by Неизвестный
“Muuh...nammm...?”
“Come on. Let’s go.”
Getting himself up, Bud knows what would happen next. He would be led to the cave if he followed. So Bud sits down again.
“What are you doing?”
And again. Standing up, then crouching again. Crouching here makes the master repeat himself. He has to repeat himself.
Standing up, then crouching again. Again, again, again, until it didn’t matter anymore. The master can no longer control himself.
“I said ‘what are you doing?’ We need you to clear out the cave. Come on, let’s go. What are you doing? I said ‘what are you doing?’ We need you to clear out the cave. Come on, let’s go. What are you doing? I said ‘what are you doing?’ We need you to clear out the cave. Come on, let’s go. What are you doing? I’m sorry. I said ‘what are you doing?’ We need you to clear out the cave. Come on, let’s go. What are you doing? I said ‘what are you doing?’ We need you to clear out the cave. Come on, let’s go. What are you doing? I said ‘what are you doing?’ We need you to clear out the cave. Come on, let’s go. What are you doing? I said ‘what are you doing?’ We need you to clear out the cave. Come on, let’s go. What are you doing?...”
***
Whenever Bud progressed to the cave before, he always sprinted. He didn’t know why he always had to run everywhere, thinking about it now. But then, it doesn’t look like there’s much else to do but repeat himself or go forward to the marked place. As if the grand planner of Bud’s destiny needed to lead him there by the hand. He takes his time, this time. He breathes in, slowly. No air, but little particles of the tiny, almost imperceptible squares collapse space around him like a crumpled piece of paper. They shoot through his mouth, through pores in the back of his neck, buzzing and stinging like shocks of electricity. Bud inches lumberingly toward the cave. He clutches his sidearm. Always there.
Infinite overgrowth covers the mouth of the cave. He takes a step inside. He raises his gun. The place is eerily lit, crawling with mutants that abhor the light. Bud registers the guttural sounds and grotesque gestures in a way that makes him sweat and twists his stomach into knots. He feels the impulse to shoot when they approach, increasingly taking pity on them as bullets obliterate their disfigured bodies. How such a small bullet can annihilate a head so completely, reducing it to a firework of blood and rotten meat cubes. Every time he shoots, the bullet rips through the heaving, grasping mutants. Mutants with skin melting off their faces, so putrid in color that the ability to smell them would’ve been too much. They hopelessly lumber and swipe at Bud, eyes bloodshot or missing, mouths necrotic and decomposed, spilling with pus and bile. They moan, cry and spit and Bud can’t help himself. He can’t stand this feeling he gets for every single one he has to put out of its misery, looking at it in its useless face. It is programmed to see Bud as food. Sometimes it sneaks out of the cave at night. Sometimes it finds a fresh young virgin and makes a meal of her, dragging pieces of her back to the cave, like dinner was all she was ever made for.
The others couldn’t build a wall around the cave. Impossible. They couldn’t send a mob to clear the cave themselves. Bud was the only one who could do it. The only one strong and brave and strapping enough. Something about this suddenly seemed cruel and absurd to him. Why is this where the town offloaded their sick? And why was their problem his problem? Because Bud can’t move forward without first doing this. Bud pushes forward, compelled not to be grabbed, to find some answer before being pulled back into the dark abyss of a broken world.
Each shot fired rips a hole through a creature, through some brownscale texture in the cave, firing infinitely, leaving behind it a trail of perforated universe. Every time he shoots, the bullet converges on a vanishing point in a darkened, back wall of the cave. Every bullet, hundreds and hundreds of them, disappear on some oscillating grid at the end of the semi-circular cavern. There is no other end to this place. Bud runs out of bullets, running, dropping the pistol to the ground where every slaughtered mutant part multiplies like the grass outside, creating infinitely growing trails and spirals of mucus and carnage which come to surround the cave until the brown-grey interior is saturated with blood reds and pea greens. Every time it crawls onto Bud it fades off, crawling back then fading again.
