“Why are you in C.N.?” Frances asks. “Go back to the main portals. There are better places to deal in death.”
“You know why we’re here,” he says.
I slowly bring my hands behind my back, hiding my baseball bat and katana. They de-materialize as I return them to my inventory list. With my hand out of sight, I quickly scroll through my weapons stash, which momentarily freezes the action. I do this as quickly as possible.
If I remember correctly, and I do, players can switch weapons during a battle with another human player. This pauses gameplay for the person changing weapons, placing an hourglass over them that all can see. Accessing items in battle is dangerous because the person not scrolling through their inventory can move to a position of significant advantage in relation to the player on pause and shank them in the spleen, or something equally insalubrious before the paused player unfreezes.
Luckily, I know exactly which weapon I need: mini-gun, item 198. It’s in my hand less than a second later, pointed at the four Chucklebutts. The feed chute snakes over my shoulder to the thousand-round ammo backpack.
“A mini-gun?” one of them asks. He laughs, a hoarse, throaty guffaw made worse by his metallic voice box.
The mini-gun spins up and I pull the trigger before he can finish laughing.
A solid stream of flying hate roars into laughing boy; he splatters like he’s been smacked with the Mystic Mallet Mjolnir, and splashes onto the other three who flinch away and return fire with their assault rifles.
“Dammit Quantum!” Frances Euphoria tosses a small metal ball in front of me. It goes zzzzt! and emits a green grid that wraps around me like a fat Auntie’s hug. Incoming bullets spang off me and my life bar doesn’t deplete – deflector shield, ha-HA!
Frances’ arm morphs into a shotgun with twin barrels the size of mortar tubes. I’ve never seen this mutant hack before, but I hardly have time to be impressed. Her blast chews the arm and shoulder off the nearest leather boy, who goes down, squealing like a perforated porcine and then disappears when the player logs out.
“Holy Frijoles, Batman!” I shout, as she blows another one into cat food with her double barrel arm howitzer.
The leader’s arm morphs into a wicked, jagged blade with an underslung gun barrel, similar to the weapon Frances is wielding. He comes at her fast, much faster than I can move – which is saying something – and she parries his blade with her über-gun.
They fly around the lobby like Andy Capp and Flo, like Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, like the Tasmanian Devil in a Texas Twister on crack, faster than the NV visor can render or the mind can follow. Wherever they touch explodes into shards and flinders, smoke and noise; they shoot and miss, shoot and miss; blast gaping holes in the very fabric of the lobby and I wonder if they’ll bring the building down. I am rendered impotent by their speed; they are hummingbird fast and phorusrhacid deadly. All I can do is stand there like Cletus Spuckler in slack-jawed amazement.
And then it’s over; the leader’s head spins across the lobby, his body hits the floor and shatters into a million pixels.
I turn to find Frances Euphoria panting, holding her double-barreled mutant hack with her other hand. Two katana blades retract into the gun while some heart-like organ pulsates on the side of her weapon, its beating slows as the mutant hack shrivels.
“They’ve found us,” she announces with a grimace.
“They who? What now?”
“We need to get someplace else NOW, before word gets out.”
“Barfly’s?” I ask. “I’m craving a morning pick-me-up.”
~*~
The sun is still in the sky, accenting The Loop in a way I haven’t seen in years. I can see for miles on end from the window of our taxi, over the gothic spires of abandoned churches, through the legs of rusted water tanks, around all the sharpened corners of shady clip joints and hidden stash spots. I can even see the perimeter of the city, a place known as The Badlands. It’s a cliché name for a place that essentially spells the end of the VE dreamscape that is The Loop.
All Proxima Worlds have an end or a border that has the ability to transport you to the opposite end of the map. This is akin to circumnavigating the globe and, years ago when I wasn’t stuck in The Loop, reaching a map’s border was the best way to travel to the other side. In worlds that required credit to travel, one could simply walk to the nearest border and be instantly transferred to the corresponding side.
The Loop has no such thing.
The Badlands end about fifteen miles away from the city center in a wall painted like a group of trees. The wall can’t be destroyed, can’t be scaled, and can’t be tunneled under. Trust me, I’ve tried. The fact that some of the highest level NPCs hang out in The Badlands keeps me from venturing out there much. Occasionally, when I feel like slaughtering, I’ll make my way to the perimeters of the city in search of trouble. For better or worse, trouble usually finds me before I can find it.
“Cat got your tongue?” I ask Frances.
With her hair pulled back into a ponytail, her face seems sharper, more defined, hardened. There is a slight redness to her cheeks; her blue life bar is about three quarters full, which means she took quite a beating back at the hotel.
“I wasn’t expecting the Reapers to show up so soon,” she finally says.
“Where to?” the cab driver asks. He resembles all the other drivers in the city – overweight, under-shaven, indifferently bathed, surly, garrulous.
