Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  There sure are. The bike slogs to a jog, then a walk, then a crawl, as we hit the ragged edge of that packed mass of bodies. I can make out the beacon clearly now, rising up above that seething, jostling horde of bodies and vehicles and augment rigs in every variant of the biotech rainbow. But I can’t see whose it is.

  Normally I’d have given up by now. Correction: I’d’ve checked the forum, seen who was throwing that beacon, and then almost certainly given up by now. A crowd like this means we have zero chance of bagging any kind of footage that our audience couldn’t see just as well if not better from any one of three hundred other streams. Last night with 28 was an utter outlier, statistically, because the only person who was there was too fucking stupid to start streaming. Generally people make better decisions, and the site gets mobbed, and they start streaming, and then you have a situation like pouring sugar water on an anthill. Like the old news clips you sometimes see about the water riots, back when there was enough of the stuff that it came out of your faucet for free.

  I’ve seen plenty of swarmed beacons in the distance in my day, and usually a crowd like this, even in virtual, is enough to turn me on my antisocial heel and send me far, far away. Today, though, I don’t get to be picky. I get to suck it up and soldier on.

  This crowd is insanity. It’s counterproductive, of course. All these people trying to capture the inner secret lives of Stellaxis operatives in their natural habitat, and in so doing, utterly prevent them from whatever they were trying the fuck to do in the first place. Which is why I generally wouldn’t waste bike battery and heals and ammo and time on trash footage. Whoever’s at the glowing core of that beacon is stuck in that crowd like a bug in amber. Not exactly putting on a show.

  In favorable conditions, the hoverbike is omnidirectionally maneuverable. In these conditions we’re cemented in place. We may as well get off and walk. So I do. Jessa follows, the bike shimmering out of existence as she stows it in her inventory.

  Walking isn’t much better. It just puts us within range of everybody’s poky elbows. I brace myself and shove through, but I’m taking damage now. The hell?

  I check my minimap. Sometime within the past thirty seconds, the random zone designator has decided this one is now PvP. Of course it has. Already people are noticing the change. There’s a general background noise of weapons being drawn, teams gathering together in formation, bodies hitting the ground.

  “Anybody got eyes on who that is?” I ask, because most of our subscribers are probably watching several feeds at once, and as the crowd starts battle-royaleing it out around me, I find myself thinking about discretion and valor and getting the fuck out while the getting’s good.

  “Looks like 08,” someone answers.

  I blink. “Really?”

  “We going for this?” Jessa asks. She has to shout to be heard.

  Elena’s gone, B says in my head. Most of the others, gone. I’m running out of time. Earn your fucking keep, Mal. “Yeah.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  She holsters the plasma guns long enough to pull two cloaks out of her inventory and toss me one. The design realism is so top-notch that the thing almost blows away before I can catch it. “Cloak up and bolt. On three,” she says.

  I look at her doubtfully. “This is going to suck.”

  “Sure is.” She’s grinning. “Three.”

  I toss the cloak over my head and run like hell.

  There are a few ultra-top-shelf items in this game that could get us there without a scratch. A suborbital drop like the one that got Jessa to the airstrip yesterday. A permeability shroud, which would interpose our virtual atoms among and through the other players’ like breeze through an open window. An invincibility shot.

  The smart camouflage cloak is none of these things. Best it buys us in a situation like this is a few seconds of confusion. Ten seconds, to be precise.

  I push and dodge, trying to shoulder people out of my path in a minimally damaging way. It’s not easy. I’ve lost sight of Jessa. Which is unsurprising because she’s invisible. I could try to track her by the trail of annoyed players she leaves in her wake, but it wouldn’t necessarily be her. We won’t be the only ones pulling this trick.

  The drain on my health is steady but slow. No lucky shots have found me yet, just incidental impact damage from body-slamming my way through other people’s power armor. I duck under someone’s pet spidermech’s autotargeting perimeter turret, I backpedal out of an all-out firefight, I burn my boots on the area-of-effect nuke radius of a lobbed grenade.

