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

by Hugo Huesca

  Then it was only whiteness.

  I coughed painfully. Every part of my body ached. My lungs were barely functional. Every breath was a fight against a weight that constrained me and suffocated me. Even after I blinked over and over, I could only see darkness.

  This all led to one inevitable conclusion.

  I was still alive.

  My right arm responded to my will and moved painfully across a debris-ridden floor towards my head. I felt my way around my mindjack and pulled it off, dragging it across the floor.

  If I wasn’t so tired, I’d then have had a flashback to a fight my friends and I had in Rune a long time ago, against a giant murder-bear that ended up on top of me.

  This time, it wasn’t a murder bear, but someone just as big. That’s why I couldn’t breath. I was slowly suffocating under a giant.

  Darren had jumped in front of the bullet meant for me. His body had served as a shield for mine and now he was looking at me with blind, unseeing eyes.

  Somehow, he felt my gaze. He smiled weakly. His teeth were covered in blood and a crimson trail went down his chin and dripped into my shirt.

  “Darren? How—” I gasped. It came as barely a whisper.

  “You’re going to have… such a guilt trip… when you think about this… later, huh?” he rasped. Then he laughed in silence and winced in pain. A splatter of blood hit my face. “I’m not… a total asshole, man… We’re at peace.”

  With his last breath, Darren rolled away from me. My body instantly filled with air. With life. Just as soon as I could breathe again, Darren took his last breaths.

  He had tried to kill me for some bullshit not two months ago. Now he had died for me, the fucking asshole.

  He didn’t even know why his death was worthwhile. He wasn’t inside Rune. He simply acted.

  That was Darren’s style.

  “Yeah, we’re at peace, man,” I whispered, as tears streamed down my face.

  I pushed my upper body up, trying to gather enough strength to stand up. My chest ached with pain beyond anything I’d ever felt and I fell to the floor as my mind danced inside my skull.

  Some of the blood on my chest was mine. The bullet had gone all the way through Darren. I knew this because I could feel the bloody thing lodged in my ribs. It felt like someone punching me constantly in the same place, using a meat-grinder.

  “Cole? Are you okay?” Rylena ran towards me from somewhere outside my field of vision. She was carrying the man’s sidearm in her hand. She seemed fine.

  “I’ll live,” I gasped, “Darren saved my ass.”

  “He jumped at you at the last moment,” she said. She knelt over our fallen comrade. “I think he was faking being unconscious the whole time… Oh shit, Cole, he’s dead…”

  I nodded weakly, too tired to even clean the tears out of my face. It wouldn’t matter, since Rylena was crying too. She was only human, after all.

  “I told him he was a waste of life…” Yeah. That would probably eat me alive if I lived long enough to go to sleep and have a nightmare.

  “People can surprise you, if you give them the chance,” she said, looking away.

  “Yeah. They do that a lot.”

  “We’ve to make it worth it,” she said, “I’m going to get my mindjack and then we can get to Validore together.”

  What?

  “I already… I already did, Ryl,” I whispered, “I was gone for a long time.”

  “What?”

  “Validore. The Keygen… I did it.”

  “Cole… you had that mindjack on for less than thirty seconds.”

  What?

  “What?”

  “You put it on. Darren jumped. I ran to fight off the man. He was dead before I reached him. I ran back here.”

  But I’d been in the ship. I’d talked to Beard. I’d…

  I’ll be damned.

  “I think the game… the Signal… helped. It has always been watching over us. Lending a hand in more ways than we may know.”

  Rylena was pale. “Because it wanted us to reach Validore?”

  “I… I think…” I hoped, “it wanted us to make a choice.”

  “And you made it?”

  Even smiling was too painful, but I did it anyway. “Girl, I’m about to blow your mind.”

  “Bold talk,” she said, “everyone says the same.”

