by Max Lagno
“Shit, your cockiness is annoying.”
“Your swearing is annoying. I suggest we turn back and go around the engine compartment along another corridor. It’ll probably be blocked, and the corridor with the clawthrower will be the only way to the core. But we’ll definitely find something that will help us defeat it.”
“And if we don’t?”
“Then I was wrong and we’ll die to an even more dangerous monster.”
“Nice prospects. Fuck.”
We turned around and went back. Along the way, we diligently pushed open all the doors and checked all the nooks and corners, looking for something that would help against the clawthrower. Amy even nicknamed it Bully and asked me:
“Do you think we can make it our pet?”
“Taming a monster like that would cost you a dozen respawns. It’ll take you a month to get out of Rim Zero. And to make it trust you, you’d have to feed it an undetermined number of players or NPCs. Luring players into a trap is tough.”
“Yep, that’s Bully. He’s a difficult one.” Amy looked at me playfully. “What if I feed you to him first?”
* * *
Since I was moving slower, Amy constantly ended up ahead. She remembered that I was slowed down, came back, tried to keep my pace, but then overtook me again.
“So you say the CSes adjust to fit us and all that stuff,” Amy said. “But what if we, as in humans, adjust to fit them? Know what I mean?”
“Let me say right away: don’t assume you’re the smartest person here. As if no one before you has experimented, checked the CSes’ reactions to non-standard user behavior. All that was done at the dawn of the development of virtual taharrated worlds. We aren’t pioneers, we’re enjoying some very carefully developed technology. The CSes, and the game itself — they aren’t our friends or enemies, they’re like indifferent gods that don’t adjust to suit us to make things easier for us, but adjust to make things as hard for us as possible without making things impossible.”
“How does that work? And what the hell is a demiurge? Some kind of monster?”
“It ensures that every situation appears hopeless, but there’s still a solution to the problem. As for ‘demiurge’, it’s an Ancient Greek word, it means ‘creator’.”
Amy shook her head thoughtfully.
“You make it sound as if the CSes just create the appearance of difficulty.”
“The CSes create the appearance of everything in Adam Online. Don’t forget, their main task is to make our time in Adam as rich as possible. That means they have to hold our interest. They give us a goal, an achievement that interests us.”
“Hmm, so what’s your goal? Obviously not just life in Adam, not the game?”
“Not telling. My goal isn’t in the game. But I can guess why you stopped being an angel and decided to be a super. You liked being an angel so much that they somehow took away the option.”
“Don’t think you’re the smartest one here,” Amy said, imitating me. “You don’t know shit about my motives.”
“Whatever they are, I’m sure the CSes had a role in creating them. While my goal doesn’t depend on them.”
Amy scratched the tip of her nose with her revolver again. She also bit her lower lip, making her even cuter. There’s a certain kind of girl that really suits a thoughtful look.
“But shit, players die when they complete quests, right?” She continued another thought as if from nowhere. “Stronger NPCs take them out, or they fall into traps or anomalies.”
“You won’t believe it, but according to statistics, players are most often killed by other players. There’s an emphasis on it. The people that come to Adam Online to play, not just to have a happier life than in the real world, get just what they want. A game. And the difficulty of a game depends on the opponent. The best opponent, it turns out, is another person. No NPC can compare.
“Are you sure?” Amy snapped. “Lots of NPCs will be better than people.”
“In what sense?”
“In all of ‘em! As if you don’t know?”
The sharpness of her objections surprised me. She looked at me so strangely, as if she expected an open answer. Something hid behind that expectation. I made as if I hadn’t noticed the changes in her tone. As if nothing had happened, I continued.
“Of course, there are leveled up NPCs that are tough to kill. But beating one of those can’t compare to beating a person. Surpassing another human being creates completely different feelings than defeating a string of code.
Amy stopped.
“I’m not talking about fights, or levels or skills.”
“What then?”
The girl spoke slowly, syllable by syllable as if for an idiot.
“I’m talking about how there are NPCs no worse than people. They’re so advanced that you can’t tell them apart from... from you, for example.”
“Even the most complex non-game character whose behavior is controlled by a whole farm of quantum computers wouldn’t be able to imitate a human.”
“How do you know? The Mentors, for example...”
“The Mentors are a myth.”
Amy angrily waved her revolver.
“Ugh, I’m sick of this. You think you know it all. Maybe you’re just a figment? Think about that, dickhead.”
She rushed forward and I shuffled after her, slow as jelly sliding off a plate.
* * *
I suspected that Amy had asked those questions to solve some personal issue, not wanting to admit what was worrying her. I knew her well enough. Not a minute had passed before she turned to me and asked me with a tone as if she wasn’t angry:
“What if, let’s say, someone doesn’t want to play? Will the CSes still pull them into some kind of interaction? Can that happen?”
“Refusing to play is just another way of playing,” I answered vaguely. “The CSes act as a kind of middleman, creating a background for interaction for us. The game is the same — the genres differ.”
“First you say the control systems create everything, and everything depends on them, then you say that it’s the other way around, that we’re in charge and they’re just middlemen.”
