“Nice job,” appears in front of me.
My breathing is erratic. I don't know if I should relax now that I'm away from the guard and the crowds, or panick because I'm in an even more dangerous area.
“This place is restricted,” I whisper through clenched teeth. “If I get caught-”
“You're a cyberterrorist now. Everywhere is restricted.”
The arrow points down the hall, to the right. I hustle past the lockers and turn into a doorway on the far end. I step on to a balcony that overlooks a large factory. Steam rises from vents all over the floor, masking the true size of the room. I can see large robotic arms picking up seven-foot long containers from a conveyor belt and loading them on to a train.
“What is this?”
The arrow continues to flash, pointing down a stairway that leads to the factory floor. I look over the railing, but I don't see anyone around, so I make my way over to one of the stacks. When I reach it, the arrow disappears.
“Open it,” the text reads.
“The container?”
There's no response, which I take as a confirmation. I search the outside of the container, and when I find the latch, I also find a label. There's a bunch of shipping information on it, but underneath it reads: Contents - Vitapaste.
I lift the latch and the top of the container flips open automatically. The substance fills the interior like a coffin of cold, gray goo.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Get inside.”
I look around, wondering again if this is all some kind of sick joke. Is it too late to back out? I stick my hand in the vitapaste, testing it. It's cold and grainy. I shiver.
“How am I supposed to breathe?”
“Get inside.”
I want to slap the words from my view, but instead I follow the directions. I have to accept this new reality. The text has gotten me this far and I have no other option. I'm past the point of no return. Far past it.
I step into the vitapaste, lifting the rest of my body over the edge. I lower myself into the gelatinous texture, inch-by-inch, trying to allow my body time to adjust to the temperature. It's no use. My teeth are already chattering. My muscles are shivering. The vitapaste spills over the side as my body displaces the volume.
A yellow light flashes on the wall next to the stack of containers. I hear a whistle. I lean up and look over the edge as one of the robotic arms swivels toward me. It reaches down and scans the container next to me. Once it reads the bar code on the label, it lifts the container from the floor and sets it on the next car of the train. When it releases the container, it turns back toward me. I grab the lid, slamming it shut on top of me.
I'm left in darkness. I can barely hear the outside, but soon enough the container lifts from the floor and slams on to the bed of the train. The vitapaste sloshes around on top of me. I wait in the silent, cold darkness for what feels like forever before I hear another alarm and the movement of the train.
“You did it,” the text reads.
“Yeah,” I say, spitting vitapaste from my mouth. “I'm in a coffin of vitapaste. This isn't exactly what you promised me, is it? I thought you were getting me back in to NextWorld.”
“The train will deliver you to a tower in the twenty-four million district. Old Mongolia.”
“Mongolia?” It's hard for me to comprehend the distance from my tower in Old Russia. “What's in Mongolia?”
“Your new E-Womb. It's time for us to meet.”
01000011
The train ride takes hours. I manage to sleep, but it's restless. All I dream about is Cyren, trapped in a world of empty blackness or swallowed by the virus, deleted from the world I'd have given anything to protect.
I'm angry because she should have trusted me. I'm angry because she should have given me a chance to come up with a plan. But then I fall in love with her all over again when I remember that everything she did was to save me. She put my life ahead of her own. They all did. The NPCs knew we were going to die. They knew it was only a matter of time. Who knows what would have happened if that virus deleted me? Would it have corrupted my nanomachines? DOTgov says that's impossible, they say NextWorld is perfectly safe, but I've already proven that wrong. What else are they lying about?
I'm woken from my dreams and nightmares as something lifts my cargo container from the train. It shakes and rumbles as it's set down, splashing the gray liquid around me. My fingers trace the inside edge of the container until I find a release lever. I throw the latch and the lid springs open. I suck in fresher air than the stagnant combination of the sweat and vitapaste aroma inside. My eyes blink a few times to adjust to the light, but when they do, I see the inside of another warehouse.
