GodsRealm- Betrayal

by Luke Isaacs

  Silence blanketed the room for some moments. The tension was tangible, and they didn’t need the talents of Edward to sense Mario’s overwhelming distress by the end of his confession.

  “You were never a chicken, Mario,” Dana declares suddenly in a breaking voice. “The day Edward was shot just proves what I am saying. Running away from death and being disenchanted with strife is not cowardice, even if the buffoons in the military say it is. It’s survival and self-preservation… it’s what makes you human.”

  Everyone agreed and Mario sat back and nodded slightly.

  “This is getting too serious,” Rania declares. “So, I’ll go next. You remember how I always took Edward, Mark being hackers lightly? Well, the reason is, I am a hacker myself. Not only am I a hacker, my folks also are. At least they used to be, and that’s how they got their coding gigs here. Back in our home country in New Korea, they were so poor, that hacking was the only means to live another day. They were about to give me up when VNRS caught them. Imagine the Valhalla Greatest without me!”

  “My turn then,” Dana coughs. “When my career was destroyed by Alena the first AI entertainer, and my boyfriend, who happened to be the father of my son, left me, I was in the dumps. I had a baby who would cost a fortune to bring up, at least as I saw it at that time, and I was broke, with no prospect, no education and nobody to back me up.”

  “It was the early thirties, where some jobs in real life still existed, but I had only one fit for my magnificent skill-set – entertaining people. I was desperate and clueless, so the first man to knock on my door, got me body and soul just because he gave me enough money to survive with my son.”

  Her avatar fidgeted but her voice was clear and steady as she went on.

  “Eventually he handed me to another and then another and another. I became a very busy girl, visited by at least three men a day. I was pretty, young and had some bygone celebrity status hanging to me, and this was desirable to a lot of men who were miserable in their marriages or just wanted a piece of a falling star. Anyway, it worked, for two whole years. In 2033 I was arrested for unlicensed sex work, and I served for six months in ComSE. This was a turning point because they took me in after the sentence and I have been working there ever since. They even took care of my son as I served the sentence. I’m not proud of it, it’s been a dirty secret for so long, but I would rather share with you guys than anybody on the planet because I trust nobody as I trust you.”

  Rania jumped towards Dana and hugged her.

  “I know all about desperation. It probably would have been my only career if my parents had not been caught when they were.”

  Mario spoke after another moment of silence.

  “Dana, if you had to sell your body to survive, there is no shame in that,” he went to her and grasped her hand. “No shame at all. Don’t think of what you had to do as anything but a means to live. It’s not the worst way to do it.”

  “I think I am the worst of you all,” said Rick, with a labored sigh. “All of what you mentioned isn’t as bad as what I did. I think I sent my own parents into servitude. When I was eight years old, I think I glitched their accounts on VNet by accident. I was playing on one of the early VNet viral games that had a lot of microtransactions, and I think I withdrew around 10,000 DC in the game using my parents’ account as I played. When the police came and took them, I didn’t tell anyone that it was me. My grandmother always thought they were put into servitude for their credit history,” he starts to sob softly, “she thought that because my father paid a few hundred DCs to upgrade their ration tier and the medical care of my grandmother, that they got into debt and ended up in servitude. It was me. I caused it, not her stupid medical! And she still suffers because of me, because I’m too much of a coward to tell her the truth. I’m an evil asshole, none of you harmed loved ones as I have.”

  Dana and Rania rose and approached him gently.

  “You were an eight-year-old kid, Rick. You shouldn’t carry this guilt – you didn’t know.”

  She patted his head softly. Rania stepped up.

  “Hey weird boy,” he raised his head to face her. “You have been living with the guilt for 10 years, isn’t it time to let go of it?”

  He looks at her round brown eyes and is speechless for a moment; then he gathers his courage.

  “I will never forgive myself, and when I find my parents…” he wipes his eyes and the tears disappear immediately, an aspect of VNet to save graphics load on the computing core. “Even if they forgive me, I won’t. I will live with this guilt for the rest of my life.”

  Rania suddenly leaned to him, held his head and kissed him deeply. The kiss lasted for some seconds until Edward cheers them loudly. Rania ended the kiss only to be surprised when he held her to him. The kiss lasted a few seconds more before he finally let go of her.

  “Don’t take it hard on yourself, kid,” Mario said as he approached, thankfully not mentioning the lingering virtual kiss. “Nobody here isn’t a screw-up, well, maybe except Edward.”

  Before Edward could respond, Rick jumped up, almost knocking Rania over in his rush to approach the younger man.

  “Edward before you say anything,” he said fast. “My research did get some results, and they concern your father.”

  29

  Jones logged in again for the 20th time in the last week. Again, she spawned at the same point where the three assailants attacked her and the Valhalla Greatest team, eventually crippling the Yu boy.

  Every time, she put out tracers and electronic signature sensors across every possible inch of the area, and every time it garnered her nothing but frustration.

