Fuse yelled over his shoulder. “Mitch—get out of here!”
“Dak—you can do this,” Mitch pleaded, using Dak’s trademark calming tone back at him. “Just grab a code package, get near Fuse and Dozer, and you’ll be somewhere else before you know it. Somewhere safe.”
“He’s going to follow us, Mitch,” Dak said back, staring Mitch in the eyes with the weight of the world on his shoulders. “He found us here. He’ll find us wherever we go. He’ll never stop.”
“We’ll deal with that on the other side,” Mitch said. “But we have to go now.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. About everything.” Dak reached into the bag, and then stood tall, looking up at Fuse and Dozer with deep, heavy eyes.
Mitch could see a flash of color in Dak’s hand, but something wasn’t right. Maybe it was the heat of battle, maybe it was the rifle fire echoing through the canyon or the bullets flying everywhere. Maybe he was just plain wrong, but Mitch could have sworn that the orb Dak picked wasn’t green, that instead it flashed a shade of red off the contours of Dak’s slate black gloves.
Dak said the words one last time, this time to no one in particular, maybe this time just to himself. “I’m so sorry.”
And then Dak disappeared.
TWENTY-FOUR
Hell of a Good Idea
BULLETS FILLED the air and skimmed across the ground, plunking into walls and sinking deep into lava, as Dak’s last remaining bits faded away.
“You bastard!” Dozer screamed at Red Code. “You killed my friend! You killed Dak!” She ran out from behind the few remaining blocks of the protective wall, staring down Red Code as he continued to fire. “You’re gonna pay for this.”
“Not sure that’s actually what happened,” Fuse said, exchanging looks with Mitch. “I mean, feel free to still kill this guy, but—”
“You killed our leader,” Dozer said, snarling back tears. “You messed with the wrong team. Prepare to feel the wrath of the Nefarious Five.”
“She’s not the bright one, I’m taking it?” Red Code asked, continuing to step forward, rifle blazing. “Honey, I didn’t steal your man. Your leader just rage quit on you like a boss.”
“You’re lying,” Dozer stopped, turning to Fuse. “He’s lying, right?”
“He grabbed the parachute,” Fuse yelled, resuming his building with both hands. “He’s back in Skirmish now, probably on his way back to Karma HQ. It doesn’t matter. Get down behind the wall.”
“Noped right out of here,” Red Code laughed. “I did not see that coming.”
“He wouldn’t have ... not Dak?” Dozer stammered, slumping down and leaning against the wall, staring out far past the lava lake.
“Don’t worry about Dak,” Mitch yelled. “Just keep building.”
“Mitch is right,” Fuse said, ducking from a fresh round of incoming gunfire. “We’ve got bigger problems right now.”
Mitch lay flat against the wall, watching helplessly as the block wall continued to get chopped down by bullets. He knew they wouldn’t last long—he had to do something. Dozer finally snapped out of her daze, joining Fuse, building as fast as she could. With each new wall of blocks, the pair paced backwards away from harm’s way, but closer and closer to the lava lake behind them.
“O.M.G. you guys,” Red Code said, pausing his fire to reload. “That Dak guy was the worst, amiright?”
“Mitch, you’ve still got an orb,” Fuse yelled. “Get out of here. We’ll build the wall over to your backpack, grab an orb, and follow you out.”
“I’m not leaving you here,” Mitch said. “We go together.”
“Don’t do us any favors,” Dozer snapped back.
Mitch knew that all he needed was a sliver of time—about thirty seconds—to build a quick one-block-wide bridge over the chasm to reach them. But Red Code was firing a steady stream of bullets, and didn’t look like he was stopping any time soon.
“Those blocks aren’t going to last you very long,” Red Code said, continuing with his rifle in one hand and producing a fresh pistol in the other. “They’re weak against any and all projectiles. And now you’re going to die, all because somebody didn’t read the manual.”
Wait a minute—read the manual?
“Fuse!” Mitch yelled. “Buy us some time. Get your friends in here. Order an attack.”
