by Dante Doom
“Well, I mean, we’re friends, right? No reason to get all stabby on you,” Trefor said as they walked out of the cave. “Say, you didn’t see anything strange in there, did you?”
“Lights were all flickering, but that was about it. No expansion details, if that’s what you mean,” Van said, feeling his heart rate go up a little bit.
“Right, right,” Trefor said as he stopped walking. They were still in the lush, green park and it was still Sleep Time, meaning that everything was quiet. There was tension in the silence this time, though, as Van had no idea what to do next. He kept checking his log-out option, but it was grayed, meaning that he didn’t have the ability to leave the game at the moment. That was odd... maybe it was because, since Sang hacked them in, he needed her to get out?
“Let me be honest with you, Van,” Trefor said as he turned to face his friend. Van swallowed hard as he saw Trefor’s hand casually touch the side of his sword. “I’ve been following stories about a bard and a ranger running around for quite some time now. Draco’s had their ears on this one, and they’ve noticed there’s some sort of pattern. The questlines are barely completed and they’re—you’re, right?—jumping from area to area, sometimes trying to enter areas that require a much higher level. Things are... let me put it delicately... suspicious on our end. Now, you of all people, I can trust. If there’s anything shady going on, it’s going to be the woman you’ve been escorting’s fault. Not yours. In fact, I should probably tell you something. Before you were hospitalized, Draco had decided to select you for sponsorship. They wanted to make you a professional player. But you vanished, and when a Draco recruiter came looking for you, they were forced to go with their second choice, me.”
“What?” Van demanded. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“It’s true, it’s true. Now, look... I’ve proven myself pretty well to these guys and they’ve given me plenty of power. I’m actually the active manager of this entire city. I have the power of police, the authority to deputize and even hire people if I want to. Of course, anyone I hire has to be cleared by Draco, but the good news is that you’re already in the clear,” Trefor said.
Van felt his heart rate increase again. He knew where this was going, and he didn’t like it one bit.
“But… there’s a problem,” Trefor continued. “For you to be gallivanting around with some kind of troublemaker’s not so great. The good news is, if you were to share everything that you knew with me, all of the details about who she is, her goals, her activities... well, then it just looks like you were my undercover man the whole time. Then you go from being an ugly-looking bard back to being Sivlander, but now as a pro gamer. What do you say? Sounds like everyone wins to me.”
“Uh, yeah, yeah, it does,” Van said hoarsely. He had no idea what to do next. This was extremely troublesome. On one hand, it wasn’t a bad idea, getting a job working for Draco, but on the other, he knew there was no way in hell he would ever betray his friend. He and Sang had grown close enough for him to legitimately care about her, and there was nothing that would change that. Also, it was probably treason to disclose the CIA’s covert operations, and then he’d be dragged out into the back of the woods and shot. Probably by O’Hara.
“You seem conflicted,” Trefor said, nodding understandingly. “I get it, I get it. You’re probably pals with her, probably been doing a lot of stuff together. Maybe you’re even sweet on her—whatever. But you’ve got to ask yourself this question: is your entire future worth risking for one girl? Because, man, I gotta tell you, every single day I wake up in my pod, attended by my own personal assistant. I get out, walk around my new house, and I get to eat real food. No more of that gamer chow crap. I eat steak now. You know how good steak is when you can afford it every day? It’s the best thing you’ll ever eat.”
Van shrugged. He was really in trouble here, and he had no idea what to do. “Yeah, of course, of course. But… look, Trefor, I’m gonna level with you. I’m not particularly in a place where I can snitch on her. I mean, if you’re gonna have to kill me, fine, but the reality is, she’s a good friend of mine and I won’t turn my back on her. I’d never do anything like that to you or the crew, and that means I morally can’t betray her either.”
Trefor nodded after a moment’s thought. “Good man, good man. Makes sense. Well, let’s forget about it then... water under the bridge?”
“Great. I’m glad you understand,” Van said.