Huge stacks of vitapaste containers, like towers themselves, lay in rows as far as I can see. Robotic arms are sorting each container, setting them inside the tubes that will deliver the different assortment of nutrients to the tower rooms that require them.
I lift myself out of the container, the vitapaste making a sucking noise as it releases me from its viscous grasp. Some of the goo drips from my body in clumps, but most of it hangs on, stuck to my skin like dried clay.
I look around for a moment, lost in the hugeness of everything, but soon enough the glowing arrow appears in front of me.
“Almost there.”
It's simple, but encouraging. I have to get out of this place. The cold temperatures. The loud noises. The horrific smells. The bland tastes. The abrasive textures. The constant threat of someone finding me. I need an E-Womb. I need NextWorld. I need Cyren.
I slap my vitapaste-covered feet against the steel flooring of the warehouse, jogging past rows of containers and dodging the swinging robotic arms. I follow the arrow through the maze of containers until it reaches a far wall, but the arrow doesn't stop. It continues upward, running the height of the wall before streaming into another air duct near the sixty-foot tall ceiling.
When I get close to the wall, I search for steps, a ladder, or handholds, but there is nothing. The wall is sheer metal. It looks as if someone constructed it from a single sheet, devoid of seams or rivets.
“Now what?”
“Follow the arrow.”
Is the text trying to mock me?
“How am I supposed to walk up a wall?”
There's no reply.
“Are you just torturing me now?”
“No,” the text appears large in the center of my view. “I believe in you more than you do. I'm more confident than you that you can solve a puzzle this simple.”
I let out an exhausted breath and grumble to myself. No real words spin inside my throat, just an upset noise that mimics some kind of animal.
I'm angry because the text is right. I've grown soft and complacent. The game world was too easy. Maximum Level. Nearly every magic item. Now it's just me and the real world. No Level progression. No magic items. It's my own body. My own spindly muscles. My own soft flesh and brittle bones. The only thing I still have is my mind. That's stronger than any metal. Sharper than any blade. Faster than any bullet.
I scan the surroundings and see a robotic arm swing overhead. It picks up a container of vitapaste and sets it on a conveyor belt. Then it returns to the same stack of containers and grabs another. Each time, it just misses a second robotic arm reaching for a completely different stack. This stack is much higher, and this robotic arm swings past the air duct that my flashing arrow is pointing at. I watch the mechanical dance for a few moments, counting in my head, keeping beat with my foot.
When I have the pattern down, I wrap my hands around the edges of the vitapaste container next to me and scurry up the side of the stack. I'm only a few feet off the ground and already my arms are shaking, my legs quivering underneath me. They're tired. They threaten to give up and drop me to the floor where they can rest again, but my mind refuses to let them. I push myself past the point of exhaustion. Each time I lift a limb, I groan and scream, doing everything I can to elevate m
yself a few more feet. When I reach the top of the stack, I hook my jaw on the corner of the top container. It gives me a moment to rest before I get my elbow over the edge to lift the rest of my body.
I pant and wheeze. My chest rises and each time it does, my ribs want to shatter and burst through my skin. My lungs want to shrivel in to deflated bags of flesh. My arms twitch, my muscles torn inside. My legs ache with a cramped stiffness from overuse. I feel as if I may die right there, lost in the mechanical gears of the tower's inner workings.
But I don't die. I'm thrust back into movement when the robotic arm swings overhead and descends right at me. Its clawed hand opens to grab the container I'm laying on. I roll to the side before the palm of the claw crushes me, wrapping my arms around the metal beam that carries the container into the air.
When it reaches the apex of its movement, it comes to a sudden halt that shakes me so hard I nearly lose my grip. My mind holds strong, pushing my arms into whatever reserve of strength they might still hold. The metal arm pivots, swinging me and the container through the air. I squint my eyes, searching my surroundings for the other robotic arm, but when I find it, it's too late. The second robotic arm swings past at such a fast speed that it's already descending toward the next container.
