When Darla vanished, Manny threw up his hands. “What's the matter with her?”
“You handled that badly,” Liz informed him. “And that's an understatement. Pull your head out of your ass, turn off your cynicism, and listen to me. First, do you believe what I told you about Am-heh? Did you talk to Farker?”
Manny sat on the edge of Wu's desk. “He believes you,” he admitted. “And I know you'd never consciously lie to me, so I guess I have to believe you too. As I told him.”
“Unless you hate being on speaking terms with your own daughter, you'd better work on believing her, too. Asklepios was a real man, and obviously she fell in love with him. I don't think you understand the enormity of what happened to her. He was not an imaginary playmate, even if he was only incarnated this time in a computer's imagination.”
Manny shook his head. “It's too much. From you, I hear of aliens. All right, it's a big universe, so I'm prepared to believe in extraterrestrials. But people don't come back from the dead and wander around in videogames.”
“They never did before, true. Maybe our computers were too primitive until now. But they do now. Accept it. Maybe up until now all the gods had to work with was appearing in our dreams. Now that our computers are unimaginably faster and more powerful than they were, maybe that makes the difference.”
“I won't call them gods,” he said firmly. “But if they really exist, why haven't they shown up until now?”
“They don't have physical bodies any more,” she told him. “Apparently it's a lot easier for them to hijack our computers than it is to manifest as physical bodies. That's all I know. And you'd better get used to the fact that your daughter has been lucky enough to meet one of the good ones.”
“Good ones?” He snorted. “What's so good about messing with people in games and complicating their lives?”
Liz grabbed him by his upper arms. Her eyes were blazing with an unexpected intensity. “Sometimes I just want to shake you!” she rasped. “Listen to me. There is more to awareness than us mortals. These...these other entities are higher on the totem pole than us, even if they're not God. If you want to think of them as demons and angels, fine. Am-heh was a bad one, and Asklepios was a good one, on the side of humanity. Your daughter, in the virtual world at least, has gotten herself pregnant by an angel, and unless you want to completely wreck your relationship with her, you'd better start dealing with it. “
He let out his breath in a sigh. “I know when I'm outnumbered,” he said. “But how can I help her? If this is all true, I am way out of my league with this.”
“You might start by looking up Asklepios and learning more about him,” she advised. “He's virtually forgotten nowadays, but you'll find him in history and mythology and the classics. He's mentioned in Homer's Iliad.”
“I'll try,” he said. “But this is hard to wrap my mind around.”
Inspiration struck. “Tell you what,” she said. “Maybe you should meet a friend of mine. Wu thinks he's imaginary, but I think Tsuneo is one of these ghosts in the PanGames machine.”
“He is imaginary,” Wu insisted, entering the building. “You say you meet him in a shack? It doesn't exist. No one else has ever seen it. If the shack doesn't exist, Tsuneo doesn't exist. I know for a fact that no one else has been given permission to instantiate any other dwellings here in the Sea of Trees. My permission from PanGames is one-of-a-kind.”
Liz just smiled. “Maybe he didn't ask permission. Manny, I believe you've met my doctor, Roger Wu. I hid out here in his Enclave as a supposed mental patient for a long time, and he's having a little trouble adjusting to the real me.”
Wu sat down behind the desk. “Elizabeth,” he said, “has it ever occurred to you that maybe you have fooled yourself, as well as me?”
Liz crossed her arms. “I know that humans are masters of self-deception. But Tsuneo is real. He's the one who convinced me that my family was still alive, when I thought they were dead. He was the one who talked me into leaving the Enclave to go searching for them.”
Manny turned to her, surprised. “I thought you said you left with Am-heh.”
“No, she said. “Am-heh was just an excuse. Tsuneo had been gently pushing me to go out long before Am-heh showed up here.”
Manny cleared his throat. “There's an easy way to settle this. Take us to him, if he's real.”
“I tried that.” Wu informed him. “We found nothing.”
“Maybe he was concerned that you'd report him to PanGames if you were certain he was real,” Liz said, after a moment's thought. “I'm sure he'll let me bring Manny, since he wanted me to go look for him.”
Wu rolled his eyes. He glanced at Manny. “If you want to waste your time, go ahead. I have a session with Akira in a few minutes, and she's still in a delicate stage.”
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