She’d been going through a medical cabinet, but now she set the pill bottles down and whirled on me. "Because I’m tired of slinking around all of the damn time," she shot back. "And now that I know about my dad, it turns out that all hiding has ever done has been to extend his pain. He needs this game to end. The headspace they’re stealing from him needs to be put toward his own recovery. It kills me that his neurons are slaving away for some bullshit corporation, especially one that's doing God knows what behind the scenes."
I could see her point, and I didn't want to argue with her. I needed to remind myself that she had way more at stake in this than I did. It wasn't my dad plugged into all these servers somewhere, his mind forced to play host to a world that gets burnt to the ground on a weekly basis.
But, that didn't mean that I was without skin in the game. When things went bad, and I had a feeling they were going to get a lot worse before they got better, it could very well be my house that the authorities pulled up in front of. She was still a mystery to them, but when they kicked in my door and yanked my body out of the rig and threw it into the back of a squad car, I’d face consequences that Sasha wouldn’t.
I started to wonder if they could do more to me than just arrest me, but I shuddered and shoved the thoughts aside. Stay smart, and you won’t have to find out.
I took a deep breath and let it out as slow as I could, hoping to reset the conversation. "Look, maybe neither one of us is thinking about this rationally. Let's just take a second and use our brains, okay?”
“No pun intended…”
I grinned. “Today is a day for the Survivors, right? I mean, on the Zombie side we’ve been told that Sundays are spent maintaining the servers, so it sure isn’t for us…”
“In theory."
I nodded encouragingly. If I could get her to talk it out with me, maybe I could drag her around to my point of view. "And at midnight tonight, which is in…" I checked my HUD, but I wasn't getting a countdown. I didn't have any clock in the corner of my vision anymore as she did, but when I glanced down at my arm, I realized that I was wearing a watch.
Good enough, I thought to myself. I checked the time. 8:11. Either sunset was happening later than it should've, or Redhook had decided to set the game in a different month. "In less than four hours it's going to be midnight. And when it is, the server’s reset. "
She wobbled one of her hands at me in an ‘if you say so’ gesture. "I’m going to attempt to stop reminding us both that the server is actually my father, but yet. Again, in theory."
"I know he is.” I pointed at the rows of computers in the other room. “But those have got to be pulling some of the weight, even if they’re just storing static data. All those machines power down and come back up. And when they do, that's when the real game starts again on Monday morning. The one with the Zombies. The one where I might have some more power, and a chance to get us some allies."
She scowled, thinking it through. "After everything we just discovered, you’re still trying to talk me into crashing Headshot again?”
"I am. It might be our only shot. Besides, is it that big a deal? Do you even remember how many times you did it last week? It can't be that much more difficult now than it was then. I mean, I know Deep Dive will have countermeasures in place, but you’re your Father's daughter. You can get around them. You’ll slice right through them. Just drag it all down for a few hours. Once midnight hits and the Zombie killing and the Survivor slaying starts up again, the developers will have their hands full.”
Sasha narrowed her eyes at me. “What’s to say that they don’t just insert themselves into the game the same way they have been?”
“They could. But I think that, right now, there aren't enough Survivors to worry them. They don’t have to keep their heads down since the game is so sparsely populated that they can pretty much come and go without starting rumors. That’ll change when the Zombie hordes log in. Can you imagine how much the free players have it out for the developers of a game that let you buy the right to hunt them down? If you want an Apocalypse, just tell the unwashed masses that the people in charge of the Pay to Win BS are walking around in the game. They’ll get torn to pieces in a heartbeat. Except that Zombie hearts don’t beat…"
Sasha was nodding slowly to herself, but I didn't think it was my words that were spinning around her head. She'd started doing that about halfway through my little speech, and as annoying as it was I had tried to pretend that it wasn't happening. The fact that I’d stopped talking and the nod kept going was even more confirmation.
I couldn't help but sigh. "Something wrong? Besides the obvious, that is."
"You're right. I did drag down the servers last week. And remember what my mom said about my dad?"
It was like a little jolt of electricity ran through me. Surgical. Exactly timed and placed. I felt the charge zip up my aorta and make contact with my heart. It was strange, especially after what I’d just said about Zombies and hearts. But now I understood what she’d just realized. "Holy shit…"
"I didn't take the servers down last week. I did something to my dad, short-circuited his brain or made his body chemistry reject the game’s subsystems. I hurt him, and for what?”
I opened my mouth but didn’t have an answer.
She made a cutting gesture through the air, and I could see that her mind was already made up. “I won't do that to him again.”
“You’re quitting?” After all of this, she was just going to bail?
Sasha shook her head. “No way. I'm not giving up on stopping Deep Dive, we just have to find another way to do it. My dad’s too far buried in their crap to risk doing even more damage to him by shutting the game down the way I have been, and I don’t know what’ll happen if I just show up at the hospital in real life and drag him out, but I doubt it turns out well for either him or me.”
