by Rachel Ford
Jack blinked. “You mean…you people literally programmed food to taste like cardboard?”
The dwarf shrugged. “You skipped the salt, dude. What do you expect?”
“Unsalted food does not taste like cardboard.”
Migli shrugged again. “Whatever. It’s not my call to make anyway. Anything else before I pop back into the real world?”
Jack scowled. “Yes, actually. Speaking of the real world, where are we at with getting me back into it?”
“Ohhh…” He sounded suddenly apprehensive, like this was a topic Richard really didn’t want to handle. “You know, let me grab someone really quick for you on that.”
A few moments later, Nate the programmer’s voice echoed through the simulation. “Nate here. What can I do for you, Jack-o?”
He frowned at the nickname but repeated his query.
Nate answered with a sound like he was sucking on his teeth. “Well, I know you want some kind of timeframe or something, but you know, we’re not there yet.”
“Jiminy,” he swore, and scowled deeper at the minced oath that escaped his lips. “How long have I been in here? How can you not have some kind of timeframe? It’s one patch, right? How hard can it be to roll back a single patch?”
“Harder than you might think, dude. You know how many millions of lines of code there are in a codebase like this? Sure, it’s one patch, but that patch interacts with about twelve hundred modules. And each of those modules interact with other modules. It’s practically exponential growth of impact.”
“So when am I getting out of here?” he repeated. “You know, I already missed a client. I can’t stay plugged into a machine. I have a life. I have a job, and responsibilities. I have other games to play.”
“Dude, we are working as fast as we can, okay?”
It wasn’t okay, and Jack told him so in no uncertain terms. He went on for a good thirty seconds before Nate cut him off.
“Believe me, dude, I get it. You want out. Trust me, we want you out too. Some of us have been here all night.”
“Oh, how rough that must be. I can’t imagine.”
“Yeah, well, you’re playing a game. We’re working.”
“I’m stuck in a game.”
Nate sighed, a long, exasperated sigh. “Right. Look, as soon as I have a timeframe for you, I’ll tell you, okay? But in the meantime, I’m back to work.” Jack started to protest, but he interrupted, “Unless you want to stay here? Because the longer I’m not working, the longer you stay here.”
He scowled but didn’t say anything more.
“Right. That’s what I thought.” Then the sound of a keyboard button being emphatically pressed sounded, and a long sigh filled the air. “Jack? More like jackoff.”
Migli laughed nervously. “Uh, Nate? Your mic’s still on.”
A moment of silence followed. Jack stared daggers at the sky. He wasn’t sure why the sky in particular, but he imagined the voices coming from on high, like some kind of deities. In Nate’s case, a douche deity.
Then Nate said, “Uh. Oops.” And nothing else. Not an apology. Not an attempt to save face. Just silence.
“Well,” Migli said, “looks like he’s back at work, working hard to get you out of there, Jack. I’ll be getting back to my own stuff too. Call me if you need anything.”
“Wait. How come he called me a jackoff?” He’d been about to protest that the profanity filter only worked in one direction, when the word came out as intended. “Son-of-a-biscuit. Are you telling me that the one word you monkey’s bottoms allow is jackoff?”
“That’s a bug, actually. Must have slipped through somehow. I already flagged it. Don’t worry, they’ll get it sorted a-s-a-p.”
“Not while I’m in the dratted machine, you won’t.”
But Richard was already gone, and Migli fell to humming about gold.
Chapter Nine
Jack ate his cardboard roast, and his cardboard carrots, gagging with every mouthful. He almost quit once or twice. But he’d reached the point where hunger was worse than cardboard. So he choked it down.
They ran into a few more swarms of Susmala. Or would they be herds? Packs? But having cut his teeth on the first ones, Jack worked his way through the newcomers without much trouble. Migli, he noticed, consistently stayed out of the fray. He didn’t know how, exactly. The dwarf just seemed to…vanish the instant danger presented itself.
