He returns his Metal Storm bonesaw to his list. “Better yet, we’d better save one for interrogation purposes.”
“They’ll just log out; they always do.”
“Not with these.” A pair of burnished steel cuffs take shape in his hand.
“Whatchoo got there?”
Doc shrugs nonchalantly. “The Reapers aren’t the only one that can prevent someone from logging out.”
Sophia: Doc! You said you wouldn’t use those unless you had to!
Rocket: Wait, is he using the permalog cuffs? NOT FAIR. Why am I not part of the Kill Squad? Only squares and girl scouts stay back and protect the target. Also, not fair. All of this is not fair.
Frances Euphoria: The Dream Team does not use permalog cuffs, as per our bylaws. Rocket, I was a girl scout and I’m proud of the fact. Anything else you’d like to say while I’m standing in the same room as you?
Rocket: Got any thin mints?
I laugh aloud and Aiden gives me a funny look. “Sorry,” I tell him, “it was something on the messaging system.”
Doc: FYI – the Dream Team is not using permalog cuffs. I was only telling Quantum about them. Remember, comms are for important conversations only. We will handle the hostiles. Frances and Rocket, you continue to provide protection for Joel and anyone else in his establishment. Rocket, shut your mouth and sit on your hands until we get back.
I wink at Doc, letting him know I’m in on his little white lie.
He does not wink back. Instead, he points at the darkened sky over Morlock, right at Sophia, and makes the universal ‘keep quiet’ single finger to his lips, followed by the ‘I’ll cut your throat’ gesture. Amazingly, Sophia gets the picture.
“Welp, better get outfitted.” I go with my SPAS-12 Shotgun, item 189, to match Morning Assassin’s shotty. Just to keep things world-appropriate, I equip my saber pistol, item 559, and holster it. For flare – because who doesn’t need a bit of flare? – I equip item 71, my eel leather belt with its QH belt buckle that spins.
I give the belt a good spin and Doc gives me a look that could break open a safe.
“What else … what else? I know!” Wade Wilson’s carbonadium katanas, item 325, appear on my back.
“You done playing dress-up?” Aiden asks, but by the twinkle in his eyes, I can tell he’s impressed. His two SPAS-12s disappear and he smirks as his right arm morphs into a hand cranked Gatling gun. The ammo belt materializes in his other hand and after he loads and locks, he throws the belt over his shoulder like it’s the Tinman’s brass-and-copper scarf. “What?” he asks. “You aren’t the only one that is allowed to be well-armed. And that, my friends, is how you make a pun.”
“I’ve gotta hand it to you, that wasn’t bad.”
He rolls his eyes. “Let’s go.”
The three of us fan out, Aiden in the lead. I don’t suspect it will be hard to find the Reapers with their masks, muscles, chains, and overall douchiness and for once, I’m not wrong.
We turn the corner and as Aiden reported, the Reapers are on Bail Bond Street, shoving their way through the crowd as they move to the next establishment. Apparently, whomever they bought their information from only gave them a portion of it, never telling them exactly where we were heading.
Me: Bystanders, what are we going to do about these guys?
Doc: I’ll take care of that.
Too late. Apparently, I’m a big deal at the Reaper Saloon, or wherever they hang out. One spots me instantly as if I were wearing a neon green jumper and a matching Dr. Seuss top hat.
“Hit the deck!” I shout as he unloads a long burst of metal unhappiness right into the crowd, tearing through the flesh of convicts, tourists, and whoever else has made the very unfortunate choice of visiting Akrasia today.
“Out of the way!”
AA bar activated, I go for my tried and true ‘walks on shoulders’ act, leaping from shoulder to shoulder as the Reapers mow through the crowd. Faster than a recently wealthy running back sprinting away from law enforcement, Doc plows through the crowd with his two Steyr AUG’s pumping out 5.56 NATOs like ‘cool’ is going out of business and he’s the one trying to run it into the ground.
The War Faun is juiced on his AA too; his bullets expertly avoid the fleeing crowd as if the bullets have minds of his own.
Damn that’s some good shootin’!
Aiden tele-kills the first Reaper, a stocky little pitbull pup with watermelon biceps and a gelled up wowsie-wow Mohawk jutting out the top of his Reaper mask. Before the next guy can even get his weapon up, Morning Assassin is behind him with his Gatling gun arm giving him the reverse firing range treatment. He’s gone before the next Reaper can spin around, get his hack up, and fire a blistering blast of fiery blue energy into Da Kine Bail, completely destroying the joint.
