Absolute Zero

by Max Lagno

  Like in life, in Adam Online luck came unexpectedly and right on time. I’d wanted to upgrade my All Thumbs achievement, hoping for a reward. Instead, the chamber easily separated and fell into the sand.

  I aimed the tablet at it.

  Synthesis Chamber.

  A valuable item for people who, unlike you, Leonarm, have arms that grow from their shoulders. The main component for building a CAM (Component Adaptation Machine).

  Value: upwards of 7,000g.

  Weight: 10 kg.

  CAM... I felt a rush of memories that I’d suppressed in real life. I remembered how Olga and I had built our first adaptation machine. We’d spent whole days and nights trying to craft weapons. The first pistols we made would hit anything but the target. Sometimes they rewarded the shooter by falling apart at random. We gradually gained experience and increased our Knowledge. The pistols got better. People bought them willingly, and we got rich. Life seemed great (even if it was virtual). Dozens of years of enjoyment in the worlds of Adam Online stretched out before us...

  I tapped on the image of the synthesis chamber and it moved into my backpack, significantly increasing its weight. I checked my Carrying Capacity, which for a human was set at Strength multiplied by ten. Of course, if I picked up a little more than my Carrying Capacity allowed, I wouldn’t be stuck in place, but I’d move a lot slower.

  Trying not to think of the past, I took apart a few more hulls. I found another synthesis chamber and gave it to Amy. I hoped I’d get a reward for Open Book, but my tablet remained silent. I’d need to try harder.

  After breaking another chamber, I got a new message.

  Achievement All Thumbs: +10 XP.

  Keep up the good work.

  Is that it? Where were the goodies that everyone in Rim Zero gets? Either my memories were corrupt, or the game was harder now... or maybe I’d really lost all my skills as an adamite.

  On the other hand, all this got me to level two. After a moment’s thought, I put plus one into Strength. I needed to make sure I had space to put loot.

  “Had enough playtime?” Amy asked impatiently. “Time to move on.”

  She was already sitting astride Swirl. Bluey grazed nearby, eating scraps of devices in the compressed garbage.

  “Have you ever thought that the Luck stat is a very strange one?” I asked, climbing onto the spiderbot.

  “Why?”

  “All our adventures are the result of my low Luck. That’s what lowered my Reputation with the driver. But at the same time, it was our bad luck that gave us so many unexpected finds. You got the rare UniSuit and an ability. You ended up controlling a whole cluster of pets. With allies like this, we’re a force to be reckoned with.”

  Amy laughed woodenly in her helmet. “You mean your low Luck value is helping my high one?”

  “Something like that. Everything I do leads to problems, but those problems turn into advantages for you. And indirectly, for me, since we’re a team. Luck is like a dichotomy of two mutually exclusive factors.

  “Cool. Now I see a point in teaming up with you.” Amy paused, then added: “And I’ll make like I understand what a dichotomy is.”

  She dug her heels into Swirl’s sides, and we started careering across the Heap again. After half an hour of wild riding across the hills, skidding down narrow alleyways and crossing high radiation zones, we arrived at a structure that looked like the remains of a huge spaceship.

  It was usually in decorations like this that the algorithm hid the core.

  As soon as we dismounted from our iron horses, a pulse grenade landed at my feet. The flash blinded me. One of the electrical discharges swirled around me like a tentacle and went into my backpack. My tablet squawked.

  That was that... now it would be knocked out for twenty-four hours... It’s a good thing I hadn’t spent any money on that Google Maps upgrade. An EMP returned the tablets to their factory settings, wiping out all their software upgrades. Good bye, loyal personal assistant. You were alright.

  Surrounded by lashes of electricity, our spiderbots contorted and fell onto the backs Bluey reared, fell and pinned me to the ground. Amy managed to leap off Swirl as he fell. A rain of bullets fell down on us, along with the flashes of lasers.

  It turned out we weren’t the first to find the crashed spaceship.