His pistol wasn’t supposed to leave his side. It hits the ground fading, returning to his holster, magically, empty. No ammo refills anywhere. Bud pulls his Bowie knife from its sheath, running, hacking his way to the back wall.
He slashes the wall and the grid pulsates, gyrates and sparkles. He hits it again, again, again. More forcefully, more desperately, he keeps slicing the grid until it cracks and a great white light explodes through it, spitting out little, grainy particles. Like a vortex it begins to consume everything around Bud. All the same carnage and same stones and same flowers and the same master and the same damsels, sucked into the light, dissipating into particles, erased. Everything around Bud affects death as he holds on, resisting the force as much as he can, still awed by the beautiful white light.
Nothing exists around him but the light, the grid and the darkness. All the world around him falls away, and he is left with a void and one escape. The world isn’t his anymore. It broke when he touched it. It felt empty when he perceived it. His whole body finally relaxes. His shoulders drop. He stops resisting. He had been coming here the whole time, anyway. He had to. He closes his eyes, smiling, and the warmth of the light embraces him, caressing his every particle until he fades into it completely.
***
“Uhhh, I think the disc is scratched,” the kid whines. Annoyed, he whips his noise-canceling cans off of his head, hops over to his team coordinator, and hands her the disc.
“This build’s pretty broken, you know?” she says, looking up at him incredulously.
“Yeah but I can’t get this one to boot at all. It used to be alright but now it crashes as soon as I press start.”
“Uh-huh.”
The young woman with the frayed bun and smartly pleated pants takes a look at the disc. She’s sitting in a similar swivel chair in a regrettably carpeted room. Rows of devkits are aligned in front of her against large plate-glass windows. She sits at a retractable table with her own kit. Her co-coordinator sits next to her, his angular, skinny face focused intently on a videogame. He’s trying to make it past the cave level without incident.
“This game makes no fuckin’ sense,” he mutters.
“Do you know how it got scratched?” she inquires, eyebrow raised.
“No. Like I said, it was fine. I was testing a pretty bad out-of-world bug, then all of a sudden it stopped working and now there’s a giant scratch on it.” His hands are perched on the small of his back, his shoulders bobbing up and down in step to the anxiously hopping syllables.
Her eyes narrowing, she tries launching the disc on her console. Some buzzing and clicking, and then nothing happens. A minute or two of crashes and hard resets later, she presses “Eject” and pulls the disc from the tray.
“Yeah, this one’s pretty dead. We’ll see if we have another copy for you on hand.”
“Thanks.” The kid sighs.
The chronically exhausted coordinator knows the broken copy will have to be handled properly. As a third-party company, policy’s strict. She sighs at the extra work of having to send a request for the useless disc to be obliterated, made unrecognizable, thrown in the garbage. She’ll have to mark things down and color-code things and make it known that one disc was malfunctioning and missing and could a replacement be made because there aren’t a ton of copies here? She sighs again. That out-of-world will need to be reproduced and reported and marked “A—Urgent” in the database. Not that the piece of shit will be ready for submission. Not that the devs seem to care all that much. Come Tuesday, the first Bud will be trucked off. The graves at the end of the death march will scatter the bottom of a landfill, resting eternally, in shiny little particles.
All Time Heroes
&
nbsp; Matt Riche
He was dreaming again; the numberless grey foes screamed towards him, with the relentless patterned efficiency of marching ants. He was as fragile as they were, but unlike his enemy, he could see, and reason, and plan—they were slaves to their patterns, where he had the gift of reflexes and choice. One of him was worth a thousand of them.
Every night he blasted through them, his proud blue fighter-craft an extension of himself. The joystick, with its familiar click and rattle, was the point at which his body connected seamlessly to the things he saw. He knew their patterns, perceiving them not just with his eyes, but with his hands, and the map of bullet and flight patterns ingrained in his brain.
Though, in his dream, he inevitably reached the point where he finally succumbed. Some stray fragment or failed maneuver after a million perfect ones caused the tiny collision that led to his unceremonious, impotent whimper of a death.
