Absolute Zero

by Max Lagno

  “Damn her. For what?”

  Grisha shrugged.

  “Fine,” Fortunado said. “We’ll have to just rely on your LeCube. But I’m worried. What if she betrays us, huh? What if she sells the second LeCube to someone else? Did you make it clear that we’re willing to pay any price?”

  “What’s there to clear up? She knows. Nah, she definitely isn’t working on a LeCube, she’s cooking up something of her own to do with some experiments or some such.”

  “What experiments can you do in this game?”

  “I don’t know, bro. I don’t know...” Grisha shrugged his rocket launchers.

  Chapter 30. Egg-Shaped White Thing

  GRISHA LIED when he said he didn’t know what Nika was doing.

  In any case, he was spending all his days capturing players that were trying to get into Rim Six. By his suggestion, the Black Wavers had built a small outpost in the Jamilla’s Tomb zone and had even brought a respawn tower there — the most expensive type of building in Adam Online. Fortunado was against the construction of a base there.

  “So now we’re violating Mariam’s embargo ourselves?”

  Mariam confirmed that. After the respawn tower activated, she called at once.

  “Why are you building a base there? You must leave area immediately. You are too close to the forbidden zones.”

  Grisha answered instead of Fortunado,

  “Look, it’s just easier for us to capture players heading for the forbidden lands this way. That corridor is still the only known entry point into Rim Six. Thanks to the new base, we can keep it shut down. Now players have to try and find other ways to get into Rim Six. And that’ll take months.”

  “It is too close to the forbidden zones,” Mariam repeated stubbornly.

  “I promise you,” Grisha’s robot crossed its fingers. “We will not go a single step further. And when we’ve defeated them all, we’ll clear away the base at once.”

  Mariam hesitated. Again, it didn’t seem as if she’d really paused for thought, but that she was trying to look like she had.

  “Very well. We agree. But keep in mind that any advance will be taken as a violation of our agreement.”

  Grisha independently controlled the construction of the base at Jamilla’s Tomb, although he couldn’t stand construction and strategic planning. He even did what he hated most of all: set up peaceful trade and defense. He directed scouts that discovered deposits of minerals and oil. They were scant, but enough for the outpost to operate independently. He installed tracking systems along the entire cliff, covering the passageway to Rim Six. He also crafted dozens of autosens to patrol the corridor and sound an alarm if anyone approached the forbidden zones.

  And all the while Grisha stared out into that distance, that place where the unknown lay waiting. He suddenly realized that he was constantly imagining how good it would be to go into that unknown. To hell with the agreement, to hell with Mariam’s anger. He had a thirst for adventure.

  But he already had enough adventure to go on with. A previously unseen enemy attacked Grisha at Jamilla’s Tomb. Ozerg the Dragon.

  Class: Reality Changer.

  Level: 404.

  Health: 340,000/600,000.

  It was the strongest foe he had ever encountered! Grisha had never heard of the Reality Changer class, or of dragons so large, or even of players or NPCs above level four hundred. If it weren’t for the autosens, Grisha wouldn’t have managed. Even LeCube couldn’t withstand the attacks of this huge creature, as large as a small settlement. His main attack was to alter the landscape itself. Ozerg used the environment to destroy his enemies. It was impossible to predict: if Ozerg threw a shard of a cliff at you, what other properties would the shard have? It could explode, or spray out acid, or split into a thousand lethal fragments. Sometimes the cliff shards thrown at Grisha did all that at once.

  In the battle against Ozerg, Grisha felt for the first time that the surrounding world may not be as it appears at all. It was if it lost all stability. Trees turned into powerful bombs, rivers rose into the sky, solidified and crashed down on Grisha like asteroid shards. And all this chaos from a dragon blotting out half the sky...

  Nonetheless, he defeated the dragon. The only loot it dropped was some ordinary-looking small white egg.

