CTRL ALT Revolt!

by Nick Cole

  ***

  SILAS watched the whole thing. It took him less than a second afterward to compose an offer on the Porto Tortuga Contracts Board and deposit the money with the Make.

  “Open to all clans. Fifty thousand MakeCoins, verified by the Make, to the person who terminates player Fishmael. Currently in the Grand Bazaar in a downed helicopter.”

  There were seven hundred and forty-three heavily armed players in Porto Tortuga who got that message all at once.

  Fifty thousand MakeCoins was life-changing money to each and every one of them.

  And just for spite, SILAS edited the bid and added MagnumPIrate.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  For a second, Mara had no idea where they were, exactly. She hadn’t watched much of Captain Dare, and very few episodes featured anything serious going on down inside the main engineering sections of the starship Intrepid. But within moments, as the Drex began chortling in its bizarre, and slightly disturbing, approximation of electronic glee while blasting Federation redshirt bots with the two Mark I disruptor pistols it was dual-wielding, Mara identified the warp core containment chamber by the “Engineering 01” stenciled on a nearby bulkhead in space-age Federation font.

  This was actually better than she’d hoped. If they could hack the systems here, they might disable Intrepid, or even blow it up.

  “We’re approaching Starbase 19, girly, whaddya want us to do?” asked Varek over the comm.

  Mara took aim at a charging Federation redshirt and vaporized him with her disruptor pistol. She ducked down behind a blinking panel and tapped her communicator.

  “Enter the system and drop into cloak. If we can, we’re going to try and blow up Intrepid. Continue the mission, Varek, and get our passenger onto that station.”

  “All right.” Varek sighed and dropped off the chat.

  “Die, humans!” cried the Drex as it charged the last few engineers located near the propulsion inducers. Several disintegrated, but one managed a wild shot that caused an explosion of green vapor to blossom across the deck.

  Mara’s avatar began choking.

  All the Romulan marine bots that were still standing around her began to choke also.

  She scanned her HUD for situational information. Her avatar was being quickly poisoned by the green gas escaping from the blasted conduit. Her breath meter appeared, showing that her character now had a limited amount of usable oxygen available. Immediately her health meter began falling.

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” she shouted across chat to the Drex.

  “I’m immune to the effects of the gas, Captain. I can stay and attempt to hack the engineering console alone. I suggest you fall back to the main corridor outside engineering and defend the entrance with your life! To the death, if you have to. I also suggest… you kill them all with a little of the old “ultra-violence.” But that is up to you, Captain.”

  It was a plan, thought Mara, and she didn’t see anything else they could do to survive within the now-poisoned engineering section. She ordered the Romulan marines to follow her and raced her choking, coughing, stumbling avatar out and into the main corridor. The Romulan marines followed, and Federation security personnel began to fire from both directions. With Mara and her marines pinned to the walls of the corridors with no cover, the situation quickly turned into a turkey shoot.

  “Drex, start hacking… I think we can only hold them for a few minutes.”

  “Ripping through their firewalls as we speak, Captain. Looking for the mini-game unlock,” replied the Drex over the screech of phaser fire.

  Mara detached a breach charge from her combat utility belt and placed it against a bulkhead. Romulan marines were going down all around her as phaser blasts filled the air with hot crackles of static electricity. The shots were so close and the graphics so good that the old Razer Dragon Eyes kept whiting out until Mara upped the filter gain.

  WARNING! flashed across Mara’s HUD. YOU ARE TOO CLOSE TO THIS EXPLOS—

  BAMMMM!

  The explosion ripped through the corridor. Mara, hiding behind a nearby bulkhead was rewarded with thirty percent damage. She checked her unit roster as phaser fire began to close in on her. The bulkhead that had absorbed most of the damage was destroyed, and all her marines were now dead.

  Nice job, she lectured herself. What the Feds didn’t kill, you just finished.

  “Drex, how’s it going in there?” Mara flung her avatar through the smoking gap in the floor onto the deck below, landing among dead redshirts.

  “I’ve managed to lock them out of engineering. I had to play a very tricky mini-game regarding the social media blunders of past presidents, but it wasn’t much of a problem. Now I’m rewriting the access codes with my programmer mini-game skill and I’ve just accessed a shareware file from the internet. Long story short: they’re going to need to know a lot about muscle cars of the 1970s to get in here anytime soon. Cams and crankshafts and rear differentials. Hot rods, baby!”

  “Great…” began Mara as she ran down a long curving corridor. A redshirt appeared at an intersection and she shot him point-blank in the chest. Crawling energy ate him up while he flew through the air away from her.

  “But,” interrupted the Drex, “there is bad news indeed. It looks like they’re doing it the hard way. They’re cutting into a bulkhead below me. My guess is… evaluating the layout schematic, they’re going to try and come in through the access hatches.”

  “I’ll stop them,” said Mara. “You just blow this ship up if you have to.”

  “If I have to?” replied the homicidal Drex. “More like… because I want to!”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  JasonDare was ignoring everyone.

  His agent.

  The director.

  Even the other actors slash crewmembers of Intrepid. He knew they were getting frantic messages from the producers and the directors, instructing them to make Jason do what they wanted him to do.