JON awoke with a start. His brain echoed a noise from the haze of his sleep, a familiar yet unplaceable sound—like a little piece of metal tumbling down a tunnel. He blinked, reminding himself today didn't have to be the day the collision happened. He rubbed his hands into his face and took a breath, trying to purge the sticky film of sleep from his brain.
When idle, a pilot like himself would have no choice but to see the endless loop in his head. Everyone in his world would see this when they closed their eyes—the flashing colors meant to attract and entice a soul to become a player, to contend in the battle to Save Our World, or to set the highest score doing so.
JON stretched and instinctively hit a button on the wall of his quarters. The big screen quietly zapped a static fuzz over itself, and the numbers and letters faded slowly onto the screen, almost as slowly and sleepily as he had awoken.
TODAY’S HEROES
1. JON - 99929520
2. A.M - 99510060
3. RET - 90004480
That there, that was his identity. To become number one, you had to want only that, and live only that.
Mr. Number One left his room and padded barefoot out to the kitchen of the opulent quarters the fleet provided him, near Area 16, the so-called "Final Area.” Today, he was going out to do Area 16 again for what would be the third time. He switched on all the CRT monitors in every room as he walked by, their barely audible static squeal making him feel less alone. JON was indeed number one among “Today’s Heroes.” But who was number one today wasn’t yet immortal, like those who lived among the All Time Heroes.
JON waited a moment for the screen to scroll to the next scoreboard. The one that changed far less. The one that honored the dead.
ALL TIME HEROES
1. J.S - 999999040
***
Long ago, J.S was the first player to see Area 16. When he approached the end of the area, the audience waited with bated breath. His skills were spectacular. J.S had brushed aside wave after wave, deftly making a path through the haze of projectiles as they created curves and sine-waves in the sky.
Amid J.S’s seemingly never-ending struggle, the warning klaxon finally came. The Mothership approached, big and angry-red, spewing bullets in kaleidoscopic swathes. It looked like the other motherships, but recolored with a more sinister palette. At that time, no one had seen a red one before. J.S was cool-headed and untouchable. He seemed to dance between the points of light forever until the satisfying sound of explosions, almost playfully rewarding, rang out against the chaos. The red Mothership faded away. The people rejoiced.
As the story goes, J.S remained still, knowing something didn’t feel right. He waited, cruising through the blackness.
The enemy sent a message.
"WE ARE NOT DEFEAT. YOUR WORLD HAS NOT SAFE! TRY AGAIN!"
J.S had feared this. Area 16 was the “last” area, but beating it didn’t make the fight stop. The waves came again, just like in Area 1, in an infinite loop. The people's hearts all died a little when J.S took out the Mothership. Once it was known that another Area 1 lay beyond Area 16, they all knew it could never stop. J.S fought through Area 16 again, watching the Mothership break apart once more. And then he faced another force of foes at another Area 1.
J.S slipped, finally, on his third trip to Area 16. It wasn’t a mothership, it wasn’t even one of the nastier waves. It barely made a sound when he died. Their hail of bullets ended the great hero, but the drones just kept flying, buzzing around relentlessly, mechanistically.
***
JON made his coffee, his hand twitching as if it were hovering over the joystick. He saw the foes, buzzing around like hornets, whenever he closed his eyes. It was time to challenge J.S’s legacy.
A tone came from a speaker on the wall. JON hit the intercom button.
"Hey! It's DAV.”
“Hey.”
“You’re doing Area 16 today, right?”
“...Yeah.”
“The big day,” DAV said excitedly.
“Do you want something, DAV?”
“Yeah. I want to do Area 16 with you.”
“No, DAV.”
“Come on, man. I'm not letting you go alone this time. J.S went alone and we both know what happened to him."
"Maybe I'm better than J.S," JON said, flatly.
"We both know it's not worth it. I'm coming and we're doing a run together. We'll see what's beyond 16-3."
