Pandemic Collapse - The First Horde: An Apocalyptic GameLit Thriller

by Leif Kennison

  Then, to her team, she said, “We’re gonna double-time it out of here. We don’t know how much he’s shedded already.”

  Hearing the word shedded reminded me of a fight between my neighbors. The virus had a tragic effect on people. It wasn’t just the horrendous death toll or the heartbreaking pain they endured when they died from the virus. It was the paranoia and hate that festered in even the best of people.

  Joshua was a priest at the local church. He lived just across the hall from me. His next-door neighbor was Arianna. The two of them had lived next to each other for ages. Before the virus, when Arianna had a miscarriage, Joshua was there for her. He tended to her. And when Joshua was sick, Arianna would bring over soup for him. Arianna wasn’t a churchgoer, and Joshua never shoved Christ down her throat. They took care of each other anyway. That’s the kind of neighbors they were.

  But things changed after the virus. One day, Arianna confronted Joshua in the hallway. I was listening through the doorway, I heard everything. Arianna was yelling at Joshua for bringing over members of his congregation. She was screaming at him for breaking the law and putting everyone in the building in danger.

  “How do I know you’re not bringing a goddamned shedder around here!” she shouted. At this point, I was peeking through the peephole. You could tell she was getting mad because she broke the social distancing and was getting up in his face.

  “I have a right to congregate,” Joshua said as he tried to back up a little. I could hear it in his voice—he was trying to keep calm. “And I keep it to one person at a time.”

  “I don’t give a fuck, you think you have the right to put my health at risk? Hell no. You better stop that shit or imma call the cops, muthafucka!”

  Joshua stayed silent to gather his thoughts, which pissed her off even more.

  Just as she opened her mouth, Joshua started up.

  “Arianna,” he said, “please don’t tell me how to live. I have a congregation to take care of. I’m doing the best that I can. I sanitize everything. So please, just relax.”

  “No, asshole,” she shot back. “I’m not gonna relax. You gonna stop that shit or not?” She was glaring daggers at him. They were practically nose to nose.

  Joshua turned his back to her to try to get back in his apartment, but she grabbed him and pushed him around.

  “You’re gonna stop this shit, muthafucka!” she yelled.

  Joshua fought her off.

  “Fuck you, you four-eyed whore!”

  Then he slammed the door shut on her.

  That’s what life was getting like.

  Anyway, Elgin and the rest of us were in a rush to get the hell out of the facility because of the virus. The way that people get infected isn’t just from breathing in the virus. It’s not that simple. There’s got to be enough of it concentrated in the air. I’m sure some doctor or scientist could tell you how many parts per million in the air or water you need to have in your system at once for the infection to kick in, but I don’t know that sort of thing.

  What I do know is that people shed the virus at different rates. Some people shed it just by breathing. There was this video of a simulated shedder. It was a dummy with a machine that sprayed mist, and it would move around in a pitch-black room with green lasers to highlight the mist in this colorful bright green. Just by breathing, the virus would be emanating from their nose and mouth. The virus would stay in the air. And when the shedder would walk around, there’d be this trail behind them. Just from walking from one end of the room to the other a few times, the entire room was filled with the virus. Then the video sped up to show what happened after just five minutes. The room was filled with a dangerous enough concentration of the virus that anyone walking in would be infected. And the worst part is that it’s usually asymptomatic. You could catch the virus for months and not show any signs. Hell, you could drop dead without coughing a single time.

  Elgin sure didn’t want to get infected, so she led the way in a jog.

  Then suddenly, Halstead, who was doing rear security, screamed.

  “Get it off me!” he yelled.

  The dead doctor, still in his white lab coat, had latched onto Halstead’s arm.

  Quickly and decisively, Addie drew his handgun and fired two rounds into the zombie’s skull in rapid succession.

  We had no time to pause and lament the doctor’s death. We kept jogging our way out.

