Chapter 30 Chapter Six

For me, the first few months of being an Overlord Celebrity were a more disorienting transition than my early days of going from darling of the Old Lands to enslaved stroke victim at Heaven's Gate.In my first month, I was booked and hired by more than a hundred worlds; I appeared on the "Moment of the Internet!" TV show with Marment Henley; There was Global Speaker Drury Fein, and more than two dozen MPs; I had talks with the Women's PEN Interplanetary Society, with the Luthers Writers Association; I was awarded honorary degrees at New Earth University and Cambridge II; I got treated, interviewed, photographed, commented on (kindly), written my biography (uncredited), made famous, serialized, blackmailed.Very busy.

A sketch of the Overlord's life: My house has thirty-eight rooms located on thirty-six worlds.There are no doors: the arched entrances are actually teleportation doors, a few of which have privacy curtains that block the light, while most are left wide open for observation, entry and exit.Each room is surrounded by windows and has portals on at least two walls.In the luxurious restaurant on the Arrow of Revival, I can see the bronze sky, and see the copper-green castle in the valley below the volcanic peak-Inebo Fortress.Just by turning my head, I can look through the portal, past the expensive white carpet in the formal living area, and see the waves of Edgar Allan Sea crashing into the steeple of Prospero Point - in Wing Po on the star.My library faces the glaciers and green skies of the North Island planet, and from there it takes only ten steps and a short flight of stairs to my Tower Study, a cozy open-air room surrounded by With polarized glass, people can enjoy the color of the peak of Kushpat Karakoran in all directions - that is a mountain range in Tianjin Sibing, two kilometers away from the easternmost colony of the Jannu Republic.

The giant bedroom that Helena and I shared swayed slightly among the branches. It was a world giant tree with a height of 300 meters in the world of the saints, the forest of gods.The bedroom leads to a solarium that stands alone in Hebron's barren salt marshes.Of course, my home’s landscape isn’t all wilderness: the media room leads to the skimmer deck, which is on the 138th floor of the Whale Center Arc tower; our courtyard sits on a terrace overlooking the New Jerusalem The bustling old city market.The architect of my house, a student of the fabled Myron de Harvey, injected quite a few naughty tricks into the design of the house: the staircase leading down to the tower room was one of them, of course, but equally It's also funny: the exit of the mountain castle leads to the sports room at the bottom of Luthers' deep hive; or the guest toilet, which has a toilet, bidet, sink, and shower, but is located in the violet of the Infinity Sea. On an open-air raft without walls at SeaWorld.

At first, the change in gravity felt unbearable when walking through the different rooms, but soon I got used to it, and I would subconsciously prepare for the heavy drag of Lusus, Hebron, Dracon 7, I also unintentionally anticipate the free feeling that most rooms are less than one standard gravity. In the ten standard months that Helena and I lived together, we were rarely at home, preferring to hang out with our friends at world-net sanctuaries, at resort eco-buildings, and at nightclubs.Our "friends" are former teleporter fans, now calling themselves "caribou herds," migratory mammals of the old lands, now extinct.There are other writers in the herd, a few accomplished visual artists, central radio intellectuals, global media representatives, a few radical fundamentalists and plastic geneticists, ring web aristocrats, wealthy teleporters Monsters, flashback junkies, a few holograms and stage directors, a few actors and performance artists here and there, a couple of reformed Mr. Mafia, and a bunch of celebrities...myself included.

Everyone drinks, uses stims and auto-implants, takes electricity, and buys the best drugs.The drug of choice is the flashback.It's clearly a high-society depravity: one needs a full suite of expensive implants to experience it fully.Helena must make me docile: equip me with biological monitors, sensory adders, intercom logs, neural shunts, catalytic converters, hindbrain processors, blood chips, RNA tapeworms... Mine Mom would never recognize the inside of me. I tried flashback twice.The first time was a glide - I slid towards my ninth birthday party and hit the target, experiencing the first burst.It's all there: the servants sing on the northern lawn at dawn, Mr. Balthazar reluctantly cancels the class, so Amalfi and I drive electromagnetic cars during the day, speeding across the gray dunes of the Amazon Basin abandoned by color; other old Families arrive at dusk, marching with torches, their wrapped gifts glistening in the moonlight and fire.Nine hours later I stood up from the flashback, smiling.And the second hallucination almost killed me.

