Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  At once we both realize what we’re saying. I’m watching it dawn on Jessa’s face. We can’t put that kind of target on the others. It’s bad enough I put one on Jessa. We have to go this alone.

  Which reminds me.

  “You can back out,” I tell Jessa. “You didn’t sign up for this. I can, I don’t know, make a new account that’s not attached to—”

  I trail off when I see her face. She’s grinning.

  “As much as I’d love to see you attempt that,” she says, “I’ve witnessed your flailings at human interaction, and I can’t in good conscience wish that experience on your audience.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “See?” she says brightly. Then her expression sobers. “Seriously, though, I’m all in. We’re a team. Live and die as one and all that junk. Besides, no way am I letting you walk off with all that sweet, sweet sponsorship, so back up.” She reaches in, gives my shoulder a quick squeeze, lets go.

  I nod. It’s all I can think at the moment to do. Gratitude has me in a choke hold, and the words won’t come out.

  Jessa seems to get it all the same. “So no more of that shit, understand? I don’t know what you and B have dug up here, but it’s… it’s something. What kind of asshole would I be if I went around wearing this stuff—” another flap of the t-shirt—“and then sat around going well it sucks, but it’s not my problem when these for-real people are in for-real trouble? If they’re actual people who were actually kidnapped and nobody’s helping because nobody knows the truth? I mean, it’s bad enough I— Oh god.”

  Jessa freezes. I raise an eyebrow. Though I already know where this is headed.

  “I mean. Not everyone’s intentions have always been as wholesome as yours. If it turns out these were real people this whole time, that’s—” Jessa stops short, shudders a little, tries again. “Virtual or no. That’s skeevy as shit.” She goes still, a look on her face like she’s remembering something she’d rather forget. “No, really. That’s disgusting. If they really…” She trails off for a moment, then shakes her head to clear it of whatever memory has lodged there. “Yeah, no. We have to tell people the truth. We have to shut this down.”

  “Shut it down. Stellaxis. Me and you. A second ago we were just trying to make it harder for them to shut us down.”

  “Well, something.”

  “And end up like B? Maybe they get us on a terrorism charge and lock out our lenses. Maybe they gas us and we wake up in an interrogation cell. Maybe they manage to precision strike us. Maybe they blow a giant hole in the side of this hotel and kill a few hundred people who were just minding their own goddamn business. We have to do this smart. Play the long game.”

  “Which is what exactly? Go get our faces kicked in at a protest? Boycott Stellaxis and Greenleaf and then die of thirst and starvation, in that order, when we remember the part where they own absolutely everything? And what’s that about anyway? No power curfew at HQ, you said. As much free water as you can drink. Why there and not here? Why am I looking at spending two months’ pay at a rehydration clinic if my account runs out of water when I can just roll some barrels over to the company drinking fountain and fill those motherfuckers up? The operatives aren’t the only thing they have to answer for. Your video is proof of that, too.”

  “I know. But we’re not going to do anybody any good if we’re dead. If we do this, we’re going to have one chance to do it right, because as soon as we make our move, we’ll have their attention, and that’s only gonna end one way.”

  “So you want to just sit on this. This new intel.”

  “Until we know how best to use it effectively,” I say. “Yes.”

  Jessa resumes pacing for a minute or so, messing with her hair. “I don’t like it,” she says at last.

  “Neither do I,” I say. 22 across the table, trying to tell me something I didn’t know how to hear. “Not even a little.”

  Everything I’m trying my feeble best to suppress, Jessa reads it in my face. “No,” she says. “I don’t imagine you do.”

  There’s a little moment of silence. We’re a couple of dipshits with fifteen seconds of internet fame. We can’t change the world. We can’t bring free water and jobs and power and food to old town. We sure as fuck can’t stop a war. We can’t even rescue the three people who happened to survive the ongoing train wreck of the other forty-five.

  We have no proof. We have no allies. We’re conspiracy theorists at best.

  And yet. If we’re wrong, we have nothing to lose.

  But if we’re right?

  Jessa shakes out of it first.