They were still en route when night fell. “We had better make camp,” Migli said.
“Camp? But those things will find us.”
The dwarf shook his head. “We can sleep in the trees. The Susmala can’t climb. There, that looks like a good place.” He pointed to a wide tree with a sprawling spread of limbs – the kind of thing that would be hard to fall out of.
“Alright,” Jack nodded. “I guess so.”
Migli went first. He was surprisingly nimble for someone who had a three-foot shoulder span and must have weighed four hundred pounds easily. Jack followed, and they each found a comfortable spot nestled in the mass of branches.
He considered eating his rabbit stew, but the thought of more cardboard turned his stomach. So he went to sleep hungry.
He slept well and woke feeling refreshed. He knew he was refreshed, because a little voice in his head told him precisely that:
You wake feeling refreshed.
He was hungry, though, so he broke down and ate the stew. It was a miserable way to start the morning. Chewing through cardboard had been bad enough. Somehow, slurping it down in liquid form proved worse.
Migli didn’t need any. He had packed some kind of jerky and munched away happily on that.
“Any chance you could share that with your fellow adventurer?” Jack wondered.
“The food of dwarves is not to the liking of men,” Migli said.
“Try me.”
But Migli did not. He chewed his jerky and washed it down with ale and offered Jack nada.
Then, they descended, checking to make sure no monsters lurked in the shadow of the tree, and scampered out onto the sunlit road. “We were most fortunate that no night terrors found us,” the dwarf confided.
“No…what now?”
“Night terrors: hideous winged beasts who haunt the depths of the forest.”
Jack groaned. He wanted to go home. He didn’t want to deal with a panoply of cheesy monsters. He wanted real food, and to sink into his real bed, and to forget all about Migli and pig monsters and anything else.
The dwarf didn’t notice. “They can devour the flesh of a man in minutes and chew him down to bone.”
He went on for a ways, listing the horrors of these monsters, but Jack let his attention wander. He’d deal with night terrors when they came. He didn’t need the spooky lead up. He focused on the forest around them instead. It seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction. He wondered how much further they had.
He was still looking around when he careened into Migli. It was like running headlong into a brick wall. The dwarf stood unmoved. Jack sprawled backward and landed on his duff. His meter dropped several points. “Ouch. What the hell, Migli?”
“Would you care to learn?” he said, and his tone indicated that he was repeating himself.
Jack blinked. “Learn what?”
“The spell.”
“What spell?”
“The fire spell. Fire is the only way to fight a night terror.”
“Oh. Well, with all the foreshadowing you’ve been doing, I guess I’d better learn it.”
“Very well. Then attend my words, young traveler.”
Jack felt a rush of understanding. The sun moved a little higher in the sky, and the hour hand on his internal timepiece advanced two notches.
“Well done, Sir Jack. You are a quick learner,” Migli said.
Jack laughed. “If only school had been that easy. I might have enjoyed something other than math class.”
“Why don’t you practice your newfound skills?”
Jack grinned. He could fe
el the magical power ebbing through him like adrenaline. His fingers danced and crackled. All he had to do was channel a thought to them, and that thought would become flame. Hell yeah, he was going to do that!
So he did. He blasted the nearest stump, and it went up like a torch. He burned a whole tree down next. He grinned ear to ear.
It was the sort of thing that reminded him of why he loved videogames. In real life, if he torched a tree in the middle of a forest, he’d start a forest fire, and probably burn to death. Even if he survived, it would only be to spend the next few decades in prison.
But in a videogame? Well, in a videogame, he could go around burning everything in sight.
Which is precisely what he did, for the next quarter hour or so. He found that his magicka replenished after a while of being unused, the way his health did when he ate or slept. He blasted through everything he could, and then he waited for his magicka to seep back, and did it all over again.
Migli tolerated his shenanigans for a while, but then he started to drop hints like, “Better save your magicka, my young friend. Who knows when you’ll need it,” and, “I hope we’re alone in these woods. You’ll draw every creature in a two-mile radius,” and, “careful now with that aim.”
