Mastermind

by Steven Kelliher

  “Take a hall pass.”

  I didn’t, but by then the teacher had already got right back onto his plot rail and I slipped out into the hall.

  I did end up going to the bathroom, if only to keep the AI from trying to pull me back into the origin it had planned for me. And also to see what my new randomly chosen avatar looked like.

  The result was a dark-haired youth that recalled me in my younger days. I was a little shorter than in real life, and my eyes were not blue, but dark – too dark to be called brown, even. I was slim, but not weak, and my skin seemed caught between pale and ashen gray. Weird. Maybe the AI was planning ahead, giving me a hint as to the dark and brooding origin it had in mind.

  I left the bathroom and passed a few other students hurrying to and fro, gliding along their set rails. I avoided eye contact with a stern-looking principal so as not to get sucked into another dialogue loop, and I made my way down toward the gymnasium. The double doors were locked, so I simply waited for someone to come in – the janitor, as it turned out – and eased my way outside.

  It looked like your typical American city of the 1990s. Too many brick buildings, from the school itself to the town houses across the way. There was traffic, but not nearly enough to be considered realistic. A bright yellow bus was idling in the horseshoe drive beneath a flag pole that was framed just right. I had to laugh. This was likely the bus that was set to take me to some or another field trip where I’d be presented with all manner of potential triggers, from radioactive reptiles at a demented zoo to experimental mishaps at a local museum dealing in science jargon that was more about the feel of intelligence than any true knowledge.

  This really was an old origin build. Even the pedestrians walking by barely spared more than a glance at one another. When the game first came out, players wouldn’t think twice, but revisiting this old origin setting was off-putting.

  The AI adjusted as I walked right past the bus, the driver waving at me without looking. I could almost hear the software running, feel the game shifting to accommodate my choice.

  My first superpower trigger opportunity presented itself just as I passed under the arch to the Trinity Park High courtyard: an old woman crossing the street directly in the path of an oncoming transport truck, yellow hazard signs emblazoned on its aluminum sides.

  Yawn.

  As the truck began to swerve and the tires started their screeching, I turned away from the scene, ignoring the too-dramatic cries of the NPCs who rushed to and from the scene.

  At the next corner, there was a live wire sparking in a puddle. A boy tossed an orange ball into the street, where it bounced slower than it should have. Slow enough to get me to notice the black-and-brown dog jogging happily after it, jowls rippling in the wind, utterly oblivious to its coming doom.

  Electricity would be a useful power, but again, it wasn’t enough. And so I moved on, leaving the smoking hound in its sorry predicament.

  I saw a local café and walked inside. The patrons were just like any you’d see in a sitcom, from the overly friendly wait staff to the businessmen reading the paper over their morning coffee, and the neighborhood kids running in to con sweets from the matronly owner in back.

  Despite my relatively sour mood, the scene put a smile on my face. Everything in Titan Online was meant to be idealized. Even the villains, in a way – more rogues than true embodiments of evil. This origin story was a pleasant throwback to times gone by, and I figured I’d enjoy the view and grab a coffee that I couldn’t taste while I waited for the AI to cook up another superpower trigger for me.

  As I leaned against the black-and-white checkerboard counter, the box TV in the corner drew my eye. They could have been playing highlights from any of Titan City’s heroes, but of course, they had chosen Leviathan. With his blond wig-like hair and his plastic teeth, he stood in the middle of the raised dais of the Heroes’ Square courtyard, bending graciously to allow the diminutive mayor to struggle to put a medal over his bulging neck.

  Another medal. Another triumph over some sorry villain who’d got in his way, and another one-up over whatever hero might be rising in the popularity ranks to challenge the man who had become more brand than player.

  “Now that’s a hero if I’ve ever seen one,” a woman said. She was a middle-aged working woman waiting with her young son. He’d just ordered a bran muffin, but his eyes were fixed on the TV screen. Fixed on his hero.

