by Oliver Mayes
“That’s for my mom.”
Struck twice.
“That’s for Lillian.”
Three times.
“That’s for calling me a min-maxer, you filthy hypocrite.”
He raised his daggers for a final, twin blow.
“And this one is for the fans. I can’t wait for them to see who you really are.”
Locking eyes with Aetherius’s blind, terror stricken gaze, he brought his daggers dow—
His entire field of vision became searing white light, accompanied by a piercing shriek that felt like it would split his head apart. He couldn’t feel his body, he couldn’t hear anything except for the high-pitched whine ringing through him. It was agony. As it took hold and increased tenfold, his thoughts were scattered by the pain until he was left with only one. The one that had haunted him the longest and had finally come to pass.
He had failed.
37
Picking up the Pieces
Damien’s world was darkness. Slowly, he blinked, and lines formed a matrix above. It was a pattern, black lines forming white diamonds. Or squares. He focused on them, still too disorientated to realize he’d regained the ability to focus, and more details started to emerge. Light and dark patches, flecks of wear and tear… it was a paneled ceiling.
Each new discovery gave way to another. He was on his back, lying on a bed and looking up. So far, so good. He tried to rise, and his head pounded with the effort. It felt like he’d been on the wrong end of Lillian’s hammer.
He moved his hands up to cradle his head, but only one of them arrived. Something sharp was digging into his wrist. He gently turned to look, suppressing a wave of nausea, and found the cause. His hand was cuffed to a metal rail at the bedside. The nausea was supplanted by panic, which increased as his eyes alighted on the sophisticated machine up against the wall.
Wires from it trailed along the bed, to his head. He yanked at his manacled wrist, the jangle of the chain overlaying the hum of the device he was hooked to.
“Hey, shh, shh, it’s okay.”
A reassuring hand touched his forehead. Looking left, he found Lillian, her hair tied back and her blue hospital overalls equipped. Worn. Whatever, that wasn’t his primary concern. Her eyes were brimming with tears. It looked like relief.
“Lillian, what’s going on? Where am I? What did—”
Then he remembered. He’d been a single blow away from killing Aetherius, but he’d been robbed of his victory. Someone had pulled off his IMBA set. He knew it wasn’t Lillian who’d done it. Which could only mean one thing. Before he could form it into a sentence, Lillian obliged him.
“You’re in Jefferson Hospital, the one I work at. I, uh, I lost my temper after Aetherius finished me off. My guardian wristband activated and security was notified. I told them nothing was wrong and sent them away, but ten minutes later they showed up again, with those two.”
Her eyes narrowed as she thumbed at the door behind her. Standing to one side of it, well within earshot but staring steadfastly ahead, was the goateed henchman Damien had spent the last week avoiding. Only the arm of the other appeared inside the frame, but it had to belong to his well-built co-worker.
“Turns out they were tracking my guardian wristband through the hospital as well. They used it going off as an excuse to invite themselves in. Told compound security they suspected a ‘dangerous criminal’ was squatting in my house and they were ‘concerned for my safety’.”
The CU lackey took a deep breath, but his tech-enhanced glasses remained fixed on the corridor wall across from him.
“So, they insist I open up, still flanked by security, and see you on the sofa. Minding your own business with your headset on. Ask who you are and I tell them you’re a friend who’s staying with me for a few days. Not good enough for that BEARDY DOUCHEBAG over there.”
The aforementioned beardy douchebag reacted to that one, rotating his shoulders one after the other. Lillian was in full flow.
“He DEMANDS that I remove the headset so he can identify you, and I tell him you’re logged into an online game. If he just waits outside for a few minutes I’ll put my headset on and send you a message so you can log out safely. Then the IDIOT—” she yelled at full volume, now facing the doorway and pointing at the idiot vindictively, “—runs over and rips the damn thing off your head, and when he’s done you have a goddamn seizure! CU’s finest, ladies and gentlemen.”
