by Hugo Huesca
So, modern mindjacks let you play at your leisure while being aware of your surroundings.
At first, it was clunky, but the brain adapted quickly. Unless something interesting was happening in the real world, I could play Rune with perfect immersion.
Other people, like Van, made an art out of micro-managing real and virtual world at the same time.
It was sometimes a bit off-putting, to be honest. Like she was two people at once.
“You need my help? That’s new.”
“Well, our first bait-girl got eaten by a raptor and respawned two hours away from the Solar System, so…”
I sighed. “You need new bait? Damn it, I should have seen that coming.”
“Yup.” Pause. “Now, what are you waiting for? It’s Jurassic Park again all up in this bitch of a planet.”
“LANGUAGE!” came Mom’s voice from the kitchen.
“Sorry!” Van and I said automatically.
“Well, I was planning on logging on anyway. But if I die, you’re paying for any lost items.”
She nodded, clearly distracted, and her attention returned to what was happening in-game. I glanced briefly at her screen and saw a pterodactyl descend upon a group of mid-tier geared players, evade their frantic shooting, and carry a scientist in a dirty lab coat up into the air. Van shot frantically at the monster while sprinting for cover.
Duty calls, I thought as I quickly walked over to my room and towards my own mindjack. Something was true about Rune Universe—the adventure didn’t wait for you. If you waited too long, the adventure liked to come to you and punch you in the mouth.
CHAPTER FOUR
Escape from Dinosaur Island
My Visage Engine mindjack waited for me in its place of honor, the plastic nightstand that, along with my bed, constituted the entire furniture of my tiny bedroom. It was the same mindjack I’d used a year ago, the only “update” being the button near it’s temple. Formerly, it used to be a quick-video button, but now Roscoe had rerouted it to connect the mindjack (and Francis) to a nearby network. It was a crude patchwork that, so far, we only had gotten to work on my phone, but in theory could work with any smart appliance.
Like a fridge, if I could somehow convince Francis to make me a sandwich.
The bedroom was tiny, but I had slept in the living room of the last place. As far as I was concerned, this room was a palace.
If the FBI was trying to mess with our heads by making us live here, they had missed the ball, hard.
I held the mindjack and sat on the edge of the bed. For extended periods of time in game, it was best to lie down on a bed. You could technically play while standing up or going to the bathroom, but imagine what would happen if you fell down in-game, or someone tackled you. No amount of security measures would prevent you from making a fool out of yourself and falling to the floor.
Unless you were Van Dorsett, who managed to carry normal conversations while fighting prehistoric monsters.
The mindjack felt light and sturdy in my hand. When it was turned off, everything was black, like I was wearing a tiny sensory deprivation tank. A few seconds after I turned it on (so it could warm up the OS) the cramped darkness was replaced by a limitless white expanse.
I was standing in the middle of my mindjack’s desktop. I had installed it myself. Instead of the last one—a tasteless mansion—it was the small and clinical interior of the Nostromo, the ship from the movie Alien. There were thousands of Internet desktops free to download, made by the fans of movies and books just like that one. I loved it and changed the thing—nothing more complex than a 3D wallpaper—like crazy. Last week I had used the interior of the ship from Matrix, the Nebuchadnezzar.
It was fun and looked nice, but at the end of the day I only spent like 10 seconds at a time in the wallpaper.
The spaceship’s floating icon next to the 3D rendition of the Alien mouth-breather was where the good stuff was at. That was Rune.
I walked toward the icon and pressed it. The Alien mouth-breather scratched against my leg like a puppy. A confirmation prompt appeared in front of me.
Begin Deep Dive Immersion?
You bet.
Welcome to Rune Universe. Connecting to the game’s servers…
For a while, I had hated this game. It reminded me of everything that was wrong with my life at the time, of everything wrong with myself and the people I chose to surround myself with.
It reminded me of Kipp Patel and how he had died the same day I went to steal information from some random nightclub.
Now, ironically, I had better reasons than ever to hate Rune Universe. It turned out to not be a game at all. Perhaps, the extraterrestrial Signal that controlled the game from behind the curtain was more intelligent than it let on. Perhaps, it had manipulated me into taking the decisions I had taken. It was indeed directly responsible for the danger my family and I were in.
A good portion of the world had clamored for the game to be shut down. Understandably so.
And still… still, the feeling of being beamed down to this virtual universe made me feel giddy with excitement. It felt like coming home after a long day of work and discovering someone had thrown you a surprise party for no reason at all.
Perhaps, it was the Signal messing with my brain. Perhaps, it was the fact that I’d met my best friends in there, that I had seen sights poets would kill to see, that I had flown across stars so bright and so immense they made you cry and laugh and you could never explain how, no matter how much you fought to find the words.
Or perhaps, I just liked to kill virtual mutants.
My avatar—Cole Picard, named after the famous leader of Star Trek, the New Generation—materialized inside the cabin of my ship, The Diplomatic Immunity. It was a modern cabin, original to Rune and not based on any franchise. It had a lot of holographic screens, beeping computers, and several seats for the crew.
