Jeff looked down at himself. Too conspicuous. If the ordinary plebs in this world saw a sixteen metre tall, purple man with pointy ears and long white hair, they were bound to recognise him as the Great God Avatar. That could be a good thing, if they recognise me as Avatar, then I can order them to help me. He thought about this for a moment longer. What if they start to wonder about why I need their help? They might start to wonder if I really am a god. Not a great plan. I need a disguise.

He looked for a suitable group of trees to hide among, but there wasn’t anything even vaguely suitable, so he sat down next to the largest tree he could find and set himself to work with his personal viewer, creating a convincing disguise, something no one would suspect.

Some time later – certainly more than he had anticipated – he finished his tinkering. He reset his physical parameters to the new design, shrinking down from his sixteen metre height to something less conspicuous.

He looked around. Damn! He hadn’t thought about navigation. He opened his viewer again. The glowing, rectangular, semi-transparent panel materialised between his hands. This is going to be a bit conspicuous too. Better think of a way to disguise this if I’m going to keep using it. He accessed the control options and chose a simpler shape, a glass sphere, an orb. He also made himself a leather satchel to carry it in.

Looking into the now spherical viewer, he called up a map of the whole of Utopia, and located his current position. He was on the easternmost of the two large peninsulas on the southern end of the continent of Dreyis. But where to go? He couldn’t think of a way to get to the throne room from here. It must be possible, he thought, those stupid clerics keep finding ways to do it. Maybe I can find one of them at a temple or something.

His stomach grumbled. He ignored it. It grumbled again. Wait a minute. That’s not supposed to happen! Why do I have a stomach? His virtual god-form was designed to ignore all the normal rules for this world. No internal organs; just a texture mapped on a 3D frame. He hadn’t changed any of those parameters. This body shouldn’t need food or sleep. He checked his viewer. No mistake. His form had been changed. Whatever had happened, his personal program had been overwritten as well. He was going to have to manage like a regular person until he could get back to his throne room and shout at Paley.

Maybe it won’t be so bad, at least I still have access to my viewer. I could re-write the program code and make some leaves or grass into a hamburger or something. He grabbed a handful of dry leaves from a nearby tree, and used his viewer to locate them in the program code, using his own hand as a reference point.

Next he tried to think of the things he needed to put into a hamburger. Bread; okay, that needs wheat, and yeast. What else? milk? Eggs? Possibly. He didn’t know. Bread’s too complicated, I need to do something simpler. What about eggs? I guess I could eat some scrambled eggs. He began programming the code to change the handful of leaves into a few eggs. I’ll need to cook them, which means I need to make a fire. This is too complicated. Maybe I’ll just make the leaves into gold and buy some food at the nearest town. He re-programmed the leaves making them into a handful of gold coins.

He wasn’t sure how many of those gold coins he would need to buy a decent meal, so he reached up to take some more leaves. As he did, he dropped one of the coins, and it reverted back into a couple of dry leaves, falling to the ground by his feet. Stunned, he threw one of the remaining coins up into the air, and it promptly reverted back into a few leaves, which were carried a little by the wind, and then dropped to the ground, just the way leaves should.

Even with the automatic reset protocol thingy Paley had been ranting about back when they set up program access from inside the system, they should have retained their form for at least ten or twenty minutes. Some system glitch was overriding his ability to change things in the program. He gave the remaining coins a hard stare. They showed no sign of changing into leaves, but then neither had the previous ones. He took out his viewer and studied the program code of the remaining coins.

They were pure gold. Absolutely pure. Just as he had programmed them to be. They were, in every respect, a gold coin. Just to be sure, he changed them to copper, silver and then lead. No problems. Then he changed them to wood, chalk, cheese and then chocolate. They managed all of those with no trouble. He had always thought it a stroke of genius that he had talked Paley into making a simple shortcut code for turning things into chocolate that was easy to remember. He took a small bite from an edge of one to test it, it certainly tasted like chocolate. He changed it back to gold. It still showed no sign of doing anything unusual. He threw it at a nearby tree, and a bunch of leaves hit the tree with decidedly less force than he would have liked. Something was affecting his personal access codes. This was not improving his mood.

* * *

Jeff’s stomach made a strange gurgling noise. It had been some time since he ate those chocolate-leaves, and now it felt as if two small fish were getting frisky in his newly acquired digestive system. So far he had eaten about half a kilogram of leaf-cum-chocolate today, but it wasn’t making him feel any less hungry, and the berries he ate afterward for the sake of variety had just made him regret eating at all.

He was fairly sure that in the past hour or so he must have flown at least twenty or thirty kilometres. His inability to move instantly from place to place was really getting on his nerves. Flying had been much less fun than he had imagined. He had turned his arms into wings so that he could fly where he needed to go, reasoning that there were plenty of wizards around and no one would pay much attention to someone flying about like that. But as it happened, flapping a big pair of wings to get airborne was a lot of hard work for very little payoff, and his shoulders got tired very quickly. What was more, he hadn’t been able to turn off his pain receptors, so now his shoulders were aching from the effort.

As Jeff trudged toward the nearest town, he consoled himself with the idea that, with the system glitching the way it had been, his wings would probably not have stayed wing-shaped for much longer anyway, and he preferred not to think too hard about that happening whilst he was airborne.

“I need food!” he whinged to the sky in general. It didn’t answer. He sighed and trudged on. Of course the sky didn’t answer, he hadn’t programmed it to. I’ll change that when I get back. From now on, when someone talks to the sky, it will answer them. He kicked a small rock so that it would bounce off a nearby tree. It missed, and disappeared into a tuft of yellowed grass with an unsatisfying swish.

The question is, what should I make it say? He looked at the solitary cloud drifting dumbly across the sky. He listened to the sound of the wind in the leaves nearby. He couldn’t think of anything funny. He really hated it when that happened. Here comes an opportunity to say something really funny, and I just know that whatever it is, it will make everyone laugh, and then I can’t think of it until five minutes later when somehow it just isn’t that funny anymore.

He walked on a moment longer. Then it came to him. We’re sorry, the non-corporeal personification you are trying to contact is currently unavailable, out of range, or switched off. Please check the number, and try again later. We apologise for any existential inconvenience.

He laughed a little to himself, but the moment had long passed, and now as there was no one around to share the joke anyway, the moment was quickly over, and left an unfulfilled feeling. He knew there was a French word for that, but he couldn’t think of it. He kept walking and tried not to think about how boring this was. He hated being bored almost as much as he hated being hungry.

Next Chapter: iv 0000100-04