Absolute Zero

by Max Lagno

  Special stats of LeCube frame:

  Transformation time: 2.2 seconds.

  Movement speed in base form: 25 mph.

  Energy unit cost per min at rest: 1.

  Energy unit cost per min while moving: 5.

  Core Health regeneration: +10% per minute.

  CN conversion to energy units: 1:1

  Forcefield.

  Invisibility: 5 seconds.

  …

  Grisha’s pride in leveling up his frame was darkened by the fact that for now, there was only one LeCube, so there was nobody to compete with.

  Then:

  Available software configurations:

  1. ‘Grenika’, flying machine.

  2. ‘LeKub_000102’, humanoid battle mech.

  3. ‘LeKub_000004’, ethereal creature.

  4. ‘LeKub_000002(ver4)’, three-person transport vehicle.

  5. ‘LeKub_000011’, forcefield.

  Contact Nika to discuss purchasing other software configurations.

  Grisha got annoyed again. Why did Nika give her configs such idiotic names? All those numbers were soulless representations of the frame’s incredible possibilities.

  “I need to tell her to work on her names. I’m her only client, after all.”

  Each configuration had its own built-in stat window. It was all standard. The flying machines had standard speed, altitude, armament and invisibility to radar. The same for the battle mechs: height, part mobility, number of limbs and so on. For the ‘LeKub_000002(ver4)’ transport, the number of seats could be increased to five, but that was the limit of its abilities.

  But ‘LeKub_000004’, the ethereal creature, made him stop to think. It was this configuration that helped him defeat an enemy as strong as Jamilla. The config’s drawback was that in ‘ethereal creature’ mode, you couldn’t use firearms or energy weapons, only variations of hacking and slashing weapons. There was a long list of abilities to level up underneath LeKub_000004. Grisha didn’t bother messing around with parameters like Axe Size or Cutting Strike Damage. All that required long and thoughtful work. So he invested in something vital: he increased his resistance to Phantom Explosion. Jamilla would surely want to take vengeance against him, and that meant she’d buy the most powerful spell scrolls she could.

  Next Grisha upgraded the Grenika’s speed characteristics. He added speed and maneuverability. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough CN left to transform into the flying machine. He’d have to make the journey back to the nearest respawn tower in the form of a slow-moving mech. It could move at the speed of a car. He’d take his base form to get over the gorges and ravines.

  Time to go back?

  Or...

  Grisha stood at the edge of the cliff and looked out, to where the unexplored supposedly hid, places many adamites wished to explore.

  Hmm. Was it just the thirst for adventure that motivated them? It couldn’t have been a coincidence that several organizations had sent agents at the same time. That loser Leonarm... Who was this Mariam anyway, when it came down to it? She was obviously not a person, but some sort of projection, an avatar. Who stood behind the avatar? Certain powers that don’t want to be discovered?

  What if...

  A message from Fortunado interrupted his thoughts.

  Well done, bro! Great job. Hurry back. A whole coalition has formed against us after what you did to the Langoliers.

  “And what does the coalition want?”

  To destroy us, obviously. A guild war is coming like we’ve never seen. The Black Wave versus everyone else in Adam Online.

  Grisha cast a final glance forward, then turned to head back.

  Chapter 29. Guild Wars

  GRISHA AND FORTUNADO were young, so they took little interest in the past. It was more important for the young to plan the future, not to think about how things used to be, about how there’s nothing new under the sun. But even the old adamites couldn’t recall a guild war like this, when a majority of guilds banded together against one.

  Actually, guild wars were everyday affairs in Adam Online. People were always settling disputes, capturing enemy territories or liberating their own. Guilds fought for veins of valuable resources like oil and metals.

  Situational alliances in which several guilds united in a fight against another alliance of guilds were also nothing new. But there always tended to be some kind of balance, like five guilds against seven. This may have been the first time that almost all the guilds united against one, albeit the most powerful.

  Moreover, individual players marched against the Black Wave as well. Jamilla was something of a cultural icon, an example to follow for all the players that liked to spend their time exploring new zones alone.

  The fact that Grisha from the Black Wave had not only killed their ‘cultural icon’, but also named a new zone ‘Jamilla’s Tomb’ made solo pioneers drop their exploring and begin to plan attacks against the Black Wave, coordinating their actions with the main guilds.

  The Viatichi and Golden Horde guilds became the core of the coalition. Ordinarily, both clans were constantly at each other’s throats. The Viatichis took only Slavic people into their guild, demanding confirmation of identity in real life. This meant they were few in number, but very rich adamites. They always had excellent equipment, and their base in Rim Four, known as Venyov Parish[5], was a small but well-fortified zone. All the Viatichis were human and they wore identical UniSuits, strengthened with the Nevsky heavy infantry exoskeleton. They considered it beneath human dignity to play as mechanodestructors, androids or bizoids. And since they were extremely religious, they despised the blasphemous angels even more.

  Disdain for the other races weakened the military might of the Viatichis: after all, they had as much need for the big guns as everyone else. A jet fighter controlled by a human was always less maneuverable than one controlled by a mechanodestructor who was the fighter itself.