Damien had noticed by now that Lillian was no longer wearing her wristband, but he was pretty sure that if she had been it would’ve gone off. The chastised CU agent had come to stand at the foot of Damien’s bed.
“May I remind you, the individual in question evaded authorities for a week. If he’d simply co-operated from the beginning, none of this would have happened. I was not about to let—”
“The ‘individual in question’ is sixteen years old!” Lillian snapped. “You chased him out of his home onto the streets, then when he was finally safe with me you nearly killed him with gross negligence. I’ll have your badge. You sure as—”
The agent was nearly as red in the face as Lillian herself. Her voice had carried into the corridor, prompting people to try and look inside while the larger agent on the door waved them past, glancing behind with concern. The smaller, redder, older of the two paced out the door.
“Stupid civs.”
There was the click of a key as he locked the two of them inside. Lillian trounced up to the door and drew the bolt, then banged her palm on the observation window.
“Enjoying your power trip now? Pube-face!”
Damien was still feeling a little woozy, but watching this exchange made him feel quite a lot better. After kicking the door for good measure, Lillian busied herself by filling a paper cup with water and returning to Damien’s side. Her voice trembled a little, but the volume had gone back to normal.
“There, now we have some privacy. Drink this. You were on a drip earlier but it can’t hurt.”
The cuffs clanked again before he took it with his unimpeded hand and drank it down greedily. He gave it back to Lillian, who promptly went to refill it as Damien’s questions formed one by one.
“How long was I out?”
“Not long. About three and a half hours.” She handed him the next cup and sat by his side as he drained it. “Anyone with a headset knows you’re not supposed to pull the damn thing off without logging out first, but…” She glared at the door again, confirming it was closed, before lowering her voice even further. “Have you ever had seizures before? Does anyone in your family have them?”
Damien shook his head. His mom had the heart condition, but never seizures. He didn’t know his father very well, but he’d never heard anything like that about him either.
“Don’t tell our bearded friend, but the reaction to being forcibly logged out is never as bad as what you had. Lots of documented cases of headaches, fatigue, brief synesthesia, never seizures though. You said your headset is a prototype. Didn’t you?”
Damien didn’t answer. He was staring off into space. So, the headset he’d been strapping himself into all week wasn’t entirely perfect. ‘Warning: may cause seizures’ was probably not the glowing endorsement Mobius had been looking for when they asked him to test it. At least now he’d be able to give Kevin some useful feedba—oh, wait, never mind.
Lillian interpreted his silence as a yes.
“Right. I’m going to recommend we keep you under observation overnight. I’ll be back in a while, after I’ve talked with Thing One and Thing Two about my recommendation and confirmed it with my supervisors. In the meantime, I brought you this.”
She leaned down and pulled out her bag from under the bed, then dipped her hand in and brought it back out holding the IMBA set. Damien stared at it, lost for words. She didn’t plan on him using it again, did she? She saw the look on his face and interjected.
“Browsing isn’t a risk. It’ll be fine, so long as you don’t log in to play. And, um…” She bit her lip. �
�You didn’t quite manage to kill Aetherius, either. There’s been lots of talk about it online. You should catch up.”
She patted him on the chest, gave him another smile and made for the other side of the bed, printing off a page of results from the machine he was plugged into before pulling the nodes off his head and heading for the door. Damien stared at her as she worked, the IMBA set clasped in his free hand. She was putting on a brave face for him. There was no way she could really be that happy.
He hadn’t killed Aetherius. After all that, when he was right on the verge of winning, his victory had been snatched away. Forlornly, he called to her as she waited for the agents to unlock the door on their side.
“I’m sorry Lillian, it’s all my fault. I should’ve killed him faster. I ruined all our hard work.”
Lillian looked over at him, her mouth dropping. Then she walked back to the bed and embraced him in a full hug, marred only by the manacled hand Damien couldn’t pull free. Behind her, the bigger agent opened the door and poked his head into the room, only to find Lillian had returned to the bedside. Lillian completely ignored his polite cough as she pulled back to look Damien in the eye. She tousled his hair and heartened him with a few carelessly chosen words.
