Absolute Zero

by Max Lagno

  “Damn, Amy, how’d you manage that?”

  “I don’t know... Maybe it’s a side effect of high Luck?”

  We stood up and started running along the top of the pile. The spiderbots detected our location and split into two groups: the first climbed upwards, the second followed us from the ground.

  The beasts approached interminably. They deftly gripped the parts protruding from the piles of garbage with their feet. Like monkeys on branches, they bobbed along one ledge and swung to the next.

  Amy suddenly fell onto all fours. “I feel sick.”

  I lifted her up by the arm and dragged her along. “There’s no time be sick.”

  “Need to go... down...”

  “No. We need to go higher.”

  “I’ll die.”

  I dragged her to the rusty cabin of a truck crowning the garbage pile. My Eagle Eye stubbornly told me that something was shining in the cabin. It could have been some more useless ammunition or another cigar cutter. But I knew the game — there should be unusual things to find at such a dangerous height.

  I pulled open the rusty cabin door and put Amy on a seat... next to the skeleton of a man dressed in the silver UniSuit of a scientist. Paying no attention to this discovery, Amy moved across to the opposite door and bent out the window like a drunken college grad on the way home in a taxi. Wiping her mouth, she muttered,

  “Fuck... this realism.”

  “It’s alright,” I said, trying to calm her. “The sickness will pass soon, and you’ll get covered in radiation sores. Now pull yourself together, girl... And give me your revolver.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Look around the cabin, check the skeleton. He has a UniSuit!”

  Amy handed over her revolver and several magazines. Then she took out her tablet and aimed it at the dead man.

  The first spiderbot appeared on the edge of the heap. A shot from the Lefaucheux took its head clean off. The second shot pierced its breast. The spiderbot’s legs collapsed and it clattered its way down the heap.

  “How much Knowledge do you have?” Amy asked.

  “Three.”

  “Sucks to be you. The UniSuit needs at least five.”

  “Any upgrades?”

  “One. With the alluring name Arachnophilia. There’s also a pack of radiation and chemical poisoning meds, a shielded tablet with a Geiger counter... that’s the second piece of bad news. The radiation...”

  Two more spiderbots appeared.

  They climbed onto the platform our cabin was on and quickly split off in different directions. I managed to shoot a leg off one — it teetered and then fell face first into the iron. It tried to dodge my second shot, but its mandibles had snagged on some scrap. The spiderbot turned onto its back. I pinned it down with a shot to keep it there.

  The second managed to approach me and grabbed me by the leg. I put two bullets into its hull. Fortunately, one made it to the core. The spiderbot begrudgingly unclenched its jaw and fell at my feet as if asking forgiveness. I kicked it away.

  “Well? You were saying? What’s the other news?”

  I turned and saw Amy’s naked back. Gathering her purple hair, she zipped up the UniSuit.

  “The background radiation here is so high that we need at least three Radiation Resistance. So you’re the one that’ll be covered in sores. My new UniSuit can withstand it. That’s all the news.”

  Amy stuck her tongue out, put the clear glass helmet on her head and fastened it.

  “Is the Arachnophilia upgrade what I think it is?”

  Amy became absorbed in her tablet. “I don’t know what you think it is, but yeah. It lets you tame a spiderbot and ride it. It takes on the status of a means of transport. Mechanodestructors can use a trained spiderbot as a sexual partner. People can too, actually. You can upgrade it... Ugh, wow. The main thing is... Watch out!”

  I turned around, grabbing my pistol with my right hand. Five spiderbots at once had climbed onto our platform.

  “Hurry, into the truck,” Amy swung the door open.

  I climbed into the cabin, kicking the skeleton out behind me.

  “The truck didn’t save that guy.”

  The spiderbots hesitated, looking for their lost target. They started combing the whole platform, feeling every outcrop and part with their mandibles.

  * * *

  “I think I get how it works,” Amy whispered, her voice barely audible through her helmet.

