Absolute Zero

by Max Lagno

  “Oh no, Leonarm, you’re going to turn into jelly?” Amy said in all seriousness. “How am I going to handle this alone? Who’s going to give me boring lectures?”

  The scientist finally stopped coughing. “Our biologist managed not only to synthesize an antidote, but also to create a new venom based on it: something that affects the clawed creatures just like their venom affects us. It slows them right down, then kills them. That was a good find, since our soldiers came to the conclusion that the creatures are tough to kill. Killing just one requires several men and lots of ammo. And we were already struggling with ammo... We decided to hit the creatures. We planned to produce plenty of poison to take them out with their own weapon, as it were... At the same time, we tasked our engineers with crafting several tranquilizer rifles that would shoot darts containing the poison... But the creatures were too quick for us. They attacked at the same time. They didn’t strike from the corridors, where we’d built solid barricades. They broke right through the lab walls. We didn’t expect that... We saw similar damage in the corridors, but we didn’t understand what it was. The ship had crashed from space, right? Who knows what damage it sustained. I barely managed to escape the lab, bringing both these vials with me. I don’t know what I was hoping for. Of course, the antidote would help if I’d just been hit by a claw, but I’ve been impaled... I’m dying... I don’t know why I’m saying this into this dictaphone... As if someone will hear me... Ugh... Tell my wife... And my kids...”

  I paused the dictaphone. “I see. We need to choose. One vial has the antidote, the other has an even stronger venom.”

  Amy, as she often did, answered in a completely unexpected way.

  “Why did they have dictaphones? Couldn’t he record his messages in a bottle on his tablet?”

  I stared at her. “What are you talking about? Do you get that I have to choose between life and death? Or respawning, at any rate.”

  “Still though, why the dictaphones?” she repeated stubbornly.

  “How should I know? Maybe the scientists had to keep logs on separate devices.”

  “Right, right. Let me hear the message, there was gonna be something sad about his kids and wife.”

  “Amy!”

  “God dammit, why do you always gotta be so boring? Don’t worry, I’ll make the choice for you.”

  “Why?”

  She took the vials from me. “I have higher Luck.”

  “What does Luck have to do with it? We have to think about this logically...”

  She offered me the vial with the red liquid. “Drink this.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? The chances are fifty fifty. But my Luck-”

  “Now let’s try some logic,” I interrupted her. “If there’s more red liquid than blue, that means that was the one developed to fight the clawthrowers. They planned to fire it from those tranquilizer rifles, so there’s more of it.”

  Amy shook her head. “Yes, but the red vial is labeled Test Sample Number Six, and that means it was tested on someone, right? The dead scientist didn’t say anything about testing the poison on the clawthrowers, but there were definitely injured and poisoned people in the squad. They tested the antidote on them.”

  I barely kept a poker face. Was the poison starting to eat away at my mind? The girl was right. To preserve the image of a man who knew what he was doing, I first grabbed the tablet and aimed it at the vials. Neither my Knowledge nor my Eagle Eye gave me any details. I weighed both vials in my palm again.

  “Hurry and decide, god dammit.”

  “If I drink the poison, you’ll be alone,” I reminded her. “I doubt you’ll reach the core.”

  “But if you’re not wrong, then the second vial will be useless anyway. What will you shoot at Bully? We have no tranquilizer rifle. The engineers didn’t manage to craft them.”

  I unscrewed the lid of the red vial and sniffed it. “I have a plan.”

  “Going to ask Bully to drink the venom?”

  I opened and sniffed the blue vial. “Almost.”

  The red vial smelled like shit, the blue like dishwater. Not much of a choice. Well, time to decide.

  I took the vial of red swill and raised it. “Cheers.”

  “Hurry and drink it, that stuff reeks.”

  I screwed up my eyes and lifted the vial to my lips. I didn’t know what dose I needed for the antidote to work (or, if it was poison, for it to kill me completely). I trusted my instincts.

