Rune Universe: A Virtual Reality novel (The RUNE UNIVERSE trilogy Book 1)

by Hugo Huesca

  The rifle kept blaring. The roots lost their grip on my body and fell inertly to the ground. I got up, stunned, as my vision slowly returned to normal. Four of the plant stalks, the ones closest to Rylena and I, burned slowly around a circle of its carbonized vegetable-entrails. One of them had been split open by the middle, and a long tongue had fallen to the ground. It went black slowly as the fire licked at it. I could see fangs around the meaty interior.

  Rylena limped towards me. “Good call, Cole. You distracted them and gave me an opening.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic, so I decided to pretend it was a compliment.

  “So, those… giant bags are their brains or something?”

  “Yeah. My minimap showed me only four attackers, so I realized these—” she kicked at a root, “—had to be just their appendages.”

  “They look disgusting.”

  “Yeah.” She took a potshot at an innocent plant stalk over the distance, killing it instantly. “Damn tentacle shit.”

  I made a pass over my suit. The things had done no damage to the fabric, only to myself. I limped the rest of the way towards the temple. This time, I didn’t feel sleepy at all.

  We stood far away from any stalks from then on, and any foliage that dared looked at us in a creepy manner, Rylena roasted.

  The temple appeared after we passed an acid geyser. The mountains rose above our heads and the temple had been carved directly on their bottom. It was a group of small, dead slabs of rock, carved a long time ago and ravaged by time and the acid mist during the centuries. It was old, very old, surprisingly so for a game that had only been out for two years.

  No one had found an intelligent alien anywhere in Rune. Yes, millions of planets were left unexplored, but any experienced player could easily scan for energy emissions and communications. If there were societies of little gray, big-headed aliens out there, they were very much a pre-hyperspace society. It was a controversial choice for a science fiction game, and the developers refused to comment about it.

  The only evidence of intelligent life were ruins like these, well-documented monoliths, temples, and ruins of extinct cultures. Some of them were built by the same beings over all a Sector. Others were different planet to planet.

  There was a hint of a background lore in Rune Universe, but so far, no one had managed to stumble upon a quest that revealed more.

  The temple in Sludge was unique in its kind. It was built by a primitive society a long time ago. It had been well explored before. The first players died three to four times to traps inside before they wised up and covered themselves with expensive shield generators.

  Rylena didn’t believe that any of those original traps still remained, but I wasn’t so sure. Not a single fungus-like plant grew over the temple, so its builders knew how to make things endure.

  “Let’s go,” Rylena said. “If we get lost and you are attacked by a mummy or something, scream like a little girl.”

  “You mean like you did when you believed those roots were tentacles?”

  “Shut up.”

  The temple’s interior was damp and dark. The slabs of polished rock were slick under our feet. As we stepped over the entrance, Rylena materialized her flying drone in her hand and set it to hover near her.

  “We are looking for traps, Four-Oh-One. Get to it.” She stood around like a thief, tense and alert. She turned to me:

  “Shouldn’t be any traps left, but guess what the last players to die here said?”

  “I imagine they said, ‘shouldn’t be any traps left.’”

  She nodded. We set out to look for Kipp’s next clue, being very careful where we stepped. The drone, 401, flew around every corner of the hall and examined random pieces of wall with a green laser grid coming from its eye.

  We searched together (even I knew not to split the party) for almost an hour. The temple was empty. It had an altar and a small catacomb, but it just wasn’t big enough to hide anything. Whoever carved it wasn’t big on religion, I guess.

  Slowly, we went over every square in the temple. Every time we passed near one, Rylena pointed at the remains of a disarmed trap. I found some of them myself. The temple had been littered with them, in a way that promised epic loot if the explorers were badass enough to survive them.

  There had been nothing. The Sludge’s temple was considered a lesson in Rune’s mark of realism and eventually players moved on. Sometimes, life didn’t kick you in the balls because she had a great plan for you, but because she just felt like ruining someone’s day.

  After a while I began to see the point. There was nothing here. Not even decorations had survived the passage of time, only old, boring rock. I started to wish a trap had been left armed so I’d have something to do.

  Even 401 looked sleepy.

  I started to feel tired again. It was almost two in the morning and I had to work in a couple of hours. Maybe, I’d tell Rylena to call it a day and try again tomorrow.

  “It was, ‘The First Immortal’ by James Halperin,” Rylena said.

  “What?”

  “The book where Kipp got the idea of freezing his… his head. It’s a book about a man who gets cryogenically frozen and wakes up in the future.” The girl’s avatar had stopped searching and was instead staring at the ceiling, deep in thought. “He always wanted to know what the future would look like. If it’d be anything like Rune.”

  We’d never talked about it. But in a way, Kipp never kept his own curiosity a secret. Every game we played was science fiction. Every movie we watched had aliens, and spaceships, and brave pilots duking it out under the stars.

  “He believed that Rune had got the gist of it. Like, the interesting parts condensed,” Rylena continued. “The spaceships, the Terran Federation, the genetic enhancements, and so on. But he hoped Rune was wrong on one thing.”