  “All right. Now that that’s all cleared up. Here’s the actual problem. Why is this going to work this time? It never worked before. We got our asses handed to us. We never made it up the boards.”

  “We’ve also never had—” I pop my lenses back in and wait the three-count for them to interface, then nearly choke when I see what they’re showing me—“two hundred and fifty-six thousand subscribers before.”

  Jessa stares at me, stunned. I can see her mouth begin to shape the words two hundred and fifty-six thousand and then give up, like saying it out loud would make it disappear.

  “So,” I say, “let’s take a look at what they gave us.”

  part three hearts & minds

  0012

  NINE HUNDRED FIFTY-THREE. NINE HUNDRED FIFTY-FOUR. Nine hundred fifty-five.

  I slide the hoverbike up the long drive through those grassy lawns to Stellaxis HQ like a boat powering upriver. A gunner in a Greenleaf exosuit rushes us from near the fountain. Jessa takes him down with a clean ninety-yard headshot through the faceplate from the moving bike. Nine hundred fifty-six.

  “Oh my god, you guys,” she shouts, “I am loving this new blaster.”

  Exosuit gunner guy seems to have radioed his buddies before charging the bike, or else we’ve tripped some kind of alarm just by setting voxelated foot on the property. Out comes a swarm of breakaway nanodrones from the building, taking point for a full squad of these exosuit gunner dudes who pour out of the front door like pissed-off wasps whose nest got bopped by a stick.

  Lucky for us, we’ve been able to acquire some upgrades.

  I flip up the bike’s reflector field and check its stats: 89.4 percent remaining. That starts to drop as enemy fire pings off it, but some of it ricochets back and lands lucky hits on the exosuits. A couple of health bars diminish marginally.

  One hand on the bike controls, I pull up a string of resonance grenades from inventory. Two weeks ago, before posting that video, I’d hoard these things like treasure. They only drop from high-level mobs or sell for thousands of credits a pop on the market. Now I pull the pins on half a dozen and chuck them at oncoming enemy clusters. A few bodies drop and are trampled. Even from inside their exosuits we can hear the snapping of their bones, though that’s probably more from the resonance charges than the stampede. Those suits are no joke.

  My kill counter whirs up as the resonance killing field winds down. Nine hundred eighty-eight.

  Some blaster fire is clearing our shields, but it doesn’t bother us overmuch today. We’re kitted out to the eyeballs in ThinkFluid smart armor, which spikes and smooths around us like living oil, absorbing fire with ease. It’s what Stellaxis’s elite soldiers use, the ones who get brought in more and more to do what the operatives would be doing if they weren’t mostly busy being dead, and as armor goes, I have to say it gets the job done. We’re driving through a rain of blaster fire and sustaining barely enough damage for our health bars to visibly register. Part of that is the reflector shields doing their thing, but still.

  The glint in a high window comes at the same time as Jessa’s shout behind me. “Snipers!” she yells, and switches out the blaster pistol for a rifle of her own. As it appears from her inventory she’s already swinging it around to twelve o’clock and resting the barrel on my shoulder to take aim.

  Her first shot shatters a neighboring window. Her second tags the sniper but doesn’t
finish it off, just drops that distant health bar by a hair shy of half. She doesn’t get a chance for a third.

  The sniper’s round hits its palm-size target dead on. The bike’s field projector shorts out, and the shielding system fizzles down to nothing, ripping us wide open as the exosuits converge. The proprietary nanofiber shields stand no chance against plasma cannon fire. The bike shudders beneath us, hard, crapping a breadcrumb trail of shielding scales the whole way up the road.

  Not that we’re particularly difficult to find on our own. A solid dozen exosuits have their arm cannons locked onto our position, and the commotion is drawing players from across the lawns. One blue fireball wings the edge of our armored skirting, upsetting the dregs of the hover calibrations royally. Another slams into my shoulder, biting a chunk out of my health bar. A third passes between Jessa’s head and mine, crackling gently. It melts the side of my helmet back to its constituent particles and whites out Jessa’s whole visual field. I know this not just because of her thumbnail feed display in the corner of mine, but also from the collective groan of our momentarily light-blinded audience.