  “Actually,” I said, my tongue getting away from me, “he’s a liar, a cheat and a menace to all the true heroes in Titan City, ma’am.” I mimed a tip of the cap I wasn’t wearing, and the patrons all looked toward me as one, each more horrified than the last.

  I gave a cold, dispassionate survey of the modest crowd, and when I turned back toward the woman, her hand was already cocked back, ready to land a crisp slap onto my defenseless cheek.

  “Let that hand get an inch closer to me, and you’ll need Leviathan himself to come help you.”

  I’d never played the menacing type. Hell, I’d never played a villain, but seeing Leviathan’s smug face put me in a foul mood, and the more villainous I seemed, the better for my purposes.

  The woman swallowed and lowered her hand as if she hadn’t been about to use it as a cudgel. She gripped her son – who was now openly glaring at me – by the shoulders and dragged him toward the glass entryway.

  “Forgot your bran,” I said, reaching back to pick up the boy’s discarded muffin. I took a bite. Eating in Titan Online was more for the world-building than the taste, meaning the in-game food never tasted like the real thing. It was just as well. It was no major loss. Bran tasted like nothing to me anyway.

  “What do you have to say to the proud citizens of Titan City now that their greatest threat, Deadlock and his Dark Grid Gang, has been taken care of?”

  The owner had turned up the volume on the squawk box, likely to annoy me. The reporter’s question let me know that this was an old recording, window dressing the AI sprinkled throughout its various origin stories.

  “Thank you, Wendy,” Leviathan replied in his smug, self-important voice. “Deadlock was my bitterest enemy. Defeating him was no easy feat. And I couldn’t have done it without the support of my loyal—”

  The mug shattered in my hand.

  “Your bitterest enemy?” I exclaimed, whirling on the TV, though it was located at the back of the café, perched atop the pastry case. “How about the greatest threat the city has ever known? Why don’t you just come right out and tell them you didn’t do it for the people, or the heroes? You did it for you!” I was fuming, and the NPC patrons all got up and shifted either away from me or toward the door in various states of distress.

  I did mention that I hated Leviathan, didn’t I? Surely you can understand my reaction. And our first and only meeting – if you could call it that – happened to coincide with the very event he was gloating about on that TV screen.

  I’d lost six months of progress on Streak. Six months.

  Now I found myself standing in a virtual café in a plain origin story, fuming at NPCs about the injustice that had befallen me. Perm’d for growing too strong, and in such a way that too few took notice to give Leviathan concern. It had been neatly done. But Leviathan and his crew had made an art of perming players and making it look like an accident or justified.

  Or maybe that was my ego talking. Maybe it really had been an accident.

  I dragged my heels, stepping back out onto the street like a whipped dog. I didn’t see any obvious attempts by the AI to present a new superpower trigger. It seemed to be taking the system some time to decide on a new approach. I was being particularly finicky. After all, what sort of power could the AI grant a player who’d rather scream at a TV screen than save a boy and his dog?

  I must admit that I took some small amount of pleasure in successfully confounding the most complex AI system in the business.

  Right up until it started screwing with me.

  As I walked down streets that grew inc
reasingly deserted, the sky began to change. It went from bright blue and sunny to cloudy in a flash, and I shook my head as the first peal of thunder rolled across the darkening skies. The AI really was fixated on electricity, it seemed. Ah, well. Maybe I’d get a good zap that would at least get me back to a speedster build.

  Only, the lightning blast never came.

  I looked up, and the skies changed again, going from purple-gray to yellow before darkening to a smoldering orange, like fire above the clouds. It was a garish, apocalyptic scene, and it reminded me of the day Streak died.

  I shook it off and continued, passing a window to a tech store. Behind the glass were a series of old-school TV monitors reminiscent of the one I’d just yelled at in the café. I expected to see Leviathan’s disgustingly perfect mug reflected back at me in these lenses, too, but the colorful, chaotic scene they depicted stopped me dead in my tracks.

  Streak. I was looking at footage of Streak.