  The Golden Horde was less picky when it came to the in-game races, but almost as selective in accepting new members. However, they didn’t require players to provide their real-life identification or reveal personal information. The important thing was that the player looked Asian. Even if you had blond hair and blue eyes like the bot Arild in real life, in the Golden Horde you had to take on an Asian look. The mechanodestructors equipped skins showing various patterns or letters to demonstrate their affiliation with Asia. Their bizoids preferred to take on forms from Central Asian mythology. But that wasn’t strict either, which was why the Golden Horde really was a horde: a diverse and numerous throng of players that selflessly bowed to their khan.

  Both guilds ceased their warring and even signed a cease-fire agreement. For the time of the accord, no player in one guild could attack a player from the other. The Horde’s bullets did no damage to the Viatichis’ UniSuits, and vice versa. And the venomous emissions of the Golden Horde’s bizoids now killed all except the Viatichis. Not even a bare fist could do any damage. The accord gave the guilds an advantage: they wouldn’t be able to hit each other with friendly fire during a free-for-all brawl.

  After some time, the other guilds also joined the accord, including the remnants of the Langoliers, and the Free Adamites guild.

  That guild had a strange organizational structure: they had no guild leader or any kind of hierarchy. All decisions went to a general vote and were decided based on the number of votes. Because of this, Free Adamites was the slowest and most inefficient guild. Every member advanced their own decision and voted exclusively for it. And anyone who voted against a decision had no plans to carry it out. In short, it was more a kind of anarchistic gang than a guild. They were the ones that operated the Free Adamite radio station through which they tried to propagate their anarchistic ideals, exhorting all adamites to recognize that their binary arrays were free from any rules or conditions of the real world. Their general call was to ‘be yourself’ and they advertised drug dens and brothels.

  It took about as long to be accepted into the guil
d as it took to send an application to join. Since applications were approved automatically, you could join the guild almost instantly. And leave it just as fast.

  Strangely enough, the Free Adamites were plenty numerous. If it weren’t for their pseudo democratic system of rule, they would have been the strongest guild. But since they could never come to a unanimous decision with any speed, they tended to arrive at the battlefield when the battle was already over.

  The Viatichis and the Horde imposed a condition on the freedomites, as they were called for brevity. The condition was that if they were to join the coalition, they must elect a leader that would speak and make decisions for the entire guild. After a few days of voting, the freedomites elected a player, but the next day they swapped him out for another, and the day after that, for yet another one. They were as unreliable and changeable as a sea breeze.

  * * *

  Fortunado knew of these differences in the coalition, which gave him time to prepare Shoreline for a siege.

  During this preparation, Fortunado put himself in an Octopus frame. It was a small robot a little larger than a core. It had six pairs of flexible arms which allowed him to effectively work on several projector screens at once, creating models of defensive layouts for Shoreline and the Black Wave’s base. Fortunado himself called this frame a ‘suit for strategic planning’. Apart from the arms, it had 360-degree vision and a multitude of sensors such as infrared vision, magnification and much more. This helped Fortunado when he went out to the defensive lines to manage construction. The frame also gave a massive plus thirty to Knowledge and plus five to Geniality. The Octopus was an indispensable frame for an engineer-class mechanodestructor.

  With his mechanical tentacles spread out, Fortunado hovered before several large projector screens. On one he called up a three-dimensional projection of the base and the town in real time and was able to observe the movement of people and battle vehicles. The other screens were full of pages of weapons, buildings and other resources in the Black Wave’s storehouses.

  Fortunado was weighing up how to organize the defense. He secured the entire town with a fortress wall and placed artillery along it. He planned out mine fields. Then he placed anti-air cannons at intervals, calculating how evenly they would cover the air.

  He rearranged both Shoreline and the Black Wave base. He moved the warehouses and repair workshops closer to the centers, surrounding them with simpler buildings: barracks, laboratories and housing. Between them he planned to place autosens that would not take part in the battle but would patrol given sections to protect against sabotage. Double anti-air defenses surrounded the mechanodestructor depot, their most valuable resource. Several worm bizoids were assigned to remain near it under the ground.

  Fortunado prepared underground nests for the bizoids and released water into them in advance from an underground river. The bizoids needed a lot of water to grow remote soldiers or create DNA modifications, far more water than the base had. That was a problem.

  Then he moved figures of soldiers onto the positions, modeling how they would protect the approaches to the town. The respawn point was already surrounded by tanks and a chain of soldiers in advanced UniSuits. It was obvious that the enemies wouldn’t take their main forces through the tower. They’d have to march across the entire map, advancing from nearby zones. Ideally, he would place defenses around every respawn tower in the area... but there were too many, he didn’t have the manpower.

