He selected Jordan’s name. Options appeared. Message? Chat? Converse? Private Meeting Room? Share Game? All but the private meeting room were greyed out. Perhaps the other options would only work when inside the Commons. Maybe they didn’t want folks that were stuck inside the game to get the word out. Private meeting room it was.
“Purchase private meeting room options,” the computer prompted. And what rooms he could purchase! These could mimic every environment imaginable, could be stocked with furniture, pets, plants, fire pits, fountains, artwork, smells, and fake friends that, with further purchases, could become reasonable substitutes for the real thing. Jeff would have to work a few more months to afford the most basic of amenities for a fake room in a virtual world. But several flashing banners told him all of this could be had via game credit.
Jeff selected the free default room. He entered a plain grey space twice the size of his cell but with none of the spare furnishings, not even a sink or toilet.
“For just a few credits, this place could be bigger,” Zachary said. “A waterfall here, a fern in that corner.”
“Go away.”
It only took a few strides for him to walk the length and breadth of the room. Zachary watched, a broad grin on his face.
“Girlfriend’s not coming,” Zachary said.
Jeff touched one wall. It felt like drywall – cool, smooth, and without added texture.
“Free beer!” Zachary shouted. The programmers who made this place must have thought it a cool idea to have echoes as a default part of the environment.
“Shut up.”
Zachary laughed.
“Jeff?” Jordan said. She appeared in the center of the room. “What are you doing here?”
“I need your help,” he said. “I’m stuck in some kind of game world.”
“That happened to me, too, but I managed to get out. Hey, you finally got your communicator working. Congratulations. But who is that?” She pointed at Zachary.
“This is Zachary. He followed me out of a game.”
“That doesn’t make sense. How is that possible?”
“It’s a long story, and we don’t have time.”
“Hello, Zachary,” Jordan said. “I’m Jordan.”
“Hey, babe,” Zachary said. He nudged Jeff with an elbow. “Ha. She just accepted me as a friend. Bienvenidos, amiga mia!”
“He’s just like a real person,” Jordan said. “He spams friend invites.”
“Jordan, you may not want him as friend,” Jeff said. “I don’t know what he’s capable of. He and this game just got stuffed into my head somehow. He might be dangerous. Don’t accept any game invites or files of any kind. He’s like a rogue AI.”
“Dude, I’m standing right here,” Zachary said.
“It’s too late,” Jordan said. “I already caught the game program from someone else. I think they’re all connected. Where are you?”
“Earth,” Jeff said. “The Grey escaped and made a new friend who wants to destroy the city. They need Oliop for whatever they’re planning. Oliop got an elevator to work somehow, and we escaped here. Then the elevator broke. And now I’ve got an alien virus in me that might force me to do bad things, like infect every other person I meet.”
“Wow. Knee-deep in it again, huh? But since you’re stuck on Earth, what do you want me to do?”
“I can’t seem to talk to anyone except for those with access to a shared game lobby like this one. You need to go warn Captain Flemming about this Lord Akimbo guy. He’s at the elevators and has an army of little worms. Whatever he’s planning will be delayed while Oliop stays here, but if he managed to help Irving the Grey escape from jail, he might have other things planned. I talked to Detective Ceph already, but they need to know how dangerous this guy is. It’s more than a couple of cops can handle.”
Jeff glanced back at Zachary. “I also think we also have to get the word out about this program.”
Zachary made a face of mock shock.
“So what happened to you?” Jeff asked.
“My friend Shannanon sent me a copy of a game that installed itself,” Jordan said. “Once inside, I had a hard time getting out. But I’m free now. There something about the game sending bots to care for people while they’re playing. It’s too weird.”
Zachary snickered. When he saw that Jeff wasn’t smiling he said, “When did you stop being fun? You’ve changed, Jeffy.”
Jeff stepped close to Zachary. “This is my brain, my rules. I know there’s got to be a way to delete you and this entire interface. I haven’t figured it out yet, but I will. Any program has a finite amount of commands, and I will find the one that removes you and your root directory, writes over you a hundred thousand times, and sets the memory of you on fire. Somehow you are part of a program that was inserted into me. Tell me what it is.”
