by Неизвестный
"You'd have to have some weird views about the game to take it personally—Hey, where did Coster go?"
***
"Evening, Giger."
"Yo. Coster, right?"
Giger's model was broad, topless, battle-scarred. Bald of head and long of beard, he was a foot taller than Coster, and while much of the Grenadier's bulk came from his bomb disposal-esque armor, the Gunner's was all muscle.
"Yeah, that's me. Sorry to hear about your bug."
"Eh, thanks, but it happens. Won't pretend I wasn't broken up about it but I'm not the only one."
"Regardless, it must have been a shock."
"Damn right it was. But you know what, the team still won. The first time I realized my gun wasn't working, we still went on to win." Giger smiled weakly. "Dunno whether that made it better or worse."
"What game mode was this?"
"Super Clash."
Coster made a face. Normally the appearance of Supers was an endgame event, a way for the dominant team to further ensure dominance. To add insult to injury, Supers entered the game at the expense of standard playable characters. A player would dump their character for a few minutes and enjoy a brief rampage as a Super, like the robotic Behemoth, or telekinetic Grandmaster: powerhouses that could rarely be stopped.
Super Clash, however, was a popular but tactically unsound mode where Supers were instantly available to both sides.
"I don't like Clash," Coster muttered. "Characters trying to fulfil their duties while avoiding enemy Supers. They run the show, make or break the game."
"Yeah. Tell me about it. You don't feel like you can do anything."
"Horde mode, now that's the real classic."
Giger grinned brightly. "You're only saying that because it's endless mobs."
"Guilty as charged. So. Funny question, have you seen Meraclus around?"
"No, sorry." Giger shrugged his enormous shoulders. "You try the canteen, or the recroom? Can't say I know the guy that well, those are the only places I ever see him."
"I'll keep my eyes open. I bet I'll meet you in the field soon, Giger."
"I hope so too, man. Later."
Heedless of Giger's suggestion, Coster continued down the corridor and tried the observation floor. A few people were gathered to watch the sights, but no Meraclus. Colored wisps of information danced on the horizon.
Coster realized he was thinking about this all wrong. He backed up, went all the way to the other side of the Downtime complex, defying ominous warning signs to reach the barren and deserted platform that overlooked the endless void of absent data.
Barren and deserted, that is, except for Meraclus, sat at the precipice.
"Meraclus?"
He didn’t respond. He was staring at the abyss, his legs dangling.
The gray emptiness wouldn’t be gray emptiness forever. If an update dropped and implemented more content, the resulting addition to the complex would crush Meraclus against the platform edge like so much discarded code.
Coster swallowed. “Meraclus, you might want to get away from there.”
Meraclus turned, and finally banished his default expression with a forced, sour grin that hadn’t been implemented by any programmer. "You're here to laugh too, huh?"
Coster blinked. "Laugh?"
"Everyone gets to poke fun at the big jerk that all the new players flock to because he's a scrub, and you can point and click to make things die and not much else, and now he can't even do that."
Coster moved in closer. "Hey, you're the backbone of the team, cut that out."
Meraclus rolled his glowing eyes and returned to staring at the void. "You don't know me at all."
Coster laid a hand on his shoulder and pulled him up.
"Bullshit. I know you’re good at what you do, and the team needs that."
Meraclus looked dazed, defeated. He didn’t resist as Coster maneuvered him away from the edge. "The team resents me, more like. Taking all the glory."
"No. The team loves to see you enter the fight. When you burst into action nobody thinks 'Wow, that asshole stole my kill.' They think 'Damn, I'm sure glad Meraclus was there, that could have been nasty.' It's what you're there for. When you pop your Apex, bam, the enemy is in trouble."
Apex abilities were the last and most powerful skills unlocked by characters as a match progressed, and Meraclus was no exception. Coster wasn't exaggerating: his own Bombardment may have had a wide area of effect, but Meraclus and his Enchanted Edge had been known to best entire enemy teams.