  There I was. Rather, there he was, looking taller than my current build, and far more heroic. He had that bright violet spandex on, emblazoned with white streaks that recalled lightning bolts on his shoulders and thighs. My – his – face was partially covered with a mask over his eyes, giving him that white-eyed look like the cartoons gave their caped crusaders.

  There was a storm raging about Streak, rubble swirling all around.

  It was strange seeing him there. Seeing me there, from an entirely new perspective.

  I saw it all on the screen now, playing right in front of me, and it took me back to the moment. I watched Streak run, and I remembered what it had felt like.

  But we’ve already been over that.

  I stood there in the now-empty city street of my latest origin story, blinking beneath a burning yellow sky. The TV monitors winked out as one, but the sky didn’t return to normal. If anything, it grew more chaotic, and I felt the gravity begin to shift, just as it had during the Ythilian Invasion. The day Streak had been killed.

  I felt dazed, unsure what to do, trying to wrap my head around exactly what the AI had been trying to accomplish by replaying my greatest failure.

  Then a lightning strike split the sky to the west. I looked, and there, in the distance, leaning precariously in the midst of a swirling storm of concrete, metal and earth, was the tower of rubble where I’d died. No hologram. No TV re-run. It was there, made virtual real.

  “Ah, what the hell,” I muttered, dragging my feet down the lane. I wondered if any devs were watching, if the AI was acting up, or if it was all some sort of cosmic joke rendered in code.

  Given how grand this all was, I had a feeling I’d find some answers in the tower. An understanding that if I climbed my aching way up into the nest where Deadlock and Streak had met their ends, I’d find the source of my new superpower.

  Four

  War Town

  I made it to the top of the tower and stood there in my twentieth century garb – dusted jeans and polyester hoodie – and blinked dumbly. The smashed control panel in the center of the ruins crackled and leaked blue light that was probably meant to be electricity but came up wanting. Easy enough to explain away as some alien plasma.

  I looked to my left, seeing the corner of the building Leviathan had thrown, halfway through breaking the wall. I even walked over to it, crouched and ran my finger along the cracks in the stone.

  It appeared the whole event was being replayed in super slow motion, with the cracks of Leviathan’s destruction splintering as slowly as grass growing. I’d not only been transported back to the place of Streak’s death, but the exact moment. I stood and turned back toward the center of the chamber, half expecting to see Streak – it no longer felt true to call him me – and Deadlock floating in the ether, locked in their death spiral.

  There was nothing. Nothing but broken rocks soon to be launched across the eastern sky and crackling electronics with just enough lights and buttons to appear legitimate without devolving into truly cartoonish territory. I walked across the now-empty chamber and toward the control panel and reached out, pulling my fingers back sharply as blue light lashed the space before me like a lizard’s tail.

  You couldn’t feel true pain in Titan Online, but the devs had done a good job of selling damage to players by “buzzing” them. Think of it like an old-school rumble pack on steroids. Made your vision go blurry and messed with your character’s fine motor skills for a short time, depending on the severity of the damage. It tended to prompt genuine reactions, hence my quick recoil, and added to that feeling of believability for viewers.

  “Hunk of crap,” I said, brushing a clutch of hanging red wires away from my face. The wires sparked and nearly made me yelp as I skittered back, expecting to be racked by heavy voltage. Instead of a wall to greet my back, I felt the panic of a sudden drop, and found myself falling through another mass of wires, like the tangled vines and creepers of a dense jungle canopy.

  Well, I say falling, but it was really more of a tumble, as I met plenty of resistance – jutting shards of stone, odd bits of metal and technology, and a hell of a lot more of those damn glowing wires, all red and green and blue – on the long way down.

  I fell for longer than I should have. The way went dark, and I left the wires behind as I spun out and cleared a ledge. I was likely in some elevator shaft, or maybe an empty missile silo, and the ensuing impact with the ground floor below would no doubt kill me.

  Killed in an origin build. I wasn’t even sure that was possible, and imagined for a brief, agonizing moment my name finally plastered across the industry blogs, and for all the wrong reasons.

