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

by Hugo Huesca

  “It’s safer than her coming with us,” Rylena told me before I’d a chance to object. “I’m sure she can handle some questioning.”

  “You sure, Van?”

  She nodded. “It won’t be a problem. I’m usually on the ambushing side, but bait gets all the glory.”

  Three minutes later, Rylena had pulled over again, this time nicely. We were in the parking lot of a local hospital. It was empty except for a lone ambulance at the other end and a guard checking us out suspiciously from his booth.

  “We needed to make a stop here anyway. Tell that guard to call the police as soon as we get off. Make a scene and all,” Rylena told Van.

  “Yeah, I know. I’ll cry and stuff.” As she stepped out of the car, another figure approached us, walking out of a shadowy spot near the corner of the lot.

  “Uh, guys…” Darren pointed at her, “friend of yours?”

  Rylena nodded. “It’s alright. We needed reinforcements.”

  The figure reached the light of the streetlamps and I realized I had seen her before, at Kipp’s funeral. She looked nothing like her avatar. She was short and frail-looking, but her eyes were as ferocious as ever. She had piercings in her eyebrows, lips, and nose.

  “Hey, guys,” said Walpurgis, “long time no see.”

  She reached for the copilot’s door as Van stared at her with caution. Walpurgis looked her over and greeted her with a nod of her head. “Hey, cutie.”

  She stepped inside the car and Van walked to the back window. “You’ll be careful, right, bro?”

  “Yeah, you can bet on it,” I said. If I survived this, I promised myself I would never lie again. I was tired of it. “Go with Mom, Van, take care of her. We’ll meet again.”

  “Of course we will,” she said. Then she told Rylena, “take good care of him for me, alright?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Van took a deep breath, like she was steeling herself. She blinked over and over again as her face went flush with red. Her eyes were misty. She smiled at us. “I’m going to make such a scene.”

  She ran to the guard and Rylena floored it so suddenly I almost smacked again against the seat.

  “She’ll be fine,” Rylena assured me as the car zipped across tight streets and alleys.

  “Of course, I taught her all I know,” I said. Then I turned to Walpurgis. “Did you just make a pass at my sister?”

  Catching Walpurgis up took Rylena and I until we reached the Financial District. Walpie was on board with it even after all my warnings about this mission. She even gave me a knowing look when I explained Nordic had an office right here in San Mabrada, with all their servers stored behind an army of security drones. Rylena stopped the car one block before we reached the massive office building.

  “What are we waiting for?” Walpurgis asked. She scanned the streets in every direction, looking for any signals of the police.

  “I’m waiting for a package,” I explained. I got out of the car, walked to the corner where I’d instructed Roscoe to send the drone, and waited.

  I didn’t have to wait for long. As soon as he saw me over his camera, a little drone turned on his motor and flew down off the rooftop where it had been perched. It was carrying a small package in a brown paper bag. The drone dropped it in my extended hands, flew up and down in front of me to wish me luck, then rose up to the sky like a bat, searching for the cover of darkness.

  Thanks, Roscoe. Hope I can pay you back someday.

  “What’s that?” Rylena asked me when I returned to the car.

  “It’s a burner Berry,” said Darren before I had a chance to ask.

  “Not any burner Berry,” I said. I picked up a nanostick taped underneath the package and examined it. “It comes with one hell of a Script. Military grade, I think. The best in my dealer’s stash.”

  “That’s how we’re getting past security?” Walpurgis asked. She sounded disappointed.

  “You were hoping we had to shoot our way through?” Rylena asked her.

  “Would’ve been cool.”

  Darren stared at me like I had grown horns. “Where did you find these girls?”

  “They helped me kill a giant bear,” I told him with a cryptic smile.

  “Helped him? Bullshit, I killed that bear…”

  We reached Xanz’s skyscraper soon enough. At night, the fountain by the entrance was turned off and gave the colossal block of steel, concrete, and glass a creepy vibe, like it was the corpse of a giant monster that died on its feet.