  The other UN agents saw what she was doing as utterly useless since the trail had grown cold and more recent traces would interfere with her search. She countered this line of logic with the fact that the area where they were attacked was remote and access since had been restricted to UN agents. The fact that she had found zero traces in the almost three weeks she had been looking proved their argument didn’t hold water.

  The problem was of course, the lack of any traces defied logic. Even the traces of her and the Valhalla Greatest team were gone.

  She determined there could only be one of three reasons for this. The first was data corruption in the matrix of this piece of VNet code. That theory had taken some time to eliminate, but two days ago the VNRS sent her back the result of their own analysis of the code for the area and it proved it wasn’t corrupted.

  The second was the possibility of an active line of code running in the background of the structure of the area, erasing all activity in it constantly. Since it would take a huge team of coders and a vast amount of time to go through the living code, line by line, to find the intruder, she had to leave this to be proven later if she failed to find another solution.

  The third and last theory was the one that kept Dahlia Jones up at night. The possibility that someone in the agency was sabotaging the packaged codes to nullify any results and return only zeros. This possibility was most frightening because it meant that she was working with a traitor; someone who in turn was working for whatever agency or entity was behind the whole incident.

  She couldn’t help but wonder about the VNet creepypasta/ urban legend about the vengeful modified human AI. It was said to have augmented accomplices all over the world. The unexplained erasures and the ambush itself were sophisticated, and the more she thought about it, the more she feared she was in the center of something much bigger than she could handle.

  It was time for a different strategy. A little subterfuge of her own to see who… or what she could shake out of the trees.

  *

  “Your father was one of three people betting heavily on the Thugs,” Rick explained. “But only he out of the three big bettors, also bet big amounts against us winning.”

  “How big?” Edward demanded.

  “One million DC.”

  “You’re crazy,” Rania said heatedly. “You want us to believe that Jam
al Yu almost killed his only son and heir?”

  “No, I didn’t say that at all,” Rick said in a sharp voice. “What I said was that he was one of three betting on a team that by any rights should have never even qualified.”

  “But he bet against us?!” Edward moaned.

  “Yes, he did,” Mario said emotionlessly. “When he didn’t know that his son was an actual member of the Valhalla Greatest team.”

  “Edward, I’m really sorry,” Rick approached the anguished man. “Mario is right though, he bet from the first round of the championship, and everybody knows that you can’t just withdraw a bet. It has to be played through until the event is finished.”

  “Yes, Edward, honey,” Dana approached Edward. “I don’t think he’s involved in the attack against us, but I think he knows some inside information about the Thugs. And if he knows that, he might be able to work out who caused our coma and what happened to you.”

  “And what am I supposed to do?” Edward said savagely. “Confront him and break my already tattering relationship with him?”

  “No,” said Rick. “Don’t do that, but something I read in your files might actually help us.”

  “What?” Edward asked in a weary voice.

  “Your father set the security of his own company vaults to your biometrics – an approved account to access in case anything happened to him. You are able to access all the data inside.” He takes a deep breath before continuing. “This might give us a solid clue as to why he bet on the Thugs and who attacked us.”

  “So, I have to allow you to incapacitate my father so I can access his data?” Edward was charged, and his friends began to shrink back. All except Rick. “You want me to turn against the single living family member that I have, just to satisfy a stupid theory of yours?”

  Edward was glowing, a strange glow that seemed to suck all the light from the room, something like the event horizon around a black hole. It was so strong it started to disrupt the code of the room itself.

  Rick stood in front of him calmly.

  “You are angry, but you’re not really angry at me,” he took a breath, fighting the waves of terror that washed over him. “You are angry at your father, for his distancing himself from you and your mother. You are angry at how uncaring he was with you when she died. But ultimately you are angry at yourself, angry because you think you can’t meet his high expectations.”

  The storm emanating from Edward grew stronger and Dana moaned from the corner of the room where she knelt in fear. Rania wailed as the room dimmed as the code of lighting failed.

  “Worst of all, you are angry at yourself because you consider us a family that is far closer to you than your father ever was or will be.”

  Edward grabbed Rick by the neck, about to crush it, but Rick reached out with his arms to encircle the younger man’s avatar in a deep embrace that was more dangerous than anything he’d ever done. As he touched the body of Edward, he felt his own mind switching off, like the lights in a house, and was suddenly certain that he would die in real life as well.

  Then as fast as it started, the storm ebbed, and the light came back to the room. Dana, Rania, and Mario, who all huddled in the furthest corner, saw the big man in the embrace of the smaller man sobbing silently and wretchedly.

  “It is ok, Edward,” Rick said softly into the shoulder of the younger man. “It’s ok; I’ll try my best to do what needs to be done without costing you or your father. I lost mine and I would never allow my brother to lose his.”

  Edward finally let go of Rick.

  “Please don’t send him into servitude.”

  “I won’t do anything like that,” Rick said. “Everything that has to be done, we’ll do together. We’ll protect your father even if he was the one behind all of this.”

  “But if he was,” Edward now stood a few feet away from Rick, “do you think we can actually face him?”

  “Are you for real?!” Rania shouted as she stood up. “You pushed two-” then she decided against bragging, “-three of the finest and most powerful players on God’s Realm to cower in terror and you are asking can we face him!?”