“Of course. But, still, I have to insist that you at least meet the boss man. He’s the guy in charge of selecting everyone, and he’d love to meet you.”
“Oh, I don’t know if that’s necessary,” Van said.
“Man, I’ll level with you,” Trefor said, “Draco knows there’s a bard and a ranger sneaking around. They don’t know you’re that bard. So, I’ll cut you a deal. We meet up with the boss, he evaluates you, and if he’s good to go and he hires you, you kick half of your signing bonus to me. Sound good? You win, I win, Draco wins. Everyone’s good to go.”
Van glanced at the massive sword hanging from Trefor’s side and then back at the paladin’s face. He shrugged. He just needed to buy time until the log-out option was back on, or until Sang contacted him. “Sure, okay, fine. I’ll listen to the pitch. But there’s no way I’m giving you half of that bonus. I’ll throw you like a few thousand, minimum.”
“Ha, we’ll figure it out after you get the offer,” Trefor said. “Now come on—let’s fly out there to meet him.”
“Fly?” Van repeated. Trefor sharply whistled, causing a massive yellow Dragon to arrive on the scene. It landed with a heavy thump right before them.
“Check it out!” Trefor said, pointing to the Dragon. “Her name is Kilsa.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” the Dragon said. She moved her head up and down, inspecting Van. “You seem nervous. Relax, I don’t bite.”
Van cocked his head. That was a strange and very responsive piece of dialogue for a NPC.
“Hop on!” Trefor said as he saddled up on the Dragon’s back. “Plenty of room back here.”
“Great,” Van said, climbing atop the Dragon and holding on to the reins tightly. He felt a considerable amount of fear as the Dragon began to take off, though. He knew that, on some level, this wasn’t going to end well at all.
Chapter Twenty
Sang opened one eye, but couldn’t see much. There was the steady beeping of a machine next to her, though, and she realized that she was lying on her back in a hospital bed. Her vision slowly came back to her as she opened her eyes and blinked a few times.
“There’s our girl!” Neil said as he leaned over and gently brushed her hair aside. “We were worried you were dead.”
“D-dead?” Sang coughed out—her mouth was incredibly dry.
“Yeah, you went into some kind of intense shock while you were in the game. Started convulsing. Doc said your body wasn’t handling something properly. So we yanked you out, but that didn’t help. So... yeah, we just kind of threw you in the medical room, pumped you full of stimulants, and hoped it would work. Guess it did,” Neil said as he sat down in the chair across from her.
“Where’s Van?” she whispered, her memory slowly coming back to her.
“Moron’s still stuck in the tube. We can’t message him either. Won’t respond, or can’t. Not dead, though. No heart issues or anything. Just lying there like an idiot, oblivious. We can’t pull him out, either... the doctor said there’s some kind of, I dunno, brainwave interference or whatever. Like, if we pull him out, there’s some kind of feedback system that will cause him to go into shock also. Doc said that, for some reason, the experimental biofeedback systems on the pods were activated, and Van’s was a little too plugged in.”
“Too plugged in?” Sang said. “That’s weird... I haven’t heard of that.”
“Yeah, well, apparently, you rip the cord out there, you kill him. O’Hara wanted to test that theory, but the doctor said no. Too bad; might have been interes
ting to see the results.”
“The message!” Sang cried, sitting up as she remembered the intense sensations of information crashing into her mind. Numbers, symbols, and pictures all came flooding back to her. “I got a message!”
“What? What are you talking about?” Neil asked. “We lost all communication and monitoring with you two when you guys went into that cave. What happened?”
“I contacted them, Neil. I contacted the aliens.”
“What? How?” Neil asked, suddenly standing up and calling into his radio, “O’Hara, get in here!”
“I don’t know. We went into that cave and there was some kind of a message. It was Morse code; I started interacting with it, and then… then I started getting some kind of feedback in my haptic system. Like a radio wave or something. I could hear a voice, but… it wasn’t human.”
“Oh, baby, this is the jackpot!” Neil said. “O’Hara, get in here!”
