“No you don’t,” Blight muttered. She reloaded and aimed once more. She managed to land a rocket six feet from the car’s driver door, shattering the earth around it and crushing the metal bodywork. Then the car’s fuel caught and, with a great, dull explosion of air, turned into a black, burning skeleton, devoid of life.
The ghouls were dead and, as the car fell still, flames lapping up its entire frame, the last few dozen zombies stopped running. Their eyes lost their fury and Davidoff watched them, just thirty feet away, as their limbs lost their vigor and they slowed to their usual shambling gait.
Within seconds, they were the groaning, nearly lifeless corpses that they had been before. They were no longer a threat, and Davidoff, Blight, Mara and Tron casually brought out their side arms and wandered through them, putting them down with easy, low XP scoring shots to the head. In the woods below, nothing stirred. No doubt the zombies were in there still, the rigor dispelled, shambling as ever.
“They won’t trouble us anymore,” Davidoff said, nodding down towards the forest. “The scientists will post snipers. Any zombie who pokes its head out by chance will be shot down easily enough.”
“Yeah,” Blight said as Mara nodded, killing the last of their attackers. “But what the hell was that all about? It looked like the ghouls were controlling them, giving them their speed.”
“It did indeed,” Davidoff muttered. “I don’t know how, but I guess we’ll have to find out if we want to put a stop to them.”
Chapter Eight
They spent an hour or so securing the compound. It was not work usually undertaken by player-led characters, unless they were directed to specifically for the purpose of completing a mission. However, those rules did not seem to apply anymore. Their survival depended on it, and all were terrified.
They had finished the battle and were celebrating. After his frantic death toll, and the combos he had managed to pull off, Davidoff took a great deal of XP. All told, the two fights—the first skirmish as they had made way for the others to come in, and the full battle with the horde and the ghouls who led them—had granted him 150 XP, giving him 155 XP in total. It would be enough to either severely buffer his current stats, or to buy a new skill as his next mission dictated.
When we manage to get out of here, if the game is still operational, I shall be a strong character indeed, he couldn’t help but think to himself as they returned back into the main hangar, leaving the battlefield behind them and wiping the blood from their faces and hands.
However, arriving into the hangar, they were been greeted with devastating news, news which made them all nearly fall to the ground in shock. Zeke moaned and blubbered, Tron walked away, cursing with the foulest mouth Davidoff had ever heard, whilst Mara went into denial, shaking her head and saying “no, that’s impossible, they can’t let it… no, no…”
Only Davidoff and Blight were quiet, and that was a dumbness brought about by nerves and shock rather than any apparent stoicism.
A chemist approached them as they stood around, congratulating themselves. Her expression was somber and her skin wan. She looked thoroughly grief stricken. As she walked, her eyes seemed to be losing an internal glow which, mere moments before, had been bright enough that they looked aflame.
“I have just managed to hack through, to interface with one of the controlling AI streams,” she told them, her voice a deathly whisper. “It’s about Jason. At his moment of in-game death, Jason’s immersion suit killed him,” she carried on. The emotions she had been given to mimic, the telltale signs of an AI character, made her look sick, like she could not believe what she was having to tell them.
“What are you talking about?” Mara demanded, stepping up to the chemist in an aggressive stance, ready to knock her down, to shoot the messenger.
“It is all over the news in your world,” the chemist said. “I saw it in the data stream, in the Wi Fi. It crushed him to death. The authorities have been notified, Code Red are sending their experts to the affected players… you are all being moved, in the real world, to a specialized facility.
“The game has gone rogue,” she said. “If you die, in game, the immersion suits will kill you.”
There was outrage; they all began to shout, to curse, to call her a liar. Only Davidoff managed to keep his head. “But if they are taking us somewhere… their programmers, their engineers… they can get us out, right?”
“Yes, in time,” the chemist nodded. “But perhaps not for days. Perhaps weeks, who knows?”
“What!” Zeke shouted. “How the hell can it take that long?”
“You are neutrally linked, and the game is holding your consciousness hostage,” the chemist said. “It will not easily allow them to separate your minds from the AI systems, nor will the game allow the immersion suits to release you. It will be a delicate task.”
“And in the meantime, we have to live in here?” Davidoff asked, surprised at how cool his own voice sounded as everybody around him erupted into panicked cursing. “We have to survive, with a rogue computer sending super zombies and hideous ghouls after us? No wonder the system has given the zombies such speed and strength, if it’s out to kill us!”
“What else did you learn?” Blight asked. “From the data stream? What else did it tell you?”
“Nothing,” the chemist replied, shaking her head. “The lead AIs came together and shut me out. We are all cut off,” she said, gesturing around at the other chemists. “We cannot access our operating systems, we cannot find out anything… We are blinded,” she finished, going quiet.
“And Jason…” Blight sobbed, choking, barely holding the emotion in.
“Do you know him… did you know him, in the real world?” Zeke asked gently. Blight and Mara shook their heads.
“No,” Mara replied. “We lived at opposite ends of the country. But we’ve been gaming together for years now. We play everything… played everything together, always as the same team.”
