Firebreak

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  Thus ensues some supportive commentary from part of the audience—drowned out by wildly predictable commentary from the rest of it. Jessa starts scolding them. “Gonna need you to keep that shit clean, guys. Nyx isn’t into it. Our house, our rules.”

  I don’t hear what witty rejoinder they come up with because I’ve already muted their stereotypical asses. I stroll out of the elevator blasting.

  The top floor of company HQ is exactly the mess we expect. Pretty much everyone I see is level-capped, but most are in full six-person squads. It’s explosions and shoot-outs and corpse looting and general mayhem as far as the eye can see. Jessa dials her field projector to electromagnetic pulse, and we storm in, disabling power armor and wide-beam wrist cannons and autotargeting systems in a traveling ten-foot radius.

  Behind it, we lay down as much fire as my two blasters and Jessa’s two plasma guns can muster. We wipe out one team, then another, and are making a decentish dent on a third when someone overhand pitches a nullity charge over the top edge of our field. It lands at our feet, and instantly our EMP shield wisps away like smoke.

  “Fuck,” Jessa breathes, and slams her back up against mine as we fire in four directions, a gun in each fist, spinning a slow circle as we try to work our way toward the stairs to the roof.

  Some kills, some points. Not enough. More teams are coming up from the bank of elevators, and while of course they’re not all targeting us, enough of them are that this situation is swiftly deteriorating.

  We have to get to the roof. That’s where the main fight is, but also the game counts it as an outdoor area, which means we have a way out with the SecOps NPC we hope to leave with: a portal evac/suborbital drop combo that Jessa bought on the market this morning for the occasion.

  First we have to dig ourselves out of this. Our smart armor is steadily snowing off of us in oil-slick-colored nanoparticulate, faster than we can reallocate effectively. I try to recharge mine, but it’s too slow, and I’m eating concentrated fire from all directions.

  I switch my blasters to auto and strafe the full one-eighty, left to right. It buys a couple seconds. I stow one blaster to free up the hand. I jab myself, then Jessa, with heal syringes, then open my inventory to pull out more resonance grenades.

  No dice. All that’s left in there is a few heals, some ammo, and something I was saving for the fight on the roof, but we’re not going to get there if we don’t live through this first, so.

  I pull the tab out of the hallucinogen grenade and chuck it into the crowd. “Mask up,” I tell Jessa, and we both make swiping motions in front of our faces, chin to eyes, nudging some of the smart armor material into its new assigned position.

  Not a second too soon. The hallucinogen grenade bounces off somebody’s helmet, drops to the floor, and vanishes in the crowd, invisibly vomiting its bioweapon load.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see someone notice it, dive for it—presumably to throw it back in my direction or out the window—and get trampled underfoot. The airborne hallucinogen is laced with propellant nanoparticles and engineered to soak into mucus membranes like water into a sponge. The real-life one is, anyway, so the in-game one, lacking these things in the virtual, makes do with a real-time approximation. It’s not long before they’re all freighted to the eyeballs with Stellaxis Innovations’ finest distillation of bewildered-to-shit murderousness and slaughtering each other where they stand.

  Nifty bit of programming, really, a BestLife hallucinogen grenade. Picture this. Your character is minding its own business, racking up points, looting a corpse, whatever. Suddenly you can’t do a goddamn thing with it. You can’t walk. You can’t get things out of inventory. You can’t loot your corpse. Your character’s been hijacked, and it’s going to stay that way until the effect wears off. For the duration it’s going to do one thing and one thing only, and that’s killing, or trying to kill, anything in your visual field. Enemy, teammate, best friend, grenade doesn’t care. Your best shot is logging off and coming back in when the zone you left is likely to be empty, because the game remembers the grenade effect was still in play, and you’re going to do your time sooner or later.

  Here on the seventy-sixth floor, player characters are dropping like flies. Up and down the hall they fall in piles, enemy and teammate alike. Chaos spreads down the halls and out of sight around corners. The nano-propelled hallucinogen reaches into the unloading elevators and grabs another batch of guys by the lungs, then travels down in the elevator airspace to whatever floor they’re headed to next.

