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

by Hugo Huesca

  Roscoe aimed down the barrels and breathed steadily. I gritted my teeth and waited for the bang and the crash of broken glass.

  Instead, the hacker lowered the weapon, sighed, and turned around. “Yeah, I guess it’d be pretty dumb to shoot down government property, am I right?”

  I nodded vigorously. Defeated, my Script dealer went back to his place behind the counter.

  “Still, I hate how they take our privacy to a trip through their dirty—”

  “I know,” I said, “but they have more guns than you do, hackerman.”

  Roscoe’s fingers flew over the keyboard of his computer so fast they were a blur. “Well, I can’t shoot it down but I just sent it packing back to its owner.”

  I heard the distinct sound of a bunch of expensive, heavy machinery slamming itself on a nearby fountain outside Roscoe’s window.

  “Whoops,” Roscoe shrugged. “I think I used the wrong Script.”

  We stared at each other as my brain processed what the hell had just happened.

  “What part,” I told him slowly, “of ‘don’t shoot it down or we’ll go to jail’ did you not understand…?”

  “I didn’t shoot it down,” he said, “the drone malfunctioned. I’m not insane, Cole. I know how to mask a Script, the guys who owned the drone have no evidence it wasn’t just a human error. Don’t worry about it, my man.

  “I do this all the time.” He smiled innocently.

  If it wasn’t for the fact that I believed Roscoe when he said he was used to things like those, I may have gone running out the store front.

  The drone itself didn’t worry me. It was a fact of life the government was constantly watching us. Most of us usually went by without any trouble, hidden by the sheer number of people living in the States. And by our sheer boringness, too, I suppose.

  What worried me was why the drone was following me. Kipp had gone to great pains to hide his plans for his parent’s quest. But he was just a guy, same as I. We didn’t have trillions invested in surveillance mechanisms. I remembered the heavy layers of security in Nordic’s offices. The only thing protecting my apartment was an old wooden door and the nearby Lower Cañitas Police Department filled with understaffed, underpaid, overworked, and often corrupt officers. Not even including the drones.

  “You can stay here, tonight,” Roscoe told me. “And, no offense man, but until we’re sure you’re not being targeted by some kind of spy bullshit, I’ll lay down with the perfectly legal software I sell you.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” I said. The back store was actually Roscoe’s home. A single-roomed square more suited for a hamster than a human being, filled to the brim with fast-food cartons, beer, cheap vodka bottles, and a plastic table covered in its entirety by drug paraphernalia. Also drugs. Enough to make a dead man forget he was dead. By the rock-star level table was a futon where Roscoe liked to bring his love conquests. I pitied the brave men who agreed to lie their backs down on that surface, which looked both sticky and slick.

  Like a soldier facing the shooting squad, I steeled myself for the futon. “Do you have a blanket?”

  He did. He was using it as the table’s tablecloth. It had been brown some time ago, now it was gray. I decided I’d place my hoodie and my suit’s jacket over it anyway, as an extra layer of protection.

  “Alright, then. Make yourself comfortable, and stuff. I’ll take a walk outside, see if the drone’s wreckage is still there. I’ll keep it in the store and wait to see if anyone comes look for their stolen property. You know, perfectly legal, good citizen behavior. Come hang out if you want.”

  “Thanks, Roscoe.”

  After he crossed the drapes back to the store, I lay down my blanket, hoodie, and jacket over the Death Futon, then wrote Mom a message.

  Hey Mom. I met with a friend and it’s a bit late now, I’ll see you tomorrow after I come back from work. Love you. I’m fine.

  I wasn’t fine. Not really. The Ferals wanted to kill me. I had set a person on fire. My best friend had been poisoned. I suspected their killers were now watching me.

  My best bet to keep a healthy mind would be to go to sleep right now. Just, turn it off. But, I couldn’t sleep, I was terrified.

  Perhaps I bit way more than I can chew, I thought.