  Waving a tentacle, Fortunado placed a projection of a building over the map’s surface. The building was called Abrams Military Replicator, and it generated level five tanks at a rate of one vehicle per minute. Of course, he could have configured it to replicate Abrams at the max level for the model, thirty, but then creating one tank would take five minutes and cost three times the energy. That was an unacceptable loss of time and resources for this battle. Based on the experience of previous mass battles, Fortunado had come to the conclusion that it was more valuable to generate dozens of average vehicles than one advanced model. The average ones had a certain advantage: they could block the enemy’s line of attack through sheer numbers. Even when destroyed, they created obstacles of debris that slowed the enemy’s advance.

  Where to put it? Fortunado thought, holding the projection like a chess piece. Hmm, how about next to this forest? Perfect! I’ll put four Tesla Towers down to protect the replicator too.

  He dropped the figure. The building dug into the ground, raising a cloud of dust. Construction bots would be heading to those woods right now, along with transporters and a player known as Orpheus, one of the most advanced engineers in the Black Wave. He would decide when he got there how to set up the replicator and lay the infrastructure to distribute energy between the replicator and the Tesla Towers.

  The neurointerface chirped:

  Great decision, Fortunado.

  Military Economy Strategist skill upgraded: +10 XP.

  City Builder skill upgraded: +25 XP.

  Congratulations, Fortunado, you leveled up!

  The Black Wave guild leader quickly invested his point in one of his base stats, then couldn’t help but look:

  Fortunado, Mechanodestructor.

  Guild: Black Wave.

  Classes: Engineer, Politician, Defender.

  Level: 254.

  Strength: 22.

  Perception: 53.

  Agility: 20.

  Knowledge: 202.

  Health: 21.

  Luck: 25.

  Special stats:

  Geniality (Engineer): 11.

  Influence (Politician): 9.

  Indestructibility (Defender): 3.

  Great. He was a little less than a hundred points away from the Knowledge he needed. With a high enough level of Knowledge, a player could become an expert in everything there was in Adam Online. The interrelation of all its items and components became visible. Few achieved such a level of Knowledge, and those that did told such tales that it was obvious they were trolling.

  Alright, time to continue the work. Fortunado waved his tentacles.

  * * *

  He decided to concentrate on protecting the base itself and the town. The attackers would begin to suffer losses even on the march, in defense against small Black Wave groups.

  The entire Shoreline economy was refocused on defense. The military factories churned out autosens, automatic artillery and anti-air guns. Before the coalition formed, Fortunado had bought a great deal of iron and other resources to protect himself against a trade embargo. In addition, there were veins of valuable minerals and oil around Shoreline itself. All that had to be defended too. There was no doubt that one of the enemy’s top priorities would be to destroy the Black Wave’s resource base.

  Fortunado wasn’t stingy. He generously provided all the guild members with the very best weaponry and equipment. The bizoids were practically swimming in huge supplies of nutrients that gave them energy, and they were also testing out the strongest DNA modifications available. But it was Fortunado that made the final decision on which frame or modification each player would use.

  The high-level solo players from the Adam Online leaderboard, except the fallen angel Blondie Lee and the mechanodestructor Henrich Saidullaev, joined the coalition. Blondie and Saidullaev preferred the Black Wave, and for Fortunado their decision made for great propaganda. The party line was that the Black Wave had the very best; the coalition made do with losers that would go down in no time.

  Mariam provided valuable aid. She didn’t just pay for the elimination of Jamilla, Ivan the Knight (from the Viatichis) and the bizoid Slippery Joe (from the Golden Horde), she also helped with deliveries of valuable resources. The resources came from accounts belonging to corporations, which naturally gave rise to certain questions, but Fortunado kept them to himself.

  However, Mariam didn’t hide her satisfaction with what was happening. During the last link, she had something approaching pleasure on her face.

  “We like that they intend to fig
ht. There will be no time to explore the new lands.”

  “Then maybe you can help us with something... more substantial?”

  “No, we cannot give you an atomic bomb.”

  “We’ve heard that before.”

  Ending the conversation, Fortunado turned to Grisha. “What does Nika say about making our own atomic bomb?”

  Grisha was in the form of a humanoid mech, one of LeCube’s software configurations. “She keeps saying the same thing. Blah blah, I can’t make a nuke.”

  “Why not? She made an awesome frame like LeCube. That’s far more complex...”

  Grisha shrugged his shoulders, which had two rocket launchers mounted on them. “She says she can’t do an a-bomb. Actually, I’ll tell you straight: she admitted that even if she could, she wouldn’t.”

  “Why is Nika so opposed to nuclear weapons?” Fortunado asked.

  “Because she says humanity has already suffered enough from nuclear warfare. So Adam Online should remain a nuke-free zone.”

  “Nonsense. If there’s a way to create a weapon of mass destruction, then someone will definitely create one. No arguments against it will stop them. And anyway, it’s better to fire off nukes in Adam than in real life.”

  Grisha shrugged his shoulders again, meaning his rocket launchers. “She doesn’t agree.”

  “Alright. What is it she’s doing anyway? When will the second LeCube be ready?”

  “Trouble is, bro, she’s so busy now that she doesn’t have enough time for a second LeCube.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, crafting is a pretty complex and time-consuming thing. She says she’s tired of it, and she needs time and energy for something else.”