  I took a gulp and belatedly thought that I shouldn’t have risked it with my low Luck. Better not to waste the time, to just find the core and go back to Zero Town. They’d definitely have been able to heal me there.

  Chapter 19. More Wood

  GRISHA, AS USUAL, ignored his brother’s advice and did not put himself in a tank or a Eurofighter. He just took a guard of two guildmates. One was a mechanodestructor, a transformer tank, the other a human. Although the human had such a sophisticated UniSuit that from afar, he looked like a small transformer.

  After paying the toll for each, they moved to Rim Three, to a location known as Brooklyn Forest, not far from the village of Brooklyn, named after a real New York district destroyed during the war.

  Then they walked down the road a long way. After twenty minutes, a bizoid attacked them. It was half made of wood, half of living flesh. They were called ‘treegorgers’. Grisha hadn’t been in the woods for a long time and had forgotten about them. The guards dealt with the treegorger pretty quickly, but Grisha felt a sharp fear, suddenly aware that he was standing in a forest full of monsters with a completely defenseless core.

  “Hah, boss,” the human said, gathering the loot. “This player thought you were an easy mark.”

  “What level?” Grisha asked. “I don’t have a neurointerface.”

  “Hundred and ten. From the Langoliers guild, if that matters. Looks like they have a base here. As long as they don’t...”

  “Forget about it, we’ll reach Nika, then we’ll be safe.”

  “What about getting back?”

  “On the way back I’ll be able to take out the whole guild myself. Hopefully, anyway. Got a locator?”

  “Yeah. It says there’s something like a base around six miles to the north. Looks like there’s another one to the south.”

  “So the Langoliers have decided to expand, huh?”

  “Black Wave got knocked out of the top ten, everyone is getting more active. They all want to take our spot.”

  They moved down the road again. There was a tank ahead. Grisha was in the middle, the human was at the rear. He put his UniSuit’s locator up to full power and left it there. It took a lot of energy to work, but now nobody could approach unnoticed. Apart from bizoids with the Earthly Tremble DNA modification, or angels.

  “Why are we walking around on foot, boss?”

  “Nika doesn’t let any military vehicles close to her borders. You’ll have to stay outside too, by the way.”

  “That’s why you’re going to see her naked?” the human asked.

  “Not just that. She asked me to ‘simplify’ things.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Be the person I am by default in Adam. A naked core.”

  “Why the hell...?”

  “Says it’ll kind of reset my habits. Keep me from relying on my level.”

  “Why though?”

  “She crafted some sophisticated mechanodestructor add-on. But its controls are so unusual, she claims, that I need to forget all my old habits and behavior patterns.”

  “Behavior what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what she said.”

  “She smart?”

  “Yeah. She got sent to a special school at twelve. The social distribution neuronets predicted a science career for her. She studied in the special school for half a year. Then she went back to our normal one.”

  “How come?”

  “Don’t know that, either. That’s when she started going all loopy. She won’t talk about wha
t happened there.”

  “They say, boss, that in special schools they do the same with people as we do here with our characters. Train up their stamina, strength, agility. Only in real life, not online.”

  “I heard that. Bullshit.”

  The human suddenly slowed his pace. “Careful, three targets detected. They’re moving from that base in the north. Looks like all three are treegorgers. They’ll reach us in ten minutes.

  Grisha twitched unhappily. He kept forgetting that he had no neurointerface, no access to chat, nothing at all. Even his vision was black and white. Damn Nika and her ideas. There was probably no basis to the need to forget habits.

  “Alright, you and I will run to Nika’s zone, the tank will sacrifice himself.”

  The tank couldn’t speak aloud, and Grisha couldn’t see the chat.

  “He says he doesn’t wanna die,” the human said, conveying the tank’s words.

  “We’re all being fairly compensated. Three hundred thousand for one death.”