  When we finally got to the main entrance and out the door, there was a cargo truck outside. We got into it, and I sat in the back between Warner and Tong. When Addie started up the vehicle, Elgin yelled from the front.

  “Bag him,” she said.

  Halstead, who was sitting in front of me, leaned forward and put a black bag over my head.

  “Sorry pal,” he said. The guy never sounded sorry. “Operational security. Gotta do it.”

  And that was that. I had a rough black bag rubbing up on my nose and cheeks the whole ride to wherever it was that I was going.

  ELEVEN

  int painResistance

  The truck rumbled along to its destination. I didn’t know where I was at the time, but I was being driven to a warehouse up in Yonkers, near an electric substation. It wasn’t too far away from the old Empire City Casino, where that data center was. It was a perfect place to set up a makeshift facility. They had easy access to a massive power source and a big fat fiber-optic network connection.

  When we finally arrived, a couple of the guys helped me out of the truck and walked me into a building. After turning a few times and stopping in a room that sounded big—I could hear the way sound was echoing—they took the bag off of my head.

  I blinked my eyes. I was in a warehouse.

  The building was big and dingy, but at least it was well-lit. It reminded me a Costco warehouse, with the big floor to ceiling shelves and pallets stacked high that made up a kind of maze. I wondered what it’d be like to climb those shelves. Looking up at the shelves, I thought about how much fun I’d have vaulting and swinging through them, and the cat leaps I’d make up on the top.

  A spacious clearing was right in front of it. There, ten STESIS machines lined up next to each other in an arcing pattern, all of them pointing at a space in the middle. In the middle stood a metal desk that looked like it was from a few decades ago, and on that desk was a computer workstation. Thick bundles of cables, each larger than a firehose, snaked from the pods towards some unknown location.

  Elgin waved me forward. “C’mon, kid. We got a lot of work to do.”

  She wanted me to make it so that everyone could keep training without dying. So that’s what I tried to figure out.

  As I wracked my brain, I thought about what the problem was. It seemed like if a soldier took too much damage, the way his or her body reacted to the simulation would interrupt the input-output signal. That’s when a thought crossed my mind. Why the hell would an advanced military simulation would be keeping track of things like hit points. It sure wasn’t the way real life worked.

  I found my answer after digging around for an hour or two. Through a combination of reading the documentation and looking through the code, I learned that it was a really sensitive system with a lot of requirements. It needed not only a stable power supply, but also a solid connection to the cloud that was measured in hundreds of gigabits per second. It wasn’t very robust. If it didn’t have what it needed, it would switch to what was called a pseudo-simulation mode.

  In the full simulation mode, practically everything was modeled. The entire human body was simulated so that when you ran and got tired, it was because the lactic acid was building up in your muscles and your blood couldn’t deliver enough oxygen to your muscles. You felt hungry when your blood sugar dropped too low.

  It turns out the military found a way to train the body faster too. To train endurance, it used electrical impulses to activate the muscle fibers and damage them. Then, when you got out of the simulation, the pod could be put into recovery mode. It made soldiers se
e gains in physical training much faster. They beat you down, and build you back up. As fast as they can.

  In psuedo-simulation mode, they took a lot of shortcuts. Rather than modeling the entire human body, it just used a passthrough mode and simulated the sensations. I’m still not exactly sure how it works, but a superadmin would have to go and set up profiles for the soldiers as a fallback. For example, the average person can sprint for ten seconds. And you’re an average person. So the admin would put you in as Level 1 for sprinting. And rather than modeling and simulating the muscle fibers in your legs, they’d just make your avatar be able to sprint for ten seconds. Then, over the next ten seconds, you’d lose stamina at a certain rate. Once you hit zero stamina, you’d get the Exhausted debuff, which gives you that sensation instead of actually simulating oxygen and bloodstream interactions. So for example, when a user sprinted, they would earn experience in sprinting. Then, when they leveled up, an automated XP manager would assign the XP points where they would realistically belong. Basically, it was an RPG system except that the gains you made in the system carried over to the real world, to a certain extent.

