Which meant we had to get out of here. Now.
Sasha must’ve had the same idea that I did, because when I turned around to try and work out how to let her know that it was safe she was already slipping through the shadows. She exited the library and walked right past me, crossing the street to exactly the place that I had determined to be safe.
She made a beeline for an alleyway and judging by her speed and the way she’d lowered her head in determination and it was clear to me that she already had a destination in mind.
The Computer Science Museum. It was the headquarters of her guild and provided that she could get there without getting followed or tracked on some long-range scanner it might turn out to be a place of safety after all. Especially if the rest of her guild was there.
I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about what the rest of the Eternals brought to the equation. I knew that she was in charge, but how much exactly had Sasha told them? From what I’d managed to intercept before, it seemed to me like they were pretty much along for the ride. They might be loyal, but it’s not easy to be dedicated to a cause when you’re not exactly sure of the motivations behind it.
She was careful as she crossed the city blocks between the library and her Guild. I was pretty sure that she didn’t know that the new attackers that had been trying to take her out were Deep Dive developers, but she very much understood that a new level of caution was required.
Although I could be wrong about what she knew and what she didn’t know. The guy in the elevator had used “Diver” and “Divemaster” as callsigns, proving that they weren’t the covert military specialists they’d geared and skilled themselves up to be in this virtual world.
They were just little gods showing off amongst the mortals.
As we got closer to the headquarters of the Eternals, Sasha impressed me once again by not walking right inside and assuming she was safe. I hadn’t heard much more than a stray gunshot in the last twenty minutes, so I supposed I would have forgiven her if she’d marched right up to the front door and gone inside.
But she didn’t. She hid across the street, crouching down and studying the entrance. Sasha knew that she couldn’t be certain that she hadn’t been followed. The Divers hadn’t been after a random victim. She wasn’t some hapless noob that had stumbled into an ambush. They’d been looking for her, even if they didn’t know her exact identity. The sniper had been ready to take his shot, and it hadn’t taken very long for the other one to come into the library after her.
And if it could happen once, it could happen again.
As if that wasn’t enough I could tell that there was something else on her mind as well. Whatever it was, bothered her I’d enough that she couldn’t stop it from gnawing at her, despite the clear and present danger that had recently surfaced.
Since she wasn’t moving, and I was standing next to her anyway I figured that now was as good a time as any to try something. Either whatever abilities my unique state of being had granted me were growing or I was getting better at using them, but the fact that I had been able to impose myself on the Diver in the library gave me the confidence to kneel down on the asphalt beside Sasha and lay my hand ever so gently on the back of her neck.
As usual, I didn’t know what type of reaction to expect.
Just like last time with the guy on the stairs, I got a hint of what she was doing with her Heads Up Display. Sasha was checking to see if any of the other Eternals had logged into the game since the servers had restarted. It didn’t look like they had.
Even I knew that was strange. I’d been a part of my share of hard-core guilds in the past over any number of games, and none of those had required the sort of dedication that Headshot did. Especially considering the fact that this one was just out of beta, I would’ve thought that the first time a survivor Sunday was live that actually meant something that the other members of her guild would have been here the instant they could.
Maybe they were having the same sort of trouble logging in that she had. It had to be something like that, a software glitch or technical error. It was the only thing that would explain their absence.
Whatever the reason that they weren’t here didn’t matter, I suppose. It meant that Sasha was still on her own.
I saw her shake her head in frustration. She stood up quickly, and my hand drifted away from her. It was the oddest form of contact I’d ever experienced, since I hadn’t felt like I was touching her and now that I clearly wasn’t, I felt as if I still was, on some level. Maybe whatever code was responsible for keeping me around and yet not letting me fully inflict myself on the world had transferred to her; some quantum entanglement of bugs and happenstance.
The result was that now I could see her HUD in front of my own eyes. It was an odd little sharing that we had now, and I was glad that I’d be able to keep better tabs on her. I couldn’t see the same things that she could, so it wasn’t as if I was looking out of her skull again. I had a good idea of her skills, abilities, and when she accessed things like the logs of her guilds presence in the game I got to take a glimpse of them to.
There was something more, something under the surface. Absolute Reality games had always been good at letting pertinent information trickle into your mind. If the game was a murder mystery and you didn’t know how to be a detective, you didn’t have to go to the police academy and learn. You just had to put a few points into investigation, and if your skill were high enough, the game would start to give you ideas. It would draw your attention to clues you might not otherwise see. It would highlight relationships between characters, pull your consciousness towards motives, lead you by the nose ever so slightly so that your decisions were still your own, but they were influenced by instincts that you didn’t possess.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that my new bond with Sasha let a few of her thoughts cross the barrier between our minds. I wasn’t exactly able to eavesdrop on everything that she was thinking, but just like the cop in the murder mystery game, I was starting to get hunches. I knew if I got out of the way and let them happen that they would turn out to be based in fact.