I close my eyes and count, replaying the pattern that the robotic arms follow in my head. When I reach the count of forty-five, I let go, allowing the momentum of the swing to throw me into the open air. I open my eyes in time to slam into the second robotic arm and dig my fingers into an open tangle of cords. The arm swings and I dangle behind it, holding on with one hand. The cords pull loose with my weight hanging from them, but they catch at the last moment, providing me with the next seven seconds that I need.
I hit fifty-two in my mental countdown and I let go of the cords. My body is flung through the air and I strike the air duct hard. The covering caves in. My ankle slams into the edge of the opening and I tumble into the corridor.
When my eyes flutter open, the pain in my body alerts me to its presence. Blood trickles on to my foot. My ankle is throbbing. My head is pounding. My limbs feel like they're missing the bones inside. I'm sprawled on the floor of the air duct without the ability to move.
My nanomachines kick in, distributing painkillers to my ankle and head. They mend the open flesh on my ankle, but I'll still have a scar. They stimulate my muscles, helping me lift myself off the metal flooring and look around.
“Nice job,” appears in front of me, and the flashing arrow continues down the metal shaft.
I don't say anything. I keep moving before my mind can think about giving up. On my hands and knees, I move as fast as I can. I'm not sure how far I travel. I take an endless amount of lefts and rights and ups and downs through the maze of ventilation before the arrow stops over a single opening in the floor of the air duct. A bright circle is pulsating over the metal grate.
“This is it,” appears in front of me.
A sudden surge pushes me toward the opening. I peer through the grate and see a family tower room below me. Larger than my single room, it's made for two partners and a child.
“What are you waiting for?”
I bang my fists on the metal grate, but only manage to bend the metal slightly. I shift my body around in the ventilation shaft and slam my feet against the covering. It doesn't do anything to alleviate the pain in my ankle, but after six hits the metal grate still doesn't break free. I almost laugh when I consider my luck if I'm stopped this close to my destination.
That's when someone steps into view. I lurch backward, filled with panic at the sight, but the man below me reaches toward the ventilation grate. He releases some kind of fastening on the other side and removes the cover.
I'm a few feet away from the opening, but I'm frozen in place. I can't move, hoping with all my might that he didn't see me, didn't hear me.
“Arkade?”
The voice doesn't sound familiar.
“Arkade?” the person says again. “It's okay. You can come down.”
I move toward the opening and look down at the man below. He's smiling back at me. He offers me his hand. I'm still moving slowly, reaching out inch-by-inch toward him. I'm waiting for him to snag me and yank me from the shaft, only to put handcuffs on me, but none of that happens. The man grips on to me and lowers me to the floor. I scan the room for others, but no one else is there. I look up at the man. He's still smiling.
He must read the confusion on my face because he apologetically holds up his hands and says, “Sorry! You have no idea who I am, do you?”
“Were you the one sending me the text?”
The man tilts his head. Now he looks as confused as me. “No... I...” He smiles again and holds out his hand to greet me, “I'm Ekko's partner.”
The acknowledgment of the name floods through my entire body. I crumple to the floor, holding back my need to weep. The man crouches down next to me and wraps his arm around my shoulders.
“Hey, kiddo, it's okay. Everything is going to be okay.”
I rub my forehead and ask, “If it wasn't you that was sending me the text, then-”
“Not sure,” he says. “Ekko told me this morning that he got a message saying you'd be coming to visit. I have to admit, I thought you'd be using the door.”
“Where's Ekko?”
He points at one of the three E-Wombs and says, “Working. He's usually gone long hours so that we can afford to keep our family room until DOTgov renews our child license.”
I glance at the third E-Womb built into the wall.
“It's all yours,” he says, motioning to the machine. When I glance back at him with a confused look he says, “Ekko said you'd be pretty anxious to log-in.”
I struggle to stand up. I also struggle to make sense of the situation.
“Th-thank you.”
He gives me an even bigger smile and says, “You saved my partner's life. This is the least we can do for you.”