  We inch our way along the corridors, mincing over corpses, staying out of sight, meeting token resistance from the few players who had the good sense to mask up when they saw what was going down. We reach the rooftop stairwell and yank open the door.

  At first I assume the gas will dissipate in the open air, but this is an old-school bioweapon, one they’ve discontinued from the game because it was too overpowered. It only exists anymore on the market, and rarely.

  The replacement version goes inert after sixty seconds. The one I’ve deployed runs for five full minutes before it dies.

  The hallucinogen gas ascends before us. We follow it up and step out onto the roof into a massacre. There must be five hundred people up here, all busily obliterating one another as the gas takes hold. We stand in the doorway and watch as the little red hostile-player blips on our minimaps wink out in a rolling wave, like town lights at power curfew. We throw up our shields and shoot the stragglers fast, before they figure out we’re not infected. Then we get to looting, one eye on the door in case somebody else makes it up here alive. Just grabbing stuff at random, no time to pick and choose in the seconds before these corpses despawn.

  Our points go up and up—and then keep going up, even after everyone on the roof is dead and warped back to their respective save points.

  “The elevators,” Jessa whispers. “The gas is traveling in the elevators. Holy crap, you guys, this stuff is cleaning this place up.”

  Our points keep climbing. We hit the top hundred on the leaderboard. Then the top fifty. Then the top ten. While we stand here staring at the numbers. It’s thoroughly ridiculous. How the hell many people were in this building?

  When we’re in fourth place (Jessa) and third place (me), the door to the roof slams open. Out comes a five-person team in full riot gear, of all things, with filter masks under their visors. The one taking point out the door has a rocket launcher, and she’s aiming it between my eyes.

  “Fucking get down,” I shout, and drag Jessa with me by a handful of smart armor, which helpfully generates enough slack for me to get hold.

  We drop, throwing up a shield and firing through it, and the rocket sails over us and plows into some kind of transmitter thing near one edge of the roof. I’m already skimming my inventory to see if anything we’ve looted off these guys might save us now, grabbing and hurling any kind of grenade I can find.

  Beside me, Jessa is doing the same. We throw particle grenades and stun grenades and plasma grenades, double-fisting them out of inventory and hurling them at the doorway like a couple of panicky noobs, and this brilliant tactical maneuver by some miracle concludes with the other team shouting and scrambling and firing over their shoulders at us as they retreat down the stairs, where of course our grenades follow. There’s some audible bouncing and rolling, and then quite a series of explosions, and then four colors of smoke and two colors of fire erupt from the open doorway, along with a sound like air leaking out of a tire and another sound like popcorn popping.

  CONGRATULATIONS, the game says when the dust has settled, throwing up the NPC selection screen and raining virtual confetti around us both. YOU’RE #1! SELECT AN ALLY.

  Except it’s not showing it to me. I’m seeing it in my thumbnail of Jessa’s feed. I guess her grenades racked up enough damage to scoot her past me on the board.

  Jessa stares at that for a second. They’re muted now, but I know from past experience that the audience is shouting suggestions at her. My
guess is she’ll take 05 again like she did a couple weeks ago, as some kind of remembrance. It’s 05 who got us into this, who got B disappeared. Jessa has also taken to wearing her old 05 t-shirt a lot more than she used to. I guess if I were to put a name to what she’s doing, I’d call it an act of resistance.

  But she doesn’t. She picks 22.

  She picks 22, and then she stops the stream, reaches into her inventory for the escape route stuff—the portal evac and suborbital drop summons—and pushes them into my hands just as he pops into existence between us and executes the world’s crispest salute in Jessa’s direction. “Awaiting orders.”

  “Go with her,” Jessa instructs him. Then she gives me a little shove, but she’s smiling when she does it. “Fuck off out of here. Go get your weird-ass fangirl friendcrush closure or whatever. I’ll hold this place while the evac spins up. 22, eyes on that door until she’s ready.”

  “Acknowledged,” 22 says, drawing his sword.