  Chapter 15. Numbers After the Decimal

  I LAY ON THE GROUND, pressed against the spiderbot’s hull. I had already freed my leg from underneath it, but I didn’t risk standing up. An unseen enemy followed us, punishing any attempt to act with shots. Bluey’s hull throbbed weakly with electricity, shuddered from the effects of the pulse explosion, sometimes twitched when a bullet hit, or heated up from a laser beam. Even if Bluey woke up, he wouldn’t live long: the damage was too great.

  Amy lay not far from me. She was in the same situation, the only difference being that around the girl — or rather, around the fallen Swirl — was a crowd of spiderbots that had avoided the explosion. But without the leader, they didn’t know what to do. They passively took shots to their sides and aimlessly span around, trying to connect to each other, but then separating. Without the command of the leader, they couldn’t reproduce.

  First one and then another reeled, falling onto their tucked front legs; they were taking critical hits. Two had already fallen with their cores shot to ribbons.

  “What do we do?!” Amy shouted.

  “We wait.”

  “What for?”

  “Until the enemy runs out of ammo. Or until they flank us and shoot us. Or until the spiderbots pick a new leader, if we aren’t all dead by then.”

  “And what then?”

  “Then they’ll attack us first, as their closest target.”

  “Did you forget? I have the Arachnophilia skill.”

  “Did you forget? The pulse grenade knocks out all active electronics. Our tablets are dead for twenty-four hours. Or until we die and respawn.”

  “I don’t feel like dying.”

  “There are two options in any fight: retreat or attack. You can also hold your current position, but that always leads to a choice: attack or retreat.”

  “God dammit, Leonarm, why are you so tedious? Let’s attack, what are we waiting for?”

  “Sure. But do you see the enemy?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. Judging by the fire, there are two of them. One is a mechanodestructor with a laser cannon in its belly. The other is a human armed with twin standard Glocks.”

  “They’ve teamed up?”

  “And very successfully. While the human fires, the mechanodestructor can fill magazines for him. His hands are free after all.”

  The fire thinned out noticeably. The enemies no longer shot at us, hidden behind the spiderbot hulls. Instead they switched their attention to the living spiderbots and the ones that were gradually coming round.

  My Bluey twitched, trying to turn over onto its legs. But Swirl still wasn’t moving. That meant his core was shot. The living spiderbots froze. A sign that they’d begun to choose a new leader.

  Amy lifted the glass in her helmet... I caught her bewildered gaze. The helmet... The UniSuit...

  “We’re both idiots,” I shouted. “You have a second tablet you got from the scientist.”

  Amy hurriedly took it out of her backpack and switched it on.

  “Yes! It works. The battery is low. Enough for a couple of minutes...” She performed the necessary actions to add another user to the tablet. “Done. Now it’s my tablet.”

  “Wait for the leader to be selected and tame him.”

  Amy lifted the tablet over the spiderbot’s frame. Bullets cracked around her, preventing her from aiming it properly.

  “Wait. I’ll distract them.”

  I stood up from cover and ran behind the frame of another dead spiderbot. I saw a stirring by the remains of the starship’s engine. The stirring was accompanied by a laser flash. The mechanodestructor! That meant the human was somewhere nearby too. My Eagl
e Eye tracking skill was fully operational.

  Around thirty feet away, a giant piece of metal from the starship stuck out of the sand. After measuring the distance, I made a second run. This time shots fired my way. The human was obviously a bad shot: the bullets landed a long way behind me. But the mechanodestructor’s laser hit me in the leg. Twice.

  Screaming in pain, I rolled under a piece of metal and held my burning wound. Even my jeans were on fire. I beat out the flames and grabbed my medkit.

  Injection. Injection. Bandage. Injection. Injection.

  The sharp pain subsided, turned into an annoying itch.

  Even without the tablet, I knew that my Battlefield Surgery skill had leveled up. I threw away the empty medkit. All gone. Now I had no way to heal. The next wound would lead to bleeding out and dying.

