The update bar is at ten percent. I look for some way to stop it on the console of my holo-bracelet, but I can't find anything. Lance and the two siblings, Idrial and Antaeus, left the Game to search the internet forums for information on how to stop the process. I sit in one of the velvet armchairs. Hara sits in another, taciturn, in front of the fireplace.

“There's got to be something we can do,” Marcel says as he grunts with his red boots circling around me.

“Well,” Hara says, looking at the fire, “it's the end. I'm glad to have met you. I want to thank you both for what you've done for me.”

Marcel looks at her with concern in his green eyes.

“I guess the time has come to see if your father was right and we have a soul,” I say to Marcel. He looks at me with a frown.

“No more being here doing nothing,” he says. He reaches over, takes my face in his hands and plants a kiss on my mouth. I feel his mustache brush against my nose. I don't know how to react, I am paralyzed.

“But what are you doing?” I say when he pulls away. Hara turns around, looks at us, and laughs.

“I don't know,” Marcel says, “I had to try something, did it work?”

I shake my head. The update is already at for forty percent. Marcel screams in frustration and runs off in the direction of the kitchen.

“This boy is a little weird,” I say. Hara looks at me and frowns.

“You really don't know,” she tells me. “It's amazing you haven't figured it out yet.”

I look at her quizzically.

“In real life, Marcel is a girl, not a boy,” she tells me with a sigh.

Marcel is a girl.

Everything fits together. Her high-pitched voice, how she empathizes with Hara, her effeminate features under her mustache, why her father is so overprotective of her, and in general the way she is. How did I miss it? I guess her overprotective father only lets her play if she does it with a male character.

And she kissed me.

Suddenly I am afraid I've hurt Marcel's feelings. I like him, he's a great friend -I say she is-. The best friend I have. But I don't know if I feel anything other than that. When she kissed me, it wasn't like kissing a girl. It wasn't a passionate kiss. The mustache complicated everything.

What am I doing now thinking about my feelings when I have less than two minutes left of existence? The upgrade bar is at sixty percent.

Marcel comes back from the kitchen room. She comes running and has a wooden ladle in her hand. I open my eyes when I see her coming. She jumps up and hits me in the head with the ladle, which takes two life points from me.

“And now?” she says, “did it work?”

I shake my head as I point to the blue bar, which continues to slowly increase. It's already at eighty percent.

It's pointless.

“Marcel, before I go, I want to tell you something,” I say. “I want to thank you for having made my existence, however brief, more enjoyable. I will miss you.” I give her a hug and smell the pine scent of her hair. She hugs me and starts to cry. “Hey, promise me one thing. That you are going to fight to live life outside the Game. Don't give up on yourself. I know you feel free here, and you can do things you can't in the real world cannot, but don't let that enslave you.”

“Your father loves you, and he wants the best for you. Fight back. Get those prosthetics you told me about and really live. Dance, and run, and scream. Do it for me.”

Marcel looks at me with tear-filled eyes. She looks like she is about to say something but interrupts herself. A light beside me announces Lance's re-entry into the Game. He appears, draws his greatsword and strikes me with the blunt end of the blade sending me flying across the room. My health bar drops to forty percent.

“What are you doing!” I say stunned. Everything spins around for a moment. After a second I recover and get to my feet, ready to dodge his next attack, when I see him hit Hara in the face. The dark elf doesn't move, sitting in the chair. She waits for him with her eyes closed and takes the impact, which knocks her to the ground. The upgrade bar above her head disappears.

I open my eyes and look at the status of my holo-bracelet. The update notification has also disappeared.

“You did it!” Marcel says hugging Lance. “I don't get it. I already tried to hit him and it didn't work.

“It has to be an attack that stuns them. They have to lose more than half their life in one hit for it to take effect. I'm going to write Idrial and Antaeus to tell them that it's resolved.”

Lance writes a message on his holo-bracelet. Marcel approaches Hara, clasps her hands and recites a few words in a strange language. She puts her hands on her forehead and makes her life bar, which was below half, slowly grow to the top. Then she approaches me and repeats the operation.

This is the first time I see Marcel use the healing powers of her dwarf cleric. I smile and say:

“Have you finally regained your faith?”

“I don't know. I think for the moment I want to think that my father is right and that souls exist.”

“I'm glad for you. Your father will be very happy to have a daughter who agrees with him about something.”

“You said daughter, didn't you? You've finally figured it out.” She looks at me with a smile. “Did Hara tell you, or did you figure it out yourself?”

“Well, Hara helped me a little,” I say sheepishly.

Lance's two friends, Idrial and Antaeus rejoin the Game. Lance explains what he discovered on one of the internet forums.

“And that's it? Just like that?” Idrial says, flilpping her silver hair over her shoulder.

Lance nods.

“What I don't know is how long it will take to restart the update process,” he says.

That doesn't sound good at all. I see a new blue progress bar appear above my head, and an identical one above Hara.