  She crawled across me and I swapped places with her. Amy aimed her tablet and I saw the unfamiliar Arachnophilia interface. Capturing first one spiderbot in the square brackets, then another, the tablet displayed some data. Some percentages stood out: 62%, 47% and so on.

  I grabbed my medkit and bandaged my leg.

  “Looks like that blueish one is the most vulnerable to taming,” Amy whispered.

  “They all look gray to me.”

  “I can see the colors in their hulls now. That one over there at the edge has a beautiful swirly pattern on it.”

  “Must be the leader. Would be nice to tame that one.”

  “Fifty two percent. Not a high chance.”

  “What’s the cooldown on the upgrade?”

  “Thirty minutes.”

  “I’ll die from the radiation. Got any pills?”

  Amy hesitated, then begrudgingly handed me a pill from her pack.”

  “I need them too. Or will. Later. Probably.”

  “Greedy. I gave you my collectible vest.”

  “Not greedy, just careful. If you’re going to die from radiation anyway, why waste expensive medicine?”

  We silently observed the spiderbots shuffling around the platform. One, probably the blueish one, approached the cabin and thoroughly investigated it with its mandibles, pushing them through the broken glass. We backed off, sinking into our seats, sucking in our stomachs. It was a purely instinctive reaction; the hitbox of a human player took up the same space regardless. You could pull in your tummy all you liked — your volume in the game didn’t reduce.

  “How high is your Luck?” I whispered to Amy after bluey left.

  “Five.”

  “I don’t remember the multiplier, but I think it increases your taming chance by a few percent. Come on, try taming the leader.”

  “Why that one?”

  “I have an idea... Let’s see how right it is.”

  Amy picked out the spiderbot standing at the edge of the platform and not taking part in the search. The tablet magnified the spiderbot and showed an indicator to confirm the action. Amy looked at me. I nodded. She pressed ‘Yes’. A progress indicator appeared above the image of the lead spiderbot. The 52% started dropping quickly. Already 43%... 37%... If it reached zero, that meant we’d fail to tame the spiderbot — we’d have lost.

  My gaze locked on the leader. At first, it didn’t react at all. Then it raised its head as if sniffing something out.

  33% — it made a few steps toward us, then hurriedly turned back.

  29% — it ran chaotically along the side of the platform, knocking into the other spiderbots. It extended its legs down, then backed off like a dog afraid to leap into a pool after its master.

  21% — it ran toward us confidently. I aimed my pistol...

  18% — it hit the cabin with its legs at a run, knocking out the remainder of the glass. The cabin shook, almost overturning. The remaining spiderbots, bowing to the will of their leader, also rushed the cabin.

  11% — the leader stuck its head into the cabin and grabbed my shoulder in its mandibles, but somehow uncertainly. I threw my pistol into my left hand and was almost ready to take off the leader’s head when Amy shouted,

  “Done, it worked!”

  A victorious signal from the tablet confirmed it.

  The leader carefully released my shoulder, dropped off the cabin and stood nearby. The other spiderbots dispersed across the platform and froze. Their task — seek and destroy — was canceled.

  I climbed out firs
t. “How long does the taming effect last?”

  “It doesn’t say.”

  “That means until it dies.”

  Amy looked at her tablet. “He’s my pet now.”

  I chuckled. “Not just him — the whole cluster.”

  “Ooh, so that’s why you chose the leader for taming? Clever Leonarm.”

  Amy approached the spiderbot and stroked his square head, tickled its mandibles rusty with dried blood. “I’ll call you Swirl.”

  Chapter 14. The Dichotomy of Luck

  THE SPIDERBOT’S smooth hull made an uncomfortable seat. The slight forward lean made me slide down to the neck flange, which threatened to pinch my testicles in the clanking space between the hull and the head. I managed to find a comfortable hold on the stationary sections of the legs starting at the body. Our iron horses strode quickly along. They leapt and skidded, but their gyroscopes corrected their body position and we barely felt any jolts.

