Bounty Harlot

by Alexei Tripmiov

  ……….

  They had to pull her off him. She attacked him with her rapier with a ferocity she didn’t know she possessed. Brand grabbed at her as Kat inserted herself between the two of them. Tasha screamed at Misha, railing with a frenzy that shocked all of them. “Damn you…damn you! I will kill you for this!” She remembered pictures she had seen of her great-grandmother, a thick-boned peasant woman, dark-skinned compared to most of the Slavs surrounding her, and she recalled the rumors of her Roma heritage. Curses came unbidden to her lips, old Gypsy threats and promises of dismemberment that must have lain fallow in her genetic code for just such a moment.

  They let her get it out, then when she collapsed in tears Brand said, “He’s not really dead, you know. Not dead-dead. He’ll respawn back in the vicinity of Elsinore.”

  “I’ll go back to Elsinore and find him.”

  “Tasha,” Kat said, putting a sympathetic hand on her own, “we have to push on. We have to get these collars off. We can find Orlando after that.”

  “He’ll find us,” Tasha said. Her icy blue eyes stared with unbridled cruelty at her ex-boyfriend. “He’ll find us, and together he and I will kill you. No, we won’t kill you, we’ll keep you alive torturing you. For days we’ll torture you while you beg us to die.”

  “Tasha,” Brand said, “Misha might have been wrong, and it might have come from jealousy, but he really did believe that Yuri has been tracking us through Orlando.”

  “I thought he believed Yuri was tracking us through the slave collars,” Tasha tersely reminded them.

  Misha shrugged. “Both would not be unbelievable.”

  “Fuck you, Misha. Fuck you.”

  That pretty much killed the conversation for a while.

  ……….

  According to Brand, they were some two days’ time from the dwarven blacksmith who would remove the girls’ slave collars – some six hours in real-world time. Everything in this world was compressed, with “adventures” thrown at you one after another. Tasha couldn’t believe people paid good money for playing this stupid game. Then her eyes focused on Kat, walking up ahead of her, her perfect derriere swaying beneath her robes. Actually she could understand why asshole guys played the game.

  Whatever, she thought. They’re not all assholes. Brand seemed like a cool guy. Misha used to be okay, but his jealousy of Orlando was driving him over the edge.

  It was true, though, that Orlando wasn’t really dead. She assumed so, anyway. He would have spawned shortly after dying. He would be back near Elsinore, outside the city gates, where he had earlier paid a priest to bind him so he wouldn’t spawn inside the city, where he was persona non grata.

  She caught up to Misha and said, “What the hell is your problem with him, anyway?”

  “It’s not a him. That’s my problem.”

  “For chrissake,” Tasha spat at him, “he could easily pass one of those, what do you call it, that test they do for artificial intelligence.”

  “A Turing test,” Brand said, who had been listening in as they paced through the world of Brutalia. Hard desert land had given way to foothills, some scrub pine and sagebrush, and up ahead, towards the mountains of Tanna-Thule, she could see full-on forest and even some snow up at the higher elevations.

  “Exactly,” she said. “He could totally pass a Turing test. He sounds like a real person, he has opinions and a personality, the sex is great, and you’re going to have to accept that I’m with him now.”

  Misha made a face at the “sex is great” comment and rolled his eyes. “The NPCs are impressive, the AI is out of this world, but none of this is real. It’s all an illusion. You’re lying in a bed, probably a hospital bed, plugged into this world, and the stimuli your brain is receiving has you convinced that it’s all real.”

  “It’s real enough,” Tasha said. “I’m arguing with my ex-boyfriend about my new boyfriend, and my feet are getting sore. I wouldn’t want it to be any more real.”

  “You know,” Brand interjected, “even in real life, our perception of the world takes place in our brain. We’re all swimming through a soup of overlapping energy fields, which our brain patterns into a sensory perception.”

  “Great, take her side,” Misha said. He had a hang-dog look, and Tasha was beginning to get the sense that he felt at least a little guilty about killing Orlando.