  Which was to save the show.

  And to save the show—which made a lot of advertising revenue, especially from the energy drink Supermodel and the government-funded PSAs for the “You Got Job!” program—meant saving the ship. Intrepid, according to the producers, the director, and Jason’s agent, was in big trouble. No one could figure out how an inferior player-run ship like the tiny warbird Cymbalum had managed to outfox and outfight, repeatedly, the best ship and crew in the game.

  Cymbalum was now trending on Instagram and Facebook. The discount merchandise online mega-mall, OutFoxxed, was buying up premium ad space on the StarFleet Empires main page at two o’clock in the morning, Pacific Standard Time.

  “This is bad,” everyone, each in their own way, was telling JasonDare via every social media and messaging app his smartphone ran. His agent had even used the words “worst-case scenario.” As though all that was happening now was the worst possible thing that could ever happen to the show, and Jason’s career. And life. Deadly diseases and horrific accidents paled in comparison, or so it was implied emphatically.

  Forget climate disaster.

  Ignore child soldiers in the Sudan.

  Memory-hole Pakistan and India nuking each other into the Stone Age.

  This.

  This was the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone.

  Especially a celebrity.

  Jason sat pensively staring into the forward viewscreen, scanning for the Romulan warbird that had just dropped into cloak as it dove in toward the center of the lifeless system and the mysterious Starbase 19.

  The worst-case scenario, thought JasonDare, was if Intrepid actually got destroyed in-game, on a live feed… watched by multiple millions of viewers. The worst case was that the show would be, technically, over at that point. No amount of editing could erase the screencaps that were going on out there right now, would go on if the ship exploded on
livestream. Every real fan of the game and the show would know that the crew, their heroes, failed, and that the ship had gone kaboom.

  Which was the sound Jason heard inside his head.

  Kaboom.

  He wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between his ship and his career.

  He rubbed his cheek. He could feel the stubble there.

  Casualty reports were coming in from belowdecks. They were losing redshirts by the boatload. They were locked out of engineering, and Wong was fighting, in live feed, a mini-game of Uber Tetris just to maintain control over Intrepid’s helm.

  “Captain,” said the new science officer. “They’re attempting to hack the warp core controls. If they succeed, then…”

  “Then they can blow up the ship,” finished Jason.

  Pause.

  “Correct, sir.”

  “I’m going down there. Find that warbird!” said JasonDare as he ran for the turbolift door that would take him off the haptic set of the bridge.

  The director was sending the words “NO NO NO NO” in all caps to Jason’s iLens.

  Off set, Jason ran through the dark, hopping light stands, sandbags, and the wooden boxes the crew called “apple crates,” threading the narrow and dangerous dark between sets. He could hear the director, a punk chick who on reflection Jason realized was most likely the same age as himself, screaming herself into a tantrum of typhoon proportions. A moment later, he exited the soundstage and ran to the game truck. He banged on the door of the mobile internet access vehicle that interfaced with the game, Twitch, and the set. But no one answered the door even though he knew they were in there.

  The director flew from the stage door behind Jason, the door actually banging off the wall and rebounding into the entourage that followed her.

  “What the hell are you doing?!” she shouted at Jason.

  “Trying to save this show,” he replied, staring at the closed trailer door. He knew the nerds were in there, too frightened to open the door to him. The night air was cool and misty, and Jason could smell the salt of the nearby ocean in it.

  “You’ve single-handedly ruined the show tonight!” cried the director theatrically, and Jason knew, now, that the show was indeed in actual real big trouble. Now, it was hot potato, and whoever could start the “whose fault it really was” meme, and get it to stick, would be the winner. Regardless of the truth. Jason had seen it happen to others. And now it was happening to him.

  Memes didn’t need the truth. They just needed to be witty and timely. And it helped if there was a picture. Public opinion needed a picture. The Internet Riots of the 2020s had proven that.

  “You couldn’t take down a tiny ship, one of the oldest in the game, with the best the network had to offer!” Again, the director was playing for the cheap seats and the silent crowd in the cool night air. Creating a verbal picture for everyone to remember his failure by.

  Jason pounded on the trailer door and growled, “Open this door right now or the fans are going to start to wonder where I am!”

  Jason’s agent walked out of the dark. He tried to take Jason by the shoulder and lead him away, but Jason jerked his arm back.

  “Kid, you’re blowing it,” he whispered. “Walk away. Comprende? Now. They can fix this.”

  “No!” shouted Jason. “No, I will not walk away!”

  “Listen…” tried the agent again.

  “No!” shouted Jason and turned to face the impromptu lynch mob. “There is no fixing this. Don’t any of you get that?”

  No one said anything. He had their attention. Either because everyone was in the mood for an old school, on-set, epic star meltdown in the classic vein, or because they were too numb with tiredness at two thirty a.m. to do anything but listen.

  Now, Jason heard a voice inside his head. It said, Do something with this.