“Stop blaming yourself. You always take responsibility for everything, even when it’s beyond your control. You’re not perfect and you never will be. But you are amazing.”
She leaned forward and planted a kiss on the center of his forehead, prompting a louder throat-clearing from behind her. She ignored that as well, pulling back to grin at her shell-shocked patient with a sudden vindictive flash of teeth.
“Besides, I never said you didn’t get our revenge. You did kill Aetherius. In a manner of speaking.”
She waggled her eyebrows. Damien was completely thrown. Before he could ask any more questions she’d already headed out the door.
Damien saw her brandishing the results sheet at the older agent through the gap, employing a long string of exquisitely complicated medical terms that may as well have been delivered in a foreign language. Some of it probably was. The words ‘hypersynchronized posterial cortical neurons’ floated through the gap before the door gently clicked shut and was locked again.
He’d had reservations about putting the headset on again, but Lillian had become even more cryptic than Bartholomew. He had to see for himself.
Dragging the set onto his head awkwardly with one hand, he navigated to his Saga Online profile page. He had over 700,000 votes. A golden ‘1’ in the center of a royal blue shield next to the vote number indicated his position in the competition.
He was in first place!
With that many votes, he’d be surprised if anyone was even close to him. He was going to win the competition. He’d be able to pay for his mom’s surgery.
What was going on? He’d missed out on completing his objective at the last hurdle. Had grievously injuring his nemesis before being forcibly logged out been enough to satisfy the voters?
He navigated to Saga Online’s homepage and found his answer in bold writing that took up the entire screen:
AETHERIUS, EX-COMPETITION LEADER, IS SLAIN BY SCOREPEEUS63, WITH A GENEROUS ASSIST FROM DAEMIEN.
Damien stared at the link, blinking. It took five seconds for the words to sink in. He read it again three times, his grin widening with each pass. Then he started howling with laughter. He pulled back his visor to wipe the tears of mirth out of his eyes before snapping it shut again with a long, happy sigh.
He selected the link. This was going to be the best thing he’d seen in his entire life. He was laughing again the moment he heard Scorepeeus63’s voice. He sounded like he was about six years old. Then he realized the clue was in the name. Scorepeeus63 was actually nine.
“Guys, it’s really scary down here, are you sure this is the right way?”
He leaned over the edge of the platform he was standing on, holding the torch over the edge. He was in The Downward Spiral. The light his feeble torch cast barely breached the darkness at all. All of a sudden, a whirlwind of Arcane Missiles erupted from the bottom floor, accompanied by a long stream of them that chased a dark hooded figure around in a circle.
Damien was watching the final leg of his fight with Aetherius through Scorpeeus63’s eyes. The two of them had been so preoccupied they hadn’t even noticed the torchlight of this late arrival.
Scorepeeus63 hurriedly paced back from the edge, his torch held out in front of him as if it would keep the danger away. Like pulling the blanket over your head to protect yourself from imaginary monsters.
“I don’t wanna go down there! They’re too OP!”
There was a babble of barely discernible voices as the crowd of people talking into his headset all vied to be heard at once. Their sentiment was easy enough to pick out. They expected him to go down there.
“Alright, STFU noobs, you’re the ones who died. I’ll go. I ain’t scared!”
He ran down the final flight of stairs, huddling up against the wall, and screamed when one of Aetherius’s spiraling projectiles exploded some twenty feet out in front of him. The voices laughed and urged him forward again, imploring him to get involved. Some of them sounded urgent, but most were laughing as they fed him contradictory instructions.
Damien realized who they were. It was the rest of the Scorpius fan club, the crazy people who’d thrown themselves at Aetherius’s back line and given him and Lillian time to regroup. One of the muffled comments was seized upon by the boy.
“I’m not scared. I’m a real Scorpius. I’m low level, but I can help!”