  The fourth fireball slags the road to hell just feet in front of us, giving me a split second to choose between dumping the bike in this mess of blue-fire lava or cutting our losses and facing down this exosuit army on foot.

  I try to yank the bike sideways, but all that gets us is caught on an upthrust slab of road junk and flipped into the air. More shots pepper the bike’s undercarriage. When this thing lands, it’s going to be in pieces.

  “Over my dead body am I losing this bike,” Jessa yells.

  I know what that means. I lift my hands off the now-useless controls and lace them behind my head, another layer of smart armor that might just keep my skull from smashing when I hit the ground.

  Not a second too soon. Jessa flashes the bike back to inventory with a couple millimeters of blinking red remaining on its bar, and we land tumbling, ass over teakettle, singeing our knees and boots and elbows on what’s left of the road. The smart armor soaks up as much slack as it can, which it turns out is enough. We come up shooting. Some nonplayer mobs, some player characters out of their depth. Nine hundred ninety-four, nine hundred ninety-five, nine hundred ninety-six.

  Funny how we’ve been high enough level for this place the whole time. Endless grinding will get you there easy. It’s not a matter of skill. It’s a matter of ass-in-chair clock-punching. What we’d been missing was the stuff. All the high-level equipment and heals and general inventory we were too poor to buy, too fragile to loot off high-level mobs or top-tier players.

  Now, two weeks or so after I posted that video, we’re optimized. Our armor is top-of-the-line. Our blasters and plasma guns, top-of-the-line. Our bike has been modded into oblivion. And all it took to get us off the ground was that initial wave of sponsorship. A few nice pieces of armor, a couple of gun upgrades, enough credits to buy some decent heals for once, and from there the work carried us. We quit our other jobs and put in the time here instead. We make enough credits to buy the in-game items we need, and sometimes audience sponsors will drop stuff in our inventories just so they can watch us use it and then comment on the feed: Hey, that was me. I’m not going to lie: after the fruitless, mind-numbing grind the process has been in years past, this new way is… refreshing.

  Not to mention how we can make our thousand a whole lot faster as a team than I ever did as my little side project, on my own time, alone.

  Today’s one thousandth kill is a drone that Jessa hauls out of the sky on the end of a magnetic harpoon. It smashes to the ground and fades into a tidy heap of tradeskill items, the little twenty-four-hour countdown ticker starts up in the upper right-hand corner of my view, and just like that, we’re on the boards.

  Again.

  These days this part is surprisingly easy. Getting on the boards is easy. Climbing most way up the boards, almost as easy. Hitting that top spot is harder, but we’ve done it a couple of times. Briefly. Okay, really briefly. Basically, one time Jessa got hold of 05 for about two minutes, and the three of us had this epic throwdown against a pair of six-player teams out by the Monument, and another time I lost the top spot while I was still on the NPC selection screen for the nanosecond it would have taken me to pick 22.

  So that part hasn’t been great. And we’ve definitely lost some of that initial batch of subscribers. But we’ve kept plenty too, and more trickle in day by day. Jessa says the contrast in our personalities is entertainment enough. I’m not that optimistic. I figure it’s more that it amuses them to see us fail. And that we throw ourselves into unwinnable fights, taking on unkillable enemies, calling out famous players by name on a pretty much daily basis, doing top-speed balls-to-the-wall hoverbike chase-downs of whoever’s got that number one spot. Keeping on doing that crazy shit, as Jessa would say.

  Staying visible.

  Here comes the tricky part.

  “Just—gotta get—to the—building,” Jessa grits out for the audience’s benefit as she backs her way across the molten road, using downed exosuits as stepping stones. “Real—party starts—in there.”

  By real party she means monumental clusterfuck. We came here because the company HQ interior has just been flagged as a PvP zone. These last precisely one hour and draw pretty much everyone. You want to pick yourself a fight you probably can’t win and go down in a blaze of—glory is much too strong a word for what we’re about to experience, schadenfreude-providing amusement is probably closer. Anyway, this is the kind of thing you go after.

