by Brian Parker
“We found them,” Sergeant Niederhauser stated. “The 761st.”
Mike saw the woman’s chin bob inside her helmet. “Any survivors?”
“Can’t you hear?” Mike screamed. “They’re all alive.”
“They ain’t alive, LT,” Niederhauser countered. “Least not like you and me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cover me,” the older man ordered, standing quickly and sprinting toward the nearest soldier. The sergeant braked when he was several feet away and altered course, coming at the soldier from behind.
“What’s he doing?”
“Watch, LT. You might learn something that the T.E.F. already spent a lot of money to teach you.”
Mike decided that he didn’t like the corporal’s attitude and stared at the side of her helmet while he wondered if he could somehow reprogram her mid-game. He doubted it.
He refocused on the sergeant, who was now sneaking up to the writhing, screaming soldier. Niederhauser drew a large vibrablade from its sheath on his hip and crouched low, where Mike couldn’t see what he was staring at.
Suddenly, the sergeant grasped the soldier’s belt and slashed his vibrablade from right-to-left near the man’s feet. The struggling man stopped instantly, his body sagging forward, only the strength in Neiderhauser’s exoskeleton suit keeping the man from falling over.
A loud rumbling from deep inside the earth shook the mountain. What in the hell? Mike thought.
Then, the sergeant sidestepped a spike that erupted near his feet and ducked his shoulder under the dead soldier’s stomach, lifting the body from its feet. He staggered under the combined weight of the soldier and the tremors that caused the ground to undulate. Something tan and cylindrical fell away from the body.
“Shit, LT. Sarge is going through a lot of trouble for you.”
“Why don’t you shut up, Haynes,” Mike ordered.
She glanced over at him to assess his mood and then nodded, saying, “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Mike put a hand down to the ground to steady himself, marveling at the sergeant’s ability to move, despite the turmoil around him.
Niederhauser careened off a rock outcrop and dropped the soldier. The words, “Fuck it,” drifted over the intercom. He bent down and grabbed a foot, pulling on the man’s leg until Mike had a clear view of the crotch area.
Or at least where the crotch should have been. Instead, a gaping hole shown where the suit had been compromised and something went inside. Mike’s eyes drifted back to where the tan thing lay on the ground. It writhed, stretching and twisting as if it were alive.
Beyond it, another one just like it searched the ground where Niederhauser had been standing.
“That is what I mean, LT,” the sergeant stated, poking his finger at the dead man. “Every one of them are already dead. Whatever creature is underground here caught the entire patrol unaware. Those tentacles clamp onto the spinal cord and stretch up into the brain. To control the body and make it appear like the victims need help.”
“And draws us out to get ourselves killed when we go to help the other group,” Mike surmised.
“That’s right,” Sergeant Niederhauser replied. “We need a plan.”
“We could use the LT for bait,” Corporal Haynes suggested.
“That’s a good idea, save me a lot of paperwork,” Niederhauser said.
“Or we could try to use one of our nukes here.”
“That may degrade us at the crater. We don’t know for sure what’s down there. Our intel is a week old, those things could have tunneled several more kilometers beneath the surface by now. We may need all three nukes.”
“Point,” Haynes said.
Mike watched the interaction for a moment and then said, “We go around it.”
“Bypass?” the sergeant scoffed. “We can’t bypass any of these creatures, LT. You see what we’ve been fighting, that’s after the 761st cleared the area up to this point. All those things have hatched in the past two weeks.”
“It looks like that battalion didn’t make it past this point,” Mike said. “So close to the crater, I’m willing to bet that thing will get wiped out by the detonation anyways.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“Then we come back and kill it somehow.”
Niederhauser scratched at his helmet’s chin line as if he could feel it through the armor. “Ain’t nobody told us in what order we have to clear this rock…”
“Exactly. We have to clear it, but it’s up to us, the guys on the ground, to decide how to accomplish the mission, right?”
“Yeah…”
“Think outside of the box for a minute, guys. We can bypass this creature—this obstacle—and come back to clear it after we defeat whatever is down in that crater. There’s no one else on this planet, so we don’t need to worry about them stumbling into that thing’s trap.”
“Damn, LT,” Niederhauser guffawed. “Maybe you should get hit by lightning more often.”
“Nah. I think I’ll pass,” Mike replied.
The three of them picked their way across a slope filled with jagged rocks, much harder to navigate than the open path they’d been following before. But it was safe. They only had a few flying creatures to contend with instead of everything else they’d dealt with thus far.
Mike was sweating freely inside his suit by the time his feet reached the valley floor. It had been hard going on the hill, but now they were only a couple hundred yards from the crater’s mouth. They stalked cautiously across the open until they stood at the lip of the hole.
“So, do we just chuck a nuke down inside, or what?” Mike asked.
“No, sir. We gotta climb down there,” Niederhauser grunted, swinging a leg over the side.
Mike shrugged. The only way out was through, so he would go down into the belly of the beast and finish the job. He paused for a moment. How long have I been in here? he wondered. He remembered the weird-ass fish simulation and now he was in this one. It only seemed like a few hours, maybe a day, to him, but he knew that time ran differently in the Sphere. Or, more correctly, a Duster’s brain didn’t register time properly when they were plugged in.