  The beacon’s close now, though. Real close. I can make out the number hovering over 08’s head. Not sure from here what they’ve interrupted him doing, and I kick myself for not getting that footage, even though I know I’d be the six zillionth dumbfuck to try to profit off it, well beyond fashionably late to that party. Now that they have interrupted him, though, he’s just standing there, chatting with the crowd. He’s holding something, or has got something propped up against him?

  People are talking to him and he’s talking back, but it’s just the one of him against the horde of them, and they’re all screaming to be heard over one another, shooting at one another, climbing over one another to get a better vantage point.

  The little cluster of people right in front of me all drops together and lies there, quivering. Resonance grenade. If this was the real war, their insides would be jellifying right now, but as it is, they just sit there for a few seconds and then blink out of existence, dead, to respawn wherever they last saved. I dart into the opening where they were—and in that instance my cloak expires and blips out, leaving me exposed.

  At least five different blasters swing round to bear on me. “Watch out, Nyx!” someone shouts at me from the audience, but I’m already on the move. My emergency shielding system is on its last hoarded gasp, but it’s not going to do me much good when someone loots it off my corpse, so I power it up and accelerate out of the gap and back into the comparative clusterfuck safety of the crowd, the shields glimmering around me like soap bubbles.

  Another few feet and I’ll be right up in 08’s face, just like B wants. I’ll snag some extreme close-ups of the pores in his nose and the capillaries in his eyes if that’s what she’s after. From the sound of things, Jessa’s already there. She’s managed to finesse her way through the waves of players breaking against the impassable glowing cliff of 08’s beacon. She’s out of close auditory range, but her voice comes through clearly on our channel, presenting 08 like he’s a wild-caught specimen of some critically endangered species. Which isn’t really all that far from true.

  “Say hi to 08, guys! I haven’t gotten close to this dude in a while! Love how he’s taking the time to stand here and hang out with us, seems like a cool guy. He’s saying something—see, you can see his mouth is moving—but there’s just too much background noise here. Sorry, 08, we can’t hear you! I’ve always liked him, though, always follow his missions on the news. Who am I kidding, though? I follow all of them. We love you, 08!”

  I risk peeking at Jessa’s visual feed in the upper right-hand corner of my field of vision. Somehow she’s gotten right up in 08’s business and is peering directly into his face at a distinctly unflattering angle. He’s still talking, but it’s impossible to make out. Which is a shame, because voice data would probably be useful intel for B’s collection.

  I shove forward, trusting the last long-suffering tatters of the shields to carry me. I scramble over corpses too freshly dead to have despawned yet and pop through the far edge of the crowd to land at 08’s feet. The shiny toes of my boots are grazing the edge of the beacon. It’s an old-fashioned skateboard he’s got, the kind with wheels. He’s standing there with it leaned up against one leg. Out of nowhere it occurs to me that the in-game versions of the operatives probably have a lot more fun than the real ones.

  “Hey, 08,” I say. “08, hey, over here.”

  It’s dangerously tempting to start waving my arms to get his attention
. As it is, I’m presenting something of a target. Someone at my five o’clock unloads a blaster in the direction of my center mass, but the iridescence of the shield not only absorbs the fire but deposits its alloyed charge into my inventory for sale as repurposed tradeskill materials. I am for sure going to miss this shield when it blows.

  All at once 08 catches sight of me. He looks straight at me looking straight back at him, and I can only hope B’s watching. There’s nothing distinctive there, though, nothing on the order of 05’s—Elena’s—scar. He just looks like some guy about my age, like someone I’d walk past on the hotel stairs without giving him a second thought.

  He’s about my height, which also seems strange for the meticulously designed, lab-grown—stolen and lab-developed?—superhuman that he is. Somehow I expected him to be taller. Jessa could probably give me his height to the millimeter.

  Another shot, this one a bullet from a standard pistol, sizzles away into my shield. Jessa, angel teammate that she is, returns the fire for me.