  “Well, I just announced to every intelligent civilization out there that the Earth is single and looking—”

  She smiled. Then, she paused to scan my face for a fraction of a second. I could imagine how her brain tried to decide if I was joking or somehow telling the truth.

  “You mean…”

  The windows in the nearby rooms exploded as a helicopter drone got right next to the skyscraper walls. It was looking straight at us, if a helicopter could somehow look anywhere. Its minigun was aimed straight for us, too.

  A military-grade lantern bathed us in light and turned the night into day. I covered my eyes with my hands and squinted hard. A heavy-duty migraine was fermenting inside my skull, while my brain was trying to convince the rest of my body that falling over unconscious would feel fantastic right about now.

  “COLE DORSETT AND ASSOCIATES. YOU’RE UNDER ARREST FOR TERRORIST TAMPERING OF CLASSIFIED MATERIAL. YOU AND ALL YOUR ASSOCIATES MUST EXIT WITH YOUR HANDS UP OR WE’LL OPEN FIRE.

  “ALSO, WHAT YOU DID TO THOSE POOR SWAT DRONES WAS UNCALLED FOR. S-002 WAS CLOSE TO RETIREMENT.”

  Rylena and I exchanged a blank look.

  “We’ll have to talk later, Ryl,” I told her, “perhaps when we’re out of jail.”

  She helped me stand up while I tried to keep my arms held up high. “I don’t think we’re getting out, Cole. Do you think it was worth it? Rune, I mean.”

  This time, human police officers were rappelling down the helicopter and into the building. They were carrying enough weaponry to level a small country. I paid them no mind. Bathed by the white light, Rylena’s face looked angelic.

  “Worth it,” I whispered. We drew closer together like pulled by a magnetic field.

  When the police surrounded us, with their rifles and grenade-launchers pointed at us in a perfect semi-circle, Rylena and I were still kissing, arms up above our heads.

  It felt like magic.

  The blood-loss probably had something to do with that, though.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Script Kiddie

  Hospital’s rooms have a way to give the color white a polished aspect that make it perfectly clear any visitor isn’t welcome for long (not with their germs and their dust), but this one had other colors to change the feeling of the place.

  For example, dark red for the flowers around the head of the bed. Pink and yellow for the chocolate boxes. Brown for the giant teddy bears sitting near the table, like a family waiting for tea time. Cherry and pink for the short hair of the girl sitting by the bed’s head, feeding her boyfriend the hospital’s vitamin-jelly.

  The feeling of this room was warm and cheery. Slightly too cheery. Almost manic. But we needed cheery. We needed warm. Perhaps we even needed manic. It helped us get our heads away from the world. It was hard to do when that world is very keen on not letting you turn your head away.

  “You started this, you better give us some explanations,” was the world’s recent spiel.

  The brief peace and quiet of this hospital room felt like a breath of fresh air for everyone here.

  Everyone except the guy laying in the bed.

  “God, guys, please, someone at least turn around those damned teddy bears,” Darren pleaded with us for the fourth time. “They are always staring. I don’t know what they want anymore.”

  “Sorry, puddin’,” sang Chimera (Real name Magda Libermann), “those are gifts from your fans. You want to appear grateful for your fans on the photographs.”

  Darren cringed at the “puddin’” name, more so when he saw my smile. “Then unplug me, woman, being dead wasn’t so bad after all.”

  D
arren had been dead for fourteen-and-a-half-minutes after the man in the suit had shot him. But his brain was intact. To the best doctors in the State, that kind of death was a temporary condition at most.

  Still, the list of damage on his body read like a horror short story for doctors all by itself. Here’s how the surgeons had received the former Feral’s leader a month ago, while Rylena, Walpurgis, and I were sent via helicopter straight to max-security jail:

  His heart had been obliterated by the last bullet. Every rib was broken. Both lungs collapsed. Intestines disintegrated. Pancreas was out of the picture. Pelvis broken. Legs broken too, somehow. Spine severed in two. One kidney turned to mush.