  We left the car on a sidestreet and jogged to the entrance.

  “I work here,” I explained while I walked with fake confidence to the slab of glass that passed as doors. “I should have access to the lobby at the very least. After that, we are going to need the Berry.”

  “Won’t the police know you’re here when the system checks you?” asked Walpurgis.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Rylena as I stood in front of the building’s scanner and waited for the go ahead. “The police will find us using the street cameras, our phone signals, flying delivery drones feeds, all that. We are running against the clock.”

  A green light turned on beneath the scanner and the doors opened with a whisper of machinery.

  “After you, ladies,” I told them, pointing at the darkness inside. I made sure to wait a beat to let Darren know I was including him there.

  We stepped into the lobby with the doubtful sway of someone who knows they’re trespassing. It was cold in there, and dark. The empty secretary booth gave the whole place a post-apocalyptic feel. I had forgotten how creepy the place was after coming here for almost two months.

  “You sure security won’t mind we’re here?” asked Darren as I guided them towards the elevators.

  “Not at first, the lobby is shared by several companies under the same conglomerate. They have no idea if someone is pulling an all-nighter or the like, so they only ramp up security at the offices” I explained. Steve, the intern, had stayed here a couple nights in a row in his latest attempt at getting a promotion. I’d helped him out the first time.

  “We should hurry,” said Walpurgis. She was constantly turning back towards the exit, like she knew a monster lurked in the darkness and was trying to find us unaware. “Police will be here any moment.”

  The elevator’s lights were on and bathed us in their yellowish tint when the doors came apart with a happy ding. We glanced nervously at each other, each one of us wondering if we were doing the right thing.

  I stepped inside, followed by Rylena, Walpurgis, and Darren. Nordic’s office was near the top so we had a couple of minutes before we arrived.

  My hands trembled as I grabbed the burner Berry and prepped it. I turned it on as my friends (and Darren) stood in silence around me, like medical interns watching as their teacher performs a rare surgery. I loaded my personalized OS, waited until the system rebooted, and then inserted the Script. It was loaded halfway when the elevator’s doors opened again when we reached Nordic’s floor.

  “Hold them open, don’t step outside yet,” I told Rylena, “I don’t have permission to be on this floor, so the alarms could jump if they sense us here.”

  My Berry showed on its little screen at least three other connections on the building, not counting the security bots inside or the network. Normally, that would have meant we had to abort the job —people were watching. In this case, we couldn’t afford to play it safe and I was packing military-grade software nonetheless.

  It was the equivalent of trying to open a door with a bazooka and hoping the guards next door won’t hear the explosion. But don’t worry, the bazooka has a silencer built in.

  I held my breath as I ran the Script and it instantly jumped against the conglomerate’s firewall. The hacking program ran a thousand different tests in one second, searching for a weakness in the firewall’s structure. When it found none, it asked me if I wanted to risk a brute-force approach.

  Roscoe, if this works, I’ll name my first-born after
you. I thought. Then I hit the “proceed” button.

  The Script ran head-first into the firewall’s defenses and charged forward like an angry pitbull to a steak. Several layers of security were torn apart in seconds and when the firewall tried to reprogram them to resist the intrusion, the Script reprogrammed them and made the entire thing believe it was part of the system’s defense efforts.

  “What’s going on?” asked Walpurgis, “it’s just numbers and random words going around the screen.”

  “That Script is a beast,” said Darren, who had almost as much experience Scripting as I did, “Cole is using it to maul his way inside the place’s firewall. Normally you try to find a back-door but…”

  “Yeah, there’s going to be none when you can pay a million for the protection,” Rylena said from her place between the elevator’s doors. “How long until it’s done?”

  “At least a minute,” I said, not bothering to look at her. An instance of the firewall had separated itself from the whole and was auditing every process in the system, searching for an impostor. My Script was bombarding me with suggestions to abort. Oh no, my friend, no. We are fighting until the bitter end. I instructed it to punch through deeper into the system, instead of trying to hide from the instance in the same place. It was risky, but if the Script was powerful enough it could potentially outrun the auditor.

