaps there was a solution to reverse his mother's fate…

However, there was still a huge problem. In Horus, all pure technological information was censored from the eyes of players. Even when characters such as Engineers gained technological knowledge, they received it in a casual and gamified way.

They didn't gain all the true knowledge of creating gadgets and machines, but only received Skills which let them create these items. A Skill like ~Technological Learning (Federation)~ was like a key to unlocking crafting and repairing actions, rather than a textbook explaining how Federation technology worked.

So there was an impenetrable border between the two dimensions. If there was a way to access the information Alexander needed directly, it would be incredibly complex and difficult to attain!

Therefore, an unfortunate truth became obvious. For Alexander to find some sort of bridge between the dimensions, he'd need to keep playing Horus… while his mother's health ran out. If he failed, he would have sacrificed the last moments they could have otherwise spent together.

However, Alexander remembered a detail he'd previously forgotten. In his first life, his mother's two years of life after her diagnosis had been thanks to the low-cost treatment which was all his father was able to afford. Even that had eaten up all their savings and sent him into deep debt.

But with so much more money at their disposal… even if the money couldn't cure Alexander's mother, it seemed very likely that she'd get more than two years of life this time around. Not only that, but the treatment would surely be far less unpleasant than the cheaper options. Would this bonus time be enough to earn Alexander success in his mission?

It was an insane gamble based on a wild theory that might not even be right, this concept that all the technology of Horus was equivalent to that in the real world…

But this gamble was all Alexander had. It was hope. It was something he could do rather than wait idly for his mother to succumb to the agony of her illness.

Alexander's inhaler lay close to the ground where he'd dropped it. He picked it up and stared at it for a long time.

Then he hurled it to the pavement, crushed the plastic under his shoe, and began his determined march back home.

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