by Luke Isaacs
Nobody argued with her logic; only magical weapons could even dent the armor and the flesh of the world’s snake. Rick took a deep breath then hurled a ball of fire at the wall, following it fast with a shot of Chill to the wall. Dana stood beside him and cast Spirit Shatter at it while Mario began casting boosts on both of them.
The wall turned red and blue alternatingly as it was hammered with the bolts of fire and ice, and every time Dana cast her spells it shook for a moment.
They stopped to munch on Blue Finger leaves to replenish their Mana, then resumed their casting.
As the armor finally fell, they heard the roar of the dragon. It had come after them.
“I think the dragon is coming,” said Edward unnecessarily. Rick wondered why Rania didn’t hit him with a ‘Captain Obvious’ comment.
“The attack on Jörmungandr attracted it to our location,” said Mario. “We have to really intensify our attack on the flesh faster then.”
He cast Corrupt and Degenerate at the wall of flesh exposed by Dana and Rick. Rick and Dona intensified their attacks too, and as the roars of the dragon drew closer, the flesh started to fall away slowly.
“Duck!” Jones shouted at them as the dragon breathed a fireball in their direction.
Everybody jumped away from their earlier standing position, throwing themselves to the sides of the wound in Jörmungandr’s body. In an amazing stroke of luck, the dragon’s fireball hit the exposed flesh, melting away the last of it and revealing a path to the other side.
“Quick! Everybody through the hole!” Edward urged.
They rushed towards the hole just as the dragon shot a fireball directly at them.
24
Since the arrest of the Valhalla Greatest team and the suspension of the game, Yee had been making one call after another; he knew something was not right.
His own intelligence sources informed him that Jones was a UN agent with high standing and that cheating was too small an offense for her repertoire. He was also informed that she used subterfuge on many occasions to pull out bigger fish using smaller players as bait.
He called Mehemet, thanking him for the performance of this team and asking if he knew anything of Jones.
“She is not somebody you would like to get on the wrong side of,” Mehemet answered in his usual leisurely manner, one that Yee knew was completely fake. “Just for your knowledge, she was the one who took Marcus The Blue down.”
In the bowels of VNet, some names spelled fear, others spelled caution, but Marcus The Blue had spelled fear, power, and caution all at once.
Marcus had been a very powerful crime lord dealing in altered state AIs, a commodity sought after by the most elite. Altered state AIs could not be tracked over VNet and would never deny any order however decadent it was. These were hard to come by and precious to those who could afford the exorbitant price tag exacted by Marcus and his team of blue coders, the term given to coders who do illegal and illicit work.
These AIs were also extremely illegal and possessing them was a major offense. Creating them, however, was a whole other level of criminality. Altering existing AIs or making them from scratch was the crime that brought most attention from law enforcement of every level, and one of the few the UN went after vigorously.
Marcus had been in the top tier of the underworld pyramid, so, when he eventually fell, anybody who was involved or even just interested in the underworld, heard the echoes of his crash.
“She was the one who took Marcus down?” Yee was now scared. “How did she do that?”
“She arrested in a very public fashion some customers of Marcus,” Mehemet sipped on his infamous tea and continued, “and as Marcus was too full of his own status, he never saw it coming. She traced the whole thing back to him through middlemen, coders, and his own executors.”
“I see,” Yee’s mind was racing. “Can you trace her whereabouts right now?”
“I can,” Mehemet smiled. “I can even provide you with limited access to her VNet testing grounds.”
“VNet testing grounds?” Yee asked. “What do you mean?”
“She has control of some prime real estate in the bowels of VNet,” Mehemet continued smiling. “And out of curiosity, my men traced it to the UN, so, they installed some wormholes to gain some minor influence on the place in case one of our own was taken there.”
“I need access to this wormhole.” Yee was eager and the smile of Mehemet grew wider. “And at least two of your best executers outside of that test ground place to help my operative in a job.”
“I am willing to do that,” Mehemet said and took another sip of his tea before continuing. “I am not even going to ask any details about your little job with Jones, but,” he stopped smiling, “I demand immediate payment before I move my men to give you access to the wormhole.”
“No more shares!” Yee snapped.
“Nothing of the like,” Mehemet said quietly. “Your company developed a new security protocol, it is still a prototype, and you have access to it,” he took a sip of his tea, “I want it.”
“No can do,” Yee shook his head in denial. “This piece of coding tech is under heavy security, being involved with its theft would be known before I even contact you to deliver it.”
“You don’t need to steal it,” Mehemet replied. “You will find in your Vmail box a single line of code, just attach it to the protocol and my men will replicate it on our servers in no time.”
Yee hesitated, but he thought of Marcus The Blue, who was put into a 200-year artificial coma by UN orders two years ago. He feared a similar fate if his involvement with the electrical surge was found out. Jones had to die.
“Ok, give me a minute,” Yee paused the call as he navigated VNet to the virtual company holdings and entered the lab where the new security protocol was being tested.
“Hello Mr. Yee,” the security AI welcomed him. “I hope you enjoy your visit.”