  “You think we could hurry?” asked Rylena. Her voice trembled slightly.

  “Uh, Cole—” started Darren.

  “Not if we want to remain undetected,” I grunted. I finally looked up, annoyed at the interruption. “Oh, fuck.”

  Three security drones were walking briskly towards the elevator. They looked like sleek Dobermans with silver skin and huge bodies. Unlike the robots we had fought back in Janus Station, security drones in the real world didn’t have any eyes. They didn’t need them.

  “I think security already found us,” said Darren.

  My Berry was starting to burn in my hands from the punishment the Script was putting on the processor. It was so far outrunning the auditor, but it was getting close and my Berry was slowing as it overheated. It needed more time…

  “Everyone stand behind me,” said Walpurgis. She pushed Darren back into the elevator and tried to do the same with Rylena. It was a bizarre sight since she barely reached the Feral’s hips in height.

  Security drones were supposed to apply non-lethal force to any intruder, subdue them, and then hand them over to the police.

  Key word being “supposed.” Accidents did happen and did so frequently. After all, dead men can’t sue you for damages, you have to deal with the State instead. And the State, sometimes, can be bought for less than a full medical bill. That’s one of the reasons I always Scripted as far away as I could from my target, better not to risk it.

  Now, I realized, if we could see the security drones advancing on us, it meant it was already too late. We had no chance of fighting metal with meat and coming up on top. And yet, the drones seemed content with staring at us two meters away from the elevator where we were trapped like mouses in a barrel.

  “Don’t move a muscle,” whispered Rylena. She nudged Walpurgis back before she could jump out of the elevator. “They haven’t jumped us yet.”

  “Close the doors,” I said suddenly. “The system isn’t sure we are intruders yet. They are scanning us…”

  Probably making calculations. Were four medical bills high enough to justify jumping first and ask questions later? I suspected the answer and Rylena probably knew it down to the decimal because she smacked the “close door” button in an instant.

  When the doors started closing —far too slowly— the drones made up their minds. Like silent ghosts, they jumped through the air straight at us. Three bullet-like hounds about to smash against us and only one had to reach the elevator to tear us to shreds…

  Darren jumped in front of Walpurgis and punched the first drone in its face. I heard the distinct sound of bone splitting open and the Feral screamed in agony. He sent the drone pummeling back to the floor and it smacked against the other two behind it, tripping them and slowing them for a second. They were back up on their feet in an instant, but by then it was already too late. I saw how they jumped again just as the doors closed completely. The metal bodies smacked hard against the doors on the outside, three times, then went quiet.

  “You could have just pushed them!” exclaimed Walpurgis, turning to face Darren. His hand was bloody and I could see red muscle turned to a pulp around broken fingers and fractured bone protruding out of the skin, like stakes out of the Earth.

  He whimpered, holding his ruined hand, and slumped against the walls, breathing heavily. “I didn’t think, just reacted…”

  Rylena examined the mess, holding his wrist. “You need to go to a hospital.”

  Darren clenched his teeth. “I’ve been through worse. Hurry up, Cole, will you?”

  “It’s almost done,” I told him. Seeing The Feral’s leader in such pain didn’t cause me the pleasure I thought it would. Probably because he had just saved all our lives.

  The Script punched through the last layers of resistance with the auditor one second away from it. I watched with triumph as a long list of permissions ran through the Berry’s screen. Then the small processor inside the plastic case made a scratching noise and the screen went dark.

  “What happened?” asked Walpurgis.

  “It overheated,” I told her, “the Berry is ruined, but I think the Script finished adding us to the system’s exceptions.”

  “You think?” asked Rylena as she bandaged Darren’s hand with a strip she had torn from his over-sized t-shirt. “So, if we open the doors, we don’t know if we are going to get torn to shreds by security?”