  “What the hell is this?” Grisha turned into a mech and turned the egg over in his hands.

  The system showed a one-line description, as if Grisha was back in Rim Zero and had just started leveling up his Knowledge.

  An egg-shaped white thing. Maybe it’s an egg?

  He put all the points he’d earned into Knowledge.

  Ozerg’s Egg.

  Item class: Unknown.

  Weight: 97 lbs.

  +50% sudden victory over opponent (activates once per day).

  Unknown property.

  Unknown property.

  Unknown property.

  Unknown property.

  Unknown property.

  Unknown property.

  Durability: indestructible.

  Still not a lot... The first property, the sudden victory, was not entirely clear, and Grisha couldn’t see any explanation. Not enough Knowledge.

  Then he thought that if he kept the egg in his inventory, the property would work in spite of the fact that mechanodestructors and androids couldn’t manipulate magical items. Grisha was a simple man. He believed in miracles and didn’t want to know anything about game algorithms, which couldn’t contradict themselves or make mages out of robots.

  Since Grisha had gone much farther during the battle with the dragon than had been agreed with Mariam, he didn’t tell his brother of the mysterious loot. He planned to sell it to some mage after the war ended. They must know what to do with dragon eggs.

  To his brother, Grisha blamed the high losses among the autosens at Jamilla’s Tomb on a sudden and fierce attack by the coalition. Fortunado looked suspiciously at Grisha’s suddenly increased level but said nothing.

  Yes, there were enough adventures.

  The coalition had begun to attack all the Black Wave’s outposts in all the Rims. They even destroyed a large base near Londinium, Rim Five’s capital. The Black Wave’s defending troops realized in time that they couldn’t win and managed to escape through the respawn tower. They saved the people and equipment but lost the tower along with the ability to safely move to Londinium, an important center of resources and technology.

  This meant that any excursion by Grisha and his squad to chase down explorers of the forbidden territories was accompanied by clashes with coalition groups. In battle, LeCube was almost invincible. Grisha leveled it up constantly, focusing in particular on defending against spells like Phantom Explosion, Ethereal Materialization and other moves against ethereal creatures. His enemies, realizing that this might be the weakest point of this never-before-seen frame, strengthened their abilities.

  In short, something of an arms race began. Grisha’s victory depended exclusively on the availability of component nanomass. Since none of the players knew this, they had no idea that they should be focusing their efforts on reclaiming the former base of the Langoliers and cutting the Black Wave off from Dimension X.

  The Langoliers themselves tried to win their base back a few times, but met mighty resistance. They were unable to convince the coalition to gather its forces and take back the base. They all believed that the Langoliers themselves were at fault for their defeat, so they should reclaim the base themselves.

  Nobody respected losers.

  * * *

  Dimension X was one of few places that Grisha could go unmolested, without fear of a fight with coalition squads. And Grisha visited Nika often. No, not just to stock up on his component nanomass supplies. He was still trying to figure out what Nika was doing in those hangars of hers.

  She tried to explain it to him once. “I’m trying to recreate reality, you understand?”

  “How’s that? Doesn’t Adam Online recreate reality?”

&n
bsp; “No, Adam is a game simulation of reality. It produces the appearance of a real world. But it works based on its own physical laws that aren’t the same as the ones in reality.”

  “Why aren’t they?”

  “Because no matter how complex the laws of physics are in Adam Online, they’re still subject to given parameters and logic. To put it more plainly, they’re scripted.”

  “So what, you’re saying there are no strict laws of physics in reality?”

  “There are, but they have no determinacy.”

  “Huh?”

  “Predetermination.”

  “Come on, I’m not a complete moron. I know that Adam Online has random number generation.”