“Stop yelling, I’m here,” O’Hara said as she walked in.
“Sang found something. Made contact.”
“It was a message, but it’s encrypted. Get me a pen, paper. I can write it down,” Sang said.
Neil scrambled to give her a notepad that he had been working out of earlier. She grabbed it and began to scribble out all of the information that she’d been given. There were symbols and codes that she didn’t quite understand, but she knew they had been transmitted to her on purpose. The voice had been real—she knew it. It wasn’t just part of the game... it had been real.
After a few minutes of hastily drawing things out, Sang took a deep breath and sat back. “There, that’s all of it,” she said.
“Lemme see,” O’Hara said as she snatched the paper out of Neil’s hands. She read over it for a few minutes, her eyes darting back and forth. “Interesting. Some of these symbols, these patterns... Definitely some kind of encryption. We’re gonna need an expert to poke around with it. Neil, can you call Fred?”
“Fred’s a nutcase,” Neil groaned. “Can’t we just call one of the guys from the agency?”
“Oh yeah, that’ll be easy to explain. Hey, code cracker, do you mind quickly deciphering this alien language for us? Thanks,” O’Hara said, shaking her head. “Fred might be a little out there, but he’s good with this kind of stuff. Dude was a linguistics professor for twenty years before he had one little manic episode. Can’t judge his work by one small incident.”
“Small incident? He burned down his own trailer and claimed that it was time to start anew and rise from the flames! That all language was nothing more than lies, and that he would invent the one language that was true!” Neil protested.
“Yes, but the good news is that his wife and kids had already moved out two days before he did that, so no one was hurt... And besides, that language of his is fascinating stuff. Get on the horn; call him.”
“Fine, whatever,” Neil said. “If he burns this place down, though, I’m blaming you.”
“Duly noted,” O’Hara said as she took Neil’s seat and leaned in close to Sang. “How you holding up?”
“I feel okay. My head is killing me, but I’m fine otherwise,” Sang said. She shifted a little in her bed. “What about Van?”
“Who cares? We got the message—we’re closing up shop,” O’Hara said.
“What?” Sang gasped.
“Look, we were ordered to investigate for alien communication and we found it. If this thing turns out to be real, then it’s big news. Big enough to bring in an actual operation on this thing. Get real agents on the ground—more investigators, bigger budget. If it ain’t real... well, we’ve spent enough money on this job and it may be time to go ahead and call it a loss. The taxpayers aren’t going to be happy, but other than that? No harm, no foul.”
Sang shrugged. It seemed a little anti-climactic to just stop right now. “Well, I think I’m going to stick around on this mission, if that’s okay.”
O’Hara shook her head. “I have no idea what happens next; we’ll have to get this message decoded first. In the meantime, just hang out and get some sleep. You’re probably suffering from some kind of trauma. The doctor doesn’t particularly know what happened, so we’re going to need a neurologist to check your head and make sure everything is okay.”
Sang sighed, the urge to fall asleep already overtaking her. It had been an intense experience... contacting whatever those aliens were... and it was somewhat of a relief that the mission was more or less on a break. As Sang began to close her eyes, though, a thought occurred to her: why hadn’t Van logged out? He’d been extremely nervous about being in Sleep Time to begin with, and would have left the moment Sang had vanished—if he’d had the option. Something wasn’t right, she realized.
Sang waited for O’Hara to leave the room before she scrambled out of her bed. She was careful to remove the IV, and then she grabbed a terrycloth robe that had been hanging off the door to the medical room. She hastily put it on over her hospital gown. There was no time to find other clothes—she had to check on Van. She staggered toward the pod room.
Inside the pod room was a small team of technicians; they were busy analyzing the pods. Sang could see a few of the technicians were measuring her own pod. “Hey, what’s going on?” Sang demanded as she limped up to the tech team.
“We’re taking this offline,” the lead technician replied. He was a short man with coke bottle glasses and a sneering face.
“Why?” Sang asked.
“Agent Neil ordered it. Said we’re putting a pin in the operation until further notice,” the man said. His name badge noted that his name was Earl.