“What are you talking about?” Fuse yelled.
“Just like he said,” Mitch replied. “Read the manual.”
Fuse nodded. “Hell of a good idea,” he said, hitting the deck. He brought up his control panel in hologram form, and Mitch could see him selecting multiple items and executing an “attack” command with a swoop of his finger.
Suddenly, all kinds of furry hell broke loose.
The rabbits had grown in numbers, as rabbits are known to do, and ran in an adorable, fluffy formation towards Red Code, flanking him via multiple blind spots. After treading silently past the gate’s threshold, they attacked with all the fury that a few dozen rabbits with razor sharp teeth can bring, which turns out to a lot.
“What the shit is this?” Red Code yelled, his weapons flying into the air as he clutched at his neck. As fast as he ripped rabbits from his body, tossing them against the slate wall, their brothers and sisters joined the fight, biting and scratching and howling from all sides, latching on like fuzzy little leeches, finally bringing him down with a sideways crash to the ground.
“Don’t move,” Mitch yelled over across the chasm. “I’m coming to you.”
“Hurry up,” Dozer yelled, not stopping her block building. “Those rabbits aren’t going to buy us much time.”
Mitch ran back to the aqueduct and looked up to see the water still flowing into the pipe’s mouth. The pistons cranked, steam pouring from each side, clunking and churning, their power keeping the gate held high.
“We’re running out of rabbits over here,” Dozer yelled. “C’mon, Mitch!”
Winding up, Mitch knocked out a block from the bottom panel of the aqueduct above his head. And then another. And another. The water poured down, crashing on his head, flowing down across his shoulders, as he continued to destroy the blocks, one at a time.
“He’s back up, Mitch!” Fuse said. “What are you doing over there?”
Swinging again, Mitch knocked a fresh block from the bottom of the duct. The water gushed down in his face, rocking him back down to the ground. Wiping water from his eyes, he looked up to see the pipe’s mouth once again dry.
The steam engines calmed their spinning, and slowed with sharp stops, metallic creaks and moans. After a few last spurts of life, the pistons went still. A loud, mechanical pop sounded through the valley, followed by a sliding sound that could be only one thing. As the gate came crashing down, Mitch could see Red Code lunging forward, kicking bunnies out of his way, trying to make it past the threshold. With a loud, earth-shaking thud, the wooden gate hit the earth with all its weight, leaving Red Code on one side, and the team on the other.
Mitch shook the pixelated water off his torso and jogged over to the chasm. He built a quick bridge, nothing to write home about, but enough to make it across to Fuse and Dozer.
“Hands on shoulders,” Mitch said.
The team braced themselves as the dematerializing beam shot up into the sky. Mitch opened his eyes long enough to watch the valley, the lake of lava, the now-busted aqueduct, and the robin egg blue sky disappear in chunks, leaving only a bright green lattice on black behind them.
“Say goodbye to BlockJoyMagic,” Mitch whispered. “And to Red Code.”
“Screw this world,” Dozer said. “Let’s go find our friends.”
TWENTY-FIVE
The Old Man’s Right
MITCH’S SENSES sprang back to life, one by one, like dominos falling in line. First, the heat of the sun across his cheeks and forehead. Then the familiar smell of salty air filling his nostrils, followed by sunlight pulsing through his virtual retinas, mainlined straight into his brain. And finally the soun
d that he knew so well, the rhythm that had rocked him to sleep every night for the past few years—the suck of crashing waves mixed with squawking gulls. For a fleeting moment, Mitch actually dreamed he might be home.
He scanned the landscape to realize this wasn’t California, in any real or virtual sense. Instead of rocky shores, his boots dug into grass-covered dunes. Small islands with shallow pools of water, starfish littered here and there. It wasn’t his beach, wasn’t his home, but at this point even a taste of home felt nice.
“Where are we?” Fuse asked, rising from his knees on the far side of the dune. “It’s beautiful. Fascinating. Incredible.”