  “I’m not taking sides, it’s just that, you know, this world feels real when you’re in it. Pain is pain, and the sex is fabulous.” He hazarded a grin at Kat, who blushed by way of reply. “If Tasha is willing to accept that Orlando is on the up-and-up, not spying for Yuri, I think we should respect her judgment.”

  Misha grunted. “Yeah,” he said. “I can see that.”

  The words came hard for him, she knew. He had never liked admitting he was wrong, was even worse about it than most people.

  “She’s stuck in Brutalia for the moment,” Brand continued. “If she ever gets out of here, she can decide what she wants to do about her in-game love. And speaking of which, you mentioned you had a plan?”

  “Yes. Kind of.” Misha stopped and abruptly sat. “I need a break.” He pulled muffins and a flask of water from his pack. The rest of the group joined him. Tasha was glad to take a load of her feet, but she hadn’t wanted to be the first to admit she needed a few minutes rest.

  “Here’s the short version,” Misha continued. To Brand he said, “If you can sleuth out where Tasha and Kat are being held, I have a possible plan for extracting them.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Okay, I work on the interface between humans and drones for the Russian military. I have a certain amount of autonomy, not by design but because nobody else in my department really has a clue about where the cutting edge of the technology really cuts.”

  Brand had taken his helmet off. He was playing his dark mage-knight character, or whatever it was, and looked gnarly, bearded and bas-ass, but Kat still stared intently at him, a small smile of pride on her lovely face. She was about as in love as you can get.

  “Among other things,” Misha continued, “I’m responsible for hooking pilots into their drone units. I think I could do that for a couple of you, and get away with it for a while. During that time, we could raid the location where Tasha and Kat are being held captive, extract them to a safe place, and get the drones back where they belong.”

  “Wow,” Brand said.

  “Wow is right,” Tasha added. She imagined her brain plugged into some kind of flying robot, or whatever the hell the drones were, kicking Yuri’s ass and flying away holding her own body. “This is way trippy,” she said.

  Brand nodded. “Way. It sounds crazy, frankly…but do you really think you can do it?”

  Misha nodded. “I think I can pull off the interface. The part that seemed impossible at first though, was…” He grinned at Brand. “Guess.”

  “Keeping from getting caught, of course.” Brand and Misha were nodding like crazy. “Doing wild shit is always the easy part,” the Australian hacker continued. “Covering your tracks so you don’t get caught, that’s always the hard part.”

  “Exactly,” Misha said. “And if I get caught…” He made a cutting motion across his throat.

  “Probably be worse than a court martial, I assume,” Brand said.

  Tasha cleared her throat. “You can’t do this, Misha.”

  Everybody stared at her.

  “I appreciate the thought, and I’m…well, I’m moved that you would risk your life for me.” She fought back the tears from her eyes at the thought of being trapped forever in this perverse gaming world…or if not forever, for as long as Yuri kept her body alive out in the real world. That would be for as long as he could make money with her in-game, which so far she had been thwarting…or as long as he enjoyed toying with her in here. Which could be a while, actually.

  “You asked for my help,” Misha said quietly, “and that’s what you’re going to get.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of
you contacting the authorities,” Tasha said to him, touched by the tender expression in his eyes. Except for his murdering Orlando, he was still the same Misha, sweet and devoted to her. And she had to admit that the “murder” wasn’t quite as bad as out in the real world. Orlando would indeed re-spawn, and she would find her way back to him. As long as she was trapped here, they would be together. And then she realized that she would never see him again if she did manage to return to her corporeal body. “Guys,” she said, “let’s get the slave collars off, for sure, but other than that…I guess I’m becoming resigned to staying in this world.”

  Kat, quiet up to that point, suddenly burst out, “Well I’m not!”

  Tasha looked at her. The girl was red-faced with annoyance. “Tasha, girlfriend, you’re cool and all, but this isn’t only about you.”

  Tasha shrugged. “Sorry, Kat. I didn’t mean to come across that way, but…you know, Misha is my friend, and I can’t let him put himself in harm’s way like this.”

