I doubted that was the case on the Survivor side. They could probably either buy or earn a way to begin their game elsewhere. Still, regardless of where she lived now, I figured that she’d spent enough time at the Computer Science Museum to be aware of the surrounding city. She wanted to surround herself with the most dangerous parts of the Red Zone, and that meant that she had better find a damn good place to hole up.
The echo and report of sporadic small arms fire were definitely crowding closer to the van as we forged ahead. That didn’t seem to bother Sasha, though. She was too busy obsessing over a dangerous thought that was crowding out everything else. It must be strong, too. Usually, there was a steady hum of background noise in there, but this time Sasha had a singular thought in her head that she couldn’t ignore. I was picking it up as clearly as if she were whispering it into my ear, which must mean that it was drowning out everything else in her mind.
Harker, Winter, and Bonbon hadn’t wanted her to contact the Eternals that weren’t in the game right now. They’d made mistakes when she suggested it, exposing themselves. So what was so important? What were they trying to keep from her?
She was desperate to get in touch with the others. Maybe they weren’t in on it, and even if they were, they obviously had something to share that the Eternals she’d just left in the dust didn’t want her to know.
This wasn’t the time, though. “Find a safe place first. No point going through all of this just to squander it now,” she told herself. If she wanted to find any safety in the Red Zone, she was going to have to build a base here.
Solo.
It was a crazy plan, but everything had been turned upside down and, right about now, crazy was all she and I had. Headshot wasn’t designed for the sort of power that the developers could bring to bear. It wasn’t meant as anything more than a playful, if grisly, escape from reality. It was supposed to be fun, and the rules were supposed to make sense.
The rules. I could feel her cling to them like a life preserver. I’d discounted the idea that they mattered right around the time when my awareness had been sucked into another person’s brain; and when I’d managed to find a new existence outside of her, in this strange form where I was little more than the angel on one of her shoulders or the devil on the other, I’d thrown the rules out again.
But she hadn’t. Even after everything she’d seen, after the Divers and the Eternals’ betrayal and the rest, she still put her faith in the logic gates and algorithms that ran this place. It might have been the coder in her, but I thought it was something else.
Faith in her Father. This was his world, and she was willing to trust that she knew the rigid structure of it, the parts of it that wouldn’t change, no matter how hard Deep Dive pushed and prodded, above all else.
I didn’t like it. It was far too much like religion to me, but I wasn’t the one calling the shots.
If anyone could survive out here on her own, it was Sasha. I couldn’t pretend that I liked her odds, since I knew from sharing her skull that Guilds of as few as three or four members had tried and failed in the past. But, the game had only officially launched last week. The Beta had brought its own difficulties with it, and there was a chance that a few quality of life improvements may have been patched in. She might be able to find a way to live out here in the cracks between the danger that swirled all around her.
As if to emphasize that last bit, I heard a bullet pass through the rear of the van. Someone had decided that we needed less metal and more peepholes back here, and the round had come close enough to me that I wasn’t sure if it had missed.
It probably didn’t matter if I got shot, but it wasn’t something I wanted to get used to. It was only one shot, though. Out here I’d have expected a whole bunch of the bullet’s brothers and sisters to crash the party, too. The van’s exit wound wasn’t anywhere near big enough to have been made by a sniper rifle, which meant that someone had probably just taken a halfhearted potshot at us.
Welcome to the neighborhood, I thought to myself. Sasha got the hint and took a right and then a left. If someone was willing to reach out and touch us, avoiding them was the best option. She was here to dig a burrow, not to shed blood. If Deep Dive didn’t know where she was, gunning down players and kicking off a turf war wasn’t the way to stay beneath the radar.
They’d be looking for anomalies. I had to hope that she was invisible to their programs, like she had been before the Divers hunting her down. “That’s it,” I encouraged her. “I know it’s not the easiest thing to do, especially when you want to kill the game, but just play it safe for a little while.”
At least until the end of the day. Hopefully, when Sunday ends, and the real game kicks off at midnight, I’ll be reunited with my bodies, both real and virtual…
I moved up into the passenger seat and started scanning the buildings as she drove. What Sasha needed was a little pocket. A bubble. An overlooked, easily defended, not-too-important-but-not-completely-useless base that she could use to hunker down and ride out the storm.
It wasn’t too much to ask. There had to be a few places like that. If she could dig in hard enough, she could make it not worth anyone’s effort to pry her out. Reboot had been a decent spot, and now all we had to do was find another.
Not for the first time, I wondered how hard all of this must be for her. I still had the security footage etched into my brain. I probably always would. Growing up with a dad like that, a guy who had basically crafted the AI that made Headshot possible single-handedly, well… She had to see signs of his presence everywhere. We were surrounded by a playground they’d stolen from him. Every dollar Deep Dive earned was a crime in progress and, to rub salt and lemon juice and probably shit into the wound, they’d taken it even farther.
They didn’t just want money. They wanted influence, and if they had to swipe the stuff from our brains that they promised they didn’t have access to, they were fine with that.
