I was a gamer, and I could work out the basics of what and how they were trading, but I didn't have any of it.
Some of the places weren’t just selling weapons. They were selling vehicles, and one girl with the front of her hair dyed purple and the back of it blood red was shining her flashlight at a loaded Mustang on one side and a neon-blue armored van on the other. She had a spiel, and she went through it with all the flair of a well-practiced carnival barker. "Step right up and take your pick, one for speed and one for muscle. You want to be the first one to the hospital, right? Well, this is how you do it. Make an offer, and I'm sure we can turn a trade."
It was an odd situation. As I browsed the stalls and tried to both keep my head down and glean information, I realized how strange it must be on the Survivor side of things. In theory, today had been about salvage. The whole point of Sunday and all of its secrecy was to allow them to cement their place in the game for the week that was soon to start. Anything they grabbed, they could keep.
At least until Saturday night, when the server reset again. But, if they were part of a Guild that was big enough or rich enough or smart enough, they'd have a Vault. And the really good stuff would go in there, safe from the wipe.
But all this shit, cars and rocket launchers and a pile of grenades that looked like it came up to my waist? For a lot of the smaller guilds it wasn’t worth the space to store it or the manpower to protect it, and so they’d sell what they could. The prices would drop and drop and drop until the raid began and then they’d basically be giving the stuff away, if they wanted it to see action.
When Sunday ended the Survivors would go on with their hard-won equipment, but Sasha and I would have already been slain, victims of Deep Dive and their Raid. Nothing more then dust on the wind, a story the other players could share without knowing any of the truth behind it.
That was what my brain was telling me, and all of a sudden that worried me immensely. I forced myself to remember that we were all dust in the fucking wind, ashes flickering from the fire and dying away to nothing at all. Don’t forget that none of this is real, I told myself. All of it is smoke and mirrors; a puppet show played in your brain. We are in a sick man's head. Your body is sitting in your rig. It isn't glamorous, but it is fun. Despite the inhibitors, and all of the safety programs, you’ve been in here too long. You're in your house, covered in your own piss and shit.
Remember that.
There were emergency systems, of course. When Absolute Reality had first come out everybody over the age of sixty had freaked the fuck out. They'd read way too much science fiction, and they had overreacted. The geriatrics were worried about people getting stuck in the game, and so by law, we had to have IVs and lifesaving solutions that could be pumped straight into our veins if things went to hell.
It didn't matter that everybody had told them that there were so many fail safes in place it was impossible for all of their nightmare scenarios to happen.
Well, those old idiots had been right. Everybody else was wrong, and I was sure that by the end of this I would be thanking my lucky stars that a bunch of old timers had read Isaac Asimov, or whatever, when they were teens.
Somebody bumped into me on my left, and I fought a little war with myself. The Zombie part of me wanted to reach over and throttle them as I lunged forward and bit a piece of flesh out of the side of the neck as I waited to see how long it took them before they stood up and helped me on my quest to rid the server of every single Survivor.
But even the Zombie side of me was a schemer. Maybe that was part of what was making this work, letting me fight back that initial reaction and allow the human side of me to hang on.
I didn't attack. Instead, I took a step away and muttered, “Sorry,” and they ignored me.
The music was dying down, now. The party wasn't over, but it was entering a new phase. It looked like groups of people were beginning to break off, and some of them had similar uniforms or had decided to all paint their weapons gold. I knew Guild meetings when I saw them, and this was going to be an issue. They'd never let me listen to their plans. There'd be too much competition for those big prizes, and cash was too often king. Even people as rich as these guys would want the prize, even if it were just to show off to the rest of their friends.
Just as I was about to try and get in on the edges of one of the larger Guilds unnoticed, somebody clapped their hand on my shoulder hard and spun me around. "Hey, you're new."
It wasn't a question. "I am," I said to a big bruiser of a guy in SWAT armor and a riot shield. "Is that okay?"
His beefy face reddened as he laughed. "Want to come with us? The Monster Makers are letting just about everybody into their guild, for now. They’ll boot us when it's done, just so you know. But they're trying to get a whole bunch of people in to see if they can win that prize, and a small share of something is better than a small share of nothing. Don't you think?"
I nodded.
The guy kept going. "They’re letting everybody they recruit have invite permissions. I'll send you an invite to the Guild, okay?"
He must've been fairly new to Headshot, because instead of the practically instant reaction that I expected, it took a moment of concentration as his voice dropped off and his face got that slack look that I'd seen Sasha have when she was going through some of the more complex menus. It shouldn’t have been hard, but when the blank look was gone, and he was smiling at me again expectantly, I realized I was really in trouble.
He’d obviously invited me, but I hadn't gotten it because I wasn't here. You can't invite a ghost to your guild…
Chapter 32
"Awesome man, thanks for the invite!" I beamed, trying to err on the side of Academy Award Nomination as opposed to sappy Telenovela drama llama. "I was worried that I'd have to go it alone."