I took a moment, because if I didn’t pause I was going to say something heated and then she’d fire back at me and we’d never get anywhere. “How many ways do you think we’ll find, when it comes to dragging Deep Dive down? Even one path to victory is almost too much to hope for, and now you want to find another?”
“Yeah, I do.” She didn’t exactly spit the words at me, but it was close. At least she got a handle on her emotions before she continued. “Look Ryan, we’ll have to beat them in the game. My dad’s running the whole thing for them, right? He’s the one that makes everyone follow the rules? Maybe if we can prove to his sleeping mind that we came out on top, he can validate it, lend our triumph some justification and stop them from getting in here at all.
She was talking nonsense, though I wasn’t sure if she knew it yet. “Warping in wherever they want with guns that trace your location isn’t exactly playing by the rules. The Divers are already playing fast and loose with the rules, and your dad’s either letting them or unable to stop them.”
But Sasha didn’t care. “I won’t break his mind just to save it, and I won’t sacrifice him for the rest of the playerbase, either. I don’t owe them anything. If we win, my dad might even be able to throw off the chains himself, then. In the meantime, let’s just accept whatever help he’s able to give us.”
“Like the hospital?” I asked. She was relentless, but she might be right…
“Absolutely. This building shouldn’t be here. It’s a gift. And better yet, I’m pretty sure there's no one here. Don't you think that's odd?"
I shrugged, but of course, I did. There absolutely should be at least a couple of Guilds fighting for control of this place, especially late in the day. It was too big a prize to ignore. If they could keep it, they’d be an economic powerhouse for the rest of the week. The advancements they stood to gain by selling medical supplies and equipment was enormous, not to mention training archetypes in healing.
"So your dad put the hospital here for you?"
Sasha smiled. "For us."
Chapter 29
I was still connected to Sasha enough to get the system message
that was no doubt blasting through everyone's headspace because there it was. The decree was, without doubt, the strongest transmission I'd ever seen Deep Dive push. I heard it in my head, as well as with my ears. I saw it splash across my eyes as it blocked my vision until I'd read it.
And even scarier than all of that put together, they slipped it into my brain. I knew it. They got it to burrow into my gray matter in such way that I made me sure the information would never vanish. It soaked both my short-term memory and my long-term recall. Maybe it would fade in time, but the sheer amount of bandwidth overpowered even knowledge of my name or the date of my birth.
Survivors. Deep Dive Studies is very pleased to announce that, for the first time ever, we are running a server-wide event.
The Good Samaritan Hospital has long been a place of respite. The Apocalypse hit the staff hard, but they dug in and fought back. There are rumors that, in addition to providing healing and supplies to the Survivors, they have even begun to make headway in research to slow or even cure the Zombie virus.
But things have changed. The doctors have been betrayed. The nurses have been deceived. The hardworking staff has been tricked by a traitor into leaving their posts, and now the hospital needs to be cleared of the evil that has begun to take hold.
Players within California will be allowed to immediately teleport to the raid on the good Samaritan Hospital. Players from other parts of the world will be given access to warp fields that will jump you into the battle as reinforcements.
The raid begins at [8:30 PM].
Holy. Fucking. Shit. Deep Dive was throwing the whole weight of the survivors against us, and there was no way that we would stand a chance against that combined assault. But they weren’t finished.
[SysAdmin.override.protocol_Blake_Redhook_Order66.exe]
Correction.. The raid will begin at [11:59 PM].
I breathed a sigh of relief. Obviously, Redhook was still in here, saving our ass by dialing back the raid’s start time. Of course he was, I growled at myself. The guy was running the whole damn thing. We were in his head; he wasn't in ours. At least he still had enough power to wrestle control of the events away from the developers, and if the raid was starting only a minute before the servers were resetting at midnight, we might be okay.
Maybe… Even then, we’d have to find a place to hide. Sixty seconds was a long time when you had hundreds of blood-crazed Survivors pouring in through every door, window, and pried-open crevice of the building.
ATTENTION. Please ignore the last message. It was sent in error.
To rectify the issues we’ve experienced since launch, Headshot 2.2187 is about to be installed. Patching will occur now. The process will take three hours, and the raid will begin when once the updated program is live at 11 PM.
There is no need to log out while the patch works its magic. We are aware that many guilds have contacted us regarding the login issues some of their members have had today. We’re looking into it, and we thank you for your patience.
As a reward for all of your hard work and continued efforts to make Headshot into the game the world’s talking about, we’d like to offer the following rewards:
Top Guild points during the Raid – $100,000 to be distributed amongst all members
Top Individual Player points during the Raid - $30,000
Capture and Confinement of Enemy Guild Leader – Lifetime Subscription to every game Deep Dive Studios creates
Also, Deep Dive developers will be on-site and acting as event observers. Moments of exemplary value, valor or cunning will be rewarded.
Prepare yourself.
That last bit wasn't for the Survivors. It was a message directed squarely at Sasha and me.
And I doubted that there’d be many who ditched the raid. It was scheduled to take place during the last hour of game time, and unless someone were knee-deep in something extremely important, they’d drop everything and take part.
