Luke: Could your MC potentially do it in the time she’s given him to do it? I mean, theoretically, like if she had a gun to his head.
Me: I suppose, but it wouldn’t be easy, and the final product may not be as good.
Luke: And I’m assuming Grace is still passed out?
Me: That’s right.
Luke: And could she potentially wake up within the next two days and do something about Veronique?
Me: Well, I guess, but that’s playing with uncertainty.
Luke: Well, you’re the writer, and as a writer, you should always play with uncertainty, otherwise it doesn’t feel original. Readers like that uncertainty. It keeps them up at night. Have him at least attempt whatever it is Veronique is asking him to do.
Me: Okay.
Luke: And if Grace wakes up, have her kick Veronique’s ass.
Me: That brings me to my next issue …
Luke: Oh boy.
Me: I’m thinking of labeling this as creative nonfiction gamer sci-fi. Does that sound too crazy?
Luke: Yes. How can it be nonfiction if it’s also LitRPG and sci-fi? For it to be creative nonfiction, it has to be true, or at least true enough. This stuff isn’t actually happening to you, is it?
Me: Of course it is.
Luke: That’s a typo, isn’t it?
Me: Of course not.
Luke: Lol! Well, I guess that would be a kind of interesting marketing ploy.
Me: Yeah, a marketing ploy, that’s what I’m going for. I’m thinking something that blends Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, Maugham’s A Razor’s Edge, Kundera’s Immortality, and some stuff written by John Updike. With sci-fi. I realize all this stuff is more literary, but this idea is just so cool. Trust me.
Luke: I trust you. So … creative nonfiction gamer sci-fi with metafictional undertones? You had me at shifter.
Me: That’s for the mainstream audience, the shifter stuff. Who doesn’t like a shifter story? Everyone wants a shifter in their life, and who wouldn’t trade anything to be a shifter and be able to do whatever they wanted with them? That’s straight up deprived fanboy territory. And the superhero stuff, that’s cool too. People love superheroes. Besides, there are so many villains in this world.
Luke: True that. There are too many villains.
Chapter Fourteen: Steak and Shrimp with Veronique
I banged on my keyboard for the rest of the afternoon.
As Veronique watched reruns of Mad Men, and I felt like a goddamn madman, I tried to put as many words to digital page as humanly possible.
Whenever I came to a point that I didn’t know what to do, or how to describe Veronique’s backstory, I asked her and she told me what she could. I needed to plug in, but she refused to let me plug into her for the time being, which left Grace.
At about five, I was sixteen thousand words in.
I had written a shitton of words in the last four hours, a lot of them shit, but some of them good. A personal record in any event. My eyes were twitchy, my fingers ached, and my mouth was the Atacama.
I was hungry too, and I didn’t have any money to buy food unless I used one of my cards, which I didn’t want to do.
But food could wait; I needed more information, and to get it, I needed to access Grace. I used my throwaway smartphone to plug into her neck. Worked like a charm.
Veronique stood near me, curious as to what I would find. With the login details that Grace had given me earlier, I got in and was presented with a shadow box that contained a series of files.
I clicked on the same file I’d clicked on previously and noticed now that there were more options …
It was like reading code or something. I scrolled through thousands of numbers and codes, trying to figure out what they meant and how to interpret them.
I recalled Grace’s white eyes as I looked at Veronique’s stats.
She had made them more interpretable, which meant that she was even more powerful than I had originally thought she was.
I got to the bottom of the code and found a button that said ‘enter.’
When in doubt, press ‘enter,’ right?
All the Matrix-esque binary mumbo jumbo disappeared and I was left with something akin to Veronique’s stats.
Sabine, Subject S.
Build: 008
Strength: 1
Intelligence: 9
Constitution: 4
Wisdom: 8
Dexterity: 3
Charisma: 6
So, her name is Sabine, I thought, as I scanned her deets.
The cursor changed once I hovered over her name and I realized that I could modify it. One click later and I changed it to Grace, Subject G, which sounded like it would have made a great title for a book on finding God and becoming a better Christian.
Also, I wouldn’t be able to write that book, especially after the last two days.
Adjusting her stats didn’t do much to prevent min-maxing for her intelligence and wisdom, which I wasn’t able to adjust down past the number eight.
A few clicks deeper and I found that her psychic abilities also had the same easy to manage dial system.
Unlike before, they also weren’t listed as levels.
She played with my mind, I thought as I looked through the options.
Omnikinesis: 1
Second Sight: 1
Psychometry: 5
Telepathy: 8
Clairsentience: 7
Psychokinesis: 1
Hypnosis: 6
I decided not to adjust them for now; I wanted a clear understanding of what they did before I messed with them, and I figured that like her base stats, changing the dial on any of them would fudge up the pre-made build.
Another thing I found interesting when parsing through her stats was that I was able to modify in real time how she appeared.
There were drop-down options for gender, race, skin tone, height, weight, and further options for various body parts. For example, clicking on a face, allowed me to modify her facial features and facial structure in real time, which was really interesting because it created a 3-D map on my smartphone screen that I could adjust with my fingers.
