by Andrew Novak
Jack sat up. Ahead he could already see Lisa. She was lying on the ground, just as he had told her. Behind... the hairy, bundle of muscles roared and fought, tangled in the bundle of long tentacles six feet about the ground, at the height of its jump before it had been intercepted by the strange creature. Jack jumped up and ran on. Perhaps, if not for the effects of the device, the remaining goblins would have reacted differently, but now several of them were attacking the tentacles with a wild screech, mauling and biting it.
However, the majority of the pack were still racing for Jack.
On the run, he pulled off his cloak, flew into the glade pitted with the inhabited holes, where Lisa was waiting and threw himself to the ground next to her. The cloak spread out and laid over them like a heavy, stuffy shroud.
"What happened?!" Lisa gasped.
"Be quiet and listen!" Jack hissed. "And don't move."
And, oh, was there something to hear. They lay, surrounded by dozens of muddy holes. The cloak, having absorbed all the dust from the roads, separated them from the world. Outside, the mud squished and smacked, the long elastic limbs pounded on the ground, the goblins roaring in their grasps... And two people lay in hiding in a small space between the ground and the canvas, endowed with a defense bonus and a bonus to concealment as Jack had once joked. They lay low, pressed tightly to each other, feeling the twin beat of their hearts.
Suddenly Jack realized that Lisa's heart was pounding faster than his own after his run.
"I think we're wasting our time," she whispered.
Jack felt her palm slip under his sweater, then lower, to his belt.
"You sure?" he asked quietly. "You can think about that in this place?"
"And what would that be?" she asked innocently.
"Death nearby, that's what."
"I died seventeen times. In game, but still... I learned to feel death. Right now, I feel something else."
Her fingers moved even lower.
"Damned device," Jack muttered, sighing. "Turns out it works on people, too. I'm going to turn it off."
"Wait..."
When Jack, red and breathless, pulled the half the cloak from himself and Lisa, everything around seemed to have calmed down. In the puddles, paw prints were rapidly drying in the mud, looking like prints of curved palms.
Several rounded elongated roll, covered with dust, marked the detached tentacles. Nothing could be heard and there was no movement. Although... One of the puddles gurgled, as if it had issued a short vocal sound, and released a dark red bubble to the surface, grew fat with blood, and popped. Another was chewing. A third, sluggishly splashed, satisfied. And again everything quieted down.
There was no doubt who had come out the winner of the bout.
They stood up, straightened their clothing. Treading cautiously, Jack and Lisa snuck between the mud holes and finally approached the ALCO company buildings. It was totally quiet. The leader Jack shot was still lying by the wall, already coated in dust. The dead goblin almost melted in with the lifeless landscape.
Just in case, Jack ensured that the device was disabled and the Smith & Wesson was fully loaded.
"They are gone," said Lisa. "Those who survived left this miserable and dangerous place."
"How do you know?"
"I don't know," she sighed. "I hope."
"I hope so, too. Stay behind me."
Jack strode across the courtyard and stood before the gaping doorway. The inside was dark and appeared to be empty. From the yard, they entered a large hall littered with broken stands and turnstiles. This had probably been the guard post. Further on was a corridor once lined with dozens of doors some of which had even survived in their places. The locks had rusted through: they snapped broken under the slightest press against the door. Ancient computers, rotting paper. Scraps of posters hung on the walls; everything was covered with a layer of dust. So much dust, everywhere. As if the former life itself had just crumbled into dust.
Jack found the control room near the entrance and tossed a few switches. Egghead had said that the server automation was powered by a geothermal source, so the electricity would work, but Jack still doubted it. But it actually worked.
Flashes of light ran through the corridor where they stood. One after another, the dim lamps turned on, crackling. Some were extinguished immediately with a final, heavy clap. Those that survived, hissed and screeched as they warmed up. Behind the wall, a huge fan came on, its steel blades creaking into a spin. A tremendous bearing began to rattle with a deafening boom. The building came to life. And somewhere down the corridor, the entrance to a large hall packed with machinery lit up. The machines roared and howled as they began to turn. Something broke with a loud crash, and Jack saw in the doorway a cloud of gray smoke floating to the ceiling. He hurried there.
He ran in and froze. The hall was huge. It occupied most of this floor. Massive iron racks lined its walls with identical plastic boxes sitting on them. Something rustled and rolled. The noise merged into a measured, monotonous drone.
Lisa entered after him and froze, shocked by the picture. They, the inhabitants of a tiny fragment of civilization, had never had the opportunity to see so many mechanisms working at the same time. It was akin to a miracle like the magical, virtual wonderland of Alterra.
"What is it?" she asked.
Jack scratched his head. "Well, I guess it's the original Alterra. Ancestral, invented and created before the Gendemic. This is the version of Alterra with all its seas, continents, mountains, and monsters. With its sunrises and sunsets, the great river Chand, ports, ships, hundreds of towns and villages. But we don't need all of that. Only a piece of it."
Jack walked along the rows of buzzing machines. In the center of the hall, set apart from the rest, stood a computer desk on a raised, corrugated iron platform with a railing. A soft chair with a high back was pushed close to it. There were two monitors on the table, large and flat, with a long, curved, crescent keyboard.