The big guy looked confused. Obviously, he was expecting some notification that I’d joined the Guild and, clearly, that wasn't going to happen. Time to sort this out. "Yeah, I heard about this happening a couple of minutes ago. Apparently, the servers are lagging, or something. The Guild invites are going through, but the people who sent them aren’t getting happy little responses to let them know they worked."
He shrugged. "There is always bugging out with this game, isn’t there? I hope they sort it out."
“So what's the plan?" I didn’t want to be too eager, but I was hoping not to have to wait around, either. The longer I stood there, the less time I had to find out whatever I could.
“Take a few minutes and move through the crowd. See if you can find anybody else who isn’t in a Guild and invite them along for the ride. It should be easy. Their name will be blue, just like yours.” He frowned, and I got the impression that this guy wasn’t a threat in the brain department. “Your name should be green to me now, but I guess that’s part of the server lag you were telling me about."
I froze, feeling like my feet were suddenly one with the asphalt beneath them. I shouldn't ask because there was no way I could phrase the question without raising suspicion in the guy… But I had to know. For my peace of mind, at the very least. "I had some problems logging in. My name was even screwed up. What does it say above my head?"
The SWAT guy looked at me long and hard. He had little piggy eyes, and they were starting to burrow into my soul. "Are you saying that you don't know your own name, now? You aren’t playing on somebody else’s account, are you? It’s supposed to be really hard to do, and you can get in a lot of trouble for even trying. Didn't you read the Terms of Service when you signed up?”
I nodded blankly. “It’s nothing like that. The servers are-”
He kept right on going, running over my words. “It says right there in black and white-"
I jumped in and interrupted this time, eager to derail him. He sounded like the kind of do-gooder who would happily turn me in regardless of the offered reward. "Slow down, man. It's not like that, and I already know that sharing is against the rules. Logging in took forever, and when it fi
nally happened, my name was screwed up. I just want to know if it’s fixed, that’s all."
I couldn’t be sure if I’d thrown him off the scent. "You must be Russian, right?”
This was getting stranger and stranger. “Why do you say that?”
“Just a guess based on your name. I’ve heard it can be male too, over there."
His comment threw me. I could almost feel the gears in my brain grinding away, whirling faster and faster as I desperately tried to work out what this dude was trying to get at. Russian? What the hell was he talking about?
I felt the urge to run shoot up my spine again, but I held my ground. He was still looking at me, and I was too far away from the barrier anyway. I had to remind myself that he’d made contact me with at the beginning of the conversation. These guys could touch me, and even if they couldn’t shoot me because of the friendly fire rules, they could probably just swarm me and drag me to the ground.
The advantages I’d had as a phantom in the game were gone. I was at their mercy.
And maybe they were at mine…
And then the answer to all this name stuff finally hit me. "Sasha! My name says Sasha, then? Thank god it’s fixed. Not Russian, though. I just have crazy parents who wanted me to be stuck with something unique. "
I must've been right about the Sasha thing because he went from wary as fuck to clapping me on the back like we were long lost frat brothers. He pointed at a big group of gathered players that had shown up in the last couple of minutes. "You had me worried there," he confided. "Head over in that direction. The Monster Makers are in charge, and their briefing’s about to start. Listen up, and maybe we can help them get that top prize. I’ll be there in a sec, right after I swap this shield for something a little more deadly."
He wandered off into the crowd without another look, clearly still keeping an eye open for more people to invite to the Guild. I ignored him and took his advice, joining the Monster Maker intro session.
That stuff about my name was strange. The only thing that made sense to me was that I’d been too close to her account for too long, and when the game had been forced to rummage through whatever minimal information it had on me, it had assigned me a name it had somehow dredged up something it shouldn’t have. Whatever slice of her programming I’d been piggybacking on didn't come with the same countermeasures that she'd been running for the codes that should have been in contact with Headshot’s systems.
Now that we’d been indirectly compromised, I had to be even more careful. With her name hovering above my head if any of the Eternals spotted me it was even more of a certainty that they’d put the whole thing together.
I was trying hard not to panic, even though I could sense that the odds of success were shrinking. I could feel them closing in around me, and I was surprised to find that I was actually getting claustrophobic.
Global spanning Corporation? Check.
Random players out to get me? Check.
And don’t forget the cherry on top, the name of my co-conspirator, the daughter of the guy who’s mind we were living in right now, emblazoned above my head?
Fucking check.
Headshot hadn’t decided I was a Survivor, though. I couldn't see anybody's name, and even if I could, there wasn’t any point in trying to invite anybody. I’d graduated from specter to something else, but the game was still trying to work out what it would let me do. I was only partially here, and the more times the Deep Dive controlled parts of the game were forced to check on my status, the more chance it would burst through whatever nonsense algorithm it'd come up with to explain my presence.
I made a beeline for the briefing. There were about thirty-five guys and girls standing in a loose circle around a man in the middle. He had a blonde mohawk with alternating stripes of white and black, as well as some type of night vision goggles over his eyes. He was already talking, and it was odd the way he refused to take them off as he stared straight at everyone's faces.
If he was expecting us to read his expression through the gear, he was going to be sorely mistaken.