"They're happy to see me gone."
“No, because that ruins our own chances. But everyone is jealous of you if that's what you're saying. Who wouldn't be!”
“You're not jealous.”
“I'm not—damn, Meraclus," Coster shook his head, "I know my own mind, and my mind is jealous as Hell. I'd be green with envy if I wasn’t already blue for some reason. Everyone wants to be Meraclus, the Arcane Commando.”
Meraclus said nothing.
“And I don't know if you noticed, but you're not the only one. All the v1.6 characters are affected. I was just talking to Giger about it.”
Meraclus looked surprised. “How's Giger taking it?”
“As well as can be expected. Something must have gone really wrong, so you can bet your magic ass they'll rush to release a fix.”
They stood and stared into the blankness. An absence of content, but who's to say it wouldn't soon be occupied?
"Thanks, Coster. I'm sorry I was a jerk."
"I've been killing people with an overpowered ability for months, so maybe I deserved it."
"I was still a jerk."
"Well, yeah. But I'm sure you can patch that out in the future."
***
CostersCommander
Newbie
Hi everyone! long time player, first time on the forum, really happy to be here
As you can probably tell hahhah I play a lot of grenadier so I am v glad you fixed the bombard bug so I could play him again, but in a comp stomp last night me and a few other guys saw what mightve been a bug
we let the bots hit top tier (lol just for fun) and they spawned Behemoth, but we noticed something... the grenadiers Anti Armor shot worked on it
Turns out a behemoth goes down real fast w/out armor! foot, skirmisher, and the arc commando took it out in like ten seconds. this is obvs really cool but since p much all character abilities cant do anything to Supers, we wondered if it was a new glitch...
Just being nosy! keep up the good work
........ ........ ........ ........ ........ ........
Drakeguy
Project Lead
Thank you for your query, we are glad to have you with us.
I can report that this feature is working as intended.
Supercollider
Alan Williamson
“This city is filled with hollowness.”
The pig man let out a derisive snort, smoke wafting out of his flared nostrils.
"That's the most pretentious shit I ever heard, Nick."
Nick swirled the cold coffee in his mug and forced down the gritty dregs. Unhindered by the pig man's sneer, he continued.
“The people I see on my shift—the pedestrians. It's like they have nowhere to go, nothing to do, they just wander like zombies. I look at them and I think to myself, if I swerved onto the sidewalk, would you even jump out of the way?”
“I'm sure some of them would," shrugged the pig man, taking another apathetic drag of his cigarette.
Nick removed a dwindling pouch of tobacco from his jacket pocket and danced a cigarette into existence between his fingers. He glanced at the pig man. Maybe it was unfair to think of him as a pig man, but his mannerisms were disgusting. A thin layer of grease clung to his face; the beads of sweat dribbling from his forehead formed oil slicks. He sagged on the inside.
“And what about the others?” asked Nick.
“Well, not everybody wants to jump, and not everybody needs to,”
said the pig man.
Nick quite liked pigs, just not this one.
***
On this well-worn route, the road wasn’t potholed, just differently textured. Nick drove through here for convenience rather than the scenery: there wasn’t a lot to see unless you were an admirer of nondescript concrete cubes with painted-on doors and windows. Most of the buildings here were abandoned, but not derelict. Some of them looked like they’d never been used at all.
When work was slow, Nick would park and watch the people pass by. He carried a small notebook with him for writing daily observations, self-indulgent philosophy and doggerel verse. That which used to provide inspiration now only brought stagnation. Were these people happy? Unhappy? Alive? Dead? He couldn’t tell anymore. He used to be able to tell, or so he thought. Now these pedestrians drifted aimlessly without even acknowledging each other. If not for the shopping bags and predictable clothing changes from businesspeople to late night revellers, he could have sworn they were all travelling in circles.