My turn.
BOOM-shakalaka-BOOM! I take the skull mask off a Reaper broad’s ugly mug and finish the job by speeding up on the AA as I overhand one of my Carbonadium katanas. It pegs her in the shoulder; she hits the pavement and logs out immediately.
Shit!
A fist outta nowhere sends me tumbling sideways.
It only takes one long, dazed glance to see that the beefiest of the Reapers is double-hacked up. The end of one of his arms is morphed into some type of symbiose Stretch Armstrong/Popeye fist, and the other a double barrel gun with underslung biomatter just to give it a cool futuristic look.
Doc: The smallest one is our patsy. I’ll get him cuffed before he logs out! You and Aiden take the other.
“With pleasure, Doc!”
Aiden has a career in telepathy if he just hones his skills and finally decides to go back to night school. He’s already laying down metal utterances of death by the time I get my shootin’ iron up and start a-blasting Rollins’ brother from another mother one boom-shakalaka after another.
I could go freeze hack and Gramoguns, items 554 and 558 respectively, but a nice afternoon of shooting always calms my nerves. Sure, the big bastard Hulk-smashed the hell out of the pavement sending debris and dust into the air, and sure, the bozo can blast the surrounding buildings with his hack until he’s blue in the face, but he doesn’t have the speed or sheer bulletry that Aiden and I are prepared to lay down to kill the bruiser.
So we keep shooting, Aiden flashing in and out to avoid the Reaper’s blasts and Yours Truly simply lets MA distract the Bronie as I keep pumping shots at Papa Bear.
Eventually, those bullets start to tear through his spike-laden armor and it is with great glory that Aiden appears directly in front of the schmoe-hawk, Slice Bang in hand, and stabs him in the stomach while simultaneously firing a shot.
The big sissy logs out before he can completely croak.
“Let me go!” I look over to see that Doc now has the smaller Reaper permacuffed. He pulls him to his feet and Aiden appears next to him.
Me: Where do we take him?
Doc: Not the safehouse. How ‘bout whatever is left of Da Kine Bail?
I point with my nose towards the smoldering bail bond shop and Aiden gets the drift. He yanks the Reaper towards the joint and pulls him behind a partially crumbled wall.
“What did you do to me!?” the Reaper bellows.
“Quiet,” Doc says as he bends over and gets in his face. “Or I’ll make sure you’ll never logout out again. We clear here?”
The Reaper gulps audibly and nods his head.
~*~
I wait for Sophia to protest and much to my surprise and delight, she doesn’t.
“You’re not supposed to illegally trap people!” the Reaper whines, his voice muffled and metallic due to his skull mask. Speaking of which, I rip the skull mask off, curious as to what this bozo hides underneath.
“Hey!” he screams.
This one dumped all his attribute points into appearance. He’s got the angular Fabio face down to a T, and a ridiculous Guile haircut to boot. Too bad his septum piercing is too small for me to grab hold of and yank out.
“What’s
your name, son?” Doc asks. Can’t tell if he is going for good cop or bad cop here. I’m down for either.
“Screw you, goat-man!”
Bad cop it is. The reaper cries out as Doc pistol whips the shit out of him.
Sophia: Doc!
“Stop! Please! Okay, I’ll tell you all of it, anything. Anything!” he sobs. “Don’t hurt me! It … it hurts!”
Aiden shakes his head, truly disappointed.
“Look, my name isn’t important. It’s information you want, right? I’ll tell you what you want to know. Just leave my name out of this. I … ” he hesitates and whispers. “I don’t want him to know.”
“Okay then,” Doc says. “Let’s start here – why are the Reapers in Akrasia? Hell, why are you people even in Steam for that matter?”
The Reaper grimaces. “Sky Iron,” he finally says, “that’s why. We’re here to collect it. I have no idea why anyone wants the damn metal. Not my department. I’m the lowest rung on the totem pole, if you couldn’t already tell. That damn Sky Iron seems impossible to find anyway. All we’ve been able to get is a little bit from some guy’s tooth.”
Sophia: THEY’RE HERE FOR THE SAME REASON WE ARE.