Dozer rose next to Fuse, spinning to take in the scene and checking her person for inventory. They had lost their Skirmish avatars and equipment in the journey, now finding themselves in futuristic blue and white jumpsuits, fitted perfectly with just the right stretch, and technical padding where it counted. But, as Dozer quickly noted with a fresh f-bomb, the jump had cost them their weapons. “What happened to Red Code?” she asked, jumping over to the nearest dune, searching for anyone hiding behind. “We destroyed the game, did he die along with it?”
“I don’t think we’re that lucky,” Mitch said. “Back when I was leaving DeadBlood I saw something—a flash of him. I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time, but now it’s starting to make sense. He’s somehow in each of these worlds. He might take different forms, but he leaves a piece of himself with anything he builds.”
“Well, here’s hoping he skipped this one,” Fuse noted, inspecting his avatar and giant, muscled arms for movement. “Wherever we are, we seem to have regained our full dexterity. Nice to not be a block head anymore. And, hey, there are worse places than the beach, right?”
Fuse was right about that—to Mitch, leaving a world of crappy block graphics and right angles into a landscape as detailed and alive as this was like opening his eyes for the first time. The sun was rising, painting the whisper-thin trees and sand across the coast with pink and orange. Birds flying in formation, the wind whipping palm trees into gentle bends. The graphics, the sensory elements, the design—this world was more realistic than any game Mitch had ever seen.
The rising sun gave him pause, making him wonder if it was day or night back in the real world, but not enough to actually do the math. He couldn’t get lost in reality right now—thinking about the bills or the dishes or anything else that would pull his mind from the game. And besides, he missed Skirmish more than anything back in reality—the game was more of a home to him than anything else he’d ever know.
“Which team member do you think was lucky enough to get stranded in paradise?” Dozer asked.
“We’re down to two options,” Fuse said. “And not a lot of time left. We’d better start looking.”
“I can tell you someone that’s not here,” Dozer snuffed. “That mofo Dak.” Kicking at the sand, she rattled off a grab bag of curses that would make any gamer hit mute. “Walked right out on his team. How’s it feel Mitch ... to be on the other side of that one?”
Mitch fought the urge to say any one of the five comebacks that popped into his mind, letting the sound of crashing waves fill the silence. Just let it go, and get on with it. You’ll be home soon enough. A crackle filled the air and a purple light caught the corner of his eye. He turned to see a rectangular video chat box popping to life, half-rendered and fighting for clarity, hovering a few feet away.
A voice broke through the static as McDougall’s face appeared, contorted in shape and hue, in the floating screen. “Mitch? Can you hear me? Is this coming through?”
“Mac,” Mitch breathed, relieved to hear the familiar voice. He gathered the team around. “Good to see you.”
“The old man figured it out,” Fuse laughed, pushing his hand through the chat hologram. “This is no easy feat—establishing contact with an unknown game world. I’ll bet this world’s server configuration allows for easier comms access.”
“Mitch?” Mac tried again. “Are you receiving?”
“He can’t hear us,” Fuse said, taking control of the chat box settings pane and messing with the settings. After trying every option, he signaled “no dice” and returned the window back to the video view. “Nothing I can do from here, I think this is as good as it’s going to get.”
“I’ll have to trust you can hear me,” Mac said, his voice fading in and out of range. “We’ve been trying our best to track your progress. It’s hard to tell which Nefarious members you’ve found, but based on our diagnostics, we know you’ve run into Red Code. It’s time for us to talk.”
Dozer walked closer to the video with a schoolgirl’s smile. “This should be good.”
“I told you that an AI was building these rogue worlds, which is true,” Mac said. “But I thought ... the board thought ... it wouldn’t be wise to tell you more than you needed to know. But now, things have changed. It’s time. Mitch, Red Code wasn’t an anomaly that popped up out of nowhere. He began as an experiment, an attempt to create a perfect non-player Skirmish character. A new class of opponent, one that could learn and compete at the highest levels. Not only a player, but a world builder—code that would build new games starting from a player’s point of view, not the other way around. A chance to finally take games to the next level. I sought help from one of my best programmers—we worked in secret—and we thought we’d found a breakthrough. But what we built turned into something I couldn’t have imagined. Bigger than what we could control.”