  Deploying the portal evac is easy. It’s just a matter of waiting the twenty seconds it takes to ready itself. It’s the game’s way of making it slightly less overpowered an item than it is already. While its progress bar ticks down to zero, I clear both blasters and help guard the door. There’s something racketing around down there, on the lower levels, working its way up toward the roof. A whole lot of something.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I tell Jessa.

  “Oh, and here I was thinking I did,” she replies dryly. “If you waste that portal, I’m going to kick your ass, so get moving. Oh—almost forgot.” She rummages in her inventory and comes out with a bottle. She flip-tosses it, catches it, holds it out with a wink. “Drinking buddies, right? Hey. Pour one out for me.” The noise below gets louder. “All right, enough of that. Get gone.”

  The portal is ready, a slowly spinning silver ring filmed with a slight sheen, a bubble not yet blown from its wand. “That’s your cue, soldier,” Jessa tells 22, and he sheathes his sword and returns to my side.

  About to step through the portal, I yell over a shoulder, “What’re you going to do?”

  “Keep my lead as long as I can hold it, obviously, and cross my fingers I make good use of it.” Then she turns her side of the stream back on. “Check this out, you guys, I have always wanted to try this.”

  Next thing I know she’s inside a fucking Callisto Deadshot, the three-part summon for which she must have looted off these corpses, then assembled in inventory. The Deadshot’s gun-arms activate with a chunk-chunk noise I mostly feel in the pit of my stomach and start whirring up. She whacks her heels together to activate the thrusters and white fire ignites out of the soles of the mech’s feet, levitating her half a foot off the roof. She belts out some kind of movie supervillain laugh and launches herself down the stairwell.

  Leaving me on the roof with 22.

  I look at the doorway. Then I look at him.

  “I have been tasked to stay with you,” he says.

  “Yeah.” Even on-duty 22, the real one, was more human than this. “All right. Come on.”

  The portal vanishes behind us as we step through.

  We emerge in a blank gray hallway, decorated only with glowing spots on the floor at regular intervals. The spot I select expands when it realizes it has two pairs of boots in it, and I punch in the coordinates, and the floor drops out from under us.

  We land at the exact coords I’ve selected, which is nowhere in particular. I didn’t exactly have time to plan this out, but I’d be lying if I said I haven’t put at least a little subconscious consideration into it generally. The suborbital drop sets us down just on the edge of the game map, some little stretch of forest full of absolutely nobody and nothing but silence and trees.

  22 starts scanning the middle distance, alert for trouble.

  “Stand down,” I tell him. “Um, at ease. There’s nothing here.”

  In-game 22’s idea of at ease is maybe different on a microscopic level from whatever he was doing a second ago, but I can’t detect any change at all. You brought me noodles, I think at him. You joked about being vaporized. You invented a war crime to cover for me. You’d hate this. All of it. Everything they’ve done to you that you don’t even know about. That we do. That I am doing now. “What is the objective?” he asks. “In this place. Were the coordinates erroneous? I can call in transport.”

  “No, that won’t be…” I open Jessa’s bottle and sit down on a rock. “Sit with me. I mean, if you want to.” The label says it’s rum, but this is a virtual reality. It’s weighted like liquid, it sloshes around. It’ll debuff my acuity and dexterity and raise my constitution, briefly, before dropping it to lower than before. Nevertheless it’s easy to see that Nycorix and 22: Drinking Buddies is going to be a far sad cry from whatever ends up happening here.

  I pass the bottle up to 22, who still hasn’t sat down. When he just stares at it, I wave it around a little, lamely. “Here.”

  22 takes the bottle without expression, raises it to his mouth, puts his head back, swallows. Then he hands it to me.

  Erroneous, I think. This is what I spent years chasing the boards to get at? This 22 is some kind of other thing, some uncanny-valley bodysnatcher bad translation of the person I followed through a war zone to the basement of Stellaxis HQ. It hurts to look at him. He’s like a taxidermy replica of himself. Like a pirated copy. I think of where I am, what this would have meant to me even a few weeks ago, and it just makes me sad.