I nearly trip as the capital letters spill across my viewing pane. Aiden gives me a confused look and I wave it away. “Sophia,” I mumble.
“What’s he planning?” Doc asks the Reaper pigeon. “What’s Strata planning to do with the Sky Iron?”
The Reaper snorts. “Like I know what he’s planning! You realize I’ve never met the guy, don’t you? Hell, most of us haven’t! I’ve only seen him on other people’s live streams and in videos that we are required to view. That’s it, honest!”
“Then why the hell do you follow him?” I ask.
“Because … ” his eyes glaze over. “Because he knows the way. He has brought us this far, and he will bring us to the end.”
“Holy Kool Aid, dumbass,” I say, “I don’t think that’s quite how it works.”
“You asked!” he snaps. “And I’m sure, no matter what you do to me, Quantum Hughes, Strata will finish what he started!”
What he started?
“Doc, let me see your bean shooter.” Too lazy to equip my own, I step forward and pop the shit out of the Reaper.
“Hey!”
Sophia: Sky Iron, when used in conjunction with other precious metals, can tear through the game time continuum. I’d bet my future home in Valhalla that this is the reason Strata wants it!
“You’ll have to tell us more than that if you want to ever logout again,” Doc tells him, “much, much more than that.”
“You really … plan to prevent me from logging out?” the Reaper snivels and his eyes flash black. “I’m recording, you know!”
Now it’s Doc’s turn to laugh. “You really don’t realize what those cuffs do, do you?”
The Reaper instinctively struggles to turn and take a look at them. Once he realizes he can’t he seethes, “They will come for me; once they see that I haven’t joined them back in the dive location.”
The last two words spark a memory. I recall what Frances and Arnie discovered when they went to retrieve Luther Godsick’s body in Colorado. There were tons of vats at his devious papa’s McMansion; there must have been fifty to a hundred. “Wait a damn minute. Is your real body in Strata’s mansion?” I blurt out.
He shakes his head and scowls at me. “Did you not hear a word that I said? I’ve never met the guy, which means I’m definitely not in his Meridian Circuit.” He bites his lip, suddenly realizing he’s said too much. “Shit … ”
“Meridian Circuit, huh?” Doc grins from cheek to cheek, stretching his salt-n-pepper goatee wide. “Ready to tell us a little more about that?”
“What do I have to tell you for you to set me free?” he counters.
Doc doesn’t take his eyes off him. “Something important, something that we can actually use.”
“The Meridian Circuit is Strata’s inner circle. They are perma-logged in. They … ” he gulps. “They protect him.”
“If these guys are so tough,” I ask, “why haven’t we encountered them before?”
The Reaper moves forward and wipes blood from his nose to his sleeve. “You have,” he says quietly. “You’re just too stupid to realize it. They are Strata. They power him.”
Chapter Eight
To make himself invincible, Strata’s avatar is created from the Digital Neuronal Autoconstruct System, D-NAS, of every single member of his Meridian Circuit. This makes him stronger than any RPC, NPC, or PC he encounters.
The bastard is feeding off the Meridian Circuit, and their autoconstruct combinations have given him god-like powers.
What’s even crazier is that like me, the members of the circuit exist in two worlds, their bodies in vats in Strata’s home and their avatars in specially constructed extraction centers in the Proxima Galaxy. By not having a single player identity, normal parameters that apply to any given player do not apply to Strata.
“So … he could theoretically crush an NVA Seed?” I ask as we make our way back to the contraband shop. With no more information to provide to us, Doc let the Reaper go, but not before blasting the palooka with his hack. Do not pass go, do not collect two-hundred bones – I wonder sometimes what it must be like to be a Reaper and not be able to log back into the Proxima Galaxy. Well, sure, they can log in, but they won’t make it out of the OMIB, plus there’s the spanking by Granny Weatherwax.
Sheesh.
Sophia: To answer your question, Quantum, an NVA seed consists of four intertwined strands of D-NAS. Strata’s avatar, if the Reaper was being honest, consists of over fifty.
Rocket: (/) (°,,°) (/) WHAT the hell did I miss?
Sophia: Here’s the transcript.
Rocket: What no vid?
Sophia: No.
Rocket: #whatcenturyamIlivingin?
