Mastermind

by Steven Kelliher

  I had to admit, it had unsettled me. Wigged me out. But I kept a smile on. “Too bad your powers don’t work that way,” I said, wagging a finger.

  “What way?”

  “You can’t see the future,” I said. “Only the next strike. But not from me.”

  I activated Sound Blitz, feeling my muscles respond, my suit constricting, white bolts lighting up. I would have preferred to land the hit in the open, but too much could happen there. A stray villain. An overzealous hero. Even a high-level NPC with an overactive gun. Nothing was going to take this moment from me.

  I settled into a crouch, like a sprinter in the blocks. Deadlock only watched me. He didn’t assume a defensive stance, didn’t try to attack. His eyes began to glow. He was going to try to Anticipate after all.

  Well, we’d see how that went for him.

  Just before I made for him, Deadlock took his eyes off me. I was already betting on him not being able to defend against my Blitz, but now it really was going to be a cakewalk.

  He looked to the right, staring at – or through – the rubble.

  I smiled, pushed my back heel off the concrete and rushed forward, my hand closing into a fist—

  And then the wall behind me exploded in a hail of stone.

  I slammed into Deadlock, felt the impact, felt the damage I’d done, and felt the side of the building Leviathan had thrown against the top of the rubble mountain. It was like hurling a boulder into a bird’s nest, and it taxed the AI so much that I was caught there, held in stasis, the point of my shoulder driving into Deadlock, whose red, metal-rimmed eyes still stared at the corner of masonry crashing through the breach.

  Given that level of damage, I was taken out in one clean hit. Had I been fighting a player, they’d have pulled their punches towards the end, aiming for the 10% knockout threshold. But a hailstorm of building didn’t hold back. My health plummeted to zero and Streak, my greatest character, was dead.

  After the crisis event was over, Leviathan denied doing it on purpose. The footage clearly showed him throwing the building at one of the Ythilian fighter jets, which just so happened to pass right in front of the room in the crumbling tower where his long-time rival stood. He hadn’t meant to kill Deadlock, he said. He certainly hadn’t meant to kill the hero who had been in there with him.

  Right. Well, the AI clearly agreed, as it didn’t hit Leviathan with the Tier-down penalty. An ‘accidental death’. Handy loophole there, and one I doubted Leviathan had discovered by chance.

  When you’re knocked out in Titan, you don’t get any angelic music or end credits. You get blackness, but it’s brief. Enough to give you a scare before you unplug, get up and stretch your legs or take a piss in the real world.

  Dying – really dying – was different.

  I watched all the major moments of Streak’s – of my – gaming life flash in the virtual depths. All his greatest fights, closest calls and, of course, his coolest-looking moments. The montage had gone on long enough to make me wonder if that was my real life, and this one the dream.

  The viewer bots filming the event couldn’t have known any of that. The spectators couldn’t have. They were caught up in the pandemonium surrounding Leviathan finally taking out his chief rival. That was the big story coming out of the event. It was the end of the first major rivalry Titan Online had seen, and the death of Deadlock, the greatest villain to ever play.

  For myself, it was all over. Taking down the top villain player with a crisis-stacked XP multiplier would have been all I needed to break tier one; to join an elite, AI-recognized company of players who numbered in the double digits worldwide.

  Sponsorships. Fan groups. Recognition. I’d been close to having it all.

  And then good ol’ Levi showed up and ended that.

  But that was the past.

  Now I look to the future.

  Two

  Last Start

  One year later…

  It was a damp night, like many in the intervening year since I’d played as Streak. Sticky and unpleasant to some, but it suited my mood. The cars made a soothing hissing sound as they glided past, skimming along the slick city streets.

  I hadn’t been idle in the year since Streak’s death, but I was yet to find the ideal means for my revenge. Tonight, I would try again.

  I’d just finished my last shift for the week, and was still greasy from handling the pizza boxes at Uncle Joe’s. I had one of them in my lap – Joe always gave me one when I clocked out – but I’d wait until I heard him lock up before I tossed it in the garbage. It wasn’t that the pizza was bad. I usually just wasn’t hungry. Food didn’t hold the same appeal as it used to. Now, I ate less frequently; it took up valuable gaming time anyway.

  My attention was fixed on a new billboard they’d put up across the way. Well, I say ‘billboard,’ but it was a hologram, like everything these days. It flickered in the misting rain, and while most people strolled or drove by without sparing it so much as a second glance, I couldn’t help myself. I was enraptured, and for all the wrong reasons.

  The advertisement depicted a man. Or rather, the ideal of a man. He was tall and blond with bright blue eyes, though to me they looked dead, like a wight’s. He wore a skintight white spandex suit, and looked to be sculpted out of granite. His gloves and boots were blue, as was his cape, and there was a blue ‘V’ stitched into the fabric of his chest.

  Leviathan. My old friend.

  I spat into the sludge that meandered past me in the gutter, tossed my pizza box toward the trash can without checking to see if it made it inside, and turned to walk up the stairs bordering the entrance to Joe’s. In addition to making sure I was fed as much grease and cheese as I could handle, Joe also provided room and board. He didn’t charge much, which was all well and good for me. VR equipment might be a dime a dozen these days, but it cost a hell of a lot more, and like many of my generation, I felt more at home in that world than I did in this one.