“Well, I’m not done with it, so you can’t dismantle my pod,” Sang said, curling up her fists.
“Hey, lady, look... we’re not in charge here, but a job’s a job,” Earl said, nodding to the team. They hastily began to unplug some of the cords from the machine.
“Hey!” Sang said as she swiftly kicked Earl right in the stomach, causing the man to slump down and wheeze hard. “I’m in charge right now, and I’m saying this thing isn’t going to be dismantled until I give the okay. Understand?”
The four other technicians had all gasped at her assault, and now they looked on in horror as Earl writhed on the ground. Sang hadn’t meant to kick him so hard, but there was a voice in the back of her head saying that something was wrong.
And while she couldn’t remember what was bothering her, she knew the aliens had warned her about something specific. She just couldn’t remember what.
“The hell is going on?” Neil asked as he stalked into the room, a burrito in his left hand and a magazine in his other.
“You ordered them to take the pod offline!” Sang shouted, pointing an accusatory finger at Neil.
“Yeah, cause we’re done here. Job’s over. We got the message thingy; we’re gonna decode it and figure it out from there. We’re packing up and getting out of here. Someone was spotted scouting this place out a few hours ago. We’re thinking it was either the Russians or Draco. Either way, we gotta bail.”
“What about Van?” Sang asked as the injured technician was hastily pulled away by the rest of the team. They all then scattered out of the room, apparently hoping to avoid any kind of serious injury.
“What about him? We’ll roll the pod out into the alleyway behind here, cover it with a tarp, and then when he wakes up, he’s free. And he gets to keep the pod,” Neil said. “So I don’t know what’s up with you, but you seem a little too frantic right now. We accomplished our job—why are you panicking so much?”
“Van’s in trouble,” Sang insisted. “I know it. The conversation with whatever those things were... they told me… something. I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it. But I know there’s something off here. Something really wrong.”
“How is that our problem? It’s a freaking video game; Van will be fine. The doc said that if the unit powers down on its own, after a few hours, it uses some kind of safety disengagement system. He’ll be booted out of the
game and it won’t affect him at all,” Neil explained, shaking his head as he walked over to the pod where Van was. “What, you think he’s in some kind of real danger?”
“How did those players die?” Sang asked. “Way back, the ones you first told me about? They died during Sleep Time! Draco must have done something to them.”
“Yeah, the sinister game company must have done something terrible,” Neil replied as he unwrapped his burrito and began to eat it while looking at all of the buttons on the pod’s interface. “Maybe they were tied to a train track by Draco and, when the train hit them, they died!”
“Are you seriously mocking me when you actively worked behind my back to trick me into a job where the primary goal was to find aliens?” Sang asked.
“Look, I’m sure he’ll be fine. There’s no reason to worry about this guy. Even if he is in danger, it’s not like he’s worth saving,” Neil said.
“Let me back in. I need to go back in there and find Van before he gets hurt. If they disabled his log-out ability, I’m the only way for him to get back out. I can use a bypass to get us both out.”
Neil grimaced at her. “Look, I can appreciate the fact that you made a little friend, I really can. It’s cute, almost heartwarming, but let’s go over the facts here. A. You just went through a high level of shock. B. Your physiological tests were indicating that extended exposure to a haptic pod was steadily growing more deadly, and C. Van is a big boy who can take care of himself. If you climb back into that pod, you could die. We were trying to be polite in telling you to take it easy, but the fact is, Agent Sang, your body isn’t cut out for this kind of device. It’s been impacting your heath.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, the doc said that, with the way your body interacts with the long periods of stasis and the haptic system… well, there’s a sizable portion of the population that just can’t physically handle this game on this level. Those who have more experience with video games have some kind of tolerance built up, but you… it’s like giving moonshine to a kid who’s never even had a beer. Problem is, it’s been affecting your overall health. We had a timetable to work with and, lucky for us, you just managed to snag the key evidence right before we had to pull the plug on the job.”