“Why does he want Sky Iron then?” I glance to the War Faun, who appears to be deep in thought. A cancer stick takes shape in his mouth and after a long inhale, he exhales a cloud of blue smoke.
“With the Sky Iron, Strata could potentially crush an NVA Seed and thus destroy a Proxima world. No doubt about it.”
“He can’t destroy an NVA Seed.” Aiden steps around a man in prison garb holding hands with a short guy with mechanical legs. “He can overpower one, but he can’t destroy it.”
“Even though … ” I do the math in my head. “He’s about twelve times stronger than an NVA Seed?”
Doc nods. “That’s why he needs the Sky Iron. I really don’t know why they invented it in the first place. Combined with metals from other worlds, it can make the equivalent of a nuclear weapon for dreamworlds.” Doc looks to the darkened sky. An SRT Zeppelin is moored over Akrasia with lines connected to a few of the taller structures. “Ray, I know you’re watching, and you know better than to hold out on us here.”
Nothing.
“Good luck with that, Doc,” I tell the Faun of Steam. “I don’t know what Ray’s endgame is, but I have the feeling he isn’t exactly concerned with how this plays out.”
“Yeah, I think you’re wrong.” Doc shrugs. “Definitely wrong there. Strata could destroy Steam, which would destroy Ray. So, Ray, ahem, a little help for the faun? How ‘bout giving us some Sky Iron and destroying whatever is left after we free Quantum’s dumb ass?”
The clink clank of chains striking the pavement pricks my ears. The Akrasia Chain Gang turns a corner in front of us. Steam’s scummiest scum march right past us with scowls on their faces. They range in size from mountain to hillock. A few puny guys make up the rear and one – shaved head, tattooed skull, pockmarked cheeks – gives me an especially ugly snarl.
“You planning to back that snarl up with some bite?” I ask the scuzzbag with an Adam’s apple that looks like he’s got a cantaloupe lodged in his throat. He’s gone before I can get an answer.
“There’s more to this story,” I say after the Chain Gang is out of earshot.
> “Gee,” Doc says, “You think?”
Sophia: Many Proxima worlds have a single rare metal that can be used to craft that particular world’s most powerful weapon. Rare Proxima Galaxy metals. Remember this? RPG! They weren’t meant to become alloys, but it seems like that is what Strata’s trying to do here. Need I remind you that we too are trying to do this?
Me: No you need not and I don’t know why you choose to do so.
Sophia: Good.
I ignore her next lengthy explanation. “What I mean by there’s more to this story is that there is something Strata is trying to do with these metals, and I don’t think we should necessarily jump to a Death Star conclusion here. What else can be done with these alloys? Is there a profit motive here?”
Doc considers this for a moment. “I don’t see what the profit motive could be, but I’m not putting it past him. Sophia? Any ideas?”
Sophia: Maybe it’s a control thing. Maybe he wants to use it to threaten NVA Seeds. For once, I agree with Quantum, there must be some type of profit motive here.
“Maybe he’s trying to get the Proxima Company by the balls,” I say as I step around a confectionary stand. Candy shivs on a stick? No thank you. “They must be monitoring this and Revenue Corporation.”
“The Proxima Company practices the same philosophy as Ray Steampunk.” Doc stops in his tracks, glances at the wares of weapon shop, thinks about going in, decides not to, and continues. “They don’t get involved unless it is of dire consequences.”
“Reapers in Akrasia looking for Sky Iron isn’t considered a consequence?”
“Any player can look for RPG metals. It’s not against a by-law or anything.”
“So we can’t expect their help then, huh?” I ask.
“Have we had their help thus far?” Doc asks. “Let’s get back to the RW.”
~*~
Got a machinehead, it’s better than the rest.
Green to red, machinehead.
All sorts of shit appears in my mind’s eye. Everything from the layout of the hotel to fluctuations in temperatures in the room remind me that, without a shadow of a doubt, I am far from human. I don’t need to even open my eyes to know that Sophia is lying on the bed. I don’t need to search for things to do in LA to know that the Holo-Eagles are playing a concert at PepsiCo’s Dodgers Stadium tonight and that while tickets are sold out, you can still purchase tickets to the virtual concert. I don’t need to check the AQI to know that LA is currently sitting in the yellow zone with a passing score of 71.
Proxima Riven: Page 9