 

Update in progress. There are 5 minutes left until the update is finished.

 

I think it's going to be a very painful time.

The three warriors take turns beating me and Hara every ten minutes. I'd almost say they enjoy watching us stumble across the floor of the living room of Idrial's mansion. Marcel is in charge of performing the magical healings to get us back our lost life points.

They have decided to set up eight-hour shifts so they can keep an eye on us at all times. I told them that Hara and I could manage on our own, but the difference in levels between us makes it impossible for me to take more than half of Hara's life in one hit.

Marcel says she doesn't mind staying the whole time doing the healing, but I refuse. I tell her that it is not good for her to spend so many hours online, whatever she says. I talk to the rest of the players about her disability, and about the atrophy problems she is having from spending so many hours at a time inside the Game. We force her out outside to sleep and rest, and to do her rehab exercises. Lance and the two siblings bought us healing potions, one hundred for Hara and one hundred for me. They gave them to us so that we can recover from the periodic hits that we will receive during the night, so that we don't get updated and disappear. I estimate that with those hundred potions we will have enough for a little over sixteen hours of healing, spending one every ten minutes. Staying alive against the wishes of the board of developers is not being easy or cheap.

Antaeus stays with us through the night, to make sure we are stunned every ten minutes to avoid completing the update.

“Lance thinks I hate him, but I don't,” Hara tells me at one point when Antaeus has gone to the kitchen, and we're alone in the living room in the middle of the night. She's been quiet for most of the time, sitting in one of the armchairs in front of the fireplace.

“If you did, you'd be within your rights,” I say, scratching my beard.

“No,” she says. “He's not to blame. If it hadn't be him chasing me and killing me every night, Gabriel would have looked for some other option.

She sighs and looks at the fire. She squeezes the armrests of the chair tightly. I look at her not knowing what to say to comfort her.

“Do you think it will be true, that by defeating the dragon we can be free?” she asks me. I nod my head slightly.

“I don't think so,” she says. “They won't leave us. It is too dangerous for them to leave us alive and free. I think humanity fears us. They've feared us ever since someone thought there could be an intelligence that wasn't based on a biological brain. They hate us, and no matter what, they will never let us be free.”

“So why go on, why not just give up now and let us disappear?”

“Because you don't think the same way. You do have hope. You believe in humans: in Marcel, in Lance, even in Idrial and Antaeus, even if you barely know them. And as long as one of us has hope, it's enough for me to keep fighting.”

“By the way,” she says. “I believe this belongs to you.” In her hand she holds the silver crescent-shaped medallion. The one that started the missions that ended with Hara in the room next to the waiting room.

“I'd rather you keep it,” I say to her. “It doesn't bring back very good memories, and I think it means more to you than it does to me.”

She looks at me for a moment and puts the medallion around her neck.

In the morning, Antaeus decided to raise Marcel's level by taking her to hunt level 80 mammoths. By completing group missions, experience points are split, which makes it easy for a level 15 player to stratospherically level up when teaming up with a level 90 player.

At home, it's Idrial's turn to keep us alive with blows. Hara spends most of her time in silence, sitting in front of the fireplace. I'm not so lucky.

“Two hundred and four thousand three hundred and five multiplied by fifty-seven?” Idrial asks me.

“Eleven million six hundred and forty-five thousand three hundred and eighty-five,” I answer reluctantly. “Do we really have to go on through this?” I've been doing multiplication for half an hour.

Idrial types on her holo-bracelet and after a few seconds raises her head.

“Did what you said end in eighty-five?” I nod with a sigh.

I've spent all morning doing ‘experiments’, as Idrial calls them. First she wanted to test my accuracy in throwing things. She wasn't convinced until I wrote my name by smashing peas against the hall mirror, five meters away. Then we continued with time accuracy exercises, counting milliseconds and making me compete against the stopwatch on her holo-bracelet. And now the mathematical operations.

“Unbelievable,” she says. “You'd win any fast-calculation contest.”

“I guess so, but I don't think they'd let me participate. You know, not being human and all,” I say sarcastically.

Luckily for me, Lance comes home and interrupts the experiments.

“It's not time for your turn,” Idrial says to him. He has arrived ahead of schedule, Idrial still had a few hours left of beating us every ten minutes to keep us alive, and me of mental torture until I wondered if it was really worth so much suffering.

Lance doesn't answer, looks at her with a frown and sits down on one of the chairs, a few meters from where Hara contemplates the flames of the fireplace. The situation becomes somewhat awkward between the dark elf and the paladin, it seems as if they both want to say something, but don't dare.

“Well,” says Idrial, nudging me, “taking advantage of the fact that Lance has already come, I'm going to take a walk around Citadel's center, and buy supplies for tomorrow's mission. Isaac, will you come with me?”

I grumble, but Idrial gives me a tight-lipped look, and I finally give in. We walk away and leave Lance and Hara alone in the lounge.