Jack pulled out the piece of paper with Egghead's instructions and looked through it. The system unit stood under the table. He pushed a big round button.
There was a buzz, a quiet crack, some clicks. One monitor stayed dark, the other was warming up.
Numbers and rows of icons appeared on the screen. Lines were running across it.
... checking the CPU
... checking the status of the system
... testing hardware devices
... downloading necessary resources
... checking the hard drive
... cluster 10001FEh corrupted
...error
...error
Then, after a pause:
system is started
The screen went black . Jack decided that it hadn't worked, but then a short message appeared,
login:
To the right of the colon was a blinking, vertical cursor.
"Is that good or bad?" Lisa asked over his ear.
"Seems to be good," he replied uncertainly, then entered what was written on the piece of paper:
Root
A new line appeared:
password:
He plugged in: root@askaserver – even though the letters didn't appear on the monitor.
The screen flashed and went blue.
"I guess it'll let me in..." muttered Jack. "So, what's written here... 'Automation script configuration'... A script, hm? Okay. Hold this piece of paper for me, please, so I can see it. Like that... All right, let's do this!"
root@backup: cd /data/backups/20160801/
root@backup: ./restore.sh -main
Start restoring...
ERROR: Connection refused.
root@backup: vi config.json
Lisa held the paper. Jack lay both hands on the keyboard. He had to enter several lines, wait for the system to respond, and then he could enter more. A few times he did something wrong, received a message about an error, and repeated the commands...
The file editor opened with some kind
of text inside. He scrolled down through the file and found the appropriate line as indicated on his paper. He replaced the line with "mainhost: 10.10.1.14" at "10.10.1.12", then entered ": wq" and clicked on "Enter". Then again he entered:
root@backup: ./restore.sh –main
Monitor replied with the lines,
unpacking
./game_start
game_start -Gaerthon
heroic mode
Then the long-awaited response appeared:
Start restoring...
0,1%=>
This number was replaced with a two. The arrow began crawling slightly to the right. In the instructions, it was called "standard Linux progress bar".
Jack took the paper from Lisa, rolled it carefully and put it in his pocket. Sweat had broken on his brow. He must have been really on edge.
He looked at the girl and nodded. She smiled at him. The monitor already said,
08%=====>
The number changed to 9 right in front of his eyes, then reached 10 percent.
"Fingers crossed," Jack whispered.
He stood up, patted Lisa on the shoulder, sat on the edge of the desk and spoke thoughtfully,
"You know, the pickup had been traveling in this direction. Old Andrew Vigo's pickup. And the technicians from New Atrium's support services, too, were heading here. When I accidentally launched the Service to the Dark questline, the alphas over there behind the Barrier decided that someone had restored an old backup and sent the airship to the Alterra Conqueror building. They wanted to do everything secretly, so they sent their own people, without the protection of the defenders. That's what Egghead thinks. They all wanted to reach this place, but only we were able to do it."
"What do you mean?" Lisa asked. "Who is old Andrew? And what about the airship? Do you mean the wreckage in the pit?"
"Yes, the wreckage. The airship crashed so the technicians weren't able to reach the building. But by then, the game had settled down. There were no more old quests coming up - they simply couldn't since they'd been blocked. I brought the Tear of Azeroth to the temple of Necta... and got a quest. Necta's priestess must have glitched. One algorithm manages all the priestesses of Necta in all the temples, and the Tear must have caused it to glitch. But the latest version of the game, how to put it... it suppressed this failure. Dissolved it in itself. I don't know how to say it. The changes I caused didn't trigger a global restructuring of the script. Really, only one line of quests was added to the game: mine. Necta no longer reappeared. Her priestesses continued to prohibit interest in demon relics. Here's how it turned out."
"But what now? If Gaerthon re-emerges in Alterra, how will that affect all the rest of it?"
"I don't know. According to Egghead, it won't break anything really serious. But, whatever happens, I want to see it!"
"Look."
He looked back at the monitor. There it was:
99%================================>
And then...
100%=================================>
Backup successfully restored
To enter the game as a god, use "god on" command
He hurriedly clicked "Enter". And it seemed to him that... It looked like... Damn, he could not even say what it looked like! It was as if something had happened somewhere very far away, something had shifted and it had become subtly different. No, the floor in the server station did not tremble, the lighting did not flicker, and reality remained exactly the same as it was before, but still...
"Wow! Did you feel it?"
“What? No, I didn't feel anything," Lisa answered in surprise.
Well, no, you couldn't really sense a change in Alterra from here, no matter how gigantic it might be. Or was it possible? Jack had spent so much time in that world; he'd absorbed so much of it, perceiving it with all his senses; Alterra had settled so firmly in him, it lived inside him... could he have felt the change in it from afar? Who knew?
He hastily dumped the contents of the backpack on the floor, raked through the junk and fished out the console wrapped in a rag. He pulled a bundle of cables out of the heap, then looked around him, studying the console and the monitors:
"An outlet. Where can I plug it in? Ah, there!"