  A distraction. Normally, I’d log-in to Rune, but my mindjack was in my apartment. Roscoe’s paranoid, ultra-hacker attitude would just put me more on edge. I could download a movie, but I knew myself: I’d just browse torrent sites for an hour, never choose anything to watch, and would just be back to thinking about my impending doom or something. Instead…

  Kipp’s books were in my apartment, too, hidden in the box they came in. But I could torrent one of those too, right? I even remembered one title. I wasn’t the reading type, to be honest, but until recently I wasn’t the Rune type either.

  Since I had nothing to lose, I tracked down Sirens of Titan. It seemed like a short read and that sealed the deal. I began reading, slowly at first, like a kid who is fooling around with his first girlfriend. Slowly, I gained confidence. It wasn’t like a first time, after all. More like revisiting your childhood home, which was strange, but by that point, I was already hooked. I was laughing out loud by the end of the second chapter.

  I kept at it until I fell asleep on the futon, forgetting all about its crusty nastiness. I kept reading as I took a bus near Accolade Square to work (after double and triple checking no murderous giant was already inside, this time). Had to stop during work, where Steve asked me if I’d spent last night on a drug-related binge. When I asked what drugs he meant, he named every one he knew.

  After a well-needed cup of Xanz’s special blend, I powered through the day and was able to leave early, since Manager Jimenez liked to leave early and thus wasn’t around to check on me. It would give me more time to avoid Darren, but I couldn’t keep it going forever.

  No one jumped me as I walked towards my house, which meant that Roscoe had worked fast in talking with Darren’s dealer. Or perhaps he wanted me to gain a false sense of security before striking.

  Didn’t matter, at least for today. I was safe at home. My clothes went straight into the laundry basket, buried deep beneath the others to hide the smell. Then I went back to reading. I finished the book by 9 pm. I had laughed during most of it, but when I closed the reading app, I had to go hide in the living room so my family wouldn’t see me tearing up.

  “Careful with those rags, the fumes are enough to melt your virtual lungs and I don’t want to find out if there’s a death-animation coded for that,” told me the Beard. He was right, the remains of my spacesuit were sizzling with a combination of toxins and acid, eroding the advanced threads and armor plaques.

  Rylena had called an old friend of her’s to get us out of trouble, since we were stranded on the Death Planet otherwise. Beard was an… interesting fellow.

  I did as he had suggested, trying very hard not to touch the exposed side of the rags with my bare skin. My suspicions over how fast they would kill me were mostly based on the fact that the Beard had refused to let me get past his freighter’s airlock with the thing on.

  Rylena, on the other side of the sealed lock, had agreed instantly.

  I was left in my gray overalls, which more or less functioned as a permanent, indestructible underwear (for obvious reasons) and tiny, blistering pieces of suit all around me in the chamber.

  “Good job. Now, I’m going to sterilize the zone and you,” the Beard went on. “So you don’t die just by being in the same place as this shit.

  “I guess it’s—” tubes fell from the walls all around me and sprayed everywhere like a hormonal teenager. The white compound was cold and itched and made me feel slightly traumatized. Rylena explained, over the intercom, that it was made of medical-nanomachines designed to find and neutralize acid, poisons, toxins, viruses, and so on.

  “You could’ve bought me dinner beforehand,” I complained, as the remnants of the compound oozed away from my skin and the pieces of suit i
nto a special drain.

  “Your sense of humor is much younger than you,” said Rylena, as the airlock’s doors finally opened and I reunited with the two players.

  “You’re calling me immature?” I tried to think back to an immature joke of hers, but my chance at a riposte was lost when I stopped.

  “Yes,” she said, moving on as quickly as she could. “Now, follow us, we need to talk business.”

  “I love talking business, makes me feel so important,” said the Beard. As Rylena guided us through the Beard’s own ship, he turned his stocky body towards me and whispered. “I thought it was a funny joke, man.”

  “Thanks, uh, Beard.”

  The Beard wasn’t his real username, but it was the one which had stuck. Real name Gabrijel Ivanic. Rylena told me Gabrijel was a forty-year-old man who worked in a steel company in Beloretsk, Russia. He’s supposed to be six-foot-tall and something resembling a bear and a walking stereotype. At least, that’s what he had told me himself.