  The cooling processor in the spiderbots’ core made their hull temperature lower than the surrounding air. They were even more comfortable to ride than horses, which I’d ridden on the Bryansk estate belonging to Major General Makarov.

  Amy rode Swirl at the head of the cluster. I was somewhere in the center. Amy said that my spiderbot was the selfsame Bluey. I took her word for it. Before she rode forward, she said that one of her pet’s perks was the ability to find the shortest paths in any zone. She showed me her tablet with a map of the Heap. It had a circle marked on it.

  “This will take us to the core before anyone else gets there. We don’t even need to search for it ourselves.”

  And so it was. The spiderbots not only confidently ran into inconspicuous alleyways in the labyrinth, they also often climbed up onto hills, cutting the path short along the peaks. That was the hardest part. Not only did the background radiation increase, but it also became difficult to hold on to the slippery hulls.

  The cluster suddenly stopped next to a pile of fresh electronic waste and fanned out. After investigating the veins of electronic garbage, they started gulping down the components they needed to repair and recharge. Amy and I dismounted to stretch our legs.

  “We got pretty lucky, right?” Amy asked.

  “The fact that we got a fancy UniSuit isn’t luck, it’s ‘game balance’.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We began the quest with unfavorable conditions. Those difficulties have to be balanced out with benefits. The balance is that there are dangerous enemies and high radiation at the northern entrance. The CSes are kind of giving us a choice: either go where it’s easier, but there’s high competition between players, or go where there’s a high chance of death, but lots of perks.”

  “Hmm, I get that. It’s the same in life.”

  “Only life doesn’t have CSes that give you a choice.”

  “Who knows, who knows...” Amy responded mysteriously.

  My vision darkened and I felt that I was just about to fall. I shook my head.

  “Give me another pill. Must have gotten too much radiation while we were riding on the mounds.

  This time Amy gave me the whole pack. I swallowed two pills and watched the spiderbots grazing peacefully.

  “I’m sure there are a lot more options for progressing through the Heap that we don’t know about.”

  “Why?”

  “There was no trigger for starting additional scenarios.”

  Amy laughed.

  “You’re trying to make excuses for your fuck-up with the bus driver. Trigger, choice options... don’t try to bullshit me.”

  “Not bullshitting you. Something will happen soon and you’ll see for yourself.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what. But we’ve been standing here and chatting for a while now.”

  “That bother you?”

  “Of course. When we don’t act, it’s like we’re handing our fate over to the control systems. You never know what they could throw at us.”

  Amy thought for a moment.

  “But when we do act, then our fate still depends on the damn control systems, right?”

  I scratched my head. “Strictly speaking, yes. Action and inaction on the part of the player are two different states that the CSes react to differently.”

  Amy took out her revolver and checked that the cylinder was full. She did that all the time now. As if hinting at me: look how fast I learn. Always on guard! It seemed my words about her inability to work as a team had had an effect on her.

  “I guess Adam Online bores you when you know how it works, huh?”

  “You can’t be completely sure of any of it. Most of the code for the QCPs is generated automatically by the QCPs themselves. And the code has been continually generated for hundreds of years now. Humanity can no longer figure out even a single line of it. In fact, there aren’t even actual lines.”

  “Then what is there?”

  I waved my hand at the environment around us. “This. An imitation of reality in which we’re forced to live so that we don’t see the horror beyond the comfort of our pods.”

  The spiderbots suddenly stopped chowing down on electronic garbage and froze. Another second and they went into a battle formation, backs to each other, ready at any moment to create reinforcements.

  * * *

  Swirl ran to Amy, helping her mount him. I had to find Bluey myself. Since they all looked the same to me, I tried to mount the wrong spiderbot a few times. They threw me off until I climbed onto the right one, which had been waiting patiently.

  “What happened?” Amy shouted at me. “One of your damn triggers?”

  “We’re in another cluster’s territory. Its owners have arrived...”