“Bossy butt,” Zachary said.
“So how is it exactly that we’re talking if you’re on Earth?” Jordan asked.
Jeff paced about the small space.
“If I were to guess, I’d say the translators. They aren’t autonomous units. They need the central translation computer to function. That computer is in the Galactic Commons. Maybe they’re like the elevators, I don’t know. Maybe they share the same bandwidth. The translator is the only access point where someone might have snuck a program into my head since I’ve never used a wet app. And the worm is what had to have put it in there.”
Zachary shook his head. “Look at you two.” He gestured. A screen appeared in a wall. It blinked white. A golden beach appeared with turquoise water gently lapping a mile-long curve of sand. Dark green trees provided shade over a laid-out blanket, where Jeff saw a picnic of steaming crab legs on paper plates and a bucket of ice filled with beer and soda. Jeff could smell the salty air and crab and hear the water and the breeze.
“There’s room for two in this game,” Zachary said. “You and Jordan can stay on the beach as long as you like. But here’s a spoiler: a map is hidden under the blanket. There’s zombie pirates on the other side of the island. But they don’t come near the beach. You can relax here or go exploring. I’ll even throw in a free water-breathing perk so you don’t have to use the snorkel or scuba gear.”
“What happens when our physical bodies get hungry?” Jeff asked.
“There’s a provision for that. Free, actually. We care for you, you enjoy the game. No fuss, no muss.”
“You send some kind of bot,” Jordan said. “We just took one out that was here for me. Is Dawn of the Rising Fantasy: Moon Queen’s Plight: Epic Champion Edition part of your game suite?”
“Part One or Two?” Zachary asked.
“Part Two.”
“It is! If you liked what you’ve tried, there’s more coming that is right up your alley. Want a glimpse?”
“No, I…wait a minute.” Jordan did a shoulder check, but there was nothing there. She appeared distracted.
“Jordan?” Jeff asked.
“There’s something going on in the city. Some kind of alert. This all might be connected. Look, I’ve got a friend here now, and there’s some kind of situation I want to check in on. I’ve got to go. Jeff, I’ll get you help, but for now it seems like you’re safe. Check back with you in a bit.”
She vanished.
“She’ll be back,” Zachary said with an air of confidence. “Hey, did I tell you I have one of the Filipino cooks willing to make us some pruno? I could get us a batch made from some apple juice and a pineapple stolen from the kitchen.”
Jeff put up a hand. “All right. I don’t know if exiting this program will drop me in a coma or wake me up. But I’ll ask you once: log me out, or I’ll log myself out. Help me fight Thaco, or not. The choice is yours.”
“Jeffy, you’re a hard man to please. The things I do for my friends.”
Zachary thumped Jeff in the forehead with an extended forefinger. With that, Jeff fell into a black well where he could see, hear, and feel nothing at all.
CHAPTER
20
The nine-millimeter slug that struck Toggs’ thick hide had impacted on his chest. It transferred 351 foot-pounds of energy, the round traveling at 1,250 feet per second. Toggs’ calculator app provided him with all of this data, translating it to his preferred units of measurement. This information piped into his brain at the same time as the pain from being shot at point-blank range with a human slug-thrower ran through the rest of his nervous system like a flood of glass shards.
Toggs could literally eat glass shards for breakfast.
The blow sent him to the floor as he tried to catch his breath. That took a moment. The migratory-herbivore kick to his solar plexus kept him from cursing the Grey or roaring in pain. An un-Kloman-like whimper escaped his lips. He put a finger to his chest. There was a cavity there one digit-joint deep where the skin had blown apart from the bullet’s impact. The lower layers of more tender hide remained unbroken. Toggs pushed hard on his chest and detected no damage to his massive ribs. He tried to inhale, succeeded. The flattened slug lay near him, squished into a flat disk of soft lead.