  That’s page one of three. Darren had been in and out of surgery for as long as we’d been in jail. A month. When the surgeons were finished with him, one of them famously said —yeah, famously, the quote was in every news station— “We had to replace so much of his body, I’d say it’s fair to call myself his second mother. A bit more damage and I’d be trying to get custody.”

  “They won’t let you die after all the taxes they spent on you,” I told him.

  “Yeah, well, that’s if they don’t change their minds again,” he grunted.

  He had spent so much time in bed that his skin sagged like a suit that fit too big. His face was thin and bony and his eyes were covered in giant bruises. He was a mess.

  Chimera hadn’t left his side since she was released —for “the country’s gratitude for our service to humanity.” Oh yes. More on that, in a bit.

  What can I say? People will always surprise me.

  Rylena —Irene, I’d begun to call her— walked to the window and looked down. I felt a twinge of apprehension as she did so. Lately I’d grown paranoid of windows. And of open spaces. I thought I’d a very good reason. Walpurgis avoided them, too.

  This one was bulletproof, though.

  “Those guys may be willing to do the job,” she meant the protesters out by the hospital’s entrance. It was a blob of people big enough to cover several blocks. Only a line of police drones and real human officers prevented them from spilling over into the hospital. If they did so, we’d be boned.

  “I don’t think they’d try with her nearby.” Darren nodded in Walpurgis direction. She was sitting in a corner of the room, away from the window and opposite to the door, so she could watch the only point of entry.

  The official story was that we’d managed to blow the SWAT drones away with explosives.

  What really had happened, though, is that five tactical SWAT tank-drones had been hunted and taken out of commission by one girl, in under three minutes. The police had found her sitting atop a smoking drone, surrounded by the destroyed remains of Nordic’s office. She was cleaning her nails while they surrounded her and the drone’s corpse. Her eyes glowed red like the pits of hell, looking straight at them, daring them…

  At least that’s how the damn legend went. I had no idea what had really happened down there between Walpurgis and those drones. Not the slightest idea. She’d told us nothing. The police had told us nothing.

  Officer Harrison told me, the one time we’d met afterward, that there was a tape from the building’s security footage.

  He had refused to let me see it.

  “If you saw it,” he had told me, “you’d think it was faked anyway.”

  Walpurgis sat on her chair with the beatific air of a monk. She caught my gaze and winked.

  “They just won’t quit…” Chimera complained. “They barely understand what happened and they still want to see blood on the floor.”

  The image of blood —all the blood I had seen— on the floor of Nordic, made my stomach churn. The nightmares had been brutal and they had no end in sight. Still, here, in the light of day, with Irene and my friends around me, they felt far away, mirages with no power. We’d meet later, my nightmares and me, when night arrived. Meanwhile…

  “They are scared,” I told Chimera —Magda—, “and from their point of view, they have a right to be. Uncertainty can be a bitch.”

  After we were captured by the police and jailed, they threw Mom and Van in jail for good measure, too. And Rylena’s dad, who I’d never met before.

  The Government had tried to call us terrorists. There were rumors of execution for betraying the country.

  During that first night, the players of Rune Universe were extremely surprised by the out-of-nowhere game’s Expansion that had fallen right out of the sky. The game’s map had grown in size. It was millions of times bigger. It was now an entire universe. Already the most intrepid of players were reporting strange transmissions and unexplainable acts all around the Outer Edges, as the new unexplored space was being called. So far, no one had any idea what they meant. Those transmissions were simply too alien.

  No one thought of connecting the events of the game with what’d happened in Nordic’s offices until later that week. When CETI announced they had intercepted a real-world transmission from outer-space, too complex to be a random phenomenon.

  When the news dropped, the world was excited and exhilarated. We’d collectively, as a species, been waiting for this for a long time.

  When news of the second transmission dropped, followed closely by a third and fourth, that exhilaration was quickly transformed into panic.