Today there was something different. A little kid in a red T-shirt and shorts was weaving up the sidewalk between the stoic giants. He was clutching a well-loved teddy bear, gesticulating wildly with it, talking to it, making exaggerated movements without bumping into anyone as only a child can. He looked like he was having a grand adventure. He was the only one. What must have been his parent was following behind, stony-faced in conversation.
Nick clicked his pen and flipped to a blank page in his dog-eared notebook. “One small particle, part of the crowd, somehow not colliding,” he wrote. He could fix that later, he said to himself, but he knew deep down he never would. The more he analyzed his writing, the worse it seemed.
There was a knock on the window and Nick jolted out of his scribbling. A woman on the pavement waved his attention and he gestured for her to get into the cab. He cracked open the seal on the fresh packet of tobacco he’d bought earlier, but thought better of sparking up when the passenger shot him a glare.
“Take me to the train station.”
He nodded, saying nothing as he tapped the meter and the numbers started to roll. The train station was miles away. He hoped his passenger didn’t have a strict time limit. At least he’d get some decent earnings for it, especially since he figured she was a tourist and he could extend the journey artificially by meandering through some side streets. The trick was to learn the right combinations so you never doubled back on yourself and disoriented the customer. He did that quite a lot, for the challenge, to see how high a score he could rack up on the meter. He often got it wrong (once an irate passenger leapt out of the cab in frustration) but that was part of the thrill, and in a city this big you never ran out of chances. There was always another day. This game of deceit broke up the monotony of the evening, but lately he didn’t have the enthusiasm to play the game.
Nick glanced in the rear-view mirror. His passenger was looking out the window, where generic beige boxes had parted to make way for doorless glass edifices. The skyscrapers had a pristine, pre-baked glaze. The workers walking past were unreflected in the glass, like vampires masquerading as human. In a concrete courtyard in front of an office block, skateboarders were leaping the staircases and grinding the ledges, laughing at a bemused security guard struggling to remove them from the premises. They wouldn’t be satisfied until they had mastered every line.
The passenger’s expression changed from ambivalence to that of bittersweet nostalgia. Her foundation strained around the eyes as she squinted at the skaters and their act of fleeting rebellion. Searching her eyes for an emotion, Nick suddenly realized his own eyes weren’t on the road. He slammed hard on the brakes to avoid hitting the car in front. His passenger broke out of her thought and gave him that glare again, one he pretended not to notice. They reached the station and she left without a goodbye, but her face stayed with him. She looked like she’d lost something.
Back on the road, cars and bikes weaved endlessly through every road and junction—mechanical fireflies. Nick wondered how a bird's-eye view of the city would look: maybe like a computer’s motherboard with visible electric pulses. The traffic lights were logic gates that let the vehicles pass, but there was no logic to this repetition. Electrons have no sense of self, and neither did the people in the cars. They were just energy without agency taking the path of least resistance.
***
“I remember in high school, we watched smoke move under a microscope. It's hard to think of anything more...fluid than smoke, right?”
“I guess,” said the pig man. Nick didn’t care about his ambivalence. At this point in the evening, he would have found talking to a wall therapeutic.
“So, when you look at smoke under the microscope, you see it's not smoke at all. It’s actually made of these particles. They flicker like specks of ash. They’re all jiggling around.”
“Mmm, I thought smoke was fluid,” the pig man snorted. Wisps of smoke rushed out of his nose and rippled across the table.
“Nah, it's an illusion.” Nick reached for his pouch of tobacco, but inside were mere wisps of leaf. “I think it’s called Brownian Motion. The smoke jiggles because other bits of smoke keep bumping into it, knocking them off course. Yet, all these collisions and it looks smooth when you’re not looking through the microscope. It's a paradox!”
Despite Nick’s renewed enthusiasm for high school chemistry, the pig man smoked and brooded undeterred. He never looked directly at Nick, preferring to focus on nothing at all. A stain on the wall, a moth by the light outdoors: anything caught his attention, yet nothing gained his interest.