I step toward the E-Womb, unsure if my actions are inappropriate or rude. Am I supposed to say more to this person I've never met before. I look back at him, but he motions toward the machine again.
“What are you waiting for?”
I don't waste anymore time worrying about social interactions. I stick my finger into the small opening with the vitapaste sensor and wait for the door to open and offer me a tube of the gray goo. When it does, I squirt the entire tube into my mouth, letting the excess hang from the corners of my lips. I nearly choke trying to swallow it all, but once it's down, I open the E-womb next to me and crawl into the spherical chamber. I give a wave of thanks to Ekko's partner one last time as the door closes behind me. The interior lights turn on and the machine hums as the electrical heat cradles me.
“Log-in,” I say.
The white light flashes and I leave my body. I leave the pain, and the cold, and the weakness.
The pixels of NextWorld shimmer into view all around me, surrounding me with a view that comes into focus rather fast. I'm sitting on a wooden bench in the middle of a very plain, very empty park. Whoever designed it couldn't have spent more than an hour on it. Trees lacking any detail spot the landscape in patterned positions. The lawn is a solid green, without any actual blades of grass. The readouts in my view tell me I'm in DOTorg. The space is misspelled: Momm laand 43b. It's exactly the kind of place someone would overlook in a list, which makes me wonder if this series of indistinct design choices could be intentional.
When I hear someone approaching from behind, I spin into a defensive stance, forgetting I don't have any weapons or defenses in this world to protect me. Behind me there's an avatar I haven't seen in a long time. She's wrapped in a white kimono with yellow floral patterns. She's wearing her white hair in pigtails tied back with ribbons of the same yellow as the floral pattern. The only difference from the last time I saw her is the lack of a giant sword strapped to her back and the fact that her white face-paint is now marked in the shape of a skull.
Despite the m
enacing look, she smiles and says, “Welcome back, Cowboy.”
01000100
“Fantom?” I mumble the name with an equal mix of disbelief and hopefulness.
She smirks. “Not exactly.”
I open the social page attached to her avatar and see the name “Rayth.”
“Fantom's a wanted criminal, yo. I can't be walkin' around usin' a flagged account.” She taps her finger on my avatar's chest as she says, “And neither can you.”
I look down at myself and see the avatar of a teenage boy. It's well-designed, but it isn't mine.
“I didn't exactly have time to clean your old account. I was a little busy trackin' you down and hackin' into your nanomachines. When I found out Ekko was still hangin' on to his son's old E-Womb, waitin' for their child license, well... It's sad, don't get me wrong, but it's good for you. The E-Womb was wiped when his son died, which made it easy for me to tag one of my ghost accounts on to the log-in functions.”
I look down at my hand, waiting to see the flicker of bandwidth lag that Ekko suffered from, but nothing happens.
“I thought Old Mongolia's connections were toast. Outdated. But I'm not experiencing any lag.”
“It isn't the infrastructure, yo,” Fantom says. “It's DOTgov limitin' their access because they ain't providin' credits like the other countries. They're doin' the same with North America.” She leans back with a smug grin. “But that ain't nothin'. If I can hack your nanomachines, you think a bandwidth cap is goin' to stop me?”
“I still don't understand how you could hack my nanomachines. No one can do that. I mean, how is that even possible?”
“I guess I'm just that good,” she says, shrugging her shoulders and doing a poor job of looking humble.
“Being able to do something like that is... I mean, the privacy laws that you're breaking are-”
“Breakin' the law? I ain't exactly worried about that, Cowboy. DOTgov didn't protect us when we were stuck in that game, and they ain't fessin' up to the error either. So if I want to spend my time findin' the flaws in NextWorld, the stuff they ain't tellin' us about, then I'm figurin' there are worse ways to spend my time. Think about what I found. Hackin' nanomachines? I might be usin' it for good, but in the wrong hands? That could be seriously dangerous, yo.”
The NextWorld 02: Spawn Point Page 10