Lisa watched his flustering for a minute, then also began to connect a headset.
When they entered Alterra, Jack rushed to the door of the cabin, threw it open and froze on the threshold. A bright sunlight hit his eyes. The schooner Dead Wind was flying across the waves under the blue skies of Alterra. The sea heaved, washing over its sides. The fog had vanished without a trace. It was the pure, real, non-alpha-corrected game.
The goblins crowded on a cistern. They poked their crooked green fingers at the horizon and happily shouted with their raspy voices.
"Look, it's Ruger!" Eloise turned to stare at the sky.
A black dot grew in the blue sky far behind them. The gryphon was approaching with its rider. Even farther in the waves, they could barely make out the sail of a ship from which the necromancer had taken off.
The goblins immediately armed themselves with crossbows and moved to the stern. The pursuer was approaching. Jack could already make out the steady flapping of its wings, the elongated neck and the powerful beak of the pet.
Jack put his hand on the handle of Shadow of the King. No matter how powerful Ruger was, Jack was not going to give up his dream.
Hercules lowered the bed of chu-ko-nu to the gunwale and turned the handle of the drive, cocking the string. His noisy companions also began to load their weapons. But the gryphon did not catch up with the schooner. It slowed down and began to lag behind. Then he banked into a steep U-turn and began to retreat. The goblins erupted in triumphant screams but Jack realized that Ruger was not afraid. He was forced to turn around by something else, not fear.
"I see," Lisa said slowly. "Right on the course."
Jack stared at the distance where the black bowsprit pointed. The outlines of a distant land rose from the waves, swelling and taking shape. Gaerthon, the vanished continent! This had to be it. There was nothing else here.
Slowly, slowly the land grew over the horizon. Mountain peaks rose, gently sloping down to the coast. Now it became clear that it was an island, and rather small one at that. But behind it he could see a second one and a third...
Jack stood on the nose of the Dead Wind, unable to take his eyes off the scene. He could already make out the trees growing on the low mountain slopes, the stream running down between the rocky spurs... and some gray stonework. What was over there, a city or a temple? Or just a ruin with no clue regarding its former purpose?
A new noise added to the splashing of the waves and the flapping of the sails overhead. And it was clearly not coming from the game.
Jack rushed to the cabin but did not make it. They tore the virt-helm from his head. A stranger's hands threw him to the floor. Jack still hadn't realized what was happening to him. He acted automatically.
He rolled over, kicking some hard object. A voice gasped. A body fell heavily next to him. After being momentarily snatched out of the game, his vision returned slowly, but Jack knew the main thing was not to stop.
He jumped up and darted, zigzagging. Something whooshed past, almost splitting his head. He grabbed at someone... or something? A rock-hard something, rigid as the ribs of the guard golem in the temple of Dargoth. Without releasing his grasp, Jack pressed the barrel of the revolver to the rock-hard object. He blinked hard and... now he saw it. Turned out, he was holding on to a defender in full armor. The man's emitter was lying on the floor. Jack had no idea how he'd managed to disarm the enemy. But his revolver wouldn't do any harm to the black armor, even at point blank range.
The second defender held Lisa's elbow firmly, and he had his emitter. It was resting against the back of the girl's head. There were three other defenders hovering nearby. They hadn't even had time to draw their weapons. They hadn't expected their prey to put up a good fight. But no matter how you looked at it, t
hey had all the aces now.
Jack unclenched his grip and lowered his revolver.
Several more people tumbled into the hall. They were not wearing armor. The first had a shimmery silver suit of a strange cut; behind him were three more in orange overalls and tool belts hung with some kind of sensors and devices. Technicians, probably.
The defender to whom he was still clinging pushed Jack away. He quickly picked up his weapon from the floor and pointed it at Jack, forcing him to toss the revolver and raise his hands. The other fighter released Lisa and pushed her over to Jack.
The one in the sparkly suit was apparently in charge here. He casually waved his hand at the technicians:
"First of all, disconnect it. Then you can power it down. First, we need to establish which version of the game it is, which year. The version that Alterra stored here has become relevant - and until we clean out the updates, we'll have to deal with it. Then we should check to see what else is stored here. There may be a lot of interesting things on these servers."
"Mr. Chanber?" a defender addressed the powerful man. "What about the trespassers?"
He must have been referring to Jack and Lisa. They were the only trespassers here.
"What? Captain, these are rebels caught with weapons in their hand in the process of committing unlawful acts. Get on with it!"
The captain raised the emitter and pointed it at Jack. Jack clenched his fists and braced himself.
"Not here!" Chanber hurled grumpily. "We are working. Take them out somewhere."
"Belay that!" a thick, hoarse voice boomed.
Another defender walked into in the hall. The captain turned for a look and lowered his weapon. The newcomer walked through the hall and stopped in front of Chanber.
"Belay that," he repeated, then turned to the officer. "That also concerns you, Captain. My orders are superior to his."
He undid his helmet and removed it, revealing the red, sweaty face of an old man. Matted gray hair framed an extensive bald patch. His facial features were coarse and large like a troll's.