So, after a while of panicking, or cursing their luck, their fates, they began to put the place back together. “If we need to wait it out, at least we can do so somewhere safe,” Mara said. They all went around, repairing fences under Zeke’s instructions, oddly earning XP from completing such menial tasks. They reinforced the gunning posts and Mara jogged down to the hillside with some gear from the stores, telling them that she would leave the road clear and nothing else. “If anyone comes up the flanks, if anyone wanders off the path, boom!” she said grimly. “That will be the end of them.”
Afterwards, they sat around in the hangar, all staring into the mid distance, all trying to wrap their heads around the impossibility of the situation, the sheer bizarre world into which they had all fallen. Davidoff was lost in thought for a little while, but eventually something that had been nagging at the back of his mind came to the fore and he felt he had to speak.
“There must be thousands of people playing this game,” he said. “It’s launch day; everyone will be logged on. What if there are people out there who need our help? We could go and save them, bring them back here. We could put the word out somehow, build an army… garrison the place properly, you know?”
But Dr. Finkelstein, sitting on the floor a little way from the others, shook his head. “No,” he said. “That’s not how it works. The game is split into multiple separate realities… hundreds of them. Otherwise, it would become too crowded as all those players attempted to complete their own missions. Only a few dozen will be in this area, right now, and goodness only knows where they might be. You would likely never find them. Everything else will be parceled off. It’s a fundamental building block in the initial design.”
He glanced around and then he looked directly at Davidoff. “I am afraid that we are all totally alone here, for the time being.”
***
A couple of hours later, they were all sat about, staring into the middle distance and wondering what the hell was going on, how they had got into this situ
ation. They were each in a state of shock, genuinely worried for their lives.
As they sat there, a low buzzing sound began to permeate everything. Davidoff could hear a sound like echoing footsteps approaching from a distance and growing closer second by second, as, at the same time, it sounded like a swarm of bees was descending on the hangar. Looking around, he saw that everybody was staring about themselves. It was not just Davidoff who could hear it.
“Guys, what is—” Blight began, looking up, awoken from her reverie.
However, as she spoke, the colors all around them began to pulse and change. First, they dropped down almost to a grayscale, creating a world of shadows juxtaposed with the odd, flickering highlights. Then they came back, brighter than before. A garish mix of fluorescent, effulgent greens and reds blew up, lighting everything in their incandescence. As they reached their peak, Davidoff could hear raised voices. Looking up, he saw the chemists running towards them, Dr. Finkelstein in the lead.
They were coming out of a corner office and they all appeared to be in pain. They were all crying out, shouting… As he watched them, however, the colors faded and the outlines of everything grew blurred. Watching Blight, he saw the form of her avatar began to fall apart as the pixels that made her up came undone. Finally, as before, the world around him shattered into a million disparate pixels. Everything was darkness, then, and he could see nothing for a few seconds. Then, as the panic rose in him, a few words flashed up in a text box, a few feet in front of him.
SYSTEM ERROR: NEW MISSION – STATUS CRITICAL
He blacked out, passing out of consciousness. All around him, the buzzing continued for a little while, just coming through to David as the avatar Davidoff slept. A few minutes passed in this way, with him trapped between full consciousness in the real world and the game’s own pull, and then, finally, Davidoff came around.
Davidoff woke up, fully alert immediately, with Dr. Finkelstein crouching over him. Another person was there, one of the assistants. She had a slim torch in one hand and was using the fingers of her other hand to pry open Davidoff’s eyelids, searching for life within them. “It’s OK, doc,” she muttered as Davidoff came around. “He’s still there.”
“Same over here!” another assistant called out, bent over Mara. The others all concurred as the player-led characters came back one after the other. “They have not been deleted, they are still with us.”
“Good,” Dr. Finkelstein sighed, smiling down at Davidoff. “After the error, you all disappeared. No stats, nothing, just empty shells. We feared the worst.”
“Really?” Davidoff asked, massaging the side of his face. When he passed out, he must have slumped down hard onto it. It felt like a bruise would be rising on it before long.
“Oh, yes,” the assistant replied. “We have all been programmed to take your wellbeing into account. We are, after all, parts of your narrative gameplays. We would always have had a vested interest in your safety. Now, it would appear,” she finished, frowning a little, “that we are developing beyond this. Our AI capabilities are adapting with you as our survival plans.”
“Mm, good to know,” Davidoff muttered. He braced himself, one hand on the wall at his back, and managed to stand, though a little shaky. Around him, all the other player-led characters were doing the same, visibly shaken, their nerves tight.
“But what the hell was that all about?” Zeke demanded, staggering as his huge bulk came up to standing. He too braced himself against a wall as he glowered around at all the AIs present. “System error, bloody critical mission. What does that even mean?”