  Several spiderbots emerged from cracks in the compressed garbage as if to confirm my words. Another dozen or more descended from a hill. I had another opportunity to appreciate how thoroughly the control systems produced such scenarios. The Heap was split between clusters that punished their rivals for trespassing. They may even fight wars for dominion over the Heap. Of course, all this happened only when a player appeared who was capable of understanding what was going on.

  And this is what happened.

  Swirl left the defensive ring of his cluster. Amy sat astride him cowboy-style, holding her revolver barrel-up. Another spiderbot separated from the enemy cluster. Both leaders slowly approached each other, clicking their mandibles.

  “What are they doing?” Amy asked.

  “How should I know?”

  “You’re a programmer.”

  “So? The spiderbots are just doing what they do.”

  “God dammit.”

  Both leaders approached and touched mandibles.

  “How cute. They kissing or what?” Amy lowered her revolver.

  “Maybe it’s a type of handshake.”

  The leaders continued to feel each other with their mandibles. Too long for a handshake. Finally they stopped scratching and disentangled from each other. I felt Bluey’s hull relax.

  “I think they’ve agreed to let our cluster through their territory.”

  “Clever boys.”

  Then, when Swirl turned around to come back to us, the enemy leader jumped and latched onto his belly. Amy fell to the ground, swearing worse than ever.

  Our spidersbots and the enemies rushed toward each other. I barely held onto Bluey’s back. And immediately regretted it; it would have been better to fall. Now I was in the center of the skirmish. Identical spiderbots crowded around, grabbing each other with their mandibles, striking with their legs. A rusty dust rose. Shards of hulls and broken limbs rained down around me.

  “Shoot, shoot them!” Amy shouted.

  Pulling up my legs to escape bites, I reeled on the hull. “They all look the same!”

  Through a haze of dust, I saw another spiderbot grab my own by the neck. I felt Bluey’s the junction of Bluey’s neck crack behind my back. I held on and fired several shots. The enemy fell back. I heard the deep rumble of
the Lefaucheux revolver, along with Amy’s “die, bitch”.

  The enemy spiderbots were too busy with the battle to pay us any attention.

  Every time Bluey grappled with another spiderbot, I supported him with my fire. I heard my tablet beeping through the rumble and scraping. Even if we lost, we’d level up a little.

  But our fire support helped Swirl’s cluster withstand the foe, even outnumbered. The sudden attack subsided, we started to steadily push the enemy back toward the garbage piles. Then the dust settled. The crowd of attackers quickly thinned out. Some sank away into crevices, others scrambled up mounds, where our shots quickly brought them back down.

  The battle ended as quickly as it began. All the spiderbots froze as if processing information on the outcome of the skirmish. Bluey’s hull, which had overheated during the battle, quickly cooled down.

  Swirl victoriously dropped the bitten-off head of his enemy from his maw, then latched onto its chest. Covering himself in drops of oil and sparks, he tore out and victoriously swallowed the enemy’s core, which then immediately fell through the broken synthesis chamber in his belly.

  * * *

  Our spiderbots, those still able, descended on the enemy corpses. After consuming one, they approached a damaged comrade and begin to repair him. They resynthesized broken limbs, replaced smashed mandibles, reset neck joints and screwed heads back on. The newly repaired spiderbots joined in with repairing the rest.

  In some cases, the repair involved taking a whole part off an enemy and using it to replace an ally’s damaged part.

  Swirl was missing two legs. He hobbled up to Amy.

  “Poor thing, did that traitor hurt you?”

  Swirl was quickly equipped with new legs, and a synthesis chamber from the enemy leader.

  I climbed off Bluey and sat on one of the corpses. I picked up a piece of mandible. Using it instead of a knife, I cracked open the belly. I tried to pull out the synthesis chamber. It was damaged — the controller was at it again. I moved to the next one and repeated the procedure. Nothing, of course. I moved to another, pushing away a spiderbot trying to repair an ally. I unscrewed the panel on the belly. Without even trying to be careful, I began to unscrew the synthesis chamber.