At night, Mai found an opportunity to speak with Dakota alone at the fountain. In the angled torchlight, her nipples were visible through her shirt by the small shadows they cast. Dakota noticed, then politely raised his eyes to meet hers. She smiled so that he knew that she knew, then let her own eyes linger on his forearms, which were strong enough to handle her.
"There's no time to think here," she said. "We're in an afterlife. We should be talking about that. But since I got here there's always something pressing."
Dakota laughed. "I'm still trying to figure out the air supply. There really were no vents in that gym."
Mai nodded. "So, three more trials."
Their smiles faded. Dakota looked up at the stars. "Yes, and I'm concerned. In only two, we dropped from 100 people to six. And the gods are apparently perverts. But still, I don't want to reincarnate. If my existence is discontinuous, without even memories carrying over, what's the meaningful difference between transmigration and real death?"
Mari nodded. "We share a conclusion. I'm not partial to reincarnation either now. But I don't agree about continuity. I already don't believe in that."
"You're a panpsychist I'm guessing?"
"Of course. Superdeterminism is obvious. You can rescue free will or you can rescue the individual. Not both."
"Yeah, lots of post docs in the lab thought like that."
"But you don't."
Dakota looked at her like he'd been caught filtching. The look was honest, childlike. "It's inconsistent, I know. Improper for an empiricist. But I like myself. I like believing I exist."
Mai did lose some respect for him as a physicist for this confession. A physicist who believed in souls! But seeing his contradictions made him real to her, as a person, and she was thankful to be trusted.
"I believe in the Dark Forest," she said. It came out of her mouth without warning: her most embarrassing belief, that the universe was full of alien life, but always quiet because that was the only way to stay alive. The powerful civilizations had every incentive to extinguish young ones before they grew into adversaries.
This time, he laughed so loud people on the pavilion looked over. "That's great," he said. "Honestly, there's nothing that precludes it. It's a brave idea."
They planted seeds of trust that night, but those seeds had no time to grow. In the morning, the next trial began.
The rules arrived in small pamphlets, delivered to everyone's bedside in the night. The title read _Trial of Lies_, and its mechanisms were complex.
In the center of the pavilion was a stone table painted with a map. Atop it rested carved wooden figures representing infantry units, tanks, planes, etc, in six colors. Mai's pieces were red. This was the Trial of Lies: a war game.
At a rate of one turn per hour, they would each seal instructions in an envelope, one instruction per military unit on the board. This happened all together, at once. No one would have any way to know other people's plans except those people's word.
The game would continue until two people had been eliminated from the map. Only four were permitted to pass the trial.
So far, two-thirds of the way through the pamphlet, it seemed like Dakota could take a breath of relief about the gods' perversions. The game seemed clean. Until Mai reached the final section. It paid to still have clothes in this trial.
When two military units met on the map for conflict, there was a basic trump order. Plane beat tanks which beat infantry. But if the two units were even, ties would break in favor of who was wearing more articles of clothing.
Then there were the consequences for loss in battle. When losing a unit, the loser also had to toss an article of clothing into the incinerator underneath the table. If they had no clothes left, the penalties were steeper. In that case, first, the winner was permitted to stimulate the loser with their hands for one minute. If the loser reached orgasm, their military unit was not just discarded, but absorbed into the winner's forces. Second, they had to swallow one of the three pills in the table compartment in front of them. These were aphrodisiacs with an exponential dose-response curve. A thirst switch. To think of resisting someone's stimulation while under the influence of such a drug...
Everyone met at the table. There was Mai (shirt, joggers, underwear), Dakota (joggers, underwear), Henry (joggers, underwear), Eva (shirt, underwear), Melissa (naked), and Mary (two socks, two shoes, joggers, underwear, bra, shirt, jacket).
Not only did Mary possess a lead in clothing, she also started with the largest military force and the largest territory. They'd given everyone a minimum of three units, plus one for every article. And that wasn't the only imbalance. In the center of the map, landlocked, was Melissa, with three weak infantry units. Anyone could attack her in the very next turn, and if everyone did, she would be eliminated immediately. It was like she'd been given a seat at the table only to humiliate her before the inevitable came to pass.