  Not knowing what’s going to come out of my mouth until it does, and even then I realize it’s probably a bad idea, it’s the kind of thing that either has no result at all or gets you put on the kind of list you really don’t want to find yourself on, but it’s just hit me, all my doubts about B’s story coalescing into this question I have to ask 08 while I have the opportunity, even as I immediately regret it, syllable by syllable, real time.

  “Do you know a girl named Elena?”

  Behind me, Jessa gasps. “Dude, what—”

  At first 08 doesn’t react. He looks at me blandly, much as 28 did last night, but then his forehead creases in something I wouldn’t hesitate to describe as confusion, if this were a real person in real life and not a glorified fanservice artificial intelligence based on the cached personality of a corporate-war superweapon, programmed into a hyperpopular massively multiplayer game.

  At first he doesn’t react. And then he does.

  “Elena?” he says, and shakes his head. “Sorry, can’t help you.”

  He says something else after that, but whatever it is, it’s annihilated, instantly, in the screaming liquid rainbow fire of a suborbital drop.

  I don’t even see it coming until I’m lying twelve feet to the left of where I was, at the edge of a smoking crater that’s aligned with the former dead center of 08’s beacon projection. I sit up amid a general flickering that I soon realize is a mass despawning of player corpses. Where the hell is Jessa?

  “She’s okay!” someone from the audience shouts. It takes a second to realize she’s talking about me. “Raids, man, that was a thing of beauty.”

  “Aw yeah,” Jessa says from somewhere. “Get it, Nyx! Do me proud!”

  Later I’ll replay the footage and realize that Jessa bodily shoved me out of the way just as the drop obliterated the twenty-foot radius of city street I was standing in. No: she put on some kind of power glove and punched me out of the way, fist to sternum, sending me rocketing backward ass-first into a bus-stop sign. Which explains the hit to my health bar, but at least I’m alive. Which is more than I can say for Jessa, who’s way back wherever we last saved. Her corpse, along with 08’s and easily three hundred others, has already vanished.

  “Oh wait,” Jessa says, watching my stream from her respawn point wherever. “Oops. I guess 08 ate that drop with the rest of us. Shit.” A pause. “Wait. Who the hell is that?”

  I’ll pick all this up later also, because I’m really not paying much attention to her now. Because I’ve already seen what Jessa is looking at, and it’s engaging the absolute entirety of my focus.

  I’m looking at what came down in that suborbital drop.

  It’s 22.

  He’s not off doing behind-closed-doors stuff after all. He’s standing there in the smoking pit of the drop crater along with whatever player has use of him. Someone high level, whoever it is, come to crash the party and rack up player kills in a high-density area. Predictable, as tactics go. Sort of a cheap shot. The suborbital drop was a nice touch, though. Effective. He’s just standing there with 22, blathering away to his unseen audience, one hand resting lazily on a holstered beam weapon like he’s waiting for someone to issue him a challenge but not expecting it to be much of one. His health bar is almost as dark red as 22’s.

  “The fuck is this asshole,” Jessa is hissing. “Lay a blast radius down on a crowd like that on purpose. Talk about a dick move.”

  I don’t care about that, or literally anything else about this new-arrival player. He wrecked my shot at getting decent footage of 08—who was answering my questions—and now he’s killed my teammate and jacked up my shield and generally pissed me off. My interest in him begins and ends with the idea that if I follow him around long enough for him to die, I might be able to loot his corpse.

  I do, however, give somewhat more of a shit about 22.

  There’s nobody else here. I mean, there’s a few, but new guy over there is picking them off one by one with flawless headshots without visibly taking aim. It’s only because I’ve been slung way the hell over to the side of the action that he hasn’t seen me yet, shot me in the face, and added me to his score.

  I can’t get casual footage of 22, not in the sense of 28 reading comics or 08 with his skateboard, because 22 is bonded to this suborbital-dropping jackass and has no choice but to behave completely neutrally for the duration. He’s just standing there like a robot, awaiting instructions.