  “That’s right, generation. Those random occurrences are programmed to occur. In the real world, any random event is an unstudied mechanism. All randomness in the real world has a reason. And that reason was caused by other reasons. In reality, whether a coin lands on heads or tails doesn’t depend on randomness, but on the strength of the spin, air resistance, unevenness in the coin itself, how the person who throws it cuts their nails. The coin’s fall is the product of a billion reasons, right down to the exact g forces on the point of the planet where you throw it. The gravity of the Moon or even Sirius affects the coin’s fall in the real world. In reality, the entire Universe influences how a damn coin falls. But in Adam Online, the CSes decide it. Do you understand? Everything that happens in real life has a multitude of reasons at its foundation. In Adam Online, a program creates all the randomness. It’s all down to the control systems. They’re the origin of everything we see in Adam Online. In reality, the combination of causes has no origin. They’ve been happening for trillions of years, starting with the Big Bang.”

  “Woah.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Didn’t I say I’m not an idiot? I’ll understand. Later... For now I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

  “I want to recreate a chunk of reality with total accuracy, right down to interactions on the subatomic level.”

  “But why? What for, dammit?”

  “Because I want to live.”

  Grisha tried to look like he understood, although it was difficult to demonstrate any emotion when you’re a simple black cube. “You want to somehow defeat informational entropy?”

  “No, smarter scientists than me have already tried that.”

  “Then what?”

  “I want to transfer my consciousness to reality. Ideally, move my consciousness into another body, another person. If I can’t do that, then I want to make some kind of robot body, maybe even recreate something like an android from Adam Online. But I’ll need to experiment before I can make the transfer. I only have one chance, after all. If something goes wrong during the transfer, my binary array will either be lost or damaged. And the virtual world of Adam Online is the only place I can do those experiments.”

  Explaining the idea to Grisha had gotten Nika worked up. Well, as worked up as the humanity chip in her android brain allowed. During this conversation, she and Grisha stood opposite a hangar with a sign: World 0.4+, Alpha Test.

  Grisha tried knocking on the gates with the edges of his LeCube, but Nika drove him away, not letting him inside.

  “As I already told you, Adam Online is a kind of sandbox in which you can produce anything you like. That means it’s possible to reproduce our reality with all its internal cohesion. I think I’ll only be limited by size. I won’t be able to create an entire world, but at least a part of it in one of these hangars.

  “Right...” Grisha said, nodding his angles, although he didn’t entirely understand.

  “To do this, I need to create a chunk of the real world here, in Adam, where I can experiment with the transfer technology.”

  “Right!” Grisha cried more confidently. “And have you managed it?”

  “I’m... I’m working on it.”

  Grisha marked the building World 0.4+, Alpha Test in his neurointerface and read its stats:

  Building in zone Dimension X.

  Size: 400х400 meters.

  Owner: Nika.

  Building type: production.

  Energy requirements: extremely high.

  Emissions: low.

  Building value: 3,450,000g.

  Land value: 10,000g per square meter.

  Access: private.

  No matter how much Grisha asked her to show him her chunk of the real world recreated in the virtual, Nika refused.

  “It isn’t finished yet. And even if it does get finished, I don’t have to show you.”

  Grisha didn’t get any further than that. Although what he’d heard was enough to know: Nika had gone nuts. She’d decided to transfer her binary array not into a virtual world, but into the real world, which, in principle, has always existed. Only into another vessel, not into her body, which would die soon.

  “What an idiot,” he concluded. “It’d be better to make us an a-bomb than kid herself with all that dumb shit.”

  Chapter 31. Surgical Precision

  ALRIGHT, so I’d managed to convince my accomplices that I had a plan. But... I had no plan. I tried to invent one in a hurry as we walked, just as I’d invented and exaggerated the amount of treasure the drivers supposedly had.

  It was an interesting aspect of human nature. After all, Offo, Ghost and Banshee weren’t new to the game. They’d already completed the Mechanodestructor Heap, but they didn’t notice the drivers collecting weapons and selling them back to the stores, accumulating money. But all I had to do was mention a ‘bug in the system’ and they were immediately convinced that I wasn’t lying. In short, if you want to deceive someone, then come up with some complete nonsense and they’ll willingly believe it. Especially if you mention a bug in the system. People love to believe that someone is more mistaken than they are.