The worst thing about the human weapon was that it had been incredibly loud. His sensitive ears rang, and a buzz settled in, drowning out much of what was happening around him. The Grey moved past him, was doing something. Toggs tried to rise. Pain shot through his arms. What the puny human bullet lacked in penetration it made up for in irritation. Toggs wheezed, clenched his fists, and bit down on his lower lip. It took effort to get up while feeling like he was trying to dislodge a score of cousins during a Kloman pile-on at a clan squabble.
He roared.
The Grey had just flung a glob of something into the male human’s face. It now looked back at him, a look of panic on its face. Toggs grabbed the Grey by its gun hand. The Grey’s mouth opened. It must have been screaming, but Toggs made out none of its words as the ringing in his head persisted. Toggs pulled the Grey up and dangled it by its arm. Toggs had never truly hurt another member of the Galactic Commons. The thought of it under normal circumstances would have made him want to vomit his last-eaten slowly digesting minerals-and-greens salad. But after three Earth months of sitting in this human camp awaiting possible execution or involuntary surgery or worse, he wanted to pull the limbs off the tiny humanoid that might be impeding his rescue.
The Grey was shouting again. It had dropped the weapon. A literal reek of fear wafted forth as it struggled to escape Toggs’ grip.
The female human doctor was helping Jeff Abel. She pushed him into the tented passageway leading out, grabbed a suspended hose with a showerhead, and began washing his face. The pressurized liquid blasting from the hose smelled like some of the local trees, with a hint of refined fuel for an internal combustion engine. The spray abraded the human’s face, molding his eyes and mouth and nose into strange shapes.
Toggs considered the Grey. “What did you do?” Toggs asked.
Through the ringing in his ears, Toggs made out some of what the Grey was saying.
“Let me go!” the Grey screamed over and over.
Toggs took a breath, and decided to hold off on the arm tearing. The Grey wasn’t carrying any other weapons that he could see. Both of the infected human guards were out of commission. Toggs tucked the Grey under one arm as if carrying a newly hatched podling.
“Will the human be all right?” Toggs asked.
But the human female still couldn’t understand him. She put on a glove from a box mounted on a rack of other protective clothes the humans normally wore around their prisoners, as if the Galactic Commons citizens were some unwashed gaggle of space hobos dripping disease from their every orifice.
She plunged two fingers down Jeff Abel’s throat, and he purged his stomach’s contents onto the ground. Whatever remained of this particular glob of Thaco now lay spread out in a puddle of water, disinfectant, and vomit. She sat Jeff Abel up against the wall of the tent where he remained, looking thoroughly knackered and maybe delirious. Toggs then saw her reach for the pistol on the ground.
He snatched it up first and put it in a pocket.
The doctor smirked. “Can’t blame me for wanting the option of protecting myself.”
Toggs looked down at her and grumbled. He crouched near Jeff and considered the wet debris recently spewed from the human’s stomach. With the tips of two fingers, he found and picked up the small translator that the Grey had given Thaco. It was covered with all the unpleasantness still swirling on the ground. He handed it to Doctor Cochran.
“What is this?” she asked. She turned the tiny steel-finished pyramid about in her gloved hand. She washed it off with a blast of the hose.
“Hey, Big Guy,” the Grey said. “Don’t start getting too attached to these humans. Why don’t you be a good boy and get us to the elevator, and I’ll make you a deal. I’ll get you home, we’ll come back here and rescue the others, and we’ll leave this planet as the backwater it was always meant to be.”
Toggs ignored it. He held out his hand to Doctor Cochran. She gave back the translator. He considered her for a moment. Humans weren’t too far off from Kloman in basic body type. Biped, brain most likely in the skull, thus her central nervous system was roughly laid out like his. He moved his hand towards her head. She flinched.
“It’s okay,” he said, even though she would only hear a low rumble of nonsense from his mouth. He said, “It’s okay,” again anyway.
She nodded as if she could understand and said, “I guess if you were going to hurt me, you would have done it a long time ago.”