What information had they gathered? I didn’t see anything to stop them from gleaning whatever they wanted. Interested in whether you prefer Coke to Pepsi? Easy. Stash a couple of rival vending machines next to each other. A billboard here, an overturned delivery truck there. You didn’t need the players to drink it. Just watch their minds when they see the logo, and you’ll know enough. Hatred and lust came too quickly to the mind for me to pretend that they were too subtle for Headshot’s AI to catalog.
And you don’t stop there. A politician’s slogan. The flag of another country. An abortion clinic in flames. Black or yellow or red or brown bodies in a pile. And what does your lizard brain do when you see these things? What does your gut say?
And then they know you better than you know yourself.
They had weaponized her dad’s dream, and then they’d found a way to press it to our temples.
And the rich ones were paying for the privilege.
I didn’t know what they were planning on doing with the information and neither did Sasha. Whatever they were waiting for obviously hadn’t happened yet. The first thing she’d done, months and months ago was sprinkle careful little alarms programs around the code. She was aware of what it took to keep Headshot running. If a large amount of stored data got moved or copied for reasons other than game maintenance, she’d know.
It wouldn’t do any good, but she wouldn’t be caught by surprise when Deep Dive transitioned from thieving game developer to… To what? Hegemony? Tyrannical dictator?
I was being dramatic, of course. They’d sell it. That way someone else could have the blood on their hands.
The van was becoming a liability. As we roared through the city, I was seeing faces appear in windows with increasing frequency. There weren’t many other vehicles operating out here. They attracted too much attention. If she didn’t ditch it soon, it would just be a magnet for the worst sort of trouble.
Well, maybe not the worst sort…
The only reason we hadn’t been waylaid so far was that Sasha knew her way around a
nd pretty much hadn’t taken her foot off the gas. It was reckless, yes, but it also was a shitty way to do recon.
Right on cue, only two intersections later we stumbled into a massive firefight and had the bad luck to drive right down the middle of the two opposing sides. The street was suddenly lined with heavily armed, trigger-happy Survivors already desperate and revved for battle.
As soon as they saw us in their midst the old turf war was momentarily forgotten. We were fresh meat, and if either side let us get away then they’d lose the chance to squabble over our remains. Easier to waylay us and then go back to the old disagreement, so they turned their guns in our direction and hit us from a hundred angles at once.
The sound tore at my ears, a screech of metal and shrapnel and lead. There were so many bullets sharing the air around us that it felt like I could have reached out and swatted some of them away like irritating flies, had they not already shredded the vehicle and perforated the space the game was allowing me to occupy.
They hurt a lot, but I wasn’t going anywhere..
The passenger window exploded beside me. The windshield becomes a modern art display of spiderwebs and heavily ventilated glass. Two of tires give up the ghost mid-skid and send us swerving at a brick wall. Sasha, apparently unharmed, fights for control and finds it, glancing off the building and trading paint and throwing sparks for fifty yards as the van lurches the wrong way down a one-way street.
Vehicle Piloting (Civilian) increased to 82%
Reckless Luck increased to 19%
Your knowledge of Engineering has allowed you to keep this pile of crap together up until now, but that’s about to change…
And just like that the ground beneath us isn’t pavement, anymore. I look around and see that we aren’t on the street, at all. It’s a ramp, the exit ramp of a parking structure, to be more precise. It’s one of the new ones, where the exit is on one side, and the entrance is all the way over on the other. Something about efficiency, they’d claimed when they started building them.
Sasha is a whirlwind of movement, though the only action she takes that can constitute as driving is when she wrenches the wheel to the left and slams us sideways into the narrowest part of the exit, right where the curved spikes on the ground can pop the rest of our tires and leave our axles dragging as the front impacts the cement barrier that should have been on our right.
I smell gas and look over to see that she’s dumping the contents of the cannister she brought to the dealership everywhere, trying not to get it on herself or the backpack she’s already thrown on. The engine is on fire, and that’s not a great sign. Especially since she’s crunched us in here at such an angle that the only way out of the vehicle is through the now barely-attached windshield and over the flames.
She takes one last look at the interior, searching for something. She looks right at me and finds it.
My heart sings. She reaches for me. I don’t know what to say, which saves me the smallest measurable unit of embarrassment as her hand plunges through my chest and she grabs the ax that the crash has thrown up against the passenger door.
And then she’s gone. I scramble to follow, and the pain from the explosion at my back is far, far worse than being shot. It still feels better than thinking that she’d finally seen me and being wrong, though.
Chapter 25
I don’t think that anyone was going to bother to pursue us through that. Even if they wanted whatever meager gear she had, the flames would convince them that she had died in the explosion. It would hardly be the first time that a fiery wreck would’ve forced someone to respawn somewhere else, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Even Sasha wasn’t sure how many subscribers Headshot had, and the number of total players was a complete mystery as well. Deep Dive had always kept those statistics close to their chest, but the answer had to be in the millions. Tens of millions, if not more. And even if only one percent of them were willing to pay the fee to be on the “good” side, and even if that one percent was more or less evenly distributed in the major cities of the world, I had to wonder where everyone was.