I could pinch her cheeks and mod them, and as I did, a dial in the upper right-hand corner would turn, and her face would actually morph in real time.
There was also a toggle button to go back to the form that she started as. I adjusted her cheeks back to their original form and closed the window that allowed me to drill into her shifter abilities.
My stomach rumbled.
“Are you hungry?” Veronique still stood over my shoulder, her shadow looming over me.
“Yeah, some food would be nice, but I can’t use my cards to buy anything, and I don’t have any cash. Had I known you were going to attack Grace when we came back from the store, I would have tried to get some cash and some snacks …” I sighed. “Point is, this woman is our only ticket to getting things like food and lodging.”
“I wouldn’t say she’s our only ticket.”
“Got a better idea?” I removed the cable from Grace’s neck. “And before you suggest it, I’d like not to go to another room, kill the people, and steal whatever food they have. Just in case that’s what you were thinking: I am not down with murder.”
“But you are okay with hiding murdered bodies?” she asked with a crooked grin.
“I’m not going to say I’m a different man now, but I will say that decision was one that had to be made at that point in time.”
Not quite a Glomar response, I thought as I ran my hand through my beard, but not far off.
“Don’t worry, I won’t kill anyone without your permission.”
“Okay,” I said, not at all comfortable with the way she phrased that last sentence. “What are you proposing?”
Veronique turned to the door. “Don’t they have a restaurant in this hotel? It looks like a nice expensive hotel, and I’m assuming they have a restaurant.”
“Yes, I believe they do.”
“Let’s see how I feel when I get back. I can at least design a cover tonight. My hands are killing me from typing so much today.”
She shrugged. “You still have two days.”
“I was afraid you’d say something like that.”
I was a man in need of a margarita. So, I ordered one and the most expensive item I could find on the menu, which was some type of steak and shrimp combo. I was ravenous, and I didn’t know how we were going to get out of there, so I figured I should eat well.
Besides, Veronique said she was covering the tab. I wasn’t sure how, but fuck it, that’s where my life was at the moment.
“What do you want?” I asked her after I ordered. Veronique sat across from me, still in her black mil-spec outfit, perusing the menu in the way one would flip through a catalog they weren’t at all interested in.
What I wanted to ask was, Do you actually eat? I had a sick feeling she was fed inmates rather than real food.
The waiter, a young guy with beard stubble and a mole next to his nostril, looked at us with bloodshot eyes. “Is that it?” He looked like he’d been working too hard, and I totally knew that feeling, which was why I wanted her to hurry up and order.
“None of this food looks good.”
“Um, why don’t you just order something small then, like a salad?” I asked her.
“A salad? I am a carnivore.” She closed the menu and handed it back to the waiter, who looked at her funny, glanced away, and stumbled off toward the kitchen.
I figured now would be as good a time as any to ask her more questions about her life.
“What do you remember from your childhood?” I asked.
“I didn’t have a childhood. Mostly training.”
“Was there a particular doctor or scientist who led most of the experiments? Do you know anything like that?”
Her face turned white as she bit her lip. Finally, she sighed heavily. “I do know a few things about that, but not much. There was a woman who was there the entire time from the start, at least from what I can remember. But she rarely made contact with us personally, at least me, anyway. Sometimes she observed us from behind glass.”
“Was it a one-way glass?”
“When I was a child, no, it wasn’t. Then I destroyed it, and we were moved to a new room that had no glass, but the walls were shiny mirrors.”
“So, it was one-way. And you saw this woman later?”
“Yes, briefly, when I was going out on a mission. Grace is not the first one who has tried to escape, but most of them never made it past the courtyard, aside from one.”
She reached for her water and took a sip from it.
“What happened to that one?”
“We captured him and brought him back.”
“So, there are men, or there were men, involved in this experiment as well?”
“Only a few, and they were either killed or phased out, aside from the one I mentioned.”
“Does he have a name?”
She swallowed hard. “Angel. His name is Angel.”
The thought returned to me: Had I somehow been part of these experiments? Why else would my picture be on Grace’s hard drive? It was a selfish way to insert oneself into a narrative, and truth be told, about the only superpower I had was holding my breath underwater for thirty seconds. But still, something was screwy about all this.
“There must be more like you,” I told her. “And as I was saying up in our room, I think getting this book out will help us find them.”
“You like to use the word ‘us,’ don’t you?”
“I want to be part of this, and I want you and Grace both to be part of it,” I told her quickly. “This will be the most important thing I ever do in my life. If I can expose this, create some change, and stop weird research universities and FCG authorities from creating super soldiers, then I’ve actually done something with my life.”
“Huh.”
Veronique was a unique beauty, with a dash of coldness and seductive vampire qualities due to her ability to deplete a person’s life force.