That gave Jack an idea. “Hey Migli?”
“Yes, sir knight?”
“How do you think cooked dwarf tastes?” He accompanied the question with a blast of fire. It rolled off the dwarf, like he mostly expected it would. Migli was an essential character, which meant he was unkillable.
And he was a beta tester. So, shouldn’t he test a thing like that? He surely wouldn’t be the only player to try blasting the dwarf.
“Careful now with that aim.”
Jack sighed. “You’re no fun.”
“If we hurry, we might make the ferry before sundown.”
“What ferry?”
“The ferry that will take us across the dark waters.”
Jack nodded. He vaguely remembered something about that. “It’s like a sea, full of monsters, right?”
“That is correct.”
He nodded again. He did remember then. After the sea came an island, then a mountain, and a keeper and a castle. Or was it castle first, then keeper? He decided it must have been. That was the only sequence that made sense.
“Right. Well, let’s pick up the pace then.”
They marched on, and Jack kept an eye out for things to roast. He was getting bored with trees. They just sat there, doing nothing. Not unlike Migli, if he was being honest. He almost wished one of those night terrors would make an appearance. He wanted a moving target.
He nearly got a rabbit when it hopped by. But it proved a little too quick, and he ended up igniting a patch of brambles instead. “Too bad. We could have had roast rabbit. You ever eaten roast rabbit, Migli?”
The dwarf started singing, this time about fair maidens and true love.
Jack sighed. “Come on, this is a forest. Where are all the wildlife?”
Just then, a bright blue bird flitted past. It was a beautiful thing, with a high, musical song, and feathers that glimmered in the sun and glistened in the shade. It was magnificent.
And it was slow moving. Jack grinned and took aim. Then he loosed a ball of fire. The bird didn’t even notice him until it was too late. And unlike the rabbit, he didn’t move in enough time.
A point Jack immediately regretted, because the bird didn’t just collapse in a smoldering heap of charred meat and burned feathers. He blew up like a nuclear bomb.
The force sent the adventurers flying head over heels. Jack’s health meter plummeted all the way down to one point as he smashed and careened into flaming wreckage.
“Great scot,” Migli cried.
“Mother trucker,” Jack said. “What the blazes was that?”
His vision blurred and danced under a red haze. That, he figured, was an effect of being at a measly one health point. He sifted through his pocket for a healing potion and drained it to the last drop.
His health ebbed back, and with it, his vision. The red, for some reason, didn’t leave. It took him a minute to figure it out. He was still a little stunned from the explosion and wondering at the messed up game physics that turned a songbird into a bomb.
But the red didn’t come from inside. The red he saw came from outside – because everything was on fire. “Son-of-a-biscuit. Migli, what’s going on?”
The dwarf stared at the blazing forest, like his own programming didn’t know what to do in this situation. Then, he said, “We are in grave danger, sir knight. We must away lest we do not survive this day.”
Jack didn’t argue, for two reasons. The first was, he didn’t have a better plan. And the second? Migli started running before he even finished speaking. Jack barely caught the “survive this day,” the dwarf had put so much distance between them.
“Blessed coward,” he sneered. But he did it as he was picking himself up and heading off in the same direction.
He ran hard and fast. For a while, Migli stayed in view, getting smaller and smaller as he put miles between them. Then, he disappeared on the forest path.
The flames followed them almost as quickly as Migli was running. He didn’t know if this was an intended part of the game or if the proximity of so much fire had triggered burning reactions from anything flammable in the vicinity. He guessed it was the latter. He couldn’t imagine the studio banking some key plot twist on the player being an asshole enough to roast a bluebird.
Then again, maybe they knew their players well enough to do it.
Either way, all Jack knew was that the temperature kept climbing, and he was decidedly uncomfortable. He didn’t know what happened in Dagger of Doom when a character burned to death. He really hoped he didn’t have to find out.