"1-4. That's what we'll see. We’ll just go back to 1-4," JON muttered exasperatedly.
Then, like every clockwork morning, he drank more coffee, did some stretches, and grabbed some fresh clothes. JON was ready to head out into the station and make the preparations for his run.
Before he went to the door he be paused, and waited, for the scoreboard to roll past in his mind’s eye.
AREA 16
1. JON - 99929520
Still number one. Soon he'd clear one-hundred-million.
He opened the door and headed out into the station.
"JON! JON!" came the cheers of excited voices. Men and women alike cheered for JON, in a fandom he sometimes thought was senseless.
"I love you, JON!"
JON just waved and smiled. He loved the shouting and the praise. They'd ask how he got so good at flying, how many he could take out, how delicately he could thread his path through bullet hell. Sometimes, he’d look twice, trying to understand what he saw in their eyes—Adoration, pride, wonder? Jealousy, fear, worry?
Other pilots saluted JON and clapped. They could see the stats, the flashing marker above his head. People shouted encouragement and praise as he walked through the promenade.
"JON!"
DAV rounded the corner.
"I'm warmed up and ready! How about you?"
"I had my coffee. My trigger finger is loose. Are you sure you have to do this?"
DAV’s face was a mix of pride and annoyance with his friend.
“I know you can probably survive this on your own, but I won’t let the world’s favorite pilot risk his life while I sit here.”
“It’s you risking your life that’s the problem,” said JON.
“I’m not the world’s favorite pilot.”
A smile crept through JON’s persistent frown.
JON and his wingman approached the hangar together. There was an old man looking at JON with a glare of disapproval. JON looked back, waiting for the look in the old man's eyes to change when he realized just who he was staring at. But the old man kept staring him down, as if he had done something wrong.
"Stats..." JON thought. He looked up at the old man, this time with his stats overlayed on JON’s vision.
AREA 2
59931. AAA - 000001580
"Bloody quitter!” DAV spat on the floor by the old man’s feet.
"How can a quitter dare show his face, huh? How can he look at you like that, with what you're about to do? Made Area 2 and gave up. What kind of life is that? Who'd even be able to wake up and face the day with that many zeros floating above their head?"
JON didn't have an answer.
&n
bsp; The two pilots passed through the hangar door and walked down the lit walkway to their crafts. JON stepped up to his slick, beautiful, blue fighter. Its wings sang of majesty to JON. He adored that jet for all the victories it saw him through, for how it made him feel so free and strong.
JON sat as comfortably as he reasonably could in the cockpit and hit the start button. The fighter was pulled automatically along the runway by the mass-driver. The fighter was pushed across the hangar toward the launch bay doors. Coming up right beside him seconds later was DAV's candy-red fighter, a perfect copy of his blue one.
A detached, yet soothing feminine voice emanated from the computer:
"One, Ready."
JON hit the ignition.
"Two, Ready."
DAV did the same.
The soaring white noise deafened them as they launched.
Through the glass before his eyes he could see the stars passing by, along with the HUD reading “AREA 16.”
"You know the drill," JON reminded his wingman. "Don't look at the bullets, look through them. See it all at once."
"I know, I know. This ain't my first rodeo either, punk."
And then the hornets came, streams of them faster than he had ever seen before.
His dream flashed behind his eyes. JON tensed, slapping his own face to correct himself.
JON and DAV tore through the waves, matching them with equal zeal. They flew so fast. They could take so many hits before they'd break. JON and DAV pulled their fighters back to put as much space—and bullets—between them and the rapid enemy cascades as possible.
"Watch your six! Don't go too far back!"
In Area 16, they liked to sneak up. JON never once let his concentration lapse. He remembered where they liked to pop out.
JON often wondered what really happened to J.S that day. Was it really too difficult? Or was something on his mind? Was he distracted? Did he just lose his patience?
The enemy fighters clustered up into a tighter formation, all occupying the same space, making a big crunchy mass for JON and DAV’s bullets to tear at.