  I thought it over. “The aliens. There is no intelligent life here, just humanity.”

  “Feels lonely, doesn’t it?” She made a gesture that enveloped the room. “The temples, the dying blue stars, the travel distance. It’s so big a game, you can spend months without running into another player if you aren’t near a community hub. I guess the designers were going for that theme. It worked for me, I guess.”

  To me, the future was a violent, angry thing that was better left alone. Maybe if you didn’t look it in the eyes, it would forget you were there. After all, instead of spaceships and exploration, our most probable future involved lots of mushroom clouds. Perhaps an Ice Age. Economic collapse at the minimum. How many years had this recession lasted, now? I couldn’t remember a time without it. It was as much part of my life as breathing.

  And civilization, to me, appeared constantly on the brink of destruction. Global warming had gotten progressively worse over the last thirty years, entire countries had gone bankrupt, and wars were fought over clean water in South America.

  Rune’s future was the most amazing lie I’d ever been told. And even after playing it for only a couple of days, I realized I already loved it.

  I loved it in a different way to Kipp and Rylena’s. They loved it for what it promised, what it could mean for our future. I loved it because it was impossible.

  You can imagine my surprise, distracted as I was when I went to lay against a wall and proceeded to fall straight through it. My screams of surprise soon became terror when I realized, falling all the while, that I was going through the walls, and through the floor, like rock had suddenly turned into thin air.

  As I plummeted towards the mantle of the death-planet, I could see giant worms crawling in the distance, swimming through the darkness. There was no limit to how far my vision went. The planet was infested with them, as far as the eye could reach.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Keygen

  Without any warning, I came to a halt when I reached an underground workroom. I went through its roof and halted suddenly in mid-air, one second before I was unceremoniously dropped to the floor. My vision flashed red for a
second and I rolled around until I was on my back.

  What the fuck just happened? The roof was as transparent as the planet’s mantle. I could see the squares of the temple from down here, like staring up from the bottom of a pool. I could see the little catacombs, the shape of the main building where the altar was, and the little annexed rooms. Just behind the catacombs, I could see tiny skeletons laying to rest as if sleeping.

  So that’s where the temple’s builders went.

  I stood up, groaning. The workshop was about the same size as my apartment’s living room. A clinical, white light came from a light bulb hanging from the roof. There was a table and a chair without the usual Rune’s futuristic style, more like something you’d buy at Home Depot. Everything was covered by a deep layer of dust.

  Behind me, standing against the wall, was a gold-engraved mural twice my size. It was a heavy looking slab of metal, which had been seemingly torn off straight from its original source. Its edges were jagged with deadly-looking points of bent metal.

  The engravings had a drawing of a planet in its center, complete with a line representing its orbit and three small moons around it.

  Next to the planet were a bunch of numbers and mathematical operations. They were beyond my ability, but I could bet real money that they were orbital and astronomical calculations. A gigantic semicircle on the bottom half of the engravings represented a star, engulfed in nuclear flames.

  “Interesting, huh?” a voice behind me said, right by my ear. My heart jumped. I knew that voice.

  Last time I’d heard it, I was hiding in a future-sewer in the Argus Space Station.

  I turned around and stood face to face with the golden avatar of my friend Kipp.

  “This is as far as I got on my own,” he explained, “I was running out of time and I knew I was being watched, so I set up this message and crossed my fingers.”

  “Kipp, we are underground,” I told him. Over the distance, two giant worms were fighting. Or mating.

  “Yeah, you no-clipped for like ten miles, deep enough to avoid player’s scanners.” He smiled. “My parents set it up. It’s a controlled glitch, I guess, obviously not a part of the base game. When I came here, for the first time, there was an avatar of Mom. Apparently, the base game included a very interesting quest and they wanted to keep it hidden to the public. So, you know, they stole this—”

  He pointed at the mural. “—and brought it here. They hoped I could complete said quest. I’m hoping the same with you.”

  “They couldn’t, like, just tell you what it means?” I wondered aloud, staring at the equations all over the mural.

  “Wondered the same thing,” he said. “They made the game, right? A slab of metal with some drawings. By this point, they could’ve just told me. Honestly? I think they don’t know the answer themselves.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You said your parents developed Rune.”

  “Yeah.” He floated towards the table and pointed at a device over it. “Before we continue this message, you need to grab this Key here. Keep it in your inventory, don’t lose it. It’s a unique item, if you lose hold of it then it could respawn anywhere in the universe.” Kipp froze after this, waiting patiently for more input.

  I did as he asked. The device was an old lead sphere, ugly and dented in every part of its surface. It was covered in concentric lines and had a triangle-shaped hole in the middle. I recognized a Quest Item when I saw one and this was definitely one.

  The Key went into my inventory with no trouble. Then, Kipp continued:

  “Good job. Now, take a screenshot of the mural, since I don’t think you’ll be able to remember it perfectly by staring at it. Screenshots are a feature of your mindjack. It’s on a button by your right temple.” I jabbed a finger to my suit’s helmet. “Cole, I mean on your real head. Really…”

  Oh, of course. Ignoring the avatar’s (that Kipp had pre-programmed ahead of time to include that answer, which said a lot about the two of us) mocking smile, I found the button on the mindjack. I clumsily moved my real arm all around it. It felt like having three arms.