Even though Deep Dive had just stacked the deck against us, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of regret at not being able to participate in the raid. Up until now, I’d always felt a certain amount of pride in participating in this sort of thing. The first time the Gates open, the original placement of the jewels that revealed the portal to the lost continent. Those were moments in time that you couldn't get back, and they were as real as anything else. For guys like me, who'd grown up wanting to be explorers and been constantly beaten down by the thought that just about anything worthwhile seemed to have already been discovered, events like this got the adrenaline pumping.
If people had been about to log out, they weren’t going to do it now. If they already had, I could imagine people getting in touch with them, yanking people out of bed and bringing them in to the raid, Whatever the time zone, even if it meant calling in sick or finding a babysitter for the kids, even if it meant strapping them all into their own miniature rigs and letting them wander in some kiddie world.
There was a war coming, and the enemy had just recruited an army in an instant.
"We’re screwed," I said to Sasha. "Your dad did his best to buy us some time, and in the end he did. But that patch isn’t going to be an aesthetic one. They're not just tweaking game settings. They’ll be locking him out, once and for all."
She shook her head defiantly. "Did you even see the patch number? They tried that shit before. If he’s still here now, he’ll find a way to stick around."
I shrugged. She might be right. "Maybe. But his power will be diminished, at least until he works out a way around whatever protocols they're establishing right this very second. The Survivors will have more than enough time to tear this place apart in the hour before the rest. They aren’t trying to kill you, either. They want to catch you… We should get the hell out of here and -”
"Run?" She spat the word at me as if it were venom in her mouth. "I'm no coward."
God, she was infuriating. I snapped my fingers as I thought of something. "He's already run, damn it. Who do you think it was that tied those bedsheets together and fled out the window, Sasha? Some random computer-generated orderly? No way. It was your dad. This was his prison, and he found a way out. Why can’t we?"
Sasha couldn’t have listened to me less if she’d stuck her fingers in her ears. "You're wrong. I don't know how to convince you Ryan, but if the hospital were a dangerous place he’d never have left that rope for me. This isn't our last stand. It's the first battle in a war that we’re going to win."
I had to sit down, and so I turned around and found a swivel chair and plopped down into it. "Are you even listening to yourself? Seriously? This is the battle we are going to win?" I pantomimed looking around, even going so far as to shade my eyes and peer into the middle distance as if I could see through the walls of the Good Samaritan Hospital and cast my gaze across America and beyond. "Are you seeing something that I'm not? I sure hope so, but by my count, there's only two of us. Two.”
She gave me a little smile. “That’s not so bad.”
“Granted, that’s twice as many as there was an hour and a half ago, but we're going to need a lot more viral growth than that if you expect to fight back somehow. You can’t just wave a magic wand here and build an army. When 11 o'clock hits, we’re goners. All hell is going to get thrown at us. I'm talking grenades in the windows, rocket launchers from the rooftops, tanks or APCs or whatever people scrounged up from military bases smashing in our front door. It will be a fucking nightmare, and the Divers will be coming up with ways to make it even worse. They know that the person that's been crashing the system is in here. They might not know it’s Sasha Redhook yet, but that won’t stop them from cracking this place open like an egg. And they won't even break a sweat doing it."
I was hoping against hope that my little speech would've brought her back to her senses, but all it did was make her square her shoulders and plant her feet. "We’re digging in. And if you don't like it, then I'm digging it on my own. You can log out. I won't hold it against you. What you did
to avoid your character getting wiped by climbing in the Guild Vault was clever, and I'm sorry it meant that you had to stick around all Sunday. Maybe in a few hours when Monday hits you'll be able to log back in and ambush the Eternals the way you intended. Maybe not. I don’t care, because all I hear from you is that this isn't your fight. Fine. But it’s mine, and I’m going to fight it."
I just sat there. I went through a lot of those stages of whatever that you're supposed to go through when something shit is about to happen. What are they? Grief, Pissed-offedness, Bargaining, Fear? I didn't know for sure. The only thing I was certain of was that the last one was supposed to be Acceptance, and I sure wasn't there yet.
But that didn't mean that I was ready to ditch her. What Deep Dive was doing was wrong, and I got the feeling that unless we could stop them, nobody else was going to. I was old enough to have watched a lot of bad things that should have been shouted down or stopped dead in their tracks, dragged out into the light of day and ridiculed for being evil get voted into practice instead, or ignored because acceptance is easier than ownership.
She was a fighter, and so was I. My whole life had been spent with one person or another assuring me that I hadn't lived up to my potential. Maybe they were right, though it was never that I didn't care, I just didn't know what to care about yet.
But here I was. I’d found it, and I'd be damned if I let these assholes walk all over it. If they could manipulate this game into some brain skimming tool to ascertain the will of the masses, the real war would be lost before people even knew that the first shot had been fired.
"I'm staying," I told her. "But I really hope you have a plan."
Sasha grinned, and at that moment I could've run over there and hugged her. "Of course I do," she said. “But you aren’t going to like it.”
Headshot: Two in the Head (Book 2 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy) Page 21