The pilot’s controls were the oldest-looking part of it, an analog flight-stick modeled after the old flight simulators that Kipp and I had played when we were kids. I walked over to them and sat in my pilot’s seat with a satisfied smile. Last time I had flown the Teddy, I had evaded the pursuit of ten Paladin Defense Force’s fighters.
“It’s good to see you again, Master Cole,” came a quiet, cheery voice from the speakers of the cabin. “I presume, from the fact that you’re not dead, that your pursuits in the other world were successful, or at the very least, not disastrous. That makes me happy.”
“Hey there, Francis,” I said aloud without looking at anything in particular. “Good to hear you, buddy.”
Francis was the Teddy’s undead AI. I had recently changed his voice from the grating drone-like blare into a softer, more realistic one. He sounded like Morgan Freeman would have sounded if he had a lot of ice-cream before dinner and was in a great mood.
I quickly updated him on what happened after my phone died, then told him:
“We’re going on an adventure today.” I set course to the Solar System.
Rune was a perfect representation of the entire universe. That included the Earth, or a fictional representation of Earth a thousand years into the future. That was because the Rune I knew was actually a mixture of the unimaginably complex Rune Signal and the videogame architecture a company named Nordic had built on top of it.
It hadn’t always been this colossal. When I first began playing, it was barely the size of a galaxy. The recent expansion had shaken a lot of things up about the gameplay and it was courtesy of yours truly, the meddling Script Kiddie Cole Dorsett.
“My favorite words,” said Francis. “Here’s the ship’s status report. All systems nominal. Antimatter Engine working at full capacity. The invisibility field is charged and ready for action. The wailing of the dead that I hear constantly is quiet today. The laser cannons are primed. Our plasma torpedoes are loaded. Warp Drive is functional…”
“Understood,” I told my friendly AI. “All looks good to me on my end. Let’s jump.”
> Checking the ship’s systems was normally the job of Beard, who was an engineer both in-game and in real life. Beard hadn’t logged on much lately, though. He had said he was swamped with work.
I’d be glad to know about Rylena’s whereabouts.
Walpurgis hadn’t logged in much, either. She was probably holed-up in an actual bunker while she waited for Earth to blow up or something, which left Francis and I as the sole crew-members of the Teddy. This meant we had to travel around more carefully than I’d have liked.
The Invisibility Field Generator, or IFG, was a big part of that. It was an expensive addition to the equipment of the Teddy, designed to make the ship invisible to both human eyes and electronic equipment. The downside was that it was extremely energy hungry. You couldn’t have shields up while the thing was on, for example.
Francis was the other part of the operation. With him taking the reins of the ship during times when I wasn’t piloting it, the Teddy was more secure than any other ship in its situation. Working together, the AI and I had managed to keep the Teddy safe from danger.
“Jump is online. Let’s ride!” proclaimed Francis.
Jumping was an experience I had never gotten fully accustomed to. Felt a bit like being turned inside out, and then kicked around. With the huge expansion to the game’s universe, we needed a lot more jumps to move around than we used to. It had given the Solar System a lot of renewed activity, though, since most of the beginner quests started there.
Earth appeared in view not long after our jump. Next step was finding Van’s coordinates. I summoned my character’s screen and navigated through the menu. I had made some changes to it, and it now had a handy “Social” screen that displayed my online friends.
Cole Picard
-Captain-
Inventory
Social
Quests
Map
Options
Stats
Tarsonnite MkII Blaster Pistol (Uncommon)
Thunderhawk Personal Shield Generator (Uncommon)
Translight Communicator
Emergency Beacon Flare
81,328 databytes
Cole Picard
-Captain-
Inventory
Social
Quests
Map
Options
Stats
Spark Bandit (Online)
Rylena (Offline)
Walpurgis (Offline)
Beard (Offline)
81,328 databytes
Spark Bandit was Van’s avatar. Apparently, it was her streamer nickname and she had managed to use it in Rune Universe. It was a bit unusual, since Rune preferred names that didn’t break immersion. For example, it had blocked my first attempt at a nickname, ButtMonkey. Whatever Rune was, it lacked an appreciation for fine art.
Since we were in each other’s friend lists, figuring out Van’s exact location was as easy as clicking on Spark Bandit’s entry and adding the coordinates to Teddy’s flight path. She was in some island near New Zealand. Well then, back to basics.
“Hey, how are you doing back there?” I asked aloud in the real world, loud enough for her to hear.
“We’re holed up in an abandoned facility,” her answer came back. “Half the scientists we were protecting got eaten by a Tyrannosaur.”
“Sounds like a fun Quest.”
“It is!” She wasn’t being sarcastic. “I had no idea a giant chicken could be so silent, though.”
I reached the island after clearing my ID with the Terran Federation. The island was atop a restricted flight zone, since it was property of the Genetic Research branch of the TF.
That branch was single-handedly responsible for a third of the beginning content of the game, the kind of quests the newbies got before acquiring enough resources to adventure into deep space. Their experiments had the custom of escaping or going horribly wrong. For all I knew, they were doing it on purpose to keep the userbase from sticking their nose in the Federation’s private business.