Everyone knew guys who starved to death inside the Sphere.
That thought spurred him to action. He tried to wake himself up, to force himself to open his eyes, to pull the huffer from his nose. But it was no use; he was stuck in the simulation.
Somehow, his mind did register that he was unhappy with being inside the sim and it compensated by turning the ominous, dark sky overhead into a bright blue sky with happy clouds floating lazily by.
So much for mind over matter.
He scrambled for a foothold on the wall of the crater as he held onto the lip. Niederhauser and Haynes were quickly making their way down. “Hey, I don’t remember anything, remember?” he said. “What’s the deal with the climbing?”
“Activate your spikes,” Haynes said.
“Spikes?”
“In the toes of your boots and the palm of your hand.”
Of course. Because, that make sense. Why wouldn’t the boots and gloves have spikes that could help him crawl into the crater below?
So, he climbed down, making his own path across the sheer walls of the crater. It seemed like he climbed for hours, repeating his slow, arduous way toward whatever awaited them at the bottom. He had to switch his optics from visible light to infrared so he could see in the inky blackness. Mike wasn’t afraid of heights, the drop had proven that, but he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of hanging on precariously to the side of a wall with no safeties and potential attacks from flying bugs, which surprisingly didn’t attack. Maybe the game designers knew it would be an impossible task to climb and shoot at the same time.
He breathed a sigh of relief when his outstretched toes tapped slightly against the cavern floor.
“‘Bout damn time, sir,” Niederhauser grumbled. “Haynes and I have already reconnoitered the area. The creature we�
��re looking for is about eight hundred meters down this tunnel.”
Mike looked around dubiously, shining his infrared light into the dark of the cavern. “Seems like a setup. It was such a big fight to get here and now…nothing? Doesn’t seem right.”
He watched the glance pass between his teammates and said, “What was that?”
“Nothing,” the sergeant grumbled. “Come on. We have a mission to finish.”
“Bullshit. I’m not going anywhere until I find out what the hell is going on.”
“You don’t remember?” Haynes repeated her question from earlier.
“No, I don’t.”
Niederhauser sighed and began to walk, talking as he did so. Mike hurried to keep up with him, careful to stay in comlink range.
“The bugs are a defensive measure. The original colonists of this planet engineered them to protect their settlement down here in the caverns.”
“So those things up there are manmade?” Mike balked.
“Yeah. Pretty fucked up, huh? Each of the creatures are implanted with a device that makes them steer clear of the tunnel entrance. They stay away, the colonists work in safety down here.”
“What do they do down here?”
“Mining mostly. A deep space mining corporation set up the colony. They mine ores that are almost completely depleted on Earth and charge an exorbitant amount because they can. If humans would have used our resources responsibly instead of squandering them…”
Oh geez, Mike groaned. Here comes the morality lesson. Most games of the modern era seemed to have some type of agenda embedded in the programming instead of simply letting gamers play the game, often in the form of some type of morality lesson between right and wrong. Everyone had an agenda.
Game designers hadn’t updated the ‘this is the important part of the game, so pay attention’ bit in over a century. All action stopped and the characters became immune to attack.
Sergeant Niederhauser droned on in his prerecorded monologue for several minutes, discussing the merits of conservation and replenishment of resources. In yet another typical first person shooter experience, Corporal Haynes stood uselessly, watching them; they were safe, no need to pull security. It didn’t matter what Mike said or did to them, the non-player characters wouldn’t react or stop talking. Mike laughed to himself as his fists passed uselessly through Niederhauser’s face as he punched at him repeatedly.
Finally, he finished lecturing Mike about the evils of corporate greed and went silent. Mike punched him again for good measure.
“Hey! Watch it,” Niederhauser grumbled as the bar spun in the corner of Mike’s vision, saving the game.
Monologue over; get ready for action.
A man appeared in the distance behind Niederhauser holding a white light. Mike shouted, “Contact!”
His teammates whirled around, bringing their weapons to their shoulder. Haynes crouched while Niederhauser remained standing, both acting as if they hadn’t been totally engrossed in a conversation two seconds before.
“That’s far enough, friend!” the sergeant said in an amplified voice.
The man stopped at what looked to be about ninety feet away and raised his hands, angling the light toward the three of them. Mike noticed that he didn’t have a mask on. The air down here was breathable.
“What is the T.E.F. doing on our planet?” the man yelled.
“Your leadership has been served notice on multiple occasions to begin trading with the intergalactic community on a fair basis instead of the blatant price gouging.”
The colonist’s eyes drifted back and forth between the two weapons pointed at him; Mike still had his pistol in its holster. “What does that mean?”
“Simply put,” Niederhauser stated, “Earth needs the resources of this planet and can’t afford to pay the prices your people are charging.”
“Supply and demand, and all that,” the man replied.
Haynes shot the man through the throat. “We’re here to renegotiate,” Niederhauser laughed.
“Whoa!” Mike said. “What the hell?”
The sergeant blinked at him lazily. “What?”
“You just killed that man. That’s what!”