  If I go over there, I’m going to get spread across this street in an even layer. You don’t make the kind of entrance new guy just made if you’re planning to throw your operative buddy a tea party like whoever it was did with 38. He’s going to have 22 murder anything that moves.

  “Clean this up for me,” new guy says, and 22 blurs into action like he’s been plugged in.

  In real life, therefore in the game, the SecOps operatives are blisteringly proficient not only with guns, but with hand-to-hand combat and bladed weapons as well. Their standard loadout involves a basic pistol and a vaguely katana-like sword. Here, now, 22 isn’t bothering with either, just kind of plowing into fleeing knots of player characters and mowing them down empty-handed. Whatever he’s actually doing to them is too fast for me to make out.

  It might save me time, honestly. Dying and respawning is a much faster way back to my save point than walking. But I really don’t want to give dipshit new guy here the satisfaction.

  I flatten myself against the back of the bus-stop bench, wishing I still had my cloak. What footage I can manage of 22 is less than great. It’s distant, it’s obscured by smoke from the crater, and all he’s doing is massacring player characters while his douchecanoe temp handler hangs back, narrating for the benefit of his audience and looting the occasional promising-looking corpse.

  “Nyx,” Jessa is whispering. “Get out of there.”

  There are two reasons why I don’t answer. One is that 22 is going to hear any tiny sound I make and laser in on me and then I’m done.

  The other is that I have a better idea.

  Well. A different idea anyway.

  I freeze and wait for 22 and new guy to work their way up the street. I don’t so much as blink until they’ve nearly vanished down that straightaway, only 22’s beacon showing where they’ve gone.

  When it’s so far off that it looks like a firefly among the long late-afternoon shadows, I peel myself off the bench and follow.

  nyx. NYX. look i get what you’re doing but this is suicide. just come back here and we’ll go try to find somebody else with the map, we’ve got like an hour and change left before curfew

  I have to be careful replying to this. Messaging is silent—I think and my implant translates into text—but it’s something that’s not concentrating utterly on not being detected, and I need what’s left of my wits sharpened to a point here if I’m going to pull this off.

  an hour and change to do what? I reply, ignoring that first part. 08’s despawned. 22’s right here. so unless y
ou have some kind of crystal ball that can tell us where exactly 06 or anybody else is, this is our best bet

  nyx, think. i get it. i promise i do. but you have to think. you die here and that guy is going to loot all your shit and then we get to spend the next week replacing it instead of doing our fucking job. anyway, footage of you letting 22 dismember your sad ass probably isn’t what she’s paying us to get

  but footage of the living ones is. and last i checked 22 is still alive. besides, joke’s on this asshole, i have no shit to loot Up ahead, new guy checks his six, and I duck in behind a dumpster to wait it out. I reply to Jessa from my hiding spot. sooner or later somebody’s going to come kill the player 22’s attached to, and he’s going to go wandering, and i’m going to follow him. there’s nobody else left alive here so that puts me in the exact same position as last night with 28, except this time i’m fucking streaming. ok?

  Unless whoever gets the top spot next picks 22 as his ally too. Unless this guy manages to hold on to him until my curfew drops me from the game. Unless whoever comes to kill him decides to take me out for fun and profit first. And so on.

  For a long time Jessa doesn’t answer. Then she does, whispering directly over the channel. “Be careful, Nyx.”

  born careful, I reply.

  I step out from behind my dumpster—and right into 22.

  A startled exhalation rips out of me. At the last second I catch it and form it into a word. “Hi.”

  22 just looks at me, head tilted fractionally like he’s trying to read something written in microscopic font on my face. I get the fleeting impression people don’t often try to strike up conversations with him in situations like this. “Hello.”

  Jessa is yelling something at me. Another two dozen people are yelling their own somethings at me. I mute them, and the whole world goes silent. 22 doesn’t say anything more. He just stands there and breathes. Watching me like I’m some vaguely interesting bug.