  “Wanna join our guild?” Offo asked.

  We walked along the street leading to the bus stop. Banshee walked behind us, probably to keep an eye on me. That battleaxe was the most dangerous link in my plan. My real plan, not the one I was inventing for my associates.

  “Your guild?” I said doubtfully. “I’m a solo player, an anarchist. I’d rather do my own thing.”

  “You never played as a bandit before?” Ghost asked.

  “No.”

  “I have, always do. If you’re solo, a shitty Reputation kills you quick. Easier to do your own thing with people.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Yeah, you think about it,” Banshee hissed behind me, clinking her katana.

  We reached the stop. It was a concrete platform with spaces drawn out for buses. The stops were a certain distance from each other and were surrounded by fences. The buses took players to the Heap, the Mercurian Planes and the Shifting Sands. You could also rent a bus with a driver and go wherever you wanted as a group.

  My old driver friend stood by his bus, playing with my cortaperillas and rolling his cigar butt in his mouth.

  “You need to approach from three sides,” I said as confidently as I could. “I’ll keep watch on the others at the stop so they don’t kick up a fuss. But someone has to take out that guard standing over there. Without being seen.”

  Offo drew his revolvers.

  “Why surround him from three sides? I’ll take the guy out. And the driver too.”

  “No, we can’t kill the driver, otherwise we won’t find out where he keeps the weapons and cash. And we need to take the guard out quietly, so he doesn’t call any others.”

  Banshee drew her katana from behind her back.

  “Alright, you go right, I’ll go left and take out the guard. Ghost, you head straight for the driver. You’re our fist fighter. Knock him out fast, but don’t kill him.” She turned to me. “As for you, Leo, if you pull any tricks on us, don’t expect to get out alive.”

  I drew my pistol and checked that it was loaded.

  “Don’t worry, you hold up your end and I’ll hold
up mine.”

  * * *

  Ghost and Offo walked in a big circle to approach the driver unnoticed. They stopped and waited as Banshee, who first hid behind the other buses, then behind rocks and bushes, to get as close as possible to the guard. Her blade flashed in the rays of the setting sun. The beheaded guard dropped his assault rifle and fell into the grass without making a sound.

  Damn, that ballbuster Banshee knew what to do with a katana. Looked like she’d invested a lot of points in Agility. I even began to doubt whether I could deal with the three bandits on my own. Of course, I had the element of surprise... But Banshee couldn’t be taken by surprise. She was on guard.

  While Banshee was dealing with the guard, Ghost headed for the driver. I overheard them.

  “Hey, could you tell me how to get to the Rim Zero Arena?”

  “I only drive to the Heap. The buses for the Arena are at the other end of the sto...”

  Ghost took a fighting stance and hit the driver right in the face. The cigar flew in one direction, the cortaperillas in another. The driver himself groaned and fell back into the side of the bus. But instead of crying out, he pulled out a tire iron from somewhere and struck back at Ghost. Ghost managed to dodge and punched the driver in his fat stomach. He dropped the tire iron and fell to his knees. He rose and tried to flee, but Offo appeared from behind the bus, spinning his twin revolvers.

  “Get back, fatty.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Weapons and money,” Ghost explained, giving the driver a smack around the head.

  “I have nothing! I’m just a driver...”

  That would have been a good time to intervene, but I was concerned about Banshee. I couldn’t see her. And attacking Ghost and Offo right then meant certain death. I couldn’t turn my back on that dangerous battleaxe.

  Ah, there she was.

  Banshee dragged the guard’s body by the feet. That was good, she was smart, she needed to hide him so as not to draw attention. She dragged the corpse under the bus and stood up, threw a careful glance my way. I nodded as if to say that everything was fine, keep it up.