One of the assistants had been separate from the others. Whilst Dr. Finkelstein and the other chemists were all worrying over the fallen players, having their assistants trying to check for vital signs, this assistant—named Jessie, Davidoff noticed as he scrolled over her—had been seated, cross-legged, in the middle of the hangar. Her eyes were closed and she looked to all the world some sort of Buddhist master, meditating and losing themselves in search of Zen. Now, however, she opened her eyes, her dark face slightly pale, her lip quivering.
“It is bad,” she said in a deep, solemn voice.
“Jessie is our main contact with the overarching AI systems,” Dr. Finkelstein explained as all the player-led characters glared at her, puzzled expressions crossing over their faces. “She is the one who gets the access codes and updates from the main server, then she passes it on to us. When you all blacked out, the system sent her a message. She has been downloading it… or trying to, at least.”
“It was challenging,” Jessie said, speaking as if from far away, with a blank expression taking over on her face. “But I managed to get the new mods. The server is not behind this,” she said, looking around them all as if to judge their reactions, as if to judge whether they would believe her words.
“Who is behind it, then?” Blight asked, aggression trembling throughout her whole body. “If not the server, then what, who?”
“I do not know, not just yet,” Jessie said. “The server could not tell me. But it passed me on some instructions, given to it by whomever is behind all of this.”
“What kind of instructions?” Davidoff asked, trying to keep a cooler head than the others. “And who are they for?”
“For you, of course,” Jessie said, looking around at them all once more. “For all of you.” She gestured, and the room disappeared. Instead, the focus toggled over to a map of the area. Their voices were still available, but their avatars had not come. Jessie’s voice spoke to them as a couple of areas of the map were highlighted.
“The server wants you to go here,” her voice said as a portion of the mountain was lit up, about sixty miles away as the crow flies. It looked like a rough drive to get up there. “It used to have missions attached to it, as did the intervening landscape, but they are all gone now. Now, the mods in between have gone rogue and the AIs are developing their own agendas.”
“What is there, up in the mountains?” Mara asked
“The warlocks have a castle up there. It is their central base of operations,” Jessie said. “It is heavily fortified, and it is where some of their most powerful members live.”
“Then why the hell do we need to go there?” Zeke asked. “We have seen firsthand what the warlocks are like. If we go there, chances are we will die. And if we die in game…” He left the rest of his sentence unspoken, hanging in the air.
“The server wants you to destroy it,” Jessie replied simply.
“Why?” Davidoff asked. “Because it thinks it will harm the hackers or whoever is doing this, or because they have told the server to make us do it?”
“I ignore it,” Jessie admitted, her voice as dark as ever. “All I know is that this is your mission.”
“And if we do not complete it?” Mara said. “If you ask me, we’re much safer staying here until those scientists get us out. I like our chances here much better.”
“If you fail the mission, then you will die on the spot,” Jessie said. “You will have ten hours from when we leave the map screen to complete it, after which your immersion suits will crush you.”
“But they will get us out by then, right?” Zeke asked. “Code Red, the police, the army, whoever? They will have got us out in ten hours’ time?”
“We can’t know that, not for sure,” Davidoff said. “Besides, I don’t like to leave my fate in others’ hands, wait and pray that everything will turn out all right.”
“And realistically,” Dr. Finkelstein’s voice chimed in. “They will not have you out by then. The systems are too complex, and the operations are too risky. It will take them at least another 48 hours, by our reckoning.”
“They are feeding you, though,” Jessie said. “Intravenously. And they are monitoring your vitals. You are all well, all healthy. Forty people in total have been trapped in game, though I don’t know where the others are. And you are all faring well, so far. I could learn this much from the server.”
“Very well, then,” Tron said, letting out a long sigh. “I suppose we have no choice. We have explosives, we have vehicles. We can blow that castle off the map and buy ourselves some more time.”
“I am afraid it will not be that easy,” Jessie’s voice said, and the map view shifted down, back towards the city.
“Why did I know you were going to say that?” Blight muttered, cursing under her breath.
“The ghouls are growing smarter and they have a team of scientists and engineers trapped in a bunker in the city’s old subway systems,” Jessie told them. “The scientists and engineers do not mind dying—it is against our own protocols to be afraid of death, if it does not serve the game’s narrative. But they cannot kill themselves, and must obey the ghouls… I do not know how, but the ghouls are somehow able to compel them to work.”
“On what?” Davidoff asked as the map centered over a couple of subway stations. “What are they working on?” An area was highlighted, a few subway routes marked for a half mile or so underground. A central hub was also shown, marked out in a brighter red, where the bunker was located.
“They are developing a plague,” Jessie told them. “It is comprised of streams of data specifically designed to overwrite the system’s programming. Anyone infected will turn into one of them: an AI ghoul mod. If you are affected, you are separated from your avatar and the avatar is given a new, AI consciousness.”
“And, let me guess,” Blight fumed. “We die, in game and in real life?”
“That is correct,” Jessie admitted. “They are writing the programs now, using a couple of technical engineer programs in avatar form. They will manifest it as a potent gas, which will be released when it is ready. If it gets us up here…” She let her sentence hang for dramatic effect, her AI coding telling her to keep the story as theatrical as possible, even with such high stakes.
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