  In Rune, his avatar had no trace of an accent and barely reached my waist. He was the shortest person I had seen in-game. And he was almost as muscled as he was short. He looked like a walking cube in his armored spacesuit.

  Next thing you noticed about the Beard was… his beard. The copper hair fell all the way to his knees in a way that looked impractical. His helmet included a specially modified forcefield so he wouldn’t suffocate trying to gather all the material inside it. It wasn’t an optimal gear choice, but he wasn’t the kind of player who cared about having the best gear.

  When I’d asked him what the deal was with his avatar, he had looked at me in surprise. “Really, man? You don’t get it? I’m a Dwarf! Like Gimli, you know? From the Lord of the Rings?”

  I had shrugged and he had shaken his head in disappointment.

  What I could gather was, the Beard had found a way of avoiding Rune’s limit on “you can be any race, as long as that race is human” aspect of character creation.

  Next thing I knew was, the Beard had been a friend of Kipp’s and Rylena before they went their separate ways six months ago.

  “He suddenly stopped answering calls to raid and party up,” he explained in the ship’s dining room, which reminded me vaguely of the inside of a prison. “Before that, we were trading partners, more or less. He got the rare minerals and materials and I got him trading deals with merchants who otherwise wouldn’t talk to him. Stuff like that.”

  I nodded. Six months ago was probably when Kipp started planning his last great heist. He stopped grouping with other people so he could focus on making preparations.

  And because he knew, if he saw his friends again it would be painful to know it was the last time they’d meet. I thought. It’s what I’d have felt, in his situation.

  “When I heard of his passing, I wanted to come to the funeral,” the Beard carried on, “but you know. Russia is far from the States, and money is tight sometimes—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, “Kipp would have said that you didn’t miss anything interesting.”

  The Beard smiled behind his beard and I realized we were now friends. He was easier to hang out with than Rylena, at least, since I didn’t have to try not to stare at his character’s chest when we talked.

  “He would have said that,” agreed Rylena. She was eating a pre-packaged space ration (looked and tasted exactly like a chocolate bar). Avatars didn’t need to eat or go to the bathroom, but some food gave you small, temporary bonus to your stats or skills. Some players went to real-life cooking universities so they would then come back to Rune and make a profit with ultra-rare crafted recipes.

  “Gabrijel, thank you for picking us up from Prima,” she added.

  “No problem is a problem for an old friend,” he said, patting her on the back. Power-Suit and everything, Rylena had to make an effort not to fall. Beard’s hands were probably real-life sized. Was there a “Brute Force” skill in Rune? “I heard about how you lost your shiny legendary ship, guys. Must feel terrible.”

  “Yeah, it’s not as bad as it looks like. I have enough databytes to buy a shirt,” I said. “It would say ‘I sold my Apollo Wing to mercenaries and the only thing I got was this lousy shirt.’”

  “That’d be a fantastic shirt.”

  Before we’d logged on, Rylena and I had had a chat. The topic was the following: we needed reinforcements to help us tackle the “Mystery of Rune” quest. Without the Apollo Wing, we could get hounded by mercenaries just like the Posse of Iron, the moment we made a noticeable discovery. If we wanted to survive, we needed backup.

  I asked her if it was wise to bring more people into this. I told her about the drone. Could we trust the old players? Kipp had limited his quest to just the two of us, after all.

  But, on the other hand, circumstances had changed. We had lost the Apollo Wing, which would have given us a huge advantage over anything in-game if we had had a crew to man it to its full potential. And, although I didn’t share this with her, I kinda had also lost Kipp’s own Personal Assistant during my anti-tutorial rampage.

  At the very least, I agreed, we should talk with the players she and Kipp had trusted the most. Some of the guys which had gone to the funeral were too young to get into real-life dangers, others were not available, or just not that good of a player. The list had quickly shrunk.

  Now, talking to Beard, I realized we should take the risk. I wasn’t naturally a trusting person, but there’s a point where you have to take the leap: if it turns out the entire world is against you, not much you can do then, right?

  “Look, Gabrijel,” said Rylena as I gave her the “go-ahead” signal we had agreed beforehand, “there’s a reason we were on Sludge.”