  “Heads up,” someone says from the audience. “Just heard there’s a full team camping the lobby, taking people out as they zone in.”

  “Perfect,” I mutter. “Thanks for the warning.”

  We smash in reloads, perform a half-assed armor recharge, and slap some heal patches on.

  Jessa adds an extra patch to my shot-up shoulder. “You want to stand and bang with these people, or…?”

  “I actually want to live a little longer than if I’d just climbed up this thing and jumped,” I reply, nodding up at the vanishing point of the spire. “I say we make a mess and run like hell.”

  I pull out another string of resonance grenades and raise my eyebrows at Jessa. She nods and calls up a projection field.

  We zone into the building just as a blue fireball from a respawned exosuit clips the upper corner of the doorway, showering us with droplets of flash-melted black glass.

  Straight into the shit as expected. Someone’s taking potshots at my head even before I’ve fully faded into the building. They hit Jessa’s projection field like snowballs against superheated metal, and I start slinging grenades.

  Thanks to my little adventure with 06 and 22, I know the layout of this lobby well enough. I space out my throws accordingly and make sure to include one toward the wide desk that somebody is almost definitely hiding behind, waiting to ambush players going for the elevators.

  We don’t wait to loot, or exchange fire, or see if our points spike. We reallocate smart armor to thicken over head and neck and center mass, and we tear ass for the elevators while the field spits and crackles around us like hot oil on a pan and our points accrue as the grenades go to work. If the leaderboard is a giant ladder, we’re up maybe the bottom few rungs. But we’re also not dead, so we’re doing better than usual.

  There’s more to the ground floor than the lobby, of course, but we’re not looking to camp out here. That’s boring. According to the touchscreen panel in this elevator, there are seventy-six floors above us and four sublevels below. Plenty of room to explore.

  Jessa reaches to press her thumb on the 76, but I’m faster, and I take us in the opposite direction, down one floor to sublevel A.

  Call it nostalgia, I guess, or unfinished business, or obnoxiously unbridled fascination. Believe me, I wish I was over it. All of it. And yet here we are, our elevator descending toward the virtual approximation of the floor where 06 sat with those people in Medical while 22 pestered the ser
ving bots into reheating my stir-fry and hinted dark things at me cryptically. I wonder what it looks like in-game. Probably nothing like it does in real life. The lobby is close enough to the reality—it’s in the documentary, people expect it to look a certain way—but I’m guessing the rest of the floors tend more toward generic corporate in design.

  Meanwhile, Jessa furrows her brow at me so hard she’s liable to hurt herself.

  “High-level players go up,” she says. “There’s going to be one hell of a fight on the roof, and forty-one minutes left before this zone reverts. What are you doing?”

  What I’m doing is… I don’t know. At least not intellectually. Which is the part I hate. I can’t rationalize why I hit that button, and my inability to make logical sense of my own motivations makes my brain itch.

  “I thought—” I say, and then realize I have no idea how to finish that sentence accurately. I reach up and hit the top-floor button instead.

  We ascend in silence, double-checking our armor and inventory. Or I do. Jessa is busy presenting.

  “Gonna be a fun one, guys. I have a good feeling about this. Oh shit! Nyx! We gotta do rock-paper-scissors. Guys, in case you missed when I explained this before, the game tracks individual kills as well as team kills, in case a team breaks up or whatever after bringing a SecOps dude on board, just to be sure that the person who earned said dude gets the keepsies. So instead of being assholes and fighting it out, Nyx and I decided the fairest way to choose, in the event that our next kill puts one of us in first place on the boards, you know, we do rock-paper-scissors, and whoever loses stands down on that last kill so the winner can grab it.”

  “The probability of which happening is, like, vanishingly small,” I add.

  “It’s good to be prepared,” Jessa says. “Best of three.”

  So we rock-paper-scissors the whole way up to 76. The tie breaks to my paper just as the elevator stops. “Maybe today we stream Nycorix and 22: Drinking Buddies,” Jessa says, drilling an elbow into my smart armor. “I’d watch that.”