So he kept running. Finally, he reached the end of the long forest. The last trees caught up just as he was clawing his way through smoke into the open air.
He put another mile or so of distance between himself and the conflagration. The horizon behind him blazed under a heavy veil of smoke. He felt exhaustion creep up on him. He didn’t know where Migli was. He guessed this must be some kind of glitch. The dwarf was supposed to be his long-term companion. That’s what Richard had said, wasn’t it?
His eyelids felt like they weighed a ton. His lungs burned. He reeked of smoke. Fortunately, the in-game smoke didn’t choke like real smoke did. But it wasn’t something he wanted to smell, either.
I need to lay down, he thought. Just close my eyes. Quick rest.
He took two steps off road, and then collapsed face first into soft grass, dead to the world.
He woke up a long time later – a long time in the game, and a long time in real life. In the game world, it was well after sunset. A pair of silvery moons rose high on the horizon. A reddish glow illuminated the world behind him.
In the real world, Richard had gone home, and Jordan had taken his place. A fact that he learned about two seconds after coming to.
Migli was standing over him, and Jack groaned. “There you are, you cowardly dwarf.”
“Jack? You okay?”
“Oh. Richard? That you?”
“No, this is Jordan. Richard’s shift ended already.”
He groaned. He didn’t really have anything against Jordan, except that he was a pain in the butt. Still, he felt too – strange – to deal with a pain in the butt. “Why do I feel so groggy?”
“You’ve been in the machine for almost thirty hours.”
He groaned again. In normal circumstances, thirty hours of almost non-stop gaming would have been about the closest thing to heaven he could imagine. But he would have supplemented playtime with snacks and caffeinated beverages. “No wonder I feel like stuffing.” He frowned. “Stuffing? That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Yeah, that’s your actual body interfering with your game experience.”
He snorted. “Well, how inconsiderate of it to – you know, be starving to death.”
<
br /> “Yeah, you’re definitely not starving to death. But don’t worry. Roberts hooked you up to a bunch of stuff. Nutrients and I don’t know what else. You look like a coma patient in the movies. All kinds of tubes and whatnot.”
If this was meant to cheer him up, it had rather the opposite effect. “Wait, what? Why?”
“Because you were ‘starving to death’?”
“I didn’t consent to a feeding tube or whatever.”
“Yeah, because you passed out. Your body just shut itself down. The doc thinks it’s a combination of stress and hunger.”
Jack breathed in and out, and then decided, “I need to talk to him.”
“He said you’d say that. He said to tell you not to worry. He did everything that needed to be done, you’re alright and – and I’m quoting him here – that if you wake him up again tonight you ‘heighten the risk of medical error significantly.’ Apparently, the doctor needs his naptime.”
Jordan laughed, but Jack didn’t. “You mean, he’s not going to even talk to me? He’s plugging stuff into my body and he’s not even going to tell me what it is?”
“He will. When he gets in tomorrow.”
“This is ridiculous.”
Jordan scoffed. “You’re telling me? You know what I’ve been doing for the last six hours? Watching your body. That’s it. He told me not to move a muscle, or he’d recommend my immediate termination.”
“I assume he meant firing you?” Jack asked. “Not the more permanent kind?”
“Uh…yeah. Obviously.”
He snorted. “Obviously? This is Marshfield Studio. One minute you’re testing a game, and the next you’re trapped in some kind of nightmare with a bunch of tubes hooked up to you like you’re some kind of Frankenstein.”
“Frankenstein’s monster,” Jordan corrected.
Jack frowned. The other man had him there. Still, he wasn’t in the kind of mood that would allow him to own up to being wrong. Not to one of these Marshfield Studio people. So he kept on topic. “So yeah, nothing is obvious anymore.”
“My point is, it was really boring. And he’s kind of a prig.” Jordan snorted. “Okay, yeah, I can see why that filter would get annoying after a while.”