  “Let’s hear him out at least!” Kat grabbed Tasha’s hand, clenching it hard. “He must have something figured out. I doubt if he’s interested in going on a suicide run.”

  Brand, nodding, said, “Come on, Tasha. Kat’s right. Give Misha a listen.”

  “Fine, fine.” Tasha gestured dismissively at all of them. “What are the deets, man?”

  ……….

  The technical aspects were a bit much for Tasha to follow – Brand had a hard time with it in places as well, so she didn’t feel like a complete idiot – but in essence it consisted of the two of them, Tasha and Kat, taking control of two drones, and once they found where the bodies were located in the real world, rescuing them and extracting them to a safe house.

  “The technology is remarkably similar to what we’re experiencing right now in this game,” Misha had explained. “Brand and I shunt your neural network over to the drone labs, take over two ‘vehicles,’ we make the extraction, then I get them back before anybody finds out they’re gone.”

  “How the hell do you hide your fingerprints with a mission like that?” Brand had asked.

  Misha had grinned. “Very carefully.”

  And if he got caught, it would be the end of Misha. He would be questioned brutally, tried for treason, and probably executed.

  ……….

  “You’re sure about this?” Tasha asked him for the tenth time.

  “Of course I am.” He put his hand out and took hers. They were all seated in a semi-circle. Kat looked away, and Brand cleared his throat, standing and gesturing to his girlfriend to follow him. The two of them walked out into the desert a bit, leaving Tasha and Misha alone.

  “I’m not…expecting anything from you,” he began. “But after all we meant to each other…I can’t leave you captive and unconscious, Tasha. I just can’t.”

  She sat that he was fighting back tears. Her own eyes misted over.

  “You were my first,” he said.

  She had known that; they had talked about it after it happened, how they had both lost their virginity to each other. For a time during their teen years they had been happy together, then he had gone off to university, and she had started pursuing her career, such as it was, and the phone calls became texts and the texts became liking each other’s Facebook posts, and that was about it.

  “We’ll make this work,” he said resolutely.

  Tasha wanted to believe him. She wasn’t sure she could.

  ……….

  The desert land had turned into mountain scree and scrub pine. Further up the mountain was snow and ice, but they weren’t going up any further. They stood in front of an ornate and mighty door, as tall as several humans and inscribed with runes.

  “Here it is,” Brand said, “the entrance to the Hall of the Dwarves.”

  “Why did they make it so big,” Kat asked, “if they’re dwarves?”

  Brand shrugged, but Misha said, “It just looks cool. And dwarves didn’t actually make it. Game designers did. I think a team in Seoul did the dwarf hall.”

  “I keep forgetting that none of this is real,” Kat said.

  Tasha suddenly remembered something she had read, a sidebar in a fashion magazine, about some theory of some super-rich guy, or something. “It could be that the so called Real World is just an elaborate game design, too.”

  “Yeah,” Brand said. “The Simulated Universe theory. Maybe we’re all just NPCs in somebody else’s game.”

  “Kind of like Orlando,” Kat murmured.

  Misha glanced back at her from where he stood in front of the giant double doors. “I really am sorry about how I behaved, Tasha. I’ll apologize to…to him when I see…him. Not that I expect him to accept it, but still.” He lowered his voice, they the other two could still probably hear. “I was insanely jealous. My bad. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Dude,” Brand said, “it was stupid, but you didn’t really kill him. He’s probably on a corpse-run from Elsinore as we speak.”

  Misha nodded and gave a quirky grin. “I guess we can all die several times over in this world and it’s just an inconvenience.”

  A very painful inconvenience, Tasha thought, and as though someone invisible overheard her, she heard the words, “But some deaths are much more painful than others!”

  ……….

  They popped up out of the ground, maybe a dozen of them, dressed in camouflage-covered leather armor and carrying a nasty assortment of vicious, customized weapons. One of them had a baseball bat with barbed wire wrapped around it; another bore a pair of hatchets that looked covered in blood and gore. They had blended in with the rocks and trees so well that nobody in the group had seen them until it was too late.