  Anyway, while Elgin and her team were sleeping, I worked through the night scouring the manuals and wikis, trying to find a way to alter Damage Resistance for each user. It was a new system that was still in development, so documentation was sparse and bugs were getting in the way every few minutes.

  Then I hit a wall.

  It turned out that I couldn’t edit the Damage Resistance. It was a private variable that I couldn’t access directly. The only thing I could do about it was maybe spawn some armor for them. But it wasn’t going to be enough.

  I must’ve spent hours wracking my brain before I came up with the solution.

  I found a variable called painResistance.

  I changed it to zero, but it didn’t work when I compiled the executable. I got a HALT error:

  [ERROR] Value painResistance must be greater than 0.

  At that point, I felt like I was done for. I couldn’t deliver on what Elgin needed. What were they gonna do to me if I didn’t deliver? I thought. It was making me nervous. And it wasn’t just me I was worried about. The whole time, time was ticking. I know it sounds stupid, but I had binge-watched a whole eight seasons of The One Fifteen, this series about the NYPD precinct that covers Corona and Jackson Heights. Yakov got me onto it, and I still remember eating some awesome al pastor tacos and a party-sized bag of Doritos while I watched. I don’t know how much weight I gained from that, but anyway…the show had a lot to do with missing people, and they kept saying that the first seventy-two hours are the most critical in a missing person case. I needed to find Nyla, and I was getting worried about her. Where was she?

  I remember how Nyla always had a knack for looking forward. She never got bogged down worrying about things.

  “What’s worrying gonna do for me?” she’d say. “It’s just getting in the way of me solving the problem. I need to focus on fixing this, so those thoughts can go right out the window.” Then she’d mime taking something out of her head, crumpling it like a piece of paper, and then toss it behind her shoulder.

  So I tried that. It didn’t really work as well as I wanted it to, but after I got up out of that shitty chair and stretched out and walked around, my head cleared up a bit. I sat back down and kept digging.

  I figured that if I couldn’t change the Pain Resistance variable directly, maybe I could change the way that it was calculated. Following that train of thought, I followed line after line of spaghetti code and finally found the spot where I needed to be.

  The way that the system was set up, there were twenty-five levels. From reading the comments in the code, they based it on the average person making relatively permanent gains in any skill every six months of connected effort. That meant that it’d take twelve and a half years to reach top condition in anything. That’s when I thanked the digital gods of technology. To take twelve years of progress and condense it into a tiny fraction of that time was a mind-blowing feat.

  Anyway, there was a stat called Combat Toughness. I wasn’t exactly sure what its effects were—I think it reduced the likelihood of getting the Panicked debuff—but it increased a little bit with every kill. So what I did was change the formula so that the Pain Resistance stat was tied into the Combat Toughness. The more kills you made in the simulation, the more resistant you were to pain. And to speed things up, I tied it into the Constitution stat. If I leveled up their Constitution, it’d make a big jump in their Pain Resistance—about four percent per level.

  By the time I’d finished modifying the leveling system to meet Elgin’s demands, it was dawn. A bit of light from the dim blue sky cast a dull glow throughout the warehouse, and a few birds were chirping outside. I knew I was dead tired because my eyelids were drooping, and I was falling asleep in my chair.

  The next thing I knew, someone was nudging me awake. I didn’t want to wake up. I wasn’t in a comfy bed, but sleep was sleep. But again, I felt a nudge.

  “What is it,” I murmured.

  “Sorry pal, we gotta get started.”

  It was Halstead. And no, he didn’t sound sorry.

  “I barely got any sleep, man. Fugg off,” I said softly.

  Elgin’s sharp voice pierced my ears.

  “Yankee doodle, it’s time to get up.”