I was four years old, crying, looking for my mother in endless rooms that smelled of dust and old furniture.The robot servants tried to comfort me, but I shook off their hands and ran into the shadowy, soot-stained hallway.I violated the first rule I knew by breaking into my mother's sewing room, her closet, where she would retreat every day, stay three hours, and come out with a soft smile and pale clothes The edge would slip across the carpet like a phantom sigh echoing. Mom sat in the shadows.I was four years old, I cut my finger, and I rushed at her, into her arms. She didn't respond.That dignified arm was still leaning on the recliner, and the other was lying softly on the cushion.

I backed away, startled by her impassive wooden figure.Instead of climbing into her lap, I drew back the heavy velvet curtain. My mother's eyes were pale, and her eyes were looking at the top of her head.Lips slightly parted.Drool was dripping from the corner of her mouth, and it shone on her beautiful chin.Through her blond hair (tied up and tied in her preferred dame shape), I could see the cold steel glint that spurred the wires, and the dull glow of the socket in the skull, where the socket was plugged.The small pieces of bone on both sides were extremely pale.On the table to her left, there is an empty flashback syringe.

The servant came and took me away.Mom's eyelids never moved.I screamed and was pulled out of the room. I woke up screaming. Maybe it was my refusal to use the flashback again, which hastened Helena's departure.But I doubt it.I was just a puppet in her hands: a primitive being whose ignorance of life she had taken for granted as her entertainment for decades.For whatever reason, I've spent many days without her due to my refusal to use flashbacks; the time spent in reenactments is real time, and when flashback users die, it's often the days spent on drugs More than when they're actually sober.

At first, I entertained the implants and tech toys that had excluded me from being part of my old family.The first year, the data web was always fun for me—I was searching for information all the time, living with a crazy comprehensive interface.I was as addicted to the material as a caribou herd is to thrills and drugs.I can imagine Lord Balthazar resting in his molten tomb, and I'm giving up long-term memory for the short-term gratification of this omnipotent implant.Only later did I realize how much I had lost—Fitzgerald's Odyssey, Wu Chiu-chih's The Last March, and two dozen other epics that survived my stroke and are now But it disappeared.After a long time, I finally got rid of the implants and once again painstakingly memorized them all.

For the first and only time in my life, I started to care about politics.Day and night, I connected to the big picture through the teletransmitter cable, or lay there, watching every move of the House.Someone once estimated that the overall situation processed a hundred pieces of Overlord's current legislation every day, and I didn't miss a single one during the months I screwed into the sensory center.My voice and my name became known on the debate channel.No issue was too trivial, no issue too simple or too complex, and I threw myself into it.The simple fact that there are votes every second gives me the illusion that I've accomplished something.I finally realized that regular access to the big picture simply meant staying out of the house or being the walking dead, so I gave up on being politically obsessed.A person, constantly busy with accessing implants, will have a poor perception of the public.I didn't need Helena's sneer to realize that if I shut myself in, I'd become a global parasite, one of the millions of slobs in the ring.So I gave up politics.But then, I discovered a new passion: religion.

I joined a religion.Heck, I also helped start a religion.Zen Spirituality has expanded exponentially. I am a loyal believer, appearing on holographic TV talk shows, and looking for my mysterious place with the piety of Muslims worshiping Mecca before the Great Exile.Also, I fell in love with teleportation.I earned almost a hundred million marks from royalties on Dying Earth, and Helena's investments were managed fairly well, but someone calculated that a home made of teleporters, such as mine, would cost fifty thousand a day Mark, and the money is just to keep it in the ring.Also, I never specified how many times I teleported to my home on the thirty-six worlds.Hyperline Publishing gave me a gold Universal Card, and I used it lavishly, teleporting to improbable corners of the ring network, and then staying in a luxurious residence for a few weeks, renting a few electromagnetic cars, and going to Find mysterious places in remote areas of the Lone Star world.