Like right now, for instance. I knew that she’d been studying the entrance to see if it was safe, but now I understood at a deeper level that she been saying goodbye to the Computer Science Museum. At least for a little while.
Sasha knew that it wasn’t safe. She decided that she needed to find another place to hole up, but she loved the spot that held the exhibition that showcased her father’s work too much to put a lot of distance between her and it. That meant that she was determined to split the difference, and as she turned on her heel and headed up the street I knew that she was planning to scout ahead. Then she would outfit a new location that was near enough that she could keep an eye the Museum and yet far enough away that she wouldn't be detected if someone decided to storm the place looking for her.
Our connection let a lot of her emotions through as well. She wasn’t petrified, but her fear was growing by the moment. Sasha wasn’t able to convince herself any longer that they didn’t know what she’d been up to. The developers knew that someone was in their game, trying to take it apart. They might not be able yet to identify her; it was only a matter of time before they narrowed down the list of suspects.
But there was a steel bar of determination that ran right through her as well. She wasn’t going to stop. She wasn’t even going to slow down, and if it meant that they were nipping at her heels, then she’d just have to tear the place down all the faster.
I didn’t know what to think. Selfishly, I thought back to how much Headshot had meant to me over the past few months. I’d looked forward to waking up in here a lot more than my own life, but the events of the past week had soured me to it so much that I found myself cheering her on. I’d hated the Pay to Win aspect more and more, and now I saw that I’d been misguided when I’d blamed the survivors for paying the exorbitant subscription fee.
It was Deep Dive that had done this to
us. And now I was getting the feeling that all of that was just the tip of the iceberg. They weren’t just running a game with predatory pricing strategies; they were using it as cover for something far more sinister.
I just didn’t know what yet, and now that it felt like I could skim a few of Sasha’s thoughts I realize that she didn’t either. She was fueled by her father’s hatred, and maybe that was enough for both of us to carry out the mission.
I put my faith in Sasha. She was damn good at what she did, and that had lasted this long. Nobody was on the same level as her. She’d practically grown up in this game. In one short week, she’d managed to completely botch the launch of their game, turning what should have been a runaway success into a massive clusterfuck that was making the news for all the wrong reasons.
Then again, now that she’d made it clear that there were forces in the game that wanted to destroy it, Deep Dive would be out for blood. If she let her guard down for even a moment, they'd be more than happy to spill hers.
Chapter 15
I was enjoying this closer bond that I was sharing with her now. When I’d been in her head, her thoughts felt like mine, but now that I was a separate entity in the game I could compartmentalize my ideas and hers.
It was nice to feel back in the loop. I didn’t like to be constantly second-guessing her, and I’d been starting to go stir crazy by being tied so closely to her in the physical space and yet unable to communicate. I still couldn’t talk to her, but at least now I could begin to anticipate what she was planning to do and possibly aid her endeavors.
There were a few other benefits to sharing this headspace with her again. I could check out her skills and study the percentages of success to various tasks. Melee, stealth, engineering, salvage, ingenuity; all that and more. I couldn’t see anything that didn’t fall into at least a general category, things like engineering had a whole bunch of sub-levels as well.
It didn’t look like she’d leveled up yet, but then again, I knew nothing about how the Survivors played the game. As a Zombie I had gained levels which should let me have access to new abilities. At certain tiers I could choose to specialize or remain on the main path, forgoing unique aptitudes in hopes that my sacrifice would pay off when I opted for something more powerful later on.
Sasha had seen her share of conflict so far, and even though the morning was still relatively young I hadn’t see the word ‘level’ anywhere on her stat sheet. Instead, there was just that massive list of skills and their assigned percentages.
And then I saw it, hiding in plain sight. I was more than a little surprised that my gamer mind hadn’t spotted right away, but I was fairly notorious for never being able to find the ketchup in the pantry or the mayonnaise in the fridge.
Right at the top, in red letters were the words
Unassigned Percentages Earned - 72%
There we go! That explained a lot. Maybe they didn’t gain levels the way I expected, but what they earned let them specialize in whatever skills they were able to get their hands on. I nodded to myself. Unless I missed my guess that meant that if you are willing to hoard percentages, the way Sasha was, you could pretty quickly become an expert in just about anything.
But there was a catch, of course. With good game design, there always is, and I saw this coming a mile away as soon as I understood exactly what the system was. Maybe you could go from 1% to 100, or whatever the cap was, with relative ease if you were willing to stockpile points, but that wasn’t the important part of all this.
Only things like the books that were still weighing down her backpack would let you learn something new. If you wanted to be a chemist, you had better get your hands on something that would teach you the basic skill in the first place.
Clever. And that meant that the big giant tome that she discovered in the library was more than worth its weight in gold. The number of skills she could begin to learn from scratch from that was crazy.
Now all she needed to do was used it.