  However I sliced it, I had to increase my Luck. Otherwise every skirmish would leave me maimed.

  * * *

  Now the enemy was forced to divide their fire between me, Amy and the spiderbots. There were six remaining. Two were so badly damaged that they couldn’t stand properly. They leaned to one side as if drunk. As soon as they finished choosing a new leader, they’d quickly escape to cover or repair each other in place without running... I hoped that Amy would be able to tame the new leader faster than she tamed Swirl.

  I assessed my condition: due to my injury, my Agility had probably fallen a point, and my Perception had likely gone down due to the large amount of painkillers in my system. Although a tracker’s skills should compensate for that, right? All this knowledge had faded so quickly.

  I shot a quick glance around the corner. The enemies changed their strategy. Now they stood next to each other. The human slowly moved toward Amy, hiding behind debris and shooting. Amy answered him once or twice with her Lefaucheux. She missed both times. These two were a perfect match in marksmanship.

  The mechanodestructor had more cunning. He started focusing his laser beam on the spiderbots’ legs. A few seconds and a leg fell off. The spiderbot tried to correct for it, balancing poorly on the remaining legs.

  I stopped firing, calculating that Amy would soon take control over the remainder of the cluster. Plucking up my courage, I ran straight to the starship’s entrance, to the position my enemies had left.

  They saw me halfway there. Many make a mistake in such situations: they start to weave in the hope of being difficult to hit. But that doesn’t work with mechanodestructor lasers. They can set their firing mode; instead of a concentrated beam of energy, the ray turns into an uninterrupted line, burning all in its path. The more advanced the laser cannon, the longer it can support an uninterrupted beam. If I’d started to weave, my Speed would have gone down. The laser would have caught up and cut my legs off, just like the spiderbots.

  All hope was on the agility of my virtual body.

  I even forgot that Adam Online is a collective illusion created by its participants out of despair and an inability to live in the real world. I was a living creature trying to save myself from a deadly beam, not a binary array sent to the abyss of the QCP. My non-existent muscles were working as hard as they could. My imaginary legs dug into imaginary burning sad. The illusory radiation pierced my body, smashing against my Radiation Resistance (I dearly hoped)... The bright sun cast a short blue shadow ahead as I ran, as if encouraging me: “Run, Leonarm, run...”

  If none of this was reality, then what was reality anyway? A lifeless body immersed in dissociative fluid?

  I ran onto the starship’s entry platform and rolled behind some containers. It seemed the aliens were trying to unload cargo, and something got in their way. The laser beam hit the containers and burned right through them. What was going on? Did this mechanodestructor have infinite energy? As soon as the thought came to me, the beam flickered out. There, now the mechanodestructor would need time to recharge his energy banks.

  I took a breath and looked out from behind the containers. The human stood over Amy, aiming both Glocks at her. He said something. I heard fragments of malicious laughter. Amy sat on the ground, covering herself with the tablet. The idiot was savoring his victory. Which, as everyone knows, is the beginning of defeat.

  I raised my pistol and took careful aim. Don’t let me down now, Eagle Eye. And you, increased critical chance on the complimentary Glock. And you, Luck, sorry for neglecting you. I promise to level you up to ten.

  One dull shot from my Glock combined with the twin shots of my enemy’s pistols. At that moment, Amy rolled to the side, knocking the tablet with her fist. I wondered whether her high Luck had helped me with my precise shot. Actually, how did Adam Online solve for things like that? If the opponent had the same Luck as Amy, would that help him dodge my tracker’s accuracy?

  Whatever the case may be, the human dropped his pistols along with bright red chunks of flesh. He fell face down in the sand, his head shot clean through. It was a shame I had no tablet. I couldn’t see the name of the player I’d sent back to the spawn point, nor how much experience I’d earned. I should have received more for a player than for an NPC.