“Consider it a quantum uncertainty,” I chuckled.
“I won’t. I don’t know what that is.”
“Quantum...” I began.
“Damn it, Leonarm, you’re messing with my head. No quantums. I’m not one of those people that comes to Adam Online to play or level up dumb skills. I just want to enjoy a happy life.”
“Uh-huh, and angels have a happy life, right? They can’t even swear. Don’t you see how you’re contradicting yourself, Amy?”
“Have you been an angel?”
“No,” I lied.
“It’s like being... I don’t even know how to explain it. You don’t have to rush anywhere, or defeat anyone, or achieve anything. Absolute calm, with a sense of complete control.”
“I heard something like that,” I answered, remembering scraps of sensation from my short stay in an angel’s body. “But you can achieve the same state with all kinds of drugs.”
“An angel can melt into the surrounding world, become a part of it. Going back to reality from being an angel is doubly harsh.”
I stopped answering. Billions of people suffered stress from the need to return. If it weren’t for the threat of death, none of them would leave the pod. Even death didn’t stop them sometimes. All that kept humanity from extinction was the short expiration date of dissociative electrolytes and the forced exit.
Although my Olga once managed to get around the forcing mechanism...
Once and for all.
For all...
I walked the last stretch of the corridor leading to the engine compartment with even greater difficulty. The poison’s effect was increasing. I didn’t just not hurry after Amy, I walked slower and slower. My backpack’s weight increased. I’d be damned if I had to throw out items.
I heard the familiar terrible knocking of claws
on metal. The corridor exit was guarded by several ordinary... what would they be called? Clawlegs? Clawwalkers?
Amy stopped suddenly and aimed her revolver at them. I grabbed my rifle as quickly as I could. This meant that I moved about as quickly as someone high as a kite.
It was all up to Amy in this fight. Before I could aim my rifle, the clawwalkers had already left my line of fire. Which wasn’t saying much: my reaction speed was so low that a blind and legless zombie could have gotten out of the way.
Amy displayed wonders of accuracy and agility. She shot off legs, making every single bullet count. Incredibly, all six of her shots hit their targets. The crippled clawwalkers fell prey to my rifle. Even as slow as I was, I had the time to aim and fire. My sloth-like pace made me hold the rifle trigger down a little longer than necessary. That made the beam so powerful that it burned up the creatures.
The corridor filled with smoke from the burning corpses. Amy and I crouched down to get below the smoke. After making sure there were none left, we moved on, listening out for the scratching of claws.
Chapter 18. Pick Your Poison
IN ONE OF THE smaller rooms, which looked awfully like a kind of futuristic storeroom, we found a laser pistol. Unfortunately there were no charges for it. Amy had around ten energy rounds, but to transform them into charges suitable for the gun, we’d not only need the right equipment, but also the right skills. Apart from the pistol, there were several other unknown items in the storeroom. Both my level of Knowledge and Amy’s defined them as “Mysterious Trinkets of Unknown Value and Origin”. Their weight varied from a couple of pounds to twenty.
“Maybe we should risk it and take a couple?” Amy asked. “We can sell them in Zero Town. The merchants will know what they are.”
“Risk it, but you’ll be annoyed when you find out that you brought some twenty-pound scrap of a lunar tractor worth two gold.”
“Right,” Amy sighed, putting aside the item she was looking at.
The doors to the side sections were often closed and didn’t react to the bracelet on the alien’s arm. Amy insisted there were mountains of loot behind those doors, but I asked her not to waste time and ammo on trying to shoot off the locks or opening mechanisms. She called me a “boring nerd”.
My skills had gone down due to the poison and all the medicine I’d been taking. Nonetheless, my Eagle Eye skill noticed a suspicious detail under the door of one compartment. Slowly, like an old man, I dropped down to my knees and took a closer look. There it was: a brown stain. I aimed my tablet at it:
A bloody fingerprint.
Eagle Eye. Judging by the shape and partially detectable ridge pattern, this is a fingerprint from a human hand. Judging by the degree to which it has dried, the fingerprint is between one and five years old.
A smaller message covered up the information on the tablet:
Eagle Eye skill increased: +10 XP.
I rose, aimed my rifle at the door and held down the trigger, letting the charge build up. Amy stepped back and hid behind me.
The rifle’s beam ripped open a section of the door, throwing off shards of burning metal. But that wasn’t enough. I made more cuts at the top and bottom of the door. Before the cuts cooled down, I pulled the door toward me, opening the entrance to the cabin.
A narrow bed and a row of strange statues took up half of the room. The cupboards on the walls were wide open, and the floor was covered in crumpled alien clothing. Amy sat on her heels and started rooting through it all without a moment’s hesitation.
I walked further. The floor was slightly angled, like it was all through the ship. That’s why I didn’t find the corpse right away. It had slid into a corner. He was a scientist dressed in the same kind of UniSuit as the one we found in the truck on the Heap. With one difference: he was torn to pieces. A claw protruded from his leg, and the blade of a second stuck out of his chest. The skull had fallen from the decaying corpse and lay some distance away, looking at me with eye sockets full of garbage.