The gathering had a lot of questions for him. It sounded like people were polite at least. He was answering everything they threw at him, and I had to admit that he was doing a good job of rattling off responses. If this was the guy in charge of the Monster Makers, I didn’t have a hard time believing that they were one of the preeminent guilds. Adding everybody to their ranks was just a lark for them, but when I looked past him at the dozen or so massive trucks and the people handing out equipment out of the back of them, I knew exactly what his plan was.
It wasn't about the money Deep Dive had offered as a raid reward. He may even have been personally well-financed, but even if he wasn't, I could see that they only thing he cared about was taking that prize from the other guilds.
This guy was competitive. He struck me as the type of player that had been in the game since day zero, and bragging rights were far more important to him than a bank account.
I realized that I’d been spacing out while building my mental profile of him, and I dragged myself out of my thought so that I could see what the hell was going on. "I hear what you're saying," he told a girl in a camouflage jacket and white combat boots that laced all the way up to her knees. She was wearing a skirt too, but it was so small that she probably shouldn’t have even bothered.
She crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “And?”
Mohawk smiled. "And you're right. It might not be fair that you’re part of the Guild for now and then at the end of the day you won't be. And if that's not okay, then you're free to leave. But I’d encourage you all to look at it as a learning experience. Use your time amongst us as an opportunity to see how the Monster Makers operate. And we’ll be watching, too. Make a name for yourself in the raid, and come Monday morning you might just find that there's an invitation waiting for you when you log in. We’re always happy to accept the best of the best. It’s just your good fortune that this time we’re happy to accept rabble because we’re willing to prove a point to the other Guilds."
Some of the other players spoke up. A lot of them didn't like being called rabble, although I had only to compare the gear they were carrying to the stuff coming out of the trucks to be damn certain that Mohawk was right about their place in the pecking order. It might not have been the most diplomatic way of saying, but that didn't make what he was saying a lie.
The Monster Maker’s Guild leader pointed at the equipment being handed out by his guildmates. "Before you get all riled up, take a look at all of that firepower. We’re not keeping this for ourselves. We've got Engineers and Artificers working around the clock, and they’re damn good at what they do. The Monster Makers want you to share in our abundance, and we’re not just giving it to you. This shit is for everyone. Even the other guilds can come and grab some, since priority one is showing the others what it means to be generous. And, if we get some good press for it, so be it. Once this little chat is finished and everyone is happy, I invite you all to get your asses over there and grab something nice. Assault rifles, C4, whatever takes your fancy. It's on the house, so take something extra and give it to somebody you don't know. Let's spread the love, huh?"
A guy on the other side of the circle was trying to say something, but his voice was drowned out by the rest of the throng. He didn't shut up though, and to make himself noticed he took three or four steps into the circle, toward Mohawk.
"Jared?" The new guy said. That must have been the Monster Maker guy’s name. The guy with the question was long and lean, with short spiky black hair that ended too soon in badly frosted tips. He looked like your average Special Forces soldier; backpack, rifle, backwards baseball cap. "Jared!"
Mohawk/Jared rolled his eyes at him. "Yes, Adam? And dare I say before you begin, it's nice to see that the Cricket Crew thinks it’s appropriate to join our little circle. You're not spying on us, are you?"
Adam wasn't going to be baited, though. He had a serious look on his face, and
judging from the way he was standing like a tree in a storm I figured he was that sort of guy. Not having fun didn’t bother him, not one little bit. "I want to know if you found out anything about the login issues. Supposedly, you guys filed a support request and got a response. Any new info to share?"
Jared shook his head sadly. "Okay, sorry for the bullshit just now, then. This is a serious issue, and I’m glad you brought it up." He spoke louder so that everyone could hear, and the half dozen little conversations that had sparked up around me died away immediately. "Put your hand in the air if you're aware of the login problems people are having today."
Just about every hand in the circle shot up.
Jared nodded knowingly. "Okay, hands down. Now let's do this because I've got a theory. Obviously, a whole bunch of people are having trouble getting into the game, and Deep Dive says that they’re looking into it. If you know someone who can’t log in, put your hand in the air.”
Every hand shot up. Every. Single. One. This was clearly a lot more widespread then I’d let myself believe.
“Hands down,” Jared told them, “because I’ve got one more question. If anyone knows someone who can’t log in who was bitten by a Zombie last week somewhere between LA and here, raise your hand.”
Again, all the hands went up. All of them except for mine. Here I was trying to work out where he was going with this, and I’d completely forgotten that I was supposed to be blending in…
I shot my hand up before he could meet my gaze and ask me what my deal was, and was happy to see that he glanced at me and then looked away. To him, I was just some stupid noob, and that was just fine with me. Better that than the truth, that was for sure.
Jared started ticking off locations on his fingers. “Los Angeles, the Basin, Beverley Hills, the fight leading into the Silicon Valley. We’ve spent a lot of time on this today, and we’re willing to bet that if you fell to the enemy last week in any of those locations, you aren’t in the game right now. You’re sitting at home, swearing at your rig and raging against Deep Dive. As you should be, mind you.”
Headshot: Two in the Head (Book 2 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy) Page 23