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Roland's Kingdom — William Tedford
Future centuries may provide us with a game like Roland's Kingdom within which participants are given rewards for the challenges they fulfill in a reality every bit as lucid as our own, except that in Roland's Kingdom, something has gone drastically wrong. Contestants enter. None leave. Even the dead return, and veritable eons drift lazily into the past.
A technician finds himself trapped within his own gaming creation and encounters mythological creatures who prove to be alien interlopers, beings using human environmental simulations within which to hide. Said nameless technician arrived through a red-rimmed door and has a quest to fulfill before red turns to green and he can leave. As King Roland, he must marry the difficult Princess Sylvana of the Chan empire and consummate the relationship. If he dies as King Roland, he becomes the knight, and he becomes the peasant should the knight die, a pitiful creature that can never die.
He engages in a series of adventures and fulfills his quest, but when Corin discovers his true identity, he discovers as well a physical universe of utter destruction. With nowhere else to go, his new challenge is to save his virtual world, salvage what he can of exterior reality, allied with conscious simulants who are living denizens of quantum computers, and the strangest of alien interlopers who rely upon him, whoever he may be, to safeguard the Reality of realities.
Only in the end is Roland's Kingdom faced with the ultimate realization that reality beyond the simulation may not be Reality at all, that nobody can wake up on a sunny morning totally certain that they have awakened to Reality without Origin, that from somewhere beyond appearances, they will not be attacked by forces who think their world an existential threat to another.
But in a fantasy powered by human willpower, your enemies cannot defeat you by physical prowess alone. It is your belief in yourself they must conquer, and knowing that is the greatest defense of any reality.
A technician finds himself trapped within his own gaming creation and encounters mythological creatures who prove to be alien interlopers, beings using human environmental simulations within which to hide. Said nameless technician arrived through a red-rimmed door and has a quest to fulfill before red turns to green and he can leave. As King Roland, he must marry the difficult Princess Sylvana of the Chan empire and consummate the relationship. If he dies as King Roland, he becomes the knight, and he becomes the peasant should the knight die, a pitiful creature that can never die.
He engages in a series of adventures and fulfills his quest, but when Corin discovers his true identity, he discovers as well a physical universe of utter destruction. With nowhere else to go, his new challenge is to save his virtual world, salvage what he can of exterior reality, allied with conscious simulants who are living denizens of quantum computers, and the strangest of alien interlopers who rely upon him, whoever he may be, to safeguard the Reality of realities.
Only in the end is Roland's Kingdom faced with the ultimate realization that reality beyond the simulation may not be Reality at all, that nobody can wake up on a sunny morning totally certain that they have awakened to Reality without Origin, that from somewhere beyond appearances, they will not be attacked by forces who think their world an existential threat to another.
But in a fantasy powered by human willpower, your enemies cannot defeat you by physical prowess alone. It is your belief in yourself they must conquer, and knowing that is the greatest defense of any reality.
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