  She had a real firmness in her voice that got me to stand up. I opened my eyes and stood up.

  “You’re lucky I didn’t blast your ass like reveille,” she said. “We’ve been up for a few hours already, we’re waiting on you. The system works best if you’ve got a fresh mind, but time is ticking. Let’s go.”

  The team and I sat on some cots. They were like a pack of wolves. They tore into their MREs—Meal Ready to Eat—and crammed the food into their mouths and down their gullets.

  “Goes down better when you do it fast,” Addie joked.

  Tong gave a friendly disapproving frown. “Ayyyyy….someone’s getting a little frisky,” he joked.

  Addie laughed and threw a balled-up napkin at him.

  Everyone watched me as I had my first MRE. Mine was a…pepperoni pizza. If you could call it that. Honestly, it tasted terrible. I won’t bore you with all the little details about how to heat up a ration and all that, but lemme tell you. It doesn’t matter what part of the country you come from. There’s just no way that anybody could tell you that that little square of flavorless dough—and it managed to be dry and soggy at the same time—there’s nobody who can tell you that it’s pizza. Tong told me about how it reminded him of Ellio’s frozen pizza, and we chatted a little about his childhood.

  After we were done eating, everyone started preparing for the immersion. They each had a job and a checklist that wasn’t so different from the one that I’d found in Room 550.

  I had a job too. I had to make sure the simulation software was doing what it was supposed to. Sitting back at the workstation, I ran diagnostic routines, launched the server, made sure all the right modules and libraries were preloaded…all that system admin stuff. It was nerve-racking though. I’d never been in charge of a system where if something went wrong, a user could die. Well, maybe just get extremely brain damaged, which arguably is actually worse than dying. With what was at stake, I quadruple-checked everything.

  Warner went over to a cabinet and took something out. When I looked over, I saw a tray of syringes and bottles in his hands. I was concerned.

  “Warner, what’s that?” I asked.

  “N-P-I,” he said loudly without looking at me. He was preparing something on a table.

  I repeated myself.

  “Warner, what is that.”

  Warner stiffened up. Annoyed, he said, “N-P-I,” stressing each letter.

  What an asshole.

  “Warner, you know what I’m asking.”

  He growled. “Maybe you should be more precise about your question.”

  Addie bounced over all cheery, trying to lighten the mood. />
  “Neuromuscular paralysis injection,” he said. “Makes sure you don’t get all—”

  Making a dumb face, he slackened his neck and jaw and let his tongue hang out of the corner of his mouth.

  I laughed.

  “But nah,” he continued, “it’s meant to keep yourself from moving while you’re in the simulation. It kicks in about a minute after injection, and it wears off after an hour or so, unless you get an IV drip of it.”

  “Why can’t you just use straps?” I asked.

  Addie put a hand on his chin.

  “Because…” He trailed off, his eyes distant in thought.

  One thought that crossed my mind was that maybe that’s why it was dangerous for them to be stuck in there without the injection. Who knows how moving around in the real world would interfere with what you think you’re doing when you’re immersed. That’s not how the system was designed to be used.

  Halstead, who was kneeling down to check the auxiliary power supply at the base of one of the sleds, yelled over his shoulder.

  “The system needs to override all your muscular functions,” he said. “It needs to stimulate them with electrical impulses. Basically, the way the whole system works it that it intercepts the signals your brain sends. Then it works its magic and sends those signals back into your brain. But not just your brain. That’s what the bodysuit is for. That one can send signals directly to the nerves in your body and electrical impulses right into your muscles.”

  Tong whooped. “Pretty good for a farmer boy,” he quipped.

  “Says the guy who dropped out of high school,” Halstead shot back.

  Elgin yelled from over at her pod.

  “You still thinking of going to tech school?” she asked Halstead.

  “Yup.”

  “You’re gonna waste your agriculture degree.”

  “Ehh, maybe. I don’t know, it could still come in useful some day.”