  Had we signed a declaration of war with an intergalactic empire without realizing it? Was there a quickly-approaching space-armada about to purge us from the surface of our planet?

  Who was hiding in the dark between the stars?

  People were angry, and angry people usually need a target for their anger. They had the perfect scapegoat in the three kids that had assaulted the Nordic’s offices, destroyed a SWAT drone squad, killed Seitaro Ogawa, and a former CIA director named John Derry. The situation looked increasingly grim for us. I heard the guards talk about an expedited trial straight into an execution. They didn’t sound like they were trying to scare me, but they managed it all the same.

  Then someone went and leaked a dozen records between Derry and Ogawa. The ex-director had been extremely careful with his own conversations and no proof of those could be found anywhere. Ogawa hadn’t been as paranoid. The leaks had come from inside the organization, by an Ogawa’s employee named Ignas Girsang, lead developer of the Rune Project. The man had dropped the emails straight to the servers of all the major news stations and then had quietly retreated back to his country in eastern Europe. His last sighting was him walking out of Nordic’s office and flipping the camera off.

  The conversations showed to the world a very different face of beloved programmer and game designer Seitaro Ogawa. They proved how he had murdered the Patels and their child. They talked about collusion with an unhinged ex-CIA operative that had bitterly refused to admit his country didn’t need him anymore.

  Worse of all, they talked about the Rune’s Signal as a weapon. Something that could be leveraged for great power to any country that owned it. Like a nuclear bomb whose use wasn’t for using against an enemy, but just to show them it was there. Because of the implication.

  I had done the international equivalent of detonating that bomb in the middle of nowhere. Now every country could share the effects of the metaphorical radiation, together.

  “Hey, States,” had asked the World’s countries, “fun talk about a super-nuclear deterrent, ain’t it? Are you sure you didn’t have anything to do with this? Because it would be a huge dick move if you had chased this Signal without telling anyone.”

  “That Signal? Oh boy, no, not at all,” had responded the States, “see, John Derry and Seitaro Ogawa acted on their own. We had no idea. Of course we would never do something like that! We’re all very lucky they never managed to get a hold on that signal, no country should have that kind of leverage over another!”

  “Great, great. That’s great. But, by the way, didn’t those kids you’re putting on trial for terrorism stop Derry and Ogawa? They kinda sound like heroes to us. They stopped the real terrorists,
didn’t they?”

  “…Oh. Shit… They sure sound like they did, don’t they?”

  “Yup.”

  And that’s why we were in this hospital, officially paraded as heroes, while we needed an escort of police to leave our homes.

  Government —and by Government, I’d recently grown accustomed to mean Stefania Caputi— couldn’t admit we’d screwed them over without proving to the world they did have something to do with Derry’s plans. That didn’t stop half the population from trying to lynch us for dooming mankind to an alien invasion.

  Heroes in name only, all of us. But we were free. And not everyone hated our guts. Some of them believed, like we did, that we had a chance at getting along with whoever waited for us out there. Rune would help. No one could die in-game, so the stakes were lower. It would act as a buffer between civilizations. It would give us time to figure our neighbors out. To learn from them. To know them.

  When I’d left my jail cell to receive a formal apology from the judge, I’d found a packet waiting for me in the limousine drone that had picked me up. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a mail-bomb, but my mindjack. It had been confiscated the night of the Nordic assault. Along with it came a small note, written in paper.

  Good game, Cole. Well played. We should have a rematch someday. —Crestienne

  It was a rematch I had no intentions to play.

  My mind had drifted away, as it used to do nowadays. My gaze had floated over to Rylena’s back without me realizing it, and when she turned, she caught me looking. She smiled. “Earth to Cole. You’re still here with us, aren’t you?”

  I jumped a bit at my daydreaming interruption, then smiled back. I walked towards her and put an arm around her shoulders. Lavender was my favorite perfume lately.