Stealth skill increased to 14%
I stiffened as the message ran through me. There was no way that the guys and girls who had made Headshot what it was today, regardless of how controversial it was becoming, or so stupid as to only allow skill increases to passive things like stealth only in situations that involve opposition.
If they had, it would be too easy to know if someone was sitting in the shadows watching. All you would have to do is crouch for a while and see if you got a boost. If you did, then there was someone out there. If you didn’t eventually, there wasn’t.
Her stealth may have only been at 14%, but it was so dark out here that when she stepped away from her hiding spot, I watched the way the darkness embraced her. I could sense that she thought that she’d somehow managed to slip through whatever dragnet Deep Dive had thrown up around the museum.
I didn’t think that she was right about that since that sort of thinking meant by its very definition that they knew where she was going. I had a different theory…
They couldn’t track her, not until they got close. Whether it was due to my presence or some other way she’d fucked with their system, she’d spent this long eluding their grasp, and that wasn’t just down to dumb luck.
Obviously, when the Divers were nearby, they could pick her up on the radars. I’d seen that firsthand. But I thought that their ability to follow her drastically fell away as they got farther from her, and even though I didn’t think it would be a wise idea to just march in the Computer Science Museum like nothing was wrong, I wasn’t exactly sure how much danger there was.
Still, I was glad that her instincts were simply to stay close. That way she would have the backup of her guild when they finally did log in, and if something went wrong before then, she wouldn’t lead Deep Dive right back to her friends.
It wasn’t as if I cared about them. Far from it. I hadn’t forgotten the way they’d betrayed the deal that Sasha and I had made. Some of them had gone against her wishes and tried to take me out. They’d murdered Riode, the one real friend I’d managed to make on the Zombie side of things. If it weren’t for his sacrifice, they would’ve gotten me as well.
There was no forgiveness in me. I’d killed three of them on my way to the Vault just before the servers would come crashing down and that didn’t come anywhere near to settling the score I felt I had with them. I might let them protect Sasha for a while, but I didn’t trust their motives.
Especially since I didn’t believe that she knew what they’d done to my friend and I.
Sasha was as quiet as she was careful, moving up the street in the opposite direction of the museum. I knew that there was a pang in her heart that she couldn't set up shop in there the way she usually did, but she was a Survivor. She knew that there was a chance that it wasn't safe, and that meant there wasn’t much room for sentimentality. Unfortunately for her, Silicon Valley was far too left-leaning to have even a few gun shops around, and a lot of the nearby buildings were pretty much useless if she ever had to defend them.
There were banks, of course. Lots of them and some of those were probably built sturdily enough to be able to withstand a Tank. Deep Dive could probably get in there if they had to, but that might be her best option. Of course, for a girl that had that much trouble getting into the library there was no way trying to bust into a bank was going to be either quick or easy. And even if she did find her way in, a bank was too obvious a place to hole up. Those sort of defenses attracted attention, and it would only be a matter of time for a bigger guild decided to storm it.
No, what she needed was something small, something out of the way enough not to paint a target on her back and yet stocked with enough supplies that she didn't have to keep running off for odds and ends every ten minutes.
She knew where she was going. As much as I tried not to, I found myself continually underestimating her. Of course, she knew the area. And she was far too smart not to have a series of backup plans.
No less than five minutes down the s
treet from the museum, only a couple blocks away, sat an odd little shop that absolutely nobody in their right mind of would’ve looked at twice, if they even bothered to look at all.
Even though she knew where it was, I gleaned from her that she’d never actually spent the time breaking in. She had too much to do in Headshot to be breaking into every single building on the street. Knowing it was here had been enough, and now that she needed it all she had to do was figure out a way inside.
It certainly looked promising. It was pretty beat up, with the entire face of the shop covered by a heavily tinted pane of glass that looked like it just might be thick enough to be bulletproof. Judging by the swarm of advertising that colored the robust door and covered the brick of the second story, the management had been a constantly revolving door. I could pick out half a dozen names, all of them some combination of the words tech, repair, phone, and data.
All but the newest name, that is. It was currently called the Reboot…
I’d been in a hundred places like this. They were all the same, little hole in the wall shops located in malls or alleyways or, like here, strange little cul-de-sacs that seemed to have no purpose. Each and every one of them had specialized in down and dirty fixes for your portable electronics and wearable devices, and as Sasha and I came to a halt in front of it, I think both of us were relieved to see that no one had hit this place yet.
I saw her reach for the ax that she’d wound through one of the straps in the backpack and I almost reached out to grab her hand. Smashing through this window wasn’t going to be as easy as it had been a library. Sure, she was strong, but even if she could pull it off, the amount of noise she would make would bring any hidden enemies scurrying in our direction. And what was the point of using this place as a hideout, if she planned to compromise the building to such an extent that it couldn’t protect her from attackers?
Headshot: Two in the Head (Book 2 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy) Page 10