  At least, I had.

  I took the stairs slowly, gripping the iron railing until my knuckles were blanched white. I had a lot on my mind, after all. If this origin didn't go better than the last, I was going to hang it up. Again. And for good this time.

  When I eased my way into the cramped studio apartment, my footsteps muffled by the assortment of my scattered clothes, I thought about irony. I had been thinking about it a lot over the last year, ever since it had done me in.

  But tonight, I thought about it from the devs’ perspective. I thought of how the thing that made Titan Online the biggest gaming and entertainment sensation of the last ten years was also the thing that gave it the power to shatter psyches, break wills, and crush dreams.

  Permadeath.

  It wasn’t a new concept in gaming, but it was a tough one to pull off. And Titan Online played it safe at first. Permadeath wasn’t a feature in the beginning. Back then there was only the knockout system. When players hit 10% health or below, their character becomes crippled and a timer starts before they’re respawned, all to allow some final role-play to be performed by the combatants. The problem was, how were you supposed to sell viewers on a living, breathing world populated by heroes and villains when they had no true incentive to act the part? How would you get people invested in stories over the long term if there was no added drama, no suspense? Without death, heroic stories were merely shadows playing out against the cavern wall. Without death, impact was lessened and emotion unearned.

  And so the devs brought death to Titan Online. They kept the knockout system in place too, but the addition of a perma-kill option absolutely ramped up the tensions in some bitter fights. So, how do you raise stakes by introducing a permadeath feature while somehow stopping Titan from being the most rage-inducing game of all time?

  Simple: the Rivalry mechanic.

  It’s exactly what it sounds like. Come into conflict with another player in the game’s open world? Killing them outright is certainly possible – though largely frowned upon in the communi
ty – but if you knock them out instead, the AI will start to see the pair of you as rivals and reward you big-time when next you have it out. Big-time XP. Big-time upgrades, and all for playing to one of the core comic book tropes: cultivating and expanding your own personal rogues’ gallery. This way, players are encouraged to keep their foes around, with each new chapter in their personal rivalry enriching both with power, Fame and Infamy, both in-game and out.

  Worked well for in-game motivation. Worked even better for spectators, and Titan had been the most-watched VR open world game for two years after its inception. Everyone knew about the permadeath feature, just as everyone knew – deep down – that it would rarely be exploited.

  At least, that was how it was supposed to operate. And, truth be told, that was how it normally did operate, with a few glaring exceptions, chief among them the aforementioned Leviathan.

  It was a brilliant move, and one I had been in favor of as a viewer and fan of the game, right up until I died. You never think it’s going to happen to you.

  Now, as I sat in a chair I had long ago worn down, and lifted a headset that cost as much as everything else in the room combined, I tried to get my thoughts in order. After all, if this was going to be my last playthrough of Titan Online, I’d better make it count.

  I wanted the AI to know that this time, I wasn’t there to be a hero. This time, I was there to kill one.

  The thing is, I wasn’t just planning on killing any hero. I was planning on killing the hero. The mightiest. The best of the best, whom I considered the worst of the worst.

  I was planning to kill God himself. Or rather, the devil.

  Leviathan’s days had been long, but like any of us, they were numbered. All I needed was to find the right character to kill him with.

  I adjusted my headset and lowered the visor. Staring at the black glass during the seconds before start-up was like staring into the void.

  A thin beam of blue light split the polished canvas, and the black underwent a subtle change, taking on a gray tint. In the darkness, ghostly images of my previous builds came up. It wasn’t as long a row of builds as most players had. There were only fifteen, and the first had represented 96% of my in-game play time. Streak had been my crowning achievement, and even grayed out as he was in the login screen, those lightning bolts shone.

  On previous playthroughs, I’d have lingered here, poring over my previous characters, their base stats and superpowers.

  Not this time. This time I was going straight in without wasting time. I allowed the AI to select a randomized avatar model for my character. My character’s name would come later, when I’d go through the origin story. For now, it defaulted to my account name. My name. Karna.

  I gave the command, and Titan Online went from darkness to light, filling the glass screen with all the colors in the real world, as well as the combinations that could only be found in Titan. Shining silver towers flashed by. Red and yellow capes stood out starkly against blue skies. Powers ignited, boomed, crashed and blasted from every direction, from the sizzle of lightning bolts to the warped warble of alien rays.

  I let the hero-villain montage stretch on, and meditated on my mission.

  I had tried all the other setups to this point. After losing Streak, I came back as a character with a job at the local power plant. Let the AI prompt me into tripping into a vat of the nastiest, brightest-looking chemicals I could find. Solid powers. Enhanced strength, infrared vision. Nothing close to what I needed.

  Next time out, I’d been an intern in a physics lab and managed to bumble my way into the path of some invisible ray of pure energy. Energy projection was always big in the comics, and it was one of the better power sets you could get in-game. The AI had granted me some solid, retro ray beams, but it was barely enough to heat a cup of coffee, and even with a steady build of Fame and the XP that came with it, there was no way the power would scale enough to kill someone like Leviathan on my own. I had never played well with others, in-game or out, and a glass canon build needed a team around him to see any measure of success.