  “Just fucking open them and find out,” spat Darren, “no point talking about it.”

  “Actually, I agree with the meatshield,” said Walpurgis, “get ready guys, I’m opening them in three. One…”

  She opened them in one.

  The hallway was empty. I caught the shiny metal glimpse of a drone’s ass as it scrambled into the vents, it’s job being marked as “done” by the cybernetic process that was its boss.

  “You need to hook me up with your dealer, Cole,” mumbled Darren as we examined the hallway for any signs of danger.

  “Sorry, man, I have exclusivity,” I lied. I tossed the useless Berry to the side and went into the hallway, followed by my friends.

  The office’s interior was like a dark catacomb. Air circulation was turned off, so the deep darkness was accompanied by heavy, dank air that made me feel like transversing an underground crypt. We turned on our phone’s lights when we were sure security wasn’t going to jump us, and we did so just in time.

  Someone behind me screamed in pain and a bunch of boxes fell to the floor. Walpurgis, Rylena, and I jumped backward only to find Darren holding his mauled hand with a pained expression.

  “Hospital,” mouthed Rylena as he gestured us to keep going.

  “The steroids numb the pain,” I heard Darren whisper as we returned to our exploration.

  Nordic’s offices were almost a faithful representation of Xanz’s downstairs. They were still a maze of cubicles and private offices almost impossible to navigate using the faint lanterns from our phones.

  “What are we looking for?” asked Darren as I opened a door to find another useless closet.

  “Server’s room,” I told him without turning back. “The Government woman, Caputi, said they had pulled Validore out of public access. If we want to find it, we need to start at the server’s room.”

  “That’s a lot of trouble for a game, why not just delete it and be done with it?”

  “I don’t think they actually can,” I said. Rylena and I exchanged a glance. “I don’t think Nordic has much control over Rune.”

  “Why? They made it.”

  I recalled a chat I’d had with the golden avatar of Kipp.

  “Perhaps they only found it,” I whi
spered.

  Before Darren could keep the questions coming my way, I stumbled into a room that held a beautiful sight. “Check this out, guys.”

  It was about as big as Xanz snack’s room, but instead of having a table at its center filled with greasy and cheap fast food, it was filled with three rows of computers resting underneath long wooden beams. Leather-bound chairs (the leather was synthetic upon closer examination) waited in front of each CPU and each of them had a mindjack waiting at the center.

  “Sweet,” said Rylena as she examined one of the nearest mindjacks, “this must be the play-testers’ room.”

  “Didn’t know Nordic bothered play-testing anything, their PvP balance sucks,” muttered Walpurgis. “Not that I mind. It gives me the advantage.”

  “The computers have to be connected to the servers,” I said, “look for cables.”

  Cables were faster than WiFi, after all, and still more secure. I knew from personal experience that if the conglomerate that owned both Nordic and Xanz could keep the entire Internet in A4 sheets of paper, they’d throw a party. Cables were the next best thing.

  We didn’t need to search for long. Each computer was connected to a sturdy cable that went into the wall behind the wooden beams.

  “Hey, big guy,” called Walpurgis, pulling one of the cables, “help me here.”

  Darren used his good hand to pull the cable and rip it out of the wall with a slight explosion of cardboard and wall-filling.

  “Let’s see where it leads.”

  We added “destruction of property” to the ever-growing list of charges we were going to face when the police finally caught up with us, but it saved us a lot of painful wandering half-blind in the dark.

  The server’s room was at the end of the office building, behind several security points that now lay shut down thanks to Roscoe’s Script. The door was next to a panel that demanded a twenty-digit passcode to open, as well as a fingerprint, a DNA sample, and a voice-recognition phrase.

  It was also wide open.

  If Nordic’s office was a catacomb, the server’s room was the place where the corpses were kept to wait for a proper burial: row upon row of black metallic monoliths, bigger than Darren, extended for hundreds of meters in every direction.