In the first turn's negotiations, Mai wasn't sure who to talk to. When everyone stood up to move about and discuss, she sat still in her seat, watching others' moves. Across from her, Melissa also stayed seated, stairing despondently at her doomed position. Near the fountain, Henry spoke animatedly to Dakota, probably trying to persuade him to unify in defense against Mary, which was geographically obvious. Mary, in such a good position, didn't seem to think negotiations were urgent. She'd gone off on a solo walk.
"Hey!" Mai said, approaching Melissa.
"Oh, hey," Melissa replied without looking up.
"I have an idea." There was a way to save Melissa, at the expense of Eva and Henry, who Mai would not mind if they were the two to be eliminated. But it required the cooperation of both Melissa and Mary. They went together to find Mary on her walk in the garden, and Mai proposed her plan.
"It makes no difference to me," Mary said. "I'm not at risk, so I don't see the need to constrain myself with promises."
Mai shook her head. "There's no part of you that wants to punish them for what they said to you when you needed help? They mocked you."
"And you sat there and listened," Mary said.
"About which I'm very sorry and repentant."
Mary noncommittally surveyed the berries on a vine. "I'll think about it.
By the time they returned to the table, Dakota, Eva, and Henry were already seated. They'd already submitted their orders to the slot in the table in front of them. A unified west of the map. Mai nervously watched Mary write and drop in her orders. Everything depended on her cooperation.
First, the pieces on the west side of the map moved. Mostly just Dakota repositioning to prepare for an invasion of Melissa's territory, but there was one surprise. Henry, who had no doubt promised peace to Eva, attacked her from the flank. Tank on infantry.
The pieces stopped moving, and a note ejected from the slot in front of Eva, whose content we could guess. She had to choose which to incinerate: her underwear or her shirt. The expression she made at Henry was one of barely contained violence. That her anger seemed to amuse him (he stifled a snicker) angered her further. She chose to incinerate her underwear, perhaps because then, at least when she was sitting at the table, she would not be exposed.
Conditions only worsened for Eva in the center of the board. As they'd promised Mary, both Mai and Melissa vacated territories, leaving them undefended, so that Mary could pass through and attack Henry. But to do this, they had to go somewhere, so they invaded Eva. They came from two fronts, and because Eva had trusted Henry, she was defenseless.
Mai moved in, killing a tank unit with a plane, and another little card popped out of the slot in front of Eva. She stared at it for a moment. If the table wasn't made of stone, she'd have flipped it. She leaned over map and scattered the pieces, but they all righted themselves and slid back into position afterward, every time she tried. Finally she took off her shirt and tossed it in the incinerator. "You," she said, staring at Henry. "I will fuck you up for this."
She would have to wait to take her vengeance, though, because Melissa's tank moved in on her infantry. And because Eva had no clothes left, the next card to pop out of the slot was black cardstock with gold trim. The higher penalties.
Chains dropped from the pavilion ceiling and emerged from the floor, and one of the three pill containers embedded in the table popped open. It made her cheeks blush when she swallowed it. She went through the motions of her penalties with affected stoicism. When Eva stepped back from the table and assumed a star pose, the cuffs at the end of chain locked themselves around her wrists and ankles to hold her there. At no point during this, or during the minute in which Melissa stood behind her and reached around to finger her, did Eva move her eyes from Henry. She held that beam of hate and made no noise at all.
As Mai hoped, Mary moved through the newly open territories to reach the west side of the map with some of her excess units. This ended the first turn, and the hourglass above the table flipped for another interval of negotiation. In only one turn, the balance had shifted. Eva lay decimated in the northwest corner with three units left, naked. Mary now had access to the entire map. No alliance was geographically obvious.
Even though she'd been weakened, Eva had gained something: she was now trustworthy. Henry was her only enemy. She promised peace to Mai and Melissa, and requested it in return, so they could focus on Henry. Which Mai and Melissa agreed to. It was not important who between Henry and Eva was eliminated first.
"Attack him," Mai said when she caught up with Dakota in the maze of hedges. "We can end this trial next turn."
"I don't think so.