  Amy put her tablet aside and reached out to search the corpse. The spiderbots stopped passively awaiting execution and rushed at the mechanodestructor. He hopelessly tried to escape from them. Thirty feet later, his monowheel stuck fast in the sand. The cluster descended on him, covering him completely, then moved off again, leaving a monowheel in the sand alongside the remains of a black hose, like a mourning ribbon on a grave.

  * * *

  I approached Amy.

  She threw the tablet she’d found on the enemy. “Catch. Your reward for saving me.”

  I pulled my old tablet out of my backpack and threw it away. It was a shame to lose the lightweight battery. But such was life. Or rather, such was Adam Online.

  My regret passed quickly. I added a user to make the tablet mine and noticed that the device was better than mine had been. It not only had a lightweight battery and the High Speed cooler, but also two applications: Google Maps with the option to set routes to quest locations in Rim Zero, and the Adam Online Wikipedia.

  When I pressed the button, nothing appeared but a description window:

  Adam Online Wikipedia.

  +1 Knowledge.

  Why think for yourself when you can look it up on Wikipedia? Your tablet has a full and detailed guide for rims One, Two and Zero. (Purchased separately.) In addition, by spending just 100,000g, you will unlock a closed section with a list of secret locations. (Each list purchased separately.)

  Buy Wikipedia addons?

  No thanks.

  Alright, time to check out the rewards. Under the protection of the spiderbots, which had managed to bulk their number up to ten, we were safe.

  Leonarm (Human) killed IOI655321 (Human) with a complimentary Glock.

  +10 XP.

  Open Book: +50 XP.

  Are you sure you chose the right character? You should have been an angelic protector. You saved your girlfriend again.

  It was funny how Adam Online found character traits in players that they never knew they had. There was a reason that some politicians and journalists said that Adam Online was a reflection of ourselves, without the distortion that our own egotism creates.

  Battlefield Surgery skill increased: +10 XP.

  You’ve fixed yourself up so much that you can now heal others. Although after your treatment they’d better go see a real doctor.

  My old tablet didn’t show achievement levels. It was probably disabled by default. The deceased IOI655321 didn’t have time to configure it. The captured tablet didn’t even show the level progress as a whole number, but as 3.79. And I thought I was a dork once.

  The thought came again: had I become another person? There was a time when I’d have spent hours configuring a tablet. I used to install nice fonts, change the color scheme, change the mode for displaying stats. Now I couldn’t care less. As long as it showed me what I needed to see. I couldn’t give a damn how many fractions of a percent
age I’d progressed in some imaginary achievement.

  That’s what it means to have a specific goal. You focus, you stop noticing the numbers after the decimal point.

  Of course, Pistols and Revolvers and Eagle Eye had leveled up. All together, I had one stat point and I’d reached level three. Just as I’d promised to who knows who, I put it into Luck.

  I found a medkit with two syringes and a bandage among the dead man’s things. I took them. Along with a box of ammo. I gave one Glock to Amy and kept the other myself. IOI655321’s armored vest was in good condition, but in contrast to mine, which gave me plus one to Agility, his gave plus one to Strength. I read Agility. I could have sold it to second-hand merchants in Zero Town, of course, but I didn’t want to fill up my backpack.

  After all, we had a whole spaceship to loot.

  Chapter 16. Corridor Shooter

  THE SECOND AIRLOCK led into the alien vessel, and it was shut. There were no locks on the wall next to it, nor any signs of how to activate it. Classic case. That was probably what had delayed our competitors. They weren’t ready for such a variation of events. Or they hadn’t had time to solve the puzzle to open the door.

  “What do we do now?” Amy asked.

  “I’ve completed the Heap a few times. The algorithm varies the scenario. Instead of an alien ship, sometimes you have to find the core in an underground science lab. Sometimes it’s in a military base captured by mutant aliens. Sometimes it’s in the Heap itself in a lair of furry spiderbots. The algorithm usually puts a huge spaceship here.”