  The tank silently turned around and drove down the road, then turned into the woods, heading directly for the enemy. Huge fantastically shaped trees bent and broke under his weight. A flock of multicolored birds took flight. Two drones accompanied them. They were designed to give the tank a bird’s-eye view of the battlefield - right up to the moment when two tree treegorgers set trees alight to create a smoke screen or threw caustic sap at the drones.

  * * *

  The human in the UniSuit could run at great speed. Grisha couldn’t keep up with him. The human picked him up and kept running. He occasionally reported on the radar readings.

  “Alright... our tank is moving into the contact zone with the treegorgers. Damn it...”

  “What?”

  “Two are dealing with him, the third is heading toward us. He’s already close.”

  But Grisha didn’t need a locator to see the tops of the trees shaking. Occasionally, first one and then another tree would shake and slowly drop, falling to an invisible sawblade. The treegorgers converted wood into energy. That meant they couldn’t survive long out of the woods. But in their homeland of the forest, they were fearsome opponents whose strength was only limited by the availability of wood.

  Soon the woods began to thin out, then ended. The road took them through hills filled with explosion craters and fire-melted cliffs. Broken mechanodestructor frames stuck out from the ground here and there, alongside long burnt-out tanks and bizoid skeletons. The background radiation increased sharply.

  A barrier blocked the road, with a sign reading “Do not enter. Private land”. Next to it was a billboard with a symbol and a sign reading “Dimension X”. It was covered in bullet holes and laser burns.

  The treegorger stopped at the edge. His body of flesh and wood looked like a centipede. It was half buried in the earth. It seemed to suck in trees, starting from the roots. One, another, a third...

  “It’s storing up energy to attack,” Grisha said.

  “Level two hundred... Judging by his size, he’s grown a second stomach for wood. That gives him half an hour of time beyond the forest,” the human said hopelessly.

  Grisha leapt from his hands. “Well, you know what I’m going to suggest.”

  “I don’t need money, boss. I’ll do anything for the sake of the guild.”

  “We’ll give you a Hero’s Star.”

  “Thanks.”

  Drawing his Salinger rifle from his backpack, the future hero crouched behind the melted hull of a gigantic mechanodestructor. Grisha rolled further down the road, getting tangled up in the remains of some barbed wire.

  After filling up on wood, the bizoid left the forest zone. Rapidly pulling himself along with its arms, he rushed forward. His body crackled and screeched, bending around craters and wrecked vehicles.

  Grisha was having trouble with potholes. Just in time he remembered that Nika regularly mined the approaches to her zone. He just noticed the edge of a mine sticking out of the sand. He barely avoided getting blown up. He had to turn sharply, losing speed.

  The mine was behind him, but now he had to move more carefully...

  Continuing his movement, Grisha turned his hull back, watching as his guildmate activated a jetpack and flew above the treegorger, firing from his rifle. The monster, losing bark and blood, darted to the side at random. And hit a mine. The explosion didn’t kill him, but severely maimed him. Trying to escape the fire, the bizoid plunged into the nearest crater. He quickly oriented himself and responded to the human’s fire by throwing up a multitude of burning firebrands and smoke, covering himself from view. The bizoid was losing the battle against the highly augmented human, although he was fifty levels higher. But that was because he wasn’t in his usual forest environment — he was conserving energy.

  The fuel in the human’s jetpack ran out. Taking advantage of his last few seconds of air superiority, he threw several grenades into the smoke. It wasn’t clear whether he hit the bizoid or not. No damage notifications, no intel from the chat...

  Hmm, Grisha thought. The world really does look different when you don’t rely on neurointerfaces and personal assistants. It’s weirdly more realistic.

  He drove further and further on.

  The last thing he saw was a mine flying out of the smoke screen. It hit the human and exploded. The jetpack deactivated and he fell. The treegorger had managed to use the anti-infantry mines by throwing them at his opponent.

  Necessity is the mother of invention, Grisha thought.