He held the translator between two fingers and put his hand around the back of her head. He pressed it in against her hair. Toggs was no expert in translators and didn’t know how long each model took to engage with a new user.
“This won’t hurt,” Toggs said. “I promise.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh my god,” she whispered. “I can understand you.”
She began to tremble, sniffed. She almost wiped at her eyes but she stopped after considering her gloved, soiled hands. Toggs pulled the translator away, thinking she was in pain. She laughed, shook her head. She guided his hand back.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Do it again.”
He did. “Is it working?” he asked.
She waited for a moment, then said, “Say something. Tell me your name.”
“I’m Toggs.”
“And I’m appalled,” the Grey said. “Another member of this mendicant species polluting the bandwidth.”
“Shut up,” Toggs said. “Can you hold it there against the base of your skull?”
“Like this?” She took the translator from him without moving it away from the back of her head. “I have to keep it pressed there? That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you had to have surgery or something. I’ve seen some of you with those body pockets.”
“I’ll help with surgery,” the Grey said. He squirmed some more, but Toggs kept him held firm. A rotten apricot smell assaulted his nose.
“No surgery required,” Toggs said. “And the pockets aren’t biological. They’re null-space pouches. You can buy them anywhere. Anywhere not here, anyways.”
Doctor Cochran went to a rack of disposable protective garments. She put on a shower cap and placed the translator inside, tucking it in with her hair. She gave it an adjustment so it would all stay.
“Hopefully that works,” she said. “Does this work? Can you understand me? Your name is Toggs? Oh my god, I want to ask you so much, there’s so many things! I want to talk to every one of you.”
“Later, Doctor,” Toggs said. “I’ve always been able to understand you. You can understand anyone even if they don’t have a translator, as long as you concentrate. If both speakers have one, it works best. But we need to get out of here and find the others.”
“And what about the mind control or infection? What is that? Is Mr. Abel going to be okay?”
“It’s a sentient virus colony. One of the refugees had it alive within him as a sym
biont, but he died soon after arrival on Earth. The virus colony moved on and infected one of you. It’s now decided to divide itself.”
“Its name is Thaco,” the Grey said. “Pleasant fellow, once you get to know him.”
“So what do we do next?” Doctor Cochran asked. “And will he be okay?”
That was when Jeff Abel coughed. He retched but nothing came out. Toggs was glad for that, as the enclosed space smelled bad from the human’s earlier expulsion. Jeff looked at both Toggs and the doctor. He struggled to stand. He found a roll of paper towels and used several to wipe his face and hands, but he was still quite wet.
“How are you feeling?” Doctor Cochran asked.
“I’ll live,” Jeff said. “I’m not sure how you got that stuff out of me, but I’m me. at least for now.”
“So we need to get you out of here,” she said. “Decide what to do after that and come up with a plan.”
“We don’t have a choice, really,” Jeff said. “We stop Thaco. We also figure out how to get everyone here back home.” He pointed at the Grey. “And we don’t let this little bugger out of our sight.”
***
The examination tent had enough tables with restraints to accommodate the Grey as well as the two unconscious guards. The doctor went to work with antivirals to try and purge Thaco from the humans.
“Can you just make them throw up?” Toggs asked.
“That’s dangerous when they’re out cold,” she said. “The medicine I gave them can take a while.”
“We don’t have much time,” Jeff said. “When the other Thacos figure out where we are, we can’t stop them from coming in here guns blazing. I’m going to go look outside and see what’s going on.”
Toggs put a hand on Jeff’s chest and said, “How about someone who isn’t prone to infection? Why don’t you stay here and I’ll go look.”
The human just nodded and took a seat.
Toggs went through the exit and looked out at the camp. Over the previous three months, the humans had been hypervigilant in their doubling up on guards, irregular patrols, and attention to other duties relating to running an internment camp for refugee extraterrestrials. Toggs could tell right away that the camp wasn’t running as smoothly as before.
House of the Galactic Elevator Page 23