“Thank you,” Yee said as he approached the test pad for the protocol. He quietly attached the tiny code bit to it and left.
“Ok, it is done,” Yee resumed the call with Mehemet. “Now the location, two men and the access.”
“Of course.” Mehemet sent the agreed upon data to Yee’s secured Vmail.
Yee ended the call and started another.
“Lara, I need you again. Meet my men at the intersection of 56 with 78 and 91 blocks and await my instructions.”
“The usual pay?” she asked him in a silky voice.
“With a bonus,” Yee answered her. “You know some AI coding, right?”
“Baby, I was bested only by the late Marcus The Blue, what do you need?”
“Some control over AI monsters to kill a woman, by the name of Dahlia Jones.”
“Consider it done.”
25
Jamal Yu had pushed his influence to its limit, but his efforts were finally coming to fruition.
After the discovery of his son’s deception of five years, he had his electronic logging signal on continuous tracking by his coders. It was this very thing that enabled him to trace his son to a physical location outside the boundaries of the city.
So, while all signs of his son’s presence on VNet were currently encrypted by the meanest piece of coding he’d seen in his entire career, now at least he had a physical address. He mobilized his own security team and they would arrive at the spot within the hour.
He was going to get to the bottom of this, no matter what the consequences.
*
The Valhalla Greatest team along with Dahlia Jones stepped out of the flesh of the Jörmungandr into a desolate street that resembled the older parts of VNet. They looked around in surprise.
“What the…?” said Rick.
“Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore,” said Dana.
The younger amongst them had no idea what that meant. Jones did.
“Yep,” Jones said, as she straightened her jacket. “And I have no idea where we are.”
“I
think I know,” Rania said to the surprise of almost everybody except Jones, who knew almost everything about Rania’s night adventures. “I think down to the right is the bit market.”
The bit market was a collector’s dream come true. Old code snippets, glitchy codes of mega-games and productivity suites, experimental codes for integration into dying single-player games, older single-player games that were no longer supported by their producers and, of the course, the ancient non-VR ready games of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
It was also the underground market for illegal code and hacking utilities.
As the group advanced towards the market, three figures in hoodies appeared and started to shoot sizzling bolts of energy at them.
“What in Helheim is that?” Rania called as they dodged the fire from the three strangers and took cover behind the corner of a building.
“Surge guns,” Jones said. “If you are shot here, you’re dead here and in real-life.”
A bolt hit the bricks above her head, sending a shower of dust and chips of brick over them. Dana raised her hand and tried to push Terror the assailants’ way, but she was too exhausted from the earlier fight and could only manage to give them a slight Discomfort.
“I got this,” Edward said and emerged from their hiding place. He shouted at the three hooded figures, “Fear me, mortals!”
The moment the assailants heard Edward’s booming spell, two dropped their guns and ran away, while the third fired two shots in his direction before fleeing with the others.
Edward turned to the others with a wide smile on his face, then he collapsed. The others ran to his aid and crouched over his downed avatar.
“What’s wrong?” asked Rania. “He’s not killed in game or low on Health.”
Suddenly Edward disappeared and one by one the rest of the team and Jones were also pulled from the game.
*
Rick was the first to orient himself and slipped out of his suit. He ran to the hanging body of Edward and pulled him out of the hanging cables before easing him to the floor. In the room’s doorway appeared two uniformed officers and an angry Jamal Yu.
Jones unsuited fast and ran towards Rick and Edward. Yu also rushed over his look of ire now one of concern.
“Clear the way,” said Jones, and gently removed Rick’s arm from the supine Edward. She checked his pulse then pulled a small atomizer from her jacket pocket and squirted it under Edward’s nose. The young teen moaned a little, then opened his eyes.
“Oh, thank God you are ok,” Rick said, putting his hand on Edward’s shoulder. He grabbed his arm to help him up, but it was flaccid and heavy. Edward’s head rolled on his shoulders, and his eyes widened.
“I can’t feel my body!” he cried as his father knelt by his side. “Daddy! I can’t feel my body!”
PART FOUR – THE TRAP SPRUNG
26
It could be argued that Jamal Yu had many flaws. He was seen by many as unsympathetic, over-ambitious, and ruthless, yet he always tried to hide these traits, the very ones that made him a successful entrepreneur, from his family. Unfortunately, they were integral to his personality, which might explain his distance from his late wife and son. The only way to hide them was to withdraw into the shadows of family life.
It also explained his strict rules regarding his son’s VNet presence. By distancing Edward from his own dark world, he also managed to alienate the boy in the process.
Edward had come very close to dying in the simulation and would be in a medically induced stasis for the coming month as nanites worked to fix his fried spinal cord. It hadn’t killed him, yet he was paralyzed from the neck down. A quadriplegic. If he were not the son of the all-powerful and extremely rich Jamal Yu, it would have been a permanent condition.