“Devil’s Alley,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Take it easy, sport.” He locks eyes with me in the rearview mirror. A stained rag hangs from the mirror, burnt at the edges. My hand goes up to access my inventory list, but Frances stops me.
“You should kill less,” she says under her breath. “It serves no true purpose.”
“Listen to the broad,” the cabbie says on the tail end of a gnarly cough, “sounds like nuggets of wisdom if you ask me.”
“No one asked you, Buttinsky. If I want any shit out of you I’ll squeeze your head.” What I wouldn’t give to taser the shit out of this driver, taser him until his eyes exploded out of his bulging fly-head. I cover my indignation by asking, “You said something about a glitch back in the hotel. Care to enlighten me?”
Frances keeps her head trained on the back of the driver’s seat.
“Well? And don’t give me this you can’t handle the truth nonsense. Give it to me straight, Frances, lay it on me.”
“You’ve been in C.N. – I mean The Loop – so long that you’ve begun talking like the NPCs here,” she says, avoiding my question.
“I’m just trying to get my head straight, sister.” I tell her. “You show up, tell me I’ve been here for eight years or so and then all sorts of shit starts happening. You’d be fired up too if you were in my shoes.”
“It’s complex.”
“Well, un-complex it for me then, start with the basics. As my mom used to say, use your words. Who are those Raper guys that attacked us back there?”
“Reapers.”
“Yeah, whatever – what about ‘em?”
“They belong to a murder guild that enters the various worlds inside the Proxima Galaxy to track players who are affected by the glitch and can’t log out; players like you. Once they find you, they kill you.”
“And then I respawn. What’s the point?”
“No, they kill you for reals. If they kill you here, your body in the dive tank at the digital coma facility in Cincinnati, Ohio dies too. They use illegal weapons that override the safeties in your visor to fry your brain.
I sideline what she has just said and return to the Reapers. “So, their weapons essentially create a brain aneurism?”
“No. An aneurism is a burst blood vessel. Their weapons trigger a low voltage, high amperage discharge right through the brain that literally fries it.”
“Thanks – good to have that straight. But why, then? What’s the point in killing us?”
“They have people
working on the outside that have already prepped all your assets, digital and otherwise, which will transfer to their organization once you die. They’ve done this hundreds of times now. They’re quite good at managing the paperwork.”
“I hardly have anything back in the real world…” I say. At least I think this is true.
“Not true. As you know, you can’t log out, which means you are stuck here in… The Loop. The Proxima Company has given substantial sums to the people who have been trapped by the glitch that prevents you from logging out. It was the same glitch that I—”
“So the glitch prevents me from logging out. What about my repetitive days? Why is every day the same?”
“The NVA Seed – neuronal visualization algorithmic seed – is responsible for the repetition.”
“Really? I was wondering if it was that…”
“The other players that I’ve rescued didn’t experience the same thing as you, the repetition. Each world is different, highly manipulated by the NVA Seeds that oversee them.”
“I’ve long since given up the search for the seed,” I say, watching the city whiz by in a flurry of filth outside the taxi’s windows. “Any clues on where I can find it?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I haven’t got that far yet.”
The sound of a passing transport vehicle momentarily fills the interior of the taxi. Our driver slows down, letting the vehicle pass.
“Back to the Reapers – they’re after money given to me by the Proxima Company due to the fact I’m stuck in The Loop, correct?”
“Exactly. They kill people and the money is transferred and shared among the members of their guild.”
“But that’s murder… ”
“Legally it isn’t. They’ve argued successfully in various jurisdictions that they are actually trying to free people, to help them log out of the various VE dreamworlds they’re stuck in. They’re quite good at what they do. There is a lot of money behind their organization now.”
“They always win, don’t they?”
“Who?”
“The bad guys.”
Frances sighs. “Almost always.”
~*~
Our taxi lowers into Devil’s Alley, which gives Basin City a run for its money. Toppled trash cans sit along the street playing host to digital rats with long scaly tails, buckteeth and beady red eyes. My hand is already coming up to access my inventory list when I see the rats – nothing like a little target practice to start the day.
“Later,” Frances says, squeezing my wrist. I turn to her, still mesmerized by the blue indicator over her head. A real person…
“How did you know what I was going to do?”
“Call it a hunch.”
I detect a sparkle behind her eyes, but I ignore it.
I’m out of our taxi before Frances so I can scan the immediate area. The streets are practically empty aside from a few NPC fiends sitting in darkened corners with their knees to their chests, huffing Riotous from beer can pipes.
“We’re good,” I tell Frances.
She laughs as she steps out. “My hero.”
The driver’s window rolls down. “Are you going to pay me or not?” he asks. “I didn’t drive all the way here for nothing.”
The urge to bash him in the face with a golf club – item 333 – swells inside me. Frances pays him before I can react.
“Thanks for the tip, toots,” he says as his window goes up. Air compresses and his jalopy shakes, lifting off the ground.