“Can you come out?” This time, I opened a communication channel to her in-game.
“We could,” she said. Her voice sounded more mature and experienced than her real-life counterpart, but then again, so did mine. “But I don’t want to lose any more scientists. We could fail the Quest.”
I nodded. Sounded reasonable. Questing in Rune didn’t reward you with tangible items, but with increased skills and better relationships with NPCs. If Van was trying to get the Genetic Department to like her team, getting their scientists killed wasn’t the way to do it.
“I see the facility,” I told her. The island was covered in a dense vegetation, genetically altered to be a prehistoric jungle. The series of buildings where my sister and her friends were holed up was in the middle of the island, next to a dormant volcano and atop a large hill. A flock of pterodactyls flew in circles around the gray block of the facility. Under them, in the forest, I could see the earth, trees, and vegetation tremble as gigantic reptiles roamed across them.
“Yeah, no,” I said to myself. “Fuck that. I’m not going down there in those conditions.”
I loaded a plasma missile and pointed the Teddy’s nose towards the nearest giant monster.
“Wait!” Came Van’s voice on the comms. “Don’t shoot, you may vaporize the tyrannosaur!”
“Have you seen the size of these things?” I told her.
“Yeah, and she’s critical to our damn Quest,” she explained. “You kill her and we are going to owe the Terran Federation a couple million databytes. And by we, I mean you.”
I cursed under my breath. I missed having Rylena around the ship. She would’ve loved to plan a complicated rescue under the nose of a tyrannosaur.
“Fine. I won’t vaporize your lizard,” I told her. “But you’ll owe me for this. What do you need so you can get out?”
“A distraction,” she said. “There’s a pack of raptors down below, you probably can’t see them from the ship. They all have like a hundred points in Sneak, it’s insane. Every time we try and get out, they eat a scientist. I need you to get those damn things off of our backs.”
“That sounds lovely,” I told her. “I wonder how long it will take for stomach acid to dissolve my suit’s shields.”
“I bet they can chew through the armor long before it comes to that.”
With my end-game power suit and shield generator, I was probably a walking tank against anything biological. On the other hand, Rune kept a log of all my deaths and half of them had happened before uttering the phrase, “I’m probably a walking tank in this situation.” It wouldn’t be the first time I ran into a genetically enhanced animal with razorwire teeth. No, it was best to proceed with caution.
“I’ll make landfall,” I said. Then, I spoke to Francis. “Buddy, I need you to tail me with the ship. Don’t land it, just follow me. Keep it invisible in case any pterodactyl wants to get close, and get ready for a hot extraction on my mark.”
“Yeah,” said Francis with an excited twinge to his voice. “I heard the young lady. Go, I have your back.”
I stood up from the pilot seat and made my way towards the airlock. I materialized my blaster gun to my hip, so it was ready in case I had to begin shooting, and set it to “Stun.”
“Here goes nothing.” The first airlock doors left me in the tiny chamber that separated me from the rest of the world. I took a deep breath and reached for the button that would unlock the doors, but Francis beat me to it and they opened before I was ready.
“Good luck, Master Cole!”
The sudden rush of air was enough to make me lose my footing and plummet through the air. I sighed as I felt my stomach churn around and the world spin around me, uncontrolled.
Step one, regain my bearings. I crossed my arms and pressed them to my chest and straightened my legs. The bits of land I saw through my helmet’s visor were still a long way down. I had time to fight the spinning until I was falling upright like a good soldier.
Great.
Now the next step was to avoid hitting the ground.
Some suits had a parachute. Mine was designed for space combat and exploration, so instead I had a tiny oxygen-based jetpack strapped to my back. It had enough fuel to last me for a minute or so; not enough to fly around like a superhero, but long enough to help me stop a freefall.
“You should count twenty more seconds before activating the jetpack,” Francis’ voice blared inside my helmet. “Since Earth’s gravity is a bit lower than on most planets we’ve worked on.”
“Yeah, I figured.” I told him.
After twenty seconds had passed (and the ground was now even closer to my poor legs), I activated the jet streams. At first, I set it at minimal power, not even close to enough to stop my fall.
This was key. Gravity and acceleration were both real parts of Rune, and if you paid no attention to them, they could easily kill you. For example, you could find a couple thousand videos of people trying to stop their fall just a foot or two from the ground and try to do a superhero landing where they smashed their fist against the ground. When they tried that, their powered-suits nailed the superhero landing alright, but the meaty bits inside were reduced to a pulpy soup inside a skin sock. It was really fun to see, and not fun at all to feel happening to you, even with Rune’s fake pain.
So I gradually added more and more power to my jetpack, carefully fighting gravity’s pull while monitoring my body’s limits in the fight between the opposing forces. It was still enough to compress my neck and vertebra and make me clench my jaw so tight it felt like my molars would crack from the pressure.
Slow and steady, Dorsett, slow and steady…
I was only ten feet from smacking into the ground when I was finally able to halt my fall and lay motionless in mid-air for a brief instant. The weight pushing down on my back and shoulders relaxed. Then it was only a matter of doing a controlled fall by slowly reducing the strength of the jet.