  The explanation took her a while. I had imported a copy of the temple’s screenshot into Rune and I slid it over the table at the appropriate time of her story. When she was finished, Beard was as serious and still as I had ever seen him in the hour we had known each other.

  “So, you’re sure Kipp was… poisoned?” he asked, in a low voice. “Before he was even born?”

  “He was sure of it,” I said. “He even had some evidence, a letter his parents managed to slip him.”

  Beard looked down to his feet and thought deeply. “And whoever the killer is, he’s still out there, very much guarding whatever Kipp wanted us to look for.”

  “Yes,” said Rylena, “we know it’s dangerous, that’s why we aren’t asking for your help straight away. Just, think it over and…”

  “What? No, no,” he shook his head and his beard danced over his belly, “I’m in, of course.” His hands were made into fists.

  I remembered he was supposed to be forty years old, with a family of his own. Perhaps he even had kids of Kipp’s age.

  “You sure? You should be safe in Russia, but if the killer is the one Kipp believed he was…”

  We didn’t say the name out loud, we hadn’t even talked about it. I was a Script Kiddie, I knew some words are monitored over the Internet. If Ogawa was the owner of Nordic, his own name was tracked for sure in-game.

  “I can take care of myself,” he said, “and so can my family.”

  Then the moment passed just like that. Beard looked at Rylena and me with bright eyes, almost bristling in excitement. “Guys… you have my axe.”

  “You don’t have an axe—”

  “How long have you wanted to say that line?” asked Rylena as she rolled her eyes. But she was smiling.

  “A very long time. I wanted to save it for a worthy occasion,” as if to confirm this, the Quest Started screen appeared right in front of him. He accepted it.

  And then we were three. Our partnership grew. Next order of business in the Patel Avenging Company was the screenshot.

  “I have no idea what it means,” Rylena said, “it must be a planetary map of some kind, but, I’m not an astrophysicist.”

  “Neither am I,” muttered Beard, as he examined closely the screenshot like he was examining a diamond, figuring
out if it was real. “But I know what planet this mural is talking about.”

  “You do?” we asked in unison.

  “About ten percent of the players in Rune do,” he explained, shrugging. “It’s not a big deal. The twin moons, the orbit, the size of the star… Yeah, this is a well-known planet. It’s Zodia 5.”

  I felt a jolt of electricity surge through my skin. “Zodia 5? Have you seen it? Can you tell us about it?”

  If it was a well-known planet, why all the secrecy surrounding it?

  “I can do better than that,” Beard said, to our unbelieving ears, “I can show it to you.”

  The Zodia system was far from Prima. It took us a couple jumps to find the correct angle and then several stints in hyperspace. Beard’s freighter was a merchant ship, sturdy just like him, but slow and vulnerable to the more agile fighter ships. He avoided pirates by staying away from dangerous Sectors of space. Zodia was in one of those sectors, so he left his ship ready to jump at the first sign of trouble.

  “Here it is, Zodia,” he said, pointing at a bright red giant at the center of the cabin’s screens. He didn’t need to bother, though. Even at a distance, Zodia was so colossal it took up ninety percent of the screen. The planets orbiting it weren’t even visible.

  “And Zodia 5?”

  “Well,” he said, typing over his retro-keyboard, “this right here is Zodia 1. Look at the scorched surface, it’s more like a ball of molten rock at this point.”

  The screens zoomed into a red-hot planet.

  “These are, Zodia 2, 3, and 4,” he kept going, showing us each of the planets. Then the screen jumped over space for a second, “and this is Zodia 6. And 7. And 8.”

  “Uhh…” I muttered.

  “Where is Zodia 5?” asked Rylena.

  Beard shook his head. “If you knew the answer to that, you’d be solving one of the most interesting creepypastas in the game, Rylena.”

  “Creepypastas?” I asked. “You mean, the shitty Internet horror stories?”

  Beard admonished me with a finger as big as my wrists. “They are not dumb! They are a bastion of creative expression, they represent our deep, dark, twisted fears!”