  I heard a shutter sound and my vision flashed white for a second. Screenshot taken.

  “Now what?”

  “Now, you come back the way you came. Before you do, here’s my take on this new quest. It’s true that my parents programmed Rune Universe, the game. They still had no idea what this mural represented. I think that’s because Rune Universe is much older than the game we are playing. You get it?”

  “What the fuck?”

  “Yeah, that’s the gist of it. Goodbye again, Cole. Hope we meet again.”

  Gravity all around me suddenly went haywire and I fell towards the roof. Then I smashed against it. I whimpered an unmanly “oomph!” and Kipp’s smile grew an inch wider.

  “Same thing happened to me. They used a ‘Gravity: -1’ line of code, but they forgot to add the ‘No-Clip: On’ before it. Oh, Say hello to Irene for me, yeah? Alright, off you go now.”

  And off I went.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Showdown on Sludge

  You have begun a new Quest! Discover the mystery behind Rune Universe! Complete this quest successfully and you’ll gain:

  —POWER BEYOND MEASURE—

  (Recommended for advanced players only)

  “What happened to you?” Rylena asked me, as I got up after smashing for the second time against a roof. “You just disappeared. I thought you had logged out until I realized you were still online on my communicator list.”

  As an answer, I took out the Key from my inventory and showed it to her. She examined it without much of a reaction, so I added, “this is what we came here for. There was… an intentional glitch in the temple. It brought me to a secret room, outside the game.”

  “Man, Beard is going to die if he hears that creepypasta is real…” she muttered.

  “Yeah,” I agreed without having any idea who Beard was. “And hear this, Kipp was there, he—”

  I told her what our late friend had found out about his parents’ quest. After I finished, I had tell her about three times that I wasn’t joking.

  “Rune Universe is the most advanced game on the market, it just can’t be older than it appears. Years ago technology wasn’t there yet.”

  I shrugged. “Kipp believed his parents were murdered over it. I’m thinking there was a military experiment that went public ahead of time.”

  After all, that’s how the Internet came to be, in a way. The military made it and then the tech made its way to civilians.

  “Maybe,” Rylena said, without committing to anything. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  Next step was to return to the Apollo Wing. I was ready to call it a day and log-out right there in the temple, but it just wasn’t safe to leave the ship standing there for anyone to steal. We had to log out in a safe zone, like the Argus Space Station or Earth.

  The return trip was easier: we just had to follow the trail of charred corpses of the plants we had murdered. I realized some of them had started to grow back.

  “Your suit is starting to fall apart, by the way,” Rylena pointed at my chest. “I don’t want to pressure you, but if you die with the Key in your inventory, and you lose it while Quantum Safeguarded, that’s it. We’re never getting it back.”

  I looked down. Over the crusty purple plant-blood all over my suit, thin lines of acid rose upwards. The suit was definitely dying. Thank you for the sacrifice, little guy. It won’t be in vain.

  We hurried back, and even took a shortcut that involved a whole lot of shooting at vegetables.

  At least we didn’t run into any giant worm.

  What we did run into, just as we finished the climb of the hill’s slope towards the ship, were three Posse of Iron fighters. They had landed all around the Apollo, and six black-suited mercenaries waited patiently on the ground around the ships. When they saw us, they raised their mean-looking laser rifles and blasters.

  “Took your sweet time, noob,”
said one of them. “Do us a solid and come closer, we have to talk business.”

  The bounty hunters raised their rifles. I wasn’t sure how to react: could Rylena and I take them? I had never fought a Player vs Player battle, and even if Rylena was better geared than them, I wasn’t, and there were a lot of them.

  I decided to act as I’d if someone pointed a gun at me in Lower Cañitas (which thankfully hadn’t happened. Why rob someone with empty pockets?), so with my hands raised I slowly did as they asked.

  Behind me, Rylena followed, her face hidden behind her visor. I whispered, without taking my sight from the mercenaries:

  “Do you think we can take them?”

  “I’d give us seventy percent chance,” she whispered back, “but there’s zero chance you’d survive the fight.”

  “I’ll respawn somewhere nearby, right?” I could take the skills penalty.

  “The Key may be lost on the Safeguard.”

  My jaws were shut tight with frustration. So, we could win the fight but lose the Key? Was the risk even worth it?

  “You two, cut it out,” the mercenary in front of us said. His face was hidden behind a menacing black helmet. They sure were eager to look like generic bad guys. “If you start Battleminding around us, we are going to just shoot you, Rylena.”

  “So, you’re not as dumb as you look,” she told him, dryly.

  “Insulting the other party during a negotiation is a bad move,” he said.

  If I jumped him, perhaps I’d take him hostage… But two of the bounty hunters had their rifles trained on me. I would never make it in time. Perhaps, if I got closer… “So, we are negotiating? Because this feels more like a mugging to me.”

  “Not at all. Posse of Iron is a respectful organization. We are merely here to buy your ship.”