Having an entire day to themselves to gather resources and staking out territory was a huge advantage for the survivors. Even with all of the server issues last week, if the players could have been here they would be. The fact that they weren’t… Well, half of the Eternals apparently couldn’t log in. If that ratio continued across the rest of the player base, it would go some way to explaining it.
I didn’t know Silicon Valley, so I couldn’t look at the map and see exactly where we were. Not in any meaningful way, at least. What I did know was that we were so far into the Red zone that the map wasn’t even showing us Orange at the borders. Sasha had hiked up to one of the higher levels of the parking structure so that she could use as a vantage point.
The city lay below us. Office buildings mingled with the smaller structures that made up government buildings and restaurants, while interspersed with all of that there was the occasional strip of greenery or parkland intended to break up the architecture that dominated the landscape.
Sasha was an engineer. She’d chosen that class because she thought like one, but that meant that she wasn’t paying attention to things like the fact that she was presenting a clean silhouette to anyone looking in her direction with binoculars. Harker, for all his flaws, would never have let her just stand here like this.
She wasn’t used to hiding. 99% of my time in Headshot had been spent with my head on a swivel, wondering when the inevitable attack would come in from which direction. Everything was a threat. I had learned to embrace paranoia, to offer myself up willingly to this certainty that the only way I was going to live was if I was both lucky and cunning.
“You can’t just stand there,” I told her, feeling more useless than usual. “You’re just asking for somebody to take a shot at you.”
And just like magic, Sasha crouched down behind the cement barrier that was meant to stop you from driving your car off the platform.
I held my breath for a second, but that didn’t last long. “Can you hear me?”
It did look like she was listening to something, but it turned out to be something else when she lowered her eyes and saw the building across the street.
It was a hospital. Usually, they were hotly contested, but the fact that this one wasn’t bristling with gunmen sticking their head out the window looking for targets didn’t necessarily mean that it was occupied. A building this size would take a big guild to hold it, and if everyone was having the same login issues is the Eternal’s then it may very well be true that it wasn’t worth the trouble.
After all, what good was only just a floor of a building? Even if she could make it into a headquarters, you couldn’t secure it.
Sasha looked like that wasn’t going to bother her, though. It was close enough to be safely approached, silent enough to possibly be unoccupied, and big enough that she might be overlooked even if a guild did already own it.
In short, it was too good a chance to pass up. She turned and raced down the stairs all the way to street level. I was right behind her, and when she carefully opened the door that would take her to her target, I looked up and saw nothing more than blank windows and a grey façade staring impassively back down at the street.
At least nobody shot at her as she crossed the street. And nobody yelled a warning or threat, either. She went into a crouch, low and slow. There were a number of different entrances, but even though the outside was dotted with a couple of dozen CCTV cameras, she didn't fear them. The grid was still down, and if they'd gotten a few of the backup generators up and running, I was sure that we would see the dead red light blinking beneath their lenses.
But how was she going to get in? That's the thing about hospitals, and one of the reasons that they’re so hard to secure. They've got more entrances and exits than a rabbit’s warren, and once you're inside, you have to contend with all of those twisting hallways with clinically similar floor layouts. I
t wouldn’t take very long at all before everything started to look the same.
She hid between two parked cars, and I took the opportunity to go ahead and scout. I got in through the door, when I talked her into crouching. I don’t know if it was because of persistence or simple randomness, but I was beginning to believe that now and then I could influence her.
That meant that I owed it to both of us to get as much information as I could. I wouldn’t be much of an advisor if I had shitty advice…
In theory, just busting in the front entrance wasn’t an option. If there was a Guild in there and they'd set a guard, as they no doubt would have, she’d be dead in seconds. I ignored the sliding glass doors that were in front of me and instead ducked around the corner. Here was a smaller entrance, and above it was a sign that said Employees Only. That had promise, and it was made even better by the fact that it was a traditional door and not one that needed electricity to open.
Judging by the damage done to both the hinges and the lock, more than one person had already tried to get in this way. I didn’t see evidence of any repairs, which meant that either whoever owned the hospital now still considered this entryway secure or they didn't know that the tampering had gone on.
Whichever one it was in, a secure location or one owned by a group too sure of their own abilities, I was fine with it.
I’d done all the looking around on my own that I could. Just as I was about to attempt to get Sasha over here, I turned around and saw that she was already on the way.
As she poked around and inspected the stuff that I had just looked at, I started to turn my mind to the problem of getting in. Another problem with hospitals is that they’re pretty much built from the ground up with the understanding that at least part of them will be open to the public at all times. That meant that they had a lot of doors that were hard to keep locked down. I was sure that, if a decent size Guild were in charge of this place, they would want more than a few escape routes in case a bigger fish decided to come and swallow them up. And since most of the doors would be electronic, that meant they would've already forced them open. Nobody wants to have to blast their way through a bunch of obstacles when death is snapping at their heels.
Headshot: Two in the Head (Book 2 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy) Page 18