One his best programmers? That would have to be ... Mitch turned to face Fuse, whose head was now bowed down, staring at the sand. Mitch felt the air leave his body, his mind starting to spin.
“Red Code broke through every security safeguard we designed,” Mac continued, the signal finding its strength. “He went loose, went wild. When he appeared in that battle ... well ... I was as surprised as anyone. And I didn’t know what to do. I should have told you, but what could I say? What could anyone say? But I never thought you’d leave, I never wanted that. No one wanted that.”
It wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a bug. They created it. They built it and never told me. Fuse kept his eyes straying everywhere but back at Mitch.
“After the battle, Red Code went dormant for years,” Mac said. “I thought we’d seen the end of him, that he’d ended up on some remote server, or just burned himself out. But now we know the real story. Red Code’s been off building worlds—doing what we programmed him to do, evading our sight. He’s out of control, building all sorts of variations of games, trying to perfect his craft. We never taught him how to stop, he doesn’t know how to stop.”
This is no rescue mission.
“Whatever you do, Mitch, you can’t let him back into Skirmish,” Mac said. “In his remote worlds, he’s like a carbon copy, his power is dimmed from the duplication. He’s trying to run home, that’s what he wants more than anything else. He knows in Skirmish, he’ll be at full power. I’m afraid to see what that looks like.”
“What does he want with Skirmish?” Dozer asked.
“He can’t hear you, Doze,” Fuse muttered.
“His worlds won’t be complete without users,” Mac continued, the audio crackling in and out. “Skirmish has exactly that—billions of users for him to bring back with him—to make his worlds real, living, breathing things. Users will take his power to the next level.”
Mitch turned away from the screen, from his team, from everything. The salt air always made him forget, always took him someplace else, at least for a little while. And that’s when it hit him—he realized what he missed about home. At home he could escape, he could hide. Here, there was nowhere to go. He stared out at the rows of waves lining up to wash the shore, only to get sucked right back out with the undertow, and somehow find their way back again. He felt anger rising up his spine, his pulse racing. But he wasn’t mad—it was more than that. He was a sucker. He’d been duped. He’d been lied to, not just today, but for years. Out of nowhere,
some of his first lines of advice to Skirmish tour groups, canned and stale, echoed through his mind. Taunting him. If you can’t spot the easy mark on the battlefield, it’s probably you.
“Did you know?” Mitch asked, gritting his teeth.
“We knew,” Dozer confirmed with a low voice. “It’s why we’re here. Mac didn’t ask us to explore exotic new worlds … he asked us to hunt Red Code down. We thought it would be an easy mission—what with the full team and the firepower we were bringing. With Red Code at lower power, we figured he couldn’t—”
“Couldn’t do to you what he did to me,” Mitch said.
“After getting separated,” Fuse added, “and now that I’ve seen his power, we’re scrubbing the mission. Now we just need to get everyone home safe.”
Years of my life, wasted. Because of this thing. Because of Mac. Because of Fuse.
“I still can’t hear you over the line,” Mac continued, “but, Mitch, I’m sorry. For all of it. For not telling you the truth. But once I lost the team—what else could I do? I knew you were our only hope. Things … things just got a little out of control.”
They all knew. And they didn’t trust me enough to tell me.
“We need you back,” Mac said. “With Red Code here … if Skirmish is lost, it would be catastrophic. Everything you’ve worked for, that I’ve worked for, that Nefarious has worked for, would be gone. So finish the mission. Now’s not the time for anger—there will be plenty of time for that. When you get back, I’ll pour us those drinks, and we’ll talk it out. Right now, the team needs you. Good luck.”
The signal went dead. The wind whipped across the sand dune where the chat box once stood, leaving Mitch staring back at his two ex-teammates, two avatars he realized he didn’t know anymore. They gazed back at him with the careful look of two people just asked to defuse a roadside bomb.
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