It was only then that Damien spotted his level in the HUD. It was a perfect match for his age. A straggler who’d been left behind by the main party, most likely. Now the rest of them were dead, they’d resorted to peer pressuring this guy down.
They must have known they were sending him to his certain death. Yet the title of the video told a completely different story. Damien chuckled into his headset as the clamor of voices rose to a peak, all of them goading him on.
“Fine! I’m going! One… two… three!”
He ran down the last of the stairs, still clutching his torch in both hands instead of equipping a weapon as he ran screaming onto the dungeon floor. When he neither immediately died nor found himself on the receiving end of an Arcane Bolt, he hurriedly ended the scream in a whisper, prompting a fresh peal of laughter from the people watching and talking to him on their channel.
“Guys, where are they? Come on, guys, help me out he—”
There was a louder, wimpier scream from the other side of the dungeon. Aetherius had already been rendered bagless. Damien couldn’t see himself in the dim light the torch provided, but it was a recent memory. He was already moving in to finish him off. The shocking thing for him was that this guy had been right behind him and he’d had absolutely no idea. The chat group started yelling at their charge to get the hell in there.
Huffing and puffing, from fear rather than exertion, Scorepeeus63 moved to obey. He was in the center when Damien heard the words he recognized bouncing off the walls.
“That’s for my mom.”
A piercing scream followed. Scorepeeus63 stopped running and took a step back, immediately prompting the chat to yell at him hysterically. He whined a little before reluctantly trotting forward.
“That’s for Lillian.”
Another scream, but to his credit Scorepeeus63 didn’t stop moving toward the noise this time.
“That’s for calling me a min-maxer, you filthy hypocrite.”
Scorepeeus63 kept the pace, his shoulders hunched and his feet dragging forward. At last he was close enough for the torch to catch Damien’s back in the light. The tiny fraction of health points that were left of Aetherius knelt at his feet, his hands held up in front of him as he tried to drown Damien out with his screams.
“And this is for the fans. I can’t wait for them to see who you really are.”
Damien raised his hands to either si
de, froze, and abruptly faded out of existence.
Aetherius continued screaming for a good five seconds, now fully illuminated in Damien’s absence. He was a broken man, his eyes squeezed tightly shut and his robes tattered where the daggers had struck.
There was a pause over the chat as everyone else absorbed what was going on and saw Aetherius in his full disgrace. Then there was the most incredible wave of noise as every single one of them hollered with all their being for Scorepeeus63 to finish him off. He was just standing there, paralyzed with fear against the competition leader… who was also paralyzed with fear.
At last, Aetherius stopped screaming and blinked against the torchlight. A sword appeared in Scorepeeus63’s off hand. Aetherius saw him and looked aghast. Being a Scorpius clone, the young player had imitated Damien’s own face. Aetherius babbled, pushing his hands together to create nothing but a dull gray light where the Arcane Missile should’ve been.
Scorepeeus63 stumbled forward, his sword held out clumsily in front of him as the least imposing battle cry of all time rang out through the dungeon in a broken falsetto chime.
“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
The clumsy strike inflicted 36 points of damage. It was enough. Aetherius finally stopped whimpering and collapsed to the ground. Dead.
The objective of Damien’s week of efforts and planning, brought to fruition by a scared, solitary, level 9 Scorpius clone. There was total silence, then, as though from afar, came cheers, laughter, screaming and delirious wailing over the chat.
Aetherius had been brought down by a nine-year-old boy.
“What the hell are you doing? Stop that! What’s wrong with you now, you idiot boy?”
Damien was laughing hysterically himself. He raised the visor, tears streaming down his face and still very much in the middle of his fit, to find the two CU agents looming over and staring at him in alarm. He tried to mouth the words, but he just couldn’t do it.
“It’s Aefffff— it’s Atherahaha!”
The older CU agent’s eyes narrowed bitterly as his companion’s widened. Then the big man leaned down to murmur in his ear.