  The road ended in front of a monolithic concrete fence covered in holes and melted scars from lasers. The fence, like a dam, partitioned off a ravine between two cliff walls. There was a deep ditch in front of the fence, and at its floor were the remains of those who had previously tried to force their way into the factory complex where Nika produced her goods: weapons, extraordinary mechanodestructor add-ons and speed chips for androids.

  Rows of Ellen turrets suddenly emerged from the ground. A projector panel appeared on one of them, displaying Nika’s face.

  “Hello, Grisha.”

  “I nearly died getting to you.”

  “Imagine what it’s like for me. Every day another treasure hunter comes to attack my factory and get fabulously rich.”

  “Fabulously idiotic.”

  One section of the fence lifted. A bridge extended through the gap. Grisha turned: three Eurofighters had appeared in the sky. Even if his guildmate had defeated the treegorger, he wouldn’t withstand the aircraft alone.

  “Don’t worry,” Nika said. “They won’t come in here. I have a non-aggression pact with the Langoliers. And the anomaly will protect us too.”

  * * *

  The brothers had always wondered what it was that Nika did in that huge zone of hers. If all of Dimension X was occupied by weapons factories, then Nika should have been producing almost as much as the corporations. But her weapon batches stayed relatively small.

  Once, the brothers tried to buy intel from a third party to learn the secrets of Dimension X. But nothing could penetrate the anomaly protecting the location from above. And nobody went beyond the defense perimeter, not even NPCs. They quickly abandoned their attempts to gain intel.

  Two months prior, during a rare conversation in real life, when all three were preparing to climb into their taharration pods again, Grisha couldn’t help but ask:

  “Damn, are you ever going to tell us what you do there?”

  Nika sat on the edge of her pod. Her body was just as thin as that of her android, only a lot shorter. As usual, she dodged the question.

  “I’ll tell you something one day.”

  Neither her nor the twins were shy of nudity. Living together in the boarding school left no room for false modesty. Nika and Grisha had already shaved their heads. Fortunado was still buzzing his in the shower room.

  Nika suddenly rose and approached Grisha. “But I do have something for you,” she whispered. “Come to Dimension X when you have time.”

 
; Grisha glanced sidelong at the door to the shower room. “And Fortunado isn’t supposed to know?”

  Nika pursed her lips. “I’ve created a special mechanodestructor frame. You can tell him that.”

  “Wow, what have you made? An arachnid? A humanoid mech? An armored vehicle? A fancy Eurofighter?”

  “You’ll see. Nobody has made anything like it before.”

  “Will you tell me your secret?”

  “The secret of Dimension X has nothing to do with Adam Online, and even less to do with the guild.”

  Fortunado stopped his buzzing.

  Nika quickly returned to the edge of her pod and offered her legs to the medical robot. It extended some tools and started clipping her toenails, filing them and covering them in a protective coating to keep them from degrading. For some reason, dissociative fluid damaged the nails of people who were regularly immersed in it. If you didn’t get them treated, you could return to reality to find your nails floating around in the pod with you.

  “When I come see you, will you tell me what you do there?”

  Nika hesitated to answer, listening to Fortunado fidgeting in the shower room. “Maybe.”

  Chapter 20. Monetization

  GRISHA ROLLED after Nika and span his hull all around, staring at the surroundings hungrily. The first thing he noticed was that Dimension X was covered in windowless buildings. Tall concrete boxes of various sizes. Something akin to factories. At the zone’s center stood the largest box, almost as high as a mountain. The anomaly shimmered above it, protecting the zone from aerial attacks.

  Secondly, Grisha felt that all the buildings in Dimension X were real, not just filler like many structures in Adam Online.

  In the virtual world, everything served the purpose of entertainment. Everything had to astound the imagination of the user. For example, thousands of skyscrapers rose miles into the sky in Capital District, disappearing into the clouds or the blue sky. Billions of NPCs filled cities like that. They did nothing until a player came along, which prompted them to action as if the player was starting their life.