Knowing that his son would eventually heal was not enough to cool the desire for vengeance boiling inside of Jamal and waiting made it worse. In business and in life he was used to punishing wrongdoers immediately and with extreme prejudice. Even when he was in the wrong, there was always an underling who was available to take the blows of his failures and misfires.
Since he couldn’t find the culprit of the attack on his son with his own resources or those of the UN, he had to vent his anger somehow. So, he limited the access of the Valhalla Greatest to VNet to a minimum and suspended their accounts on GodsRealm, making the completion of the championship an impossibility for the time being, much to the disappointment and ire of the fans.
As the days rolled by, Jamal nursed his fury until he could locate a deserving target. To take his mind off his troubles, he decided to go back to doing what he enjoyed most. Coding. After his nightly visit to Edward, he sat to code a new game, one he’d been formulating for months. He even had a name for it. The Last. If it went as he imagined, its features included an extensive backstory and backdrop for its events and the most advanced AI NPCs and monsters. It would make GodsRealm look like a kid’s sandbox.
He didn’t really have a driving reason to develop it, or even why he was working on it without the aid of his coding army. The fact was it took his mind off things and the more he worked on it, the more passionate he became. He coded like there was no tomorrow.
*
Another person angered and puzzled by the attack, not as powerful as Jamal but powerful enough, was Dahlia Jones. She couldn’t find any answers, and neither could her superiors or coworkers.
According to Central Control’s record of the simulation, everything appeared normal and they insisted that Jones had responded to their frequent check-in calls, something that the testimonies of Jones and the Valhalla Greatest team disproved. As far as Jones was concerned, Central Control’s records were not related to the truth of the events in the simulation at all and could only be the result of hacking.
No, the data recorded wouldn’t lie, unless an extremely powerful hacker with impossible proximity to their own servers in real life had coded his or her way to blind the Control from the events unfolding in the simulation, right down to sending the fake recorded messages in Jones’ voice to the Central.
Jones and the UN agents couldn’t even pinpoint an attack on their servers, so finding a trail to follow was next to impossible. Moreover, since the entire crime was perpetrated on VNet, Jones would have to go through the VNRS to try to find out anything that occurred that day in their logs, a process that would take a team of coders at least a month.
This slowed Jones’ investigation of the suspicious ‘super’ powers that the team had shown during the simulation, another aspect of their interactions that were never recorded by the UN Control. It was very suspicious. Nevertheless, Jones pushed this to the back of her mind for the time being until she could work out who the failed assassins that attacked them were.
*
While Jamal and Jones were hunting their quarry, Rick called on the group to meet in real life for similar reasons. Their VNet access was too limited and too surveilled for the time being to think of meeting online.
A local café, considered to be old or quaint by many, was the place of choice for the meeting between Rick and the other three members of Valhalla Greatest.
Rick arrived first since the café was practically on the roof of his residential building, then Mario came, followed by Dana and last of all was Rania. The young girl immediately started to complain about meeting in real life.
“I had to walk nearly four miles!” she said in exasperation before slumping at the table next to Rick. “In open air! It’s dangerous for your health; you know!”
“We had no choice,” Rick answered calmly. “We are restricted to 10 hours of VNet access with zero credit balance except for ordering entertainment clips and food. Plus, we’re being watched no doubt, and we can’t even access our own accounts in the game. We need to plan our next move.”
“We know all of this,” Rania said, stealing his gaze with her big brown eyes. He found her beauty very disconcerting. “But what can we do?”
“Rania is rig
ht, dear,” Dana exhaled. “The Jamal Yu and his ilk are virtual gods in our world, and we just can’t fight a man like him.”
“True,” said Mario. “I understand he’s shocked and angry about his son’s injury, but we certainly didn’t deserve any of it. It affected us as much as it did him,” he paused for a second then continues, “Edward is as much family to us as he is to him, maybe even more so.”
“And don’t forget the comas. It made us closer than family,” Rania said, and it brought a smile to everybody’s faces.
“OK, let’s put some order to our thoughts then, shall we?” Rick said to of agreement. “First we need to see Edward, which might not be so easy.”
“It might be,” Rania looked at him in uncertainty, “he already sent me a Vmail for a place and date to meet.”
“Why didn’t you say something earlier?” Mario asked her. Rick also looked put out. “And why did he only contact you?”
“Because he studies in the same VNet university with me,” Rania explained. “It was safer, because his message would be seen as just another study commentary to another student.”
Rick visibly cooled down and said, “This is good news. So, when and where do we meet him?”
“Remember him trying to convince us to have an HQ in VNet on some virtual real estate he wanted to buy for us?” Rania’s eyes glowed.
“Yeah, and we refused,” Mario smiled, “because we thought his fortune was illegal and that he procured it through hacking.”
“Well, he did buy it,” Rania said excitedly, “almost a year ago he bought a full terabyte in the outskirts of Central City, developed by his own code and, according to him, it’s as impenetrable as, if not more than, his father’s own company on VNet.”
Central City was the hub of VNet, a vast virtual space spanning millions of terabytes. Even real estate on the outskirts would cost a small fortune to buy and develop.