“So?”
“They’re all gonna die today,” Haynes said. “It’s just a matter of when and how.”
“Let’s move out,” the sergeant directed. “We have a colony to destroy.”
The bar spun once again in Mike’s periphery, overwriting the previous save. He wondered briefly why it had saved before the man appeared and then again after the confrontation. Had he missed a required action or somehow performed one while he stood uselessly by and watched them execute that colonist?
As his teammates ran deeper into the cavern, Mike brought up his pistol, centering the crosshairs on their backs. Normally, if he splashed his weapon across Niederhauser or Haynes, the reticle pattern was green, indicating that they were friendly. This time, the reticle turned red.
Enemy.
He knew then what he was supposed to have done before Haynes killed the colonist. He was supposed to stop her, but he failed to do that and the game was adjusting.
“Mother fucker,” he grumbled.
“What’s that, LT?” the sergeant asked without looking back. “Better get a move on before we separate too far. Wouldn’t want you to be classified as a deserter, sir.”
Mike began walking, debating what he should do. He needed to get this under control. “What’s the plan, Sergeant?”
“We find their habitat, drop a nuke next to it, and exit the cavern before we become barbecued troopers.”
“Was that the plan all along?” Mike asked.
“Of course it was, LT,” Corporal Haynes quipped. “You devised the plan.”
Mike stopped walking. He wished he’d gotten some type of backstory before joining the game. He knew—thought he knew—that the T.E.F. was out here to force the company to sell their ores at a responsible price. Now, with the new information he’d just learned, he suspected that the T.E.F. was about to get into the mining business, which is one of the reasons they had to clear all the bugs from the planet’s surface.
He was at a crossroads in the game, the save point from a few moments ago was proof that he was supposed to make a choice. Would he stay loyal to the company that employed him or should he violate their trust and stop these two maniacs?
In the end, Sergeant Niederhauser made the decision for him.
“Come on, LT. Our window of opportunity is narrowing,” he said. “It’ll be morning soon. If we want to catch them all inside before they scurry down into the mine or go off to school, then we need to hit it in the next thirty minutes.”
“School?” Mike asked.
“Yeah, kids go to school, hero. Everyone is racked out right now; we wait too long and total elimination of the colonists becomes exponentially harder.”
Mike brought his pistol up and fired two quick rounds into the back of Niederhauser’s head. He pitched forward soundlessly. Haynes dove to the side, unleashing a volley of fire from her own pistol as she hit the ground.
Mike howled in pain. One of her rounds took him through the leg. In the back of his mind, he screamed that it wasn’t real, that it was only a simulation, but the pain felt real, his wound throbbing with each beat of his heart as it pumped out blood.
“You stupid bastard!” Haynes screeched, firing once again.
Mike squeezed off two quick blasts, taking her high in the shoulder with the first and missing completely with the second. She dropped to the ground out of his line of sight.
“You bleeding heart. I should have known that such a Braxton Miller-looking mother fucker wouldn’t have the stomach to do what was required.”
He giggled deliriously. Braxton Miller was a ruggedly handsome underwear model with chiseled abs, massive chest, and bowling ball shoulders. To be compared to him made Mike grin, forgetting that she was talking about a video game character, not the real him.
; “I regret those blowjobs too, you son of a bitch,” she continued. A few more laser bolts passed harmlessly overhead.
The angle was wrong. She’d fired from a different position. Mike peeked up to see her sprinting around a bend in the cavern wall. “Game over, Greg,” she muttered over the team’s frequency.
“What are you talking about?” he managed to say. He was losing a lot of blood.
She didn’t answer him for several minutes. When she finally did, her voice was distorted and scratchy. “Nuke’s in place, LT. You have twenty-four minutes to get out of the tunnel or you’re gonna be a barbecued Braxton.”
That knowledge made Mike struggle. If the nuke went off while he was in the cavern, the pressure and flames would seek the easiest way out, which was directly over him.
Attempts to crawl away were useless; he’d lost too much blood and his body wouldn’t respond to his directions. He tried anyways, reaching for a bump in the floor to help pull him along. His fingers grasped the rock, but he no longer had the strength to pull himself along.
“Pathetic,” a female voice drifted into his ear. That wasn’t right; he wore a helmet, so he shouldn’t be able to hear her. Then, a shadow appeared in the glow of his IR.
“I’ll take that,” she said, stepping over his prostrate form and attempting to pull the pistol from his grip.
“No,” he muttered weakly.
The corporal’s voice deepened, becoming a male’s voice as she pulled on his hand. “Come on, Mike. Don’t do this.”
Mike’s helmet was ripped away, the oxygen tubes going into his nose slid out roughly, causing him to panic as the IR lights disappeared, plunging him into darkness. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to hold his breath as long as possible.
“Mike!” the male shouted, gripping his shoulders, which felt oddly naked, not like the armored suit he wore.
What’s happening to me? he screamed internally. He was in a game, he shouldn’t be having as violent of a reaction to his character’s injuries and impending death.
“Mike, stop fighting me,” the man ordered.
Where’s Corporal Haynes? Did I transition into a different game since I failed that one?