I knew there was a better way to phrase and think about what she did rather than ‘deplete someone’s life force’ or ‘seductive vampire,’ but it was the easiest way for my mind to comprehend it, and I didn’t want to get into some mitochondria-depleting-oxygen-reverse-osmosis jargon, or whatever the hell it was she was actually doing when she drained someone’s life.
“And what were you doing with your life before?” she asked, bringing my inner monologue to a blinding halt.
“I was working at a Yale gift shop and writing science fiction.”
She laughed at this, producing a rare smile on her face just as my margarita came.
A few sips in and my lips and thoughts loosened up. “You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget,” Cormac McCarthy wrote in The Road.
If ever there was a theme for my rambling …
Veronique continued sipping her water as I told her about my life – inconsequential details, about who I was and what I’d been up to over the last twenty-five years. She seemed interested though, and I wondered if the blandness of my life had some appeal to the super soldier.
It wasn’t long before the steak and shrimp came and with them a side of asparagus and red potatoes that had been baked and fried. The shrimp were juicy and pink, and the steak produced a hint of red liquid around it as I sawed in.
Meat!
My god, was it a good meal, and for a fleeting moment, I wasn’t worried about how all this would end up. I was focused on feeding, drinking, feeding some more.
The check eventually came around, and I went from satiated to nervous as Veronique lightly placed her hand on the check. She looked up at the waiter, something flashing behind her dark eyes.
“I believe there is a discrepancy,” she told him.
He bent over to peer at the check, and as he did, Veronique touched his wrist. Her hand glowed red and the waiter fell.
He cracked his head on the table and took one of the plates with him as he slid to the side.
Just as this happened, all the screws and bolts in the restaurant tore from their sockets, followed by anything metal, from silverware to napkin holders.
People started to scream and scramble, the metal whipping around the room like angry bees, scraping the walls and shattering anything it came into contact with.
Oblivious to the chaos, Veronique took my hand and quietly led me out of the restaurant. We passed through the lobby, made it to the elevator, and took the ride up to our penthouse.
Her knees buckled once we reached the door of our room, and she fell into my arms.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, my thoughts blurred from the alcohol and pandemonium I’d just witnessed.
Her face was flushed, and I could suddenly smell the sweet sick scent of alcohol.
“Just relax,” I told her as I reached for my room key. “Let’s get you into bed.”
Chapter Fifteen: A Hand in the Shower
Kudos to the waiter for showing up drunk and transferring his drunkenness to Veronique. With both women out – Veronique on the king-sized bed in one room and Grace on the queen-sized bed in the other – I was finally able to focus a little more on my writing.
Of course, it took me all of twenty minutes to calm down and parse through what had happened in the restaurant.
That was some pretty crazy shit, and I couldn’t get the image out of my head of Veronique and me moving through the pandemonium as screws and bolts and nails and knives zipped all around us in the air.
There was something beautiful about it; something utterly frightening too. This was another side of the superhero story most people didn’t get to experience: what it felt like from a civilian perspective.
So, I was ready for some peace an
d quiet, and I’d just sat down to write when Veronique stirred.
“What’s wrong with me?” She asked as she sat up. Her stomach grumbled as she looked at me, her face bright red.
It wasn’t so easy to answer her, especially because there was a flattened coat hanger floating in the air before me.
“You poisoned me,” she said, and with the flick of her wrist, the coat hanger shiv began to rotate.
It was aimed at my face, and I knew exactly where it would go if I didn’t tell her what she wanted to hear.
The only problem was, I didn’t really know what she wanted to hear, nor did I know how to explain everything to her in a way she’d readily understand.
Deep breath in, and I started with the basics. “Do you know what drunk is?”
She didn’t nod, but the coat hanger flinched as if to replicate a nod.
“Okay, so you know what drunk is. Good. I mean, bad. Drunk is bad. I think the waiter was drunk,” I said, recalling that his eyes had been glazed over and that he’d stumbled a bit on the way to the kitchen.
“You tried to poison me,” she slurred.
“Veronique, please, please don’t fucking stab me with that goddamn hanger.”
I thought about swiping the hanger out of the air but quickly bottled that thought, knowing all too well that this would end poorly for me.
Instead, I tried reason.
“Where the hell was I supposed to get some poison over the last couple of hours?” I asked her as calmly as possible. “I have no idea how to poison you, nor anyone for that matter. I mean, aside from making you drink bleach or something, which I clearly don’t have the power to do, I’m pretty much clueless when it comes to killing people. Hiding the bodies too. Well, I didn’t do too poorly back at the Home Depot parking lot.”
“Enough talking,” she growled.
“Okay,” I said, clearing my throat. “But I just want to be clear: I don’t even know what’s poisonous, aside from certain snakes, some cleaners, spiders, and, um, mercury. I think mercury is poisonous.”
Another deep breath in and I found I wasn’t nearly as on edge as I should have been. Oddly enough, I had grown used to being around the superpowered women. I mean, I’m not saying I was all of a sudden some sort of expert, but a lot of weird shit had happened to me over the last few days and as it would turn out, this was just the start of the madness to come.
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