  A chill of fear ran down Tasha’s spine and almost without volition she invoked her invisibility spell.

  “Damn, where’d the bitch go?”

  “We got the other one,” said a particularly large and brutal-looking member of this feral gang of outlaws. He lunged toward Kat, his slavering features grinning lasciviously.

  “Brand!” Kat shouted. “Death’s Hand! Use it on me!”

  Her boyfriend hesitated, but only for a moment. Tasha could see the look in his eyes as he reached out toward her…but he was instantly felled by a club to the back of his head, delivered by the largest of the gang of thugs, a near-naked ogre covered in desert sand and dust. Another of their assailants grabbed Kat, knocking the harp from her hands. He was human, lithe and vicious looking, his eyes glowing with desire – desire for murder and rape, Tasha knew. He pulled Kat safely away from Brand’s killing touch. Death’s hand was the only thing that would save her from the indignities which lay ahead.

  Kat was captured, being mauled by a pair of the thugs now, who pulled her robes up over her head and began fumbling with her armor and undergarments. Brand lay in a heap on the ground, conscious, she could tell from his vague moans and the shaking of his head, but only just. Misha stood over him, sword out and ready to fight, but hopelessly outnumbered.

  The huge, near-naked ogre approached Brand and Misha. “If you had killed the bitch before we had our fun with her, I would’ve really been pissed.” Brand focused briefly on the ogre, then fell back, moaning, his hands on his head. He was really hurting…or maybe not. Tasha had gotten to know the young computer hacker fairly well in a short amount of time, and the possibility he was shamming was quite real. He still had the Death’s Hand spell, which could be used once to take out one of the gang members…but that would still leave –

  Too damned many. Even if she used backstab and got a critical hit, felling a second one, there would still be at least ten of them. If she materialized and they were defeated, she too would suffer the indignities that were about to face Kat. A brutal gang-rape, no doubt, with these cretins laughing and high-fiving the whole time.

  Maybe if they killed Misha and Brand quickly, they would spawn back in Elsinore and get back to them before Kat…no, that would take too long by foot, hours by horseback, even.<
br />
  “You guys might as well have a seat and watch while we take turns on her,” the ogre told Misha and Brand. “Maybe when we’re done we’ll let you have a crack at her…before we kill her.”

  “My God you’re disgusting,” Misha said to him.

  “There’s a big bounty out on harlots with slave collars,” the ogre said, shrugging. “Some Russian pimp dude is paying out decent skrilla for a confirmed kill of your friend here, and the other one that disappeared.” He looked around at his gang of degenerate roleplayers. “Not a one of these assholes has detection spells. What I get for playing with a bunch of melee punks.”

  They laughed, and one of them, a little dark elf with a swaggering attitude, stepped over to Kat and said, “I do believe it’s my turn to be first.”

  “I believe you’re right, Driz,” the ogre said.

  “Flip her over on her belly,” the dark elf told his companions. Kat was naked now, her round white bottom pointed up at the uncaring sky of Brutalia. “That’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh uh-huh.” He sang the words in an ironic funky style and dropped his leather pants.

  Tasha couldn’t take much more of this. Maybe she’d die in battle. Maybe all three of them would, then re-spawn in Elsinore…there must be a faster mode of travel –

  And there was. Something much faster than a regular horse.

  A flying horse. That’s what she saw approaching them, a winged steed like Pegasus from myth, shooting toward them as though rocket-propelled, and on its back, an archer taking aim –

  An arrow embedded itself in the dark elf’s lean, shiny black belly and he fell back with a grunt and a look of disbelief on his face. The pleasures of eminent rape had transformed into the pain of an arrow in the guts. Good, Tasha thought, backstabbing the freak nearest her, a barbarian covered in hideous, satanic-looking tattoos. Critical hit, she saw – ha. The barb fell to his knees, blood geysering from his pierced heart.