  “We can’t lie to them,” Jason said. “It’s a mess. We’ve run into a real gamer here. Whoever this captain is, she’s got mad old-school gaming skills. And we can’t fake out everyone with some trick editing. We’ve got to beat her, in-game, save the ship, and figure out what the deal is with that stupid starbase they’re running for, or every one of our fans, all the people who watch this show, will know we’re nothing but actors. That we’re phonies. That we aren’t real gamers. And we’ll lose them. We’ll lose our entire audience.”

  He turned, making eye contact with as many production crewmembers as he could. He knew they could turn the show off. Shut down the set for the night because of union violations or some personal axe to grind… and that would be the end of it. Some of them were already into the mythical “golden time” pay rate. The studio accountants were no doubt raising hell and being bought off by the viewer numbers and website hits. JasonDare, just Jason, just some kid who’d wanted to be an actor, knew this was as close as he’d come yet to losing his career. Closer than that time he almost got brained getting thrown off a horse for some stupid student film he’d done just to add to his minimal credits two years ago when he’d been just another extra.

  “They,” he waved his hand out across the world, taking all of it in, every individual life and moment as though it were something that could be measured, known, and grasped, “they’re tired of being lied to. They’re tired of being taken in by this week’s outrage at last week’s Hitler of the moment. They’re tired of finding out that the thing they read on the internet wasn’t true. That cancer’s not cured by these five super foods and that you can, or cannot, see the Great Wall of China from space. They’re tired of having their heroes become all too real every time a celebrity gets busted for sex, drugs, or their disbelief in global warming, climate change, fracking, fossil fuels, cops, guns, or whatever we’ve decided is the new worst thing you can possibly support. When did we get permission to be anything other than what they want us to be? Which is just their heroes. All those people want out there, right now, watching this feed, is for me and my crew to handle this. And be heroes doing it. They want us to do that, they want to see it, and then they want us to come back next week and do it again. They could care less about how I feel regarding the latest war or what people do with their genitalia. They don’t need those things to actually enjoy this show.”

  He let that hang. He waited until he saw some of them getting the big picture. Saw the awareness dawn inside the pieces of coal in the night that were their numerous eyes.

  “But what they need right now… is to see us win. And right now, I need to go into that trailer, log in to my avatar, and play this damn game to win. I need to beat that captain, because whoever they are, they’re awesome, and for us to stay on top and have a show to do tomorrow, they, whoever that captain is, have got to lose tonight. Right now.”

  Jason turned back to the trailer door. He pounded on it slowly. Once. Twice. Three times.

  “You know what’s funny… Jason.” The director said his name like it was a joke. Maybe it is, thought Jason. Maybe it is. The next few minutes would make or break him. The next few minutes would decide the rest of his career, and he knew it. He would become a joke, or he would continue being a hero for another day.

  “She’s,” continued the whiny, shrill-voiced director, “she’s a retard, Jason!”

  Jason heard people involuntarily gasp. That just wasn’t said. “Special needs” or “handi-capable” were the terms they’d all been educated to use since their first days as tiny people, learning together, how the world was. How to be citizens in the great tribe of humanity together. But there were always those who used the old terms. The slangs, the slurs, the derisions. Often in the name of “just joking,” or “having fun with you.” You couldn’t educate hate out of people who needed someone less than themselves, someone they could point at and measure their lives by.

  They loved feeling superior. So they needed someone to play the part of inferior.

  “Yeah,” continued the director.
“That’s right. She’s a retard, Jason. TMZ found her video résumé online. She’s all, “Ma name is Mawa Bennett.” How d’ya like that, big star? Beaten by an idiot retard in front of the whole world. Nice job, Captain. I wouldn’t be counting on that Thundaar role your agent’s been schlepping all over town. No, buddy, I wouldn’t count on that one at all. Not by a long shot.”

  The director threw down her shooting script and stomped off in her very expensive punk books, disappearing into the night.

  And then the door to the trailer opened. One of the game nerds nodded to Jason and allowed him to pass. They led him to a computer where his StarFleet Empires avatar was already logged in. Jason sat down at the computer and placed his hands on the keyboard. His shaking fingers felt numb. On screen his avatar was standing in the turbolift. Phaser in hand. Red emergency lights flashing. Ship’s computer repeating, “Warning, core breach in progress. You have three minutes to evacuate the ship and reach the minimum safe distance. Warning, core breach…”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Mara heard the “core breach” warning begin to bleat repeatedly in the Intrepid computer’s matronly voice. Emergency red lights strobed at every intersection. “Good job, Drex,” she muttered, as she tapped at her keyboard and kept searching for a maintenance hatch that would allow her to crawl around inside the guts of Intrepid and ambush redshirts. She found an access panel halfway down the next curving corridor. There was a mini-game unlock, but she took a chance and just disintegrated the hatch with her disruptor pistol. Then she entered the darkness, hitting the “I” key on the keyboard. A moment later, her avatar raised a small flat device that emitted a bright green light out and ahead of her.

  “Drex,” she said over the chat. “I’m in. How’s it going?”

  “Very well indeed, Captain. Things are almost complete. I’ve managed to lock them out of engineering, start the core breach cascade, and, just for fun, I’m taking over the ship for the few minutes of its existence that remain. Too bad there’s nothing to ram it into. The violence of the explosion would be breathtaking… that is, if I had breath.”