  I should be continuing the conversation from the elevator. Getting those answers. Doing something, anything, to prove to him I’m on his side. But this isn’t 22, and this 22 wasn’t there. It’d be like shouting down a well, mistaking echo for reply. Message in a bottle, I think.

  I toss back a gulp of my own, then pour one out for Jessa on the mossy ground. 22 observes this in quizzical silence. “My friend,” I explain. “On the roof. She sent us here.”

  “To what purpose, I wonder.”

  I shrug. “Whatever purpose we want.”

  This seems to strike him as inadequate. He hmms a little. They got that part right, at least, as well as the exactitude and economy of his movements as he parks himself on the rock beside me.

  He’s close. So close. There’s a faint chemical smell to him, like he’s dragged it the whole way out here to this half-assed scrap of forest from the antiseptic white halls of whatever subbasement of the Stellaxis building they stash him in.

  An idea strikes me.

  I pour out another. It splashes to the moss between our boots.

  “For Elena,” I say clearly.

  As shots fired go, this one smashes into 22’s glacial demeanor like a bird into a window. There’s a long few seconds of silence. You can almost see the virtual gears turning in his virtual head: make conversation, do as ordered, fulfill directive.

  “Is that your friend?” he says at last. “Who sent us here?”

  This sets me back. “No, it’s—it’s 05. Elena?”

  Nothing. Just the blank wall of his regard. What has happened between my footage of 08 and this?

  Suddenly I feel very, very tired.

  “To the dead, then,” I say.

  He nods a little. This at least he understands. “To the dead.”

  The bottle shakes a little as I pour. “To 17.” Another. “To 38.” Another. “To—”

  22 vanishes. Doesn’t atomize to pixels, doesn’t shimmer back out of existence like a mirage. No fanfare, no preamble, no warning from the game when somebody else nabs that top spot and claims him out from under me. Just straight-up disappears, like a projection that’s been switched off. Leaving me to stare at the impression in the moss the game has so carefully rendered, indicating where his boots had just been.

  sorry, Jessa messages. bit off a little more than i could chew there. it go ok?

  fine, I reply because it’s easier than honesty. thanks again

  well come on back—we got loot to divvy

  on my way

  First, though
, I sit there a while longer with my bottle, pouring shots out into 22’s boot prints—to 28, to 33, to 42, to 02, to my parents and Jessa’s and Suresh’s and Keisha’s and Allie’s and Tegan and Talya’s and everyone’s—until the bottle is empty. Then I smash it on the rock and walk away.

  0013

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER POWER CURFEW, I HEAD up to the roof alone. These days the weather is turning, winter’s slow fade into spring. Still cold, but not abrasively so. Scents are clearer, less muffled. I can smell thawed mud and garbage and rain and the faintest possible perfume, like distant waking trees blossoming.

  It’s just about warm enough that I’m not taking refuge in the greenhouses. I’m standing at the edge of the roof, leaning against the parapet, staring out toward the distant skyscrapers of the city.

  Cycling through my head on infinite loop is in-game 22: To what purpose, I wonder.

  All I can think is: they got to him. Even though there’s no him there to get to. 08’s response before was some kind of glitch, something overlooked when they fine-tuned the dialogue parameters on the SecOps analogues. Something they weren’t supposed to know, or show they knew, the way 06 and 22 referred to each other in front of us civilians by their numbers, not their names. 08 should in no way have responded to Elena. They must have ironed out the glitch the way they ironed out the glitch of B digging too deep into their business.

  I’m the glitch that’s left.

  I’m under surveillance, and I don’t know it. They’ve got me on a list. They’re watching my every move. They have to be. The remaining untouched eye of the storm of this is me. Me and Jessa. And whoever else gets in the—

  The light hits before the sound. Against the dark it’s scouring. An air strike? Something out over the city buildings, something that rises in a swift tight parabola, whistling. A ground strike. Surface-to-air.

  Then it explodes into scatterings of white light, and my blood runs ice. There’s only one thing it can be.

  I never chanced upon one live before. Typically I see them in newsfeeds, repeated over and over from different angles with various commentary.