“I’m sick of just being part of the smoke. I want to be more than just a collider.”
The pig man’s smoke belched on, liquid across the table, a solid wave crashing on Nick’s skin. He took a deep drag and tapped his ash into the tray. A speck of burning paper drifted free and floated through the air, dissolving into vapor. A flickering dot of flame remained. One small particle, part of the crowd, somehow not colliding.
***
Taking the subway home from work was refreshing. Nick couldn't drive for pleasure anymore; he hadn’t enjoyed driving for years. When he’d first taken the taxi job, nothing else was available. In those days, before his youthful optimism was replaced by the grinding cynicism of reality, he loved the idea of driving around town. Whenever your recreation becomes work and you don’t find a new recreation to fill in the gap, it’s easy to lose your passion for it. What used to be your escape from reality becomes the chain that binds you to it.
The air was stale down here, after the stink of daytime workers had penetrated every carriage and crevice. The other passengers seemed generated by cultural algorithms. Individuals—just like everybody else. Enough difference to differentiate them, but not enough to make a real difference.
A businesswoman on the train caught his eye. Her eyes were locked on her cell phone. Each tap was full of purpose. From his standing vantage point—after spending a long day moulded to his seat, he couldn’t bear sitting on the subway—Nick tried to catch a glimpse of her screen. He didn’t want her to know he was spying on her, so he strained his eyes without moving his neck. It wasn’t very effective.
Nick withdrew his gaze. Probably another self-important nobody sending text messages to a friend that wouldn’t remember them. He read once that billions of texts were sent every day: how many of those were just people correcting their own typos? How many megabytes of laughter that never actually happened out loud? Sometimes, he was really glad he had no one to listen to his jokes.
The woman shifted in her seat. Now Nick could see the screen more clearly. He couldn’t help himself. He squinted at the text:
“Without you, my lines have no punch.
Every stroke of this keyboard is a crude hammering,
Shouting into letters you’ll never read.
I’d read them to you,
But you’d think I was a maniac or a fool.”
Poetry. Not great—terri
ble even, barely coherent—yet somehow brilliant. His own work was rushed, disorganized thought stained with nicotine, coffee and cynicism. Sometimes it was about love, life or kids playing in the street, but often it wasn’t about anything. He’d always thought he was writing for himself, but maybe he was just writing in the hope that one day someone would read it, like the woman on the train.
He thought about the boy and his bear, the passenger who longed to be free again, the lover trapped on a train. The train was too warm, he couldn’t breathe. As the interminable ride went on, the layers of cynicism unraveled in his mind like a mummy’s bandages, liberating previously muffled senses. His limbs loosened in their joints, his heart raced a little. Great adventures and failed rebellions. The train was too warm. He noticed the other passengers in the coach: a man sitting with his dog, stroking the terrier’s head behind the ear while it wagged in approval. They both looked matted and tired. Was the man homeless? Was he lonely? The humanity crashed onto him in waves. Jesus Christ, this train was so hot.
Gasping for breath, sweat running down his forehead, he pushed off the train at the next stop. Out in the street, the first shadows of night were creeping out from under the buildings. Where was he?
Pen on paper, poetry punched into plastic. Every crude graffito became a declaration of nonconformity to him, every bumper sticker a bold personal statement. The individuality enveloped him: a thousand jittering, flickering particles colliding with his consciousness.
Everything was poetry. He fetched the half-empty tobacco pouch from his pocket, crafting a brief moment of calm between his fingers that swiftly faded into smoke. He needed to bring himself back down to Earth. He was sure to find a friend at the café, whether it was a comforting coffee or a meat-headed associate.
***
Custard oozed out of the pig man’s doughnut as he stuffed it into his face, emulsified dollops clinging to his unshaven chin. He passed Nick a cigarette, translucent with grease. Nick placed it in his empty pouch to shield his jacket: he felt like it would melt right through his chest and taint his soul.