  I’d received enhanced strength without the speed to back it up, heat vision without the strength to make me anything more than a glorified tripwire, a tech-based setup that was the result of an origin that led me to a cache of weapons and armor some in-game Legend had left behind (I’d almost taken that one all the way,) but deep down, I knew that none of those fourteen post-Streak builds would get me any closer to taking Leviathan down.

  So here I was, desperately attempting another origin trigger.

  I told myself this was the last one. The last origin I’d be attempting.

  It was another chance at a first impression, and since I didn’t run the risk of running afoul of any players in the origin story, I planned to take my time, see what power-granting opportunities the AI had in store for me, and make a good effort at not packing it in and calling it quits before that bastard could kill me all over again.

  This time, I’d make a show of it. This time, I’d make them remember. This time, I’d make it into a damn industry blog post, at least.

  Three

  Origin Story

  As far as origin stories went, this one had a dull beginning.

  It was your typical high school setup. Desks with drab colors to match drab-colored walls. Old-school green chalkboards – the kind they hadn’t used since the early aughts – and a bespectacled teacher who didn’t so much lecture as drone, tapping his annoying miniature wand of chalk in the same spot over and over.

  If I had half a mind to check the math on the board, I’m sure it wouldn’t have added up. Just a random collection of digits and jagged lines meant to lend some credibility to the proceedings.

  I looked around the room, noting the archetypal students scattered about. One girl with a plaid skirt and dark hair with a bow in it sat up stock still, her artificial eyes tracing a pattern at the front, utterly enraptured by the artificial presentation. Behind her, a greasy-haired boy slept soundly, head down, stained shirt pulled up to expose a soft stomach with exactly three rolls of fat. The class clown made faces at everyone and no one, his animated expressions and imitations coming off more horrifying than natural.

  But then, most players didn’t really look as closely as I did. They were utterly taken with the experience of inhabiting their own miniature, idyllic version of whatever their favorite comic book city happened to be, where adventure lurked around every corner.

  Before all that, though, you had to get out of the blasted intro sequence.

  “Our world stands on a knife’s edge between order and chaos,” the teacher was saying, reciting the same hard info dump I’d already heard a dozen times over the course of a dozen attempts at starting a new character and nabbing the perfect origin story. “Should you be one of the lucky few blessed with the power to effect change in our society, take care that you uphold—”

  In the virtual world, the only escape from a boring lesson was the same as in the real world: daydreaming.

  Valorous Industries never made it easy to skip their mandatory intros. Some or another schmuck writer had toiled for hours to come up with the most seamless way to incorporate game mechanics into a natural-seeming blanket of superhero worldbuilding. The thing is, you weren’t really supposed to have fifteen characters in Titan. Meaningful leveling took a while, which is why most stuck with the character they’d first created and the origin they’d first been granted… until death did them part.

  If you think I’m being overly dramatic for letting the death of my first build affect me so profoundly, you’re missing the point. It wasn’t that I had died; it was who had killed me. And why.

  In a sense, Titan Online was being held hostage by its most popular player. All games needed to innovate. Innovation required change, and Leviathan stood in the way of that change. The irony that the game’s biggest moneymaker and revenue generator was also the biggest thing holding it back was not lost on me, nor other players – typically newer, lower-
tiered heroes and villains – but it was lost on those in charge. Those who feared that the power vacuum left by Leviathan’s passing would not be filled by the next crop of emergent stars.

  I planned to show them all. I planned to teach them that the only thing bigger than a god was the killing of one.

  The crackle of the PA system booting on – they were really going for the retro vibe in this origin – jarred me from my private contemplations. I tried to focus my mind and think of how to show the AI what I intended with this build.

  Power sets, it was generally thought, were selected by the AI to best enrich the world of Titan Online, and the tapestry of stories its players acted out. Each player was a part of a larger whole, and no one was supposed to be built to stop another, but rather to find his or her role – namely, whatever best suited the AI’s organic narrative.

  My challenge was in convincing the AI that the greatest threat to its story was not an ending to its most prized creation, but the stagnation that Leviathan’s seemingly eternal in-game life had resulted in. After my fight with Deadlock, his comments had stuck in my mind. Perhaps the AI and I wanted the same thing. Maybe it already knew things needed to change. I just had to prove myself a worthy executor.

  That was a heavy thought to carry in such a sunny, Americana setting.

  I thrust my hand up, waved it around like I was supposed to. How’s that for credibility? If I was really going to be stuck in a Monday-morning lecture at some virtual high school – something I had no desire to revisit in my real life – then you could sure as hell bet I’d find a way out of it.

  “What is it… Karna?” the teacher asked.

  There was a brief delay as the AI worked out how to pronounce my real name.

  “I need to pi...” I paused as the teacher’s eyebrows began to rise. No way I was spending any more time than absolutely necessary on this thread, least of all in detention. “May I please go to the bathroom?”