  “I guess we can,” Rick said. “You’ll turn 18 in two days, that’s when the instructions of your father are activated, and that’s when we have to act.”

  “But we won’t harm him, right?” Edward asked.

  “No,” said Rick. “We’ll incapacitate him by using a very old and not much used virus through VNet.”

  “Which one?” Mario asked him as he gingerly approached.

  “The Stasis Can,” Rick announced.

  30

  The two days passed, and Jones was out in the real-life slums of the city. The places that were never rebuilt after the war or were deemed too contaminated by either chemical or biological agents to be salvageable. All these slums, of course, were above ground; the one she was going to was the tallest building in the city at 138 meters above sea level.

  The slums don’t have verified VNet access — no InstaFood machines, no luxuries at all. There is also no police presence. Police wouldn’t enter it even if they were paid top dollar. Fear of contamination was, of course, the main reason for this, but coupled with no VNet link for backup, no VNet controlled power grid to cut off the power from the pursued subject, and no Grid Lock gates to section off parts of the slum, patrolling there would be a virtual death sentence.

  Dahlia was not on the way to her first dance though, for a long time she had maintained a cover alias in the slums to be able to gain unlawful access to the VNet.

  Her plan was risky, even if rather simple: she would buy early generation primitive tracers and sensors, log in through an account that would never be under the jurisdiction of the UN or anybody else, thus if there were a mole at UN Control, she would bypass them altogether.

  The only problem was, these accounts were a one-time only with a high risk of regular surge attacks to their users. This put her real life at risk while she was hooked into VNet.

  She suspected she had a few hours of access to determine if the reason for the sensor failure was a mole at Control before her alias account got tracked and targeted for illegal entry into VNet.

  She entered an elevator that looked deceivingly damaged and inoperable, slid out her real-life DC card to show the hidden camera that she meant business, and stood in the middle of the elevator waiting for the response.

  It happened in less than 10 seconds. The broken door of the elevator closed smoothly, and the elevator started to ascend. It stopped at floor 32, a significant number for most occupants of the slums since it was the year that marked the end of their existence as law-abiding citizens of the 21st century and turned them into refugees and rejects of society.

  Dahlia wore a revealing blue dress; her cover identity was a high-level prostitute for the monied denizens of the underground city. She walked out of the elevator in slow, self-assured stepped towards door number 325.

  The goons in front of the door recognized her immediately. The bigger one gave her an oily smile and looked her up and down with greedy eyes.

  “What brings you back Elena?” he asked.

  “Let me pass Mustafa if Chen knew you were delaying me for your own pleasures,” she gave a seductive smile, “he would be pissed.” She reached between her breasts and the big man’s eyes widened. She pulled out an InstaFood capsule and, while not what he was lusting after; he took it gratefully. “A tip for being a good boy.”

  Mustafa grabbed the capsule quickly and hid it in the various layers of his clothing. A capsule like the one she gave him was worth at least 20 DCs, and that was a lot more than the average daily income of any denizen of the slum tower. He smiled a disgusting yellow-toothed smile and signaled to his colleague to open the door.

  “Who am I to stand between the boss and his meat?” He said, and let her pass inside.

  The apartment behind the door was a safety nightmare. Cables of various colors and thicknesses ran all over the place, along the floors, up th
e walls and jostled around monitors hung from the ceiling in precarious positions. Several large computing units of various vintage and power were at the hubs of the cables and monitors. In and a part of the left wall of the apartment was one of the older rigid model VNet suits. It operated without a half gravity pod yet had other features that the newer models lacked, anonymous log in for example. Beside it on a stool sat Chen Min, the best coder in the world according to his claims, or at least the best this side of the law.

  He was soldering an interface card, so totally lost in concentration that he jumped when Dahlia spoke.

  “Hello Chen, old friend.” As she was actually in his private space, she dropped the whore act altogether, and a genuine smile played across her face.

  “Dahlia, you rascal!” He jumped up to hug her. “Where have you been?”

  “Doing the UN’s work of course,” she hugged him back and smiled, “who else would do it?”

  “Sit, have some tea then.”

  He pointed to a plastic countertop balanced between new stacks of electronic boards and interfaces.

  “No time,” she sighed. “I need to use Delila.”

  He looked her over critically.

  “You could have gone to Raafat or Vladimir, yet you came here, to the most expensive log-in in the slums?”

  “I’m after something or someone big,” she said in a strong tone. “This is why only Delila will do.”

  “Someone like Markus?” he laughed at the name.

  “You got a healthy dose of vengeance on that guy, why mention him?” she asked in amusement.

  “Because you have a poor memory, dear friend,” he smiles wide. “It was the last time you used Delila.”

  “Really? I must have grown old then.” She smiled slyly.

  “How many hours?” he moved towards the suit and started to adjust its straps to fit Dahlia’s body.

  “As much as you can give me, I need enough time to get to the bottom of something big that I can’t even tackle through Control.” She stripped off her own dress and stepped to enter in the suit.