Amy pulled a red shirt out of the pile of clothing and pulled a metal badge shaped like a star from it. “Bingo! Another rare collectible.”
“Good for you,” I turned the corpse onto its back and took off the backpack. I could feel bones and remnants of flesh beneath the UniSuit.
Amy walked over and we ransacked the backpack together. We found a box of energy rounds branded with an alien emblem, and a second laser pistol. Amy took both pistols and held them like a cowboy.
“Now I’m armed and dangerous.”
“With your aim, you’re only a danger to yourself. Don’t forget, energy weapons ricochet more often than firearms. And some surfaces make the charge bounce back, with around a quarter of its initial strength. If it hits you, you’ll get a bad burn.”
“Alright, dad,” Amy said, deftly spinning both pistols in her fingers.
“That was cool,” I said. “Where’d you learn that?”
“My Agility and Knowledge levels unlocked the Pistol Tricks skill. Practically useless, but it looks cool. I don’t even have to try, I just start spinning them and it happens by itself.”
“Don’t be silly. Learning new tricks lets you reload your pistol with one hand. Could be useful if you get wounded.”
We continued our looting. The scientist’s tablet was the Protected Tablet version, but the screen was broken and the battery was dead. It also didn’t have any valuable upgrades to transfer to ours. We found another Glock with a silencer and flashlight. The silencer wasn’t particularly valuable. We could sell it at Tenshot for scrap. But the flashlight under the barrel was a welcome surprise. It wasn’t particularly rare, but right now it’d come in handy. There were some pamphlets at the bottom of the backpack: “New Data on Spiderbot Fauna at the Mechanodestructor Heap North Entrance in Rim Zero”, “Hypothetical Principles of the Operation of the Hypothetical Hyperquantum Jump Drive”, and another couple that I didn’t bother looking at.
“A pamphlet about spiderbots — that’s for you,” I said, handing it to Amy. “If you manage to get through it, you’ll teach your pets to get into forbidden zones.”
“You mean they’ll follow me everywhere, even outside the Heap?”
“Yep.”
“I’m going to be a super, I don’t need an escort like that.”
“About that, Amy. You understand that a super is a tough character to be, right? You don’t just have to level up your human to two hundred, you also have to level up certain branches of skills. Only that unlocks the ability to transform a human into a superhuman.”
“You’re too long out of the game. The toughest character right now is the bizoid. You’re not wrong though. I have the branches written down. And stop with the unsolicited advice. Talking to you is like playing through an endless tutorial.”
I found two large flasks reinforced with metal in the backpack’s side pockets. One was full of a cloudy reddish liquid, and the label on the glass read:
Test Sample #6
There was little liquid in the second flask, and it was transparent, light blue, and nothing was written on the bottle.
The last item at the bottom of the backpack was a dictaphone. Just like the one the scientist in the truck had. The dictaphone had enough charge to listen to a message.
“There are three of us left out of the whole group…” the speaker breathed heavily. Distant shots rang out in the background. “The spiderbots wounded my colleague and the expedition commander ordered us to leave him in the truck. We all felt awful to abandon a comrade, but now we’ve been properly punished.”
The scientist coughed. There was a noise as if he was crawling across the floor. I heard the hiss of a door opening.
“It is now clear that our colleague in the truck has a better chance of surviving and being rescued than we do...”
“No, buddy,” Amy laughed. “Your colleague didn’t get rescued.”
“We’ve reached the spaceship’s engine. We couldn’t study its specifications... My tablet has
all the necessary diagrams not only to repair this ship’s engine, but also to create one like it. This gives us, humanity, a path to the stars... But an engine alone isn’t enough. In the navigational cabin in front of the main deck, there are maps of all the star systems that this extraterrestrial species has explored...” He coughed. I heard a strike from something heavy. It was accompanied by the familiar scratching of claws along the floor. The scientist screamed and the recording cut off. Then it continued again. There were no more shots. The scientist spoke quietly. It was clear his strength was failing.
“We studied the alien spaceship all day. It took a lot of time to map out the corridors and find out what the rooms were for. In the room that we deduced was a laboratory, we placed our own lab. We moved all the alien corpses we’d found into there. None of the aliens survived, which surprised us. All showed signs of a violent death. But what killed them? That forced us to take safety measures. We began to carefully check the entire ship, room by room, until one of our groups of soldiers ran into a nest belonging to some kind of creatures with long claws instead of legs. We don’t know whether those creatures are a product of the Heap, or if they arrived here with the aliens... Most of our soldiers were killed. Two came back wounded, with claws in their body, but the others managed to shoot one and dragged it into the lab for study...”
During a pause in which the scientist had another coughing fit, I glanced at Amy. The girl listened, her mouth open and breath held.
“This is what our biologist found out,” the scientist continued. “Their claws inject a venom into their victim’s body, and it does more than just slow you down. The poison works as a preservative. The victim’s blood slowly starts to thicken, and the patient first falls to sleep, and then into a coma. After some time, the victim dies and turns into jelly suitable for absorption by the monsters’ digestive systems... Incidentally, we have called these beasts...”
The scientist broke off to cough again.