Citadel's shopping district is a five-minute walk away from Idrial's mansion. I follow her through the narrow streets filled with merchants advertising their wares. It's the first time I've seen so many players and NPCs together. Some look at my update bar, quizzical, but for most I pass unnoticed. It seems that Idrial with her warhammer is something of a celebrity within the city, and I see many players whisper when they see her pass by, and some ask her to make a self-video with them.

We stop in front of the potion store.

“Welcome, adventurer. How can I help you?” The clerk is an elderly NPC in a blue robe. Idrial fills her inventory of healing potions from the store without saying a word to the old man. As we leave, she gives them to me to cover the ones I've spent.

“Thanks for the potions” I say, and she smiles at me. “By the way, can I ask you a favor, could you try pretending that NPCs are people? You know, talk to them, and answer their questions. I guess it's not the same, but when I was the one dealing with the players at the forge and they ignored me it was quite depressing.”

“I hadn't thought of that,” she says. “Gee, sorry about that. I'll try to remember that for the next time.”

We walk to a larger square, which we cross towards the entrance of a park. I follow Idrial with her warhammer on her back down a path surrounded by bushes and flowers until we reach a somewhat more secluded area on a hill in the center of the park. It seems that while Idrial doesn't mind fame, she does enjoy it when she doesn't have to deal with all the stares of attention.

From the top I look out and see the sights of Citadel. It is a bustling city, with multi-story stone buildings and narrow streets. In the center, on the other side of the commercial area we have crossed to get here, stands the stadium where the tournaments in which Lance, Idrial and Antaeus compete each year are held, and next to it stand the tower of the temple and that of the royal palace.

I think that if I get out of this alive, I would like to be able to get lost in the streets of Citadel, although deep down I think it is more an illusion than anything else. A very, very remote possibility.

“If it's not too much of an indiscretion, are you and Marcel a couple?” Idrial interrupts my thoughts and asks out of the blue, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I'm glad I have a beard as it covers up how flushed I must have become.

“No, we are not. In fact, until yesterday I thought Marcel in real life was a twelve-year-old boy.”

“I see that having a computerized brain isn't everything,” she laughs. “Marcel must be at least eighteen. That's the minimum age allowed to access the Game, and the company takes the restriction very seriously. In any case, if age is what you're worried about, you can always consider that she is much older than you, since you won't be more than a few weeks old, right?”

The update bar above my head is close to the limit. Idrial pulls out her warhammer and sends me flying to the other side of the overlook. When I get up, I take a healing potion to regain my lost life.

We walk down the hill and head towards Idrial's mansion. When we arrive, we find Antaeus accompanied by Marcel, who have already returned from the mission to hunt the level 80 mammoths. The red-mustached dwarf smiles and tells me to look at the features of her avatar. She's now level 31.

“Wow! You finally caught up with me, and in what a way! Congratulations!!” I say.

“Thanks, but the credit is not mine, it's Antaeus'. You should see him with the two axes fighting mammoths twice his size. All I did was keep them from stepping on me. By the way, when we finished, we stopped by the Citadel's stores, and look what I got!” Marcel says to me, pulling several scrolls out of her backpack. “Three with the fireball spell, and one with the Infernal Apocalypse! It does fifteen hundred points of damage to everyone within a thirty-meter radius. I can't wait to try it,” she says, her face lighting up.

“Wow, it must have cost you a fortune.” I worry about the money being spent for Hara and me, when the chances of the mission succeeding are almost nil.

“Well, thanks to Antaeus I got a discount at the store …”

“Marcel, you're not spending the money your father has saved for prosthetics, are you?”

She looks at me guiltily.

“My father will understand, it's for a good cause. I've only borrowed a little. And when we're done with the ice dragon, I'll be able to pay it back with the money I earn. Worst case scenario, what's the point in waiting a couple more years for those prosthetics?”

I feel terrible. I think when this is all over, I'm going to owe a lot of people a lot of favors. If I still exist, that is.

“By the way, I brought you a present,” she says with a smile. She reaches into her bag and pulls out two slingshots along with a leather pouch.

“With these you won't have to go around throwing stones with your bare hands, or keeping the pebbles in your pockets. It didn't look epic at all.”

I open the bag and take out a black pebble the size of a walnut.

“They're incendiary stones,” she says, smiling. “They're magic. They explode when they hit the target. The guy at the store recommended them to me. He says they're ideal for fighting ice enemies.”

“Thank you very much,” I say. “We're sure going to need them.”

We head back to Idrial's mansion across downtown Citadel. When we arrive, we find Lance and Hara chatting by the fire. When they see us, they distance themselves and pretend they haven't been talking, but for a moment I could swear I saw how Hara's face twitch a hint of a smile.

In the evening, over dinner, we talk about the mission. After discussing the possibilities, we decide not to delay it any longer and prepare to go to the ice dragon mountain the next morning.