The Ellimist vs Father

The Ellimist vs Father.

How many games had I played with Father? A thousand? Ten thousand? But it was more than the loss of illusions that motivated me to play. It was that I had nothing else. Nothing but the game. The game and the tiny flicker of undying hope. What a sad, desperate illusion. How ludicrous to cling to the hope of escape. And escape to what? Where would I go? What would I be? I was part of Father. There was only Father. And yet . . . I still lived. I still played the game and made my own gaming decisions. Father needed me, I had long since recognized that fact. He kept me alive to play. Because though I lost each game, I was his best opponent.

"I want to play a game," Father said. He had acquired a new face, his own face, or a facsimile, a sort of "game name."

Father played many games. Many games. I believe he had culled them from a thousand races, all over the galaxy. We had simple games of reflex. Killing games. Games of forethought involving the complex movement of pieces on a flat plane or within a cube or within n-dimensional space. Games that were games of games. It was all I had. I had begged Father to kill me, to end it. But of course he refused. I had tried deliberately losing, hoping to make the games boring to Father. But Father was patient, he could outwait me. For years, decades, it didn't matter to him. And in the end I always came back to the game. You make what you can of the life you have, I suppose.

The new game began. It was different. Father had acquired some new species. We, me and Father, were performers at one end of the room on a raised platform. We each held a tool of some sort. A long thing, nearly my own body length, a sort of flattened, whimsically shaped board. And stretched along the board were seven taut strings. There was a mouthpiece as well that reached up to where I could, by bending my neck just a little, place it in my mouth.

Father grinned at me, a cocky challenge. He placed his mouth around the mouthpiece and blew while strumming his fingers across the strings. The result . . . it was . . . it was like nothing I'd heard in life or a dream. The sounds were not mere sounds. I don't have words to explain. Maybe no one does. The sounds touched a part of me I'd long forgotten, all the beauty, sadness, joy, and laughter I'd ever known. Father finished playing and the creatures in the audience emitted honking vocalizations that seemed especially harsh in contrast with the sounds of Father's instrument.

"Your turn," Father said.

I placed my lips as I'd seen him do, and my hands as he had done. And I made sounds. But not the sounds he had made. Mine were harsh and grating and contemptible in my own ears. And yet, I could hear, even there, even in my own incoherence, the seed of something. Something. The audience favored me with stony silence.

"That's game." Father laughed.
"What is this game, Father?"
"The game, Father. What is it called?"
"They call it music."
"I can never hope to win," I said. "I beg you, Father, release me. I don't want to play it again."
He refused. Of course I knew he would. And I knew this about Father, His one weakness was his cruelty. I could use that. He would force me to play this game a thousand times.

I had waited. To show just enough improvement to entice Father, to challenge him, without revealing all that I was learning. So hard to lay the foundation of this moment. The hundredth game. But the ten thousandth time I had played it in my mind, all alone. The instrument, had scarcely been out of my thoughts. It had become a part of me. It was inside me, in my brain, and even if Father ended the game, he could never take the instrument from me, never take music from me, never. I owned it. I had become it. And now, this game, the hundredth, I would show him. He was Father, cocky, sure of victory, but wary enough that he had to try harder than he'd have liked to gain the approval of the audience. And yet, in a hundred games Father had not advanced. Not an original idea, not a new expression. It was love that made the music possible for me, and the lack of love, or anything like it would doom poor Father. You needed love to win at the game of music.

I played a riff. Father gaped. The audience sat forward. That's right, Father, I've rewritten the rules. I played of sadness. I played of loneliness. Despair. Love found and lost. I played of tragic misunderstanding and weary cynicism and defeat. I played of perseverance, endurance beyond all suffering. Endurance in the face of hopelessness, hope when even hope was a betrayal. And yet, though I played so much sadness, the music at the same time denied despair. How could anyone despair while music was being played? Oh, yes, I had them. I owned them, the audience. I had them through and through and they would go with me wherever my adge instrument.

And Father? Oh, it was sweet to see him. Sweet to watch his uneasiness turn to amazement turn to sullen anger. The music didn't touch him. But he could see that I had won. I had won the game so resoundingly, so finally that he could never hope to compete with me again. Not at the game of music.

"How?" he asked me finally.
"How?!" Father demanded, barely concealing the rage.
"I'm a loser," I sang in answer. "They called me a brilliant loser, all winners, all winners but me. But only a loser can sing the azures. Only a loser truly sees."

I thought that Father would kill me straightaway. But he didn't. I thought he would never play the game of music again, but he tried. And this time he copied much of what I'd done. It didn't matter. I had a new trick up my sleeve: improvisation. I had devised a tactic of improvising in duet. I would offer a musical phrase, play for a few moments, then invite him to pick up the thread and extrapolate. Father could not. And his efforts were pitiful. For a long time afterward, Father did not approach me. No games of any kind. Nothing but silence. But everything was changed now. I had music.

At long last, after years perhaps, Father came to me. He had a new game, a new species. Not music, not anything like it. A simple game of placement and pieces. I lost the first four games. I won the fifth. The sixth. The next five games after that. Every game. Father raged and twisted the scenario into a nightmare vision. He stormed away and left me to float. And surely now he would kill me. He understood what had happened. I had won at music and that free-form, improvisational game had done things to my mind, changed me in ways even I could not understand. I saw in more dimensions. Intuition was close to me now, intimate to me. I trusted my own moves. And conversely, Father had been shaken. A year. A new game. A killing game this time. Weapons in, a maze. I won the first game. I won every game.

Silence from Father. Why did he not kill me? I reached out to him, wanted to know his mind. But he made no answer. He had gone far away, he had withdrawn. And yet, I lived. And then dreadful hope, that awful emotion that draws us to our doom, began to rise in me. I reached out, reached down my tether, through Father's own neural net as if it was a biological network. I reached out to the biological brains, neurons switched on, a biological computer, nothing more. I started downloading them. One by one I absorbed their minds.

I was an invader in the network, eating data, spreading, consuming, absorbing. Still I was no more than one percent of Father, but already I was a hundred times myself. I emptied each dead mind into mine, each set of data, no time to look, to see, to open and enjoy, oh no, no time, the race was on, a race to consume, to download and absorb. How long till you see it, Father? How long till you spot this new game? On and on I roared. And still Father did not feel me, did not sense his growing peril. Why should he? Father had never known a true enemy. He had owned his entire world for his entire evolution. A single life-form that had invented every other that swam in his sea, simply to amuse himself.

Then, at long last, I felt his unease. Felt his attention. He sent out impulses, racing through his vast network, felt here and there for the cause of the odd, disturbing sensation. I showed him nothing. I hid myself. He searched and found only emptiness. Emptiness where there had been captive minds. And at long last, as his slow-growing dread emerged, as he began to feel a new emotion, he asked: Where is Ellimist?

I was half of Father now. We were equal. I stopped my advance.
"Shall we immerse, Father?" I said.
"What game?" he demanded.
"The game, Father. The last game."

The last mind I absorbed was Father himself. And when I took him, I took nothing. There was no Father. No mind at all. He was nothing but a sponge, in the end. A creature of the simplest biology, a predator sponge that linked with its prey. Father was nothing but his victims. And-when I had absorbed and cut him off from all of his victims, Father was nothing more than so much seaweed. I was Father now. I contained within me all the knowledge of a hundred intelligent races. But I was still The Ellimist.