  I’d tell you I didn’t scream or flail or swear, but I did plenty of each of those, with enough crossover to make it nearly impossible to distinguish one from another. I felt that weightless feeling in my chest, and the knowing dread that the ground was just about to smash into me and render the whole enterprise futile.

  Only, I didn’t hit the ground. Instead, I felt as if I’d plunged into water, or very thick air.

  I opened my eyes, and found that I could now see farther than a foot in front of my face. The chamber – the tube, more like – made up the metal walls around me. I was floating in some sort of anti-gravity field, twisting on the currents like a leaf on the wind. I squinted back up the way I’d come – as if it had been my choice – and saw the barest hint of the glow from the top of the tower.

  “Okay, then,” I said, trying to stretch my feet down toward the floor.

  As I rotated, I saw thick copper and steel tubes littering the floor. They looked like coiling snakes, and the faint green light that spilled over them lit them like algae. I managed to scrape the nose of my sneaker against one of the thickest tubes and used it to spin me toward the center of the chamber, rotating as I did.

  I yelped again as the faint green glow brightened and I nearly collided with a pedestal in the center of the nest. I reached out and steadied my hands against the smooth metal base, but my eyes were taken with what lay on top.

  It looked like a god’s gem, like some mystical jewel out of Indiana Jones. It was emerald green, bright enough to light the nest, but faint enough not to sting my eyes. As I floated in the strange gravitational field, pulling myself around the hovering gemstone using the metal base beneath it, I heard a faint buzzing sound emanating from it. I looked up again, half expecting a squadron of the same alien henchmen that had littered the place during the crisis event to come rappelling down at me, red eyes glowing and blue guns blazing.

  But this was an origin story, not a live build. I was safe here, or so I believed. And everything I saw, everything I touched, everything I experienced was put there with purpose by the AI, driving me toward a series of choices, guiding me toward my next build.

  I eyed the alien rock suspiciously, considering my options.

  “What are you, anyway?” I asked it. No answer. “Gamma radiation powers, maybe?”

  Seeing how I had no discernible way back up into the tower’s nest, and seeing ho
w there were no doorways or hidden tunnels around me, I shrugged and reached toward the pulsating emerald heart, bracing for the damage it was about to inflict. I could always try for another origin story tomorrow.

  My palm hovered around the rotating emerald and I felt its warmth tickle my blood. I tensed and closed my hand over the smooth cut edges, squeezing my eyes shut at the same time. I gripped the piece and ripped it free, falling the three feet to the hose- and wire-laden floor. I clutched the rock to my chest, cradling it with both hands, hoping to contain whatever power was held therein.

  Nothing happened. At least, nothing apart from a bright flash that emanated from the rock I clutched, and a sound like whispers in my mind that soon faded, causing me to question whether or not it had been there in the first place.

  I opened my eyes, looked around to ensure that I was still in the virtual world and not rocking back and forth in the fetal position in my studio apartment – where damp towels and extension cords could easily be mistaken for alien tubes and tech – and stood.

  I unfurled my palm and saw that the emerald was still glowing softly. I glared at it with a mix of disgust and disappointment, perhaps with an odd touch of dark humor.

  “Figures,” I said, tossing it up into the air like a softball and catching it in an easy motion. “Your tech’s busted!” I yelled up into the dark, airy heights of the shaft. “Dead-end build! Hear me? This build’s a dead end! Broken quest chain!”

  No answer. Well, the AI had never exactly responded to my pleas before.

  I drew my arm back, preparing to throw the stone, hoping to dash it against the far wall before I spoke the “End Game” command, when the tower collapsed around me.

  Well, not collapsed so much as dissolved.

  The walls broke apart, tearing free to admit the sunlit orange dust of the surrounding ruins. The storm broke in, ripping the structure apart and taking all its tubes, wires and blinking lights with it. It left me alone, but took the ground beneath my feet. I began falling, and I felt a smile pulling at the corners of my mouth.