“Remember,” she says, ‘violence will only get you so far in The Loop. This is something you may have forgotten.”
“Violence is The Loop and The Loop is violence. That’s been my motto for as long as I can remember. Why would I change it now?”
“Why would anyone change anything?” she asks.
“Is that supposed to be some type of philosophical statement?”
“It’s more of an observation. Come on, let’s get to Barfly’s.”
A tin can hurls over my shoulder, slamming into a trashcan. I spin around to find dozens of bottles and cans hovering in the air.
“Is The Loop trying to kill us or something?” I ask.
“Something like that.”
More cans zip through the air towards Frances. Her body shield protects her, flashes a green grid as the cans ricochet off her frame.
“Don’t worry about the cans; they can’t hurt us with our body shields on.”
She turns into an alley and I follow, bottles and cans pelting us along the way. Occasionally the sound of shattering glass meets my ears, as some of the bottles are made of thinner glass than others. We advance towards Barfly’s, moving in front of a few transients.
“Hey buddy… ” one of the vagrants calls out. He’s an ugly man with a blackened throat; a large bruise covering his left eye reminds me of Mount Fuji.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Can you spare some cred?”
“Why did the Proxima designers put so many fiends in this world?” I ask Frances. Before she can stop me, I retrieve a Glock 22, item 199, from my inventory list and paint the wall crimson with the back of the bum’s head. The others quickly scatter.
“Quantum!”
“What?”
“You don’t have to kill everything, you know.”
“How would you have handled it?”
“I would have transferred him some money.”
“Tried that before. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this, but violence is the answer to the enigma that is The Loop. Remember – I’ve been here a lot longer than you.”
She huffs, “Keep your cool, got it?”
“The next thing you’re going to say is that NPCs are people too.”
“They were people… “
“What?”
Frances shakes her head. “Never mind.”
“No, tell me.”
“The majority of NPCs, aside from certain assassins, were once beta testers for the various Proxima Worlds, before the galaxy expanded. The Proxima Galaxy, which was based on primitive algorithms used in a game called No Man’s Sky, randomly generates worlds, which are seeded – called niche seeding – and then opened for population. Think of the generation process as a sine curve, one simple equation known as the Superformula populates the Proxima Galaxy with various worlds, niche worlds marketed towards certain audiences. So there are dragon worlds, mining worlds, housewife worlds, high fantasy worlds, arctic worlds… you get the picture. Within these worlds, you can “play” the game by fighting, or going on quests. You can also simply exist, living your life within the world.”
“So where do NPCs fit in all this?”
“You’ve forgotten everything…”
“Selective memory, I suppose.”
Frances says, “At the start, before you or I started playing, regular players worked in-game jobs which allowed them to participate freely in various Proxima Worlds. Some were taxi drivers; others were bartenders or doormen at hotels. The Proxima designers captured all these interactions and expanded upon them using the Superformula, which strangely enough, was actually created in 2003 by a Belgium plant geneticist named Johan Gielis to study flora and predict its spreading patterns. You should already know all this, Quantum. NPCs were people too.”
“But they aren’t now.”
“True, but they were, at some point. Anyway, you should be nicer to them. There is no telling what they may be able to tell you or help you with.”
A neon sign flickers at the end of the alley. Barfly’s. Gone are the NPCS hovering about, offering assassinations or quickies for a small fee. Gone are the candy men in baggy slacks hawking Riotous. The place would look somewhat cheerful if it weren’t for the dried piles of vomit, the coagulating puddles of blood, the broken bottles and the syringes scattered around the entrance.
“Shall we?” Frances asks. A flying bottle hits her shoulder, deflected by her body shield. “There will probably be fewer bottles hurled at us inside.�
��
I laugh. “You haven’t spent enough time at Barfly’s.”
~*~
Croc the doorman pats me down, rougher than I would have liked.
“You know that won’t help any, right?”
“Rules is rules, Quantum.”
“When did you start patting people down? Hell, this is Barfly’s, the Mos Eisley Cantina of The Loop. There isn’t a better place to get stabbed in the back in the entire city.”
“Watch it, Quantum.” Good ol’ Croc with his chiseled features, gargantuan size and fists the size of computer monitors. I’ve taken a good beating by those hands before. Claiming that the man packs a mean knuckle-sandwich is an understatement.
“The bar has disabled access to our inventory lists,” Frances says under her breath.
“They’ve done what? What the hell is happening in here?”
“The Loop,” she says, using my word for it. “You can’t access weapons in here now. Don’t worry, my mutant hacks aren’t as easily affected by the game’s AI.”
Croc finishes TSAing me and moves onto Frances, who is more or less indifferent to the entire affair. I still haven’t figured this little lady out. Sure, she’s a tough cookie, but there’s something she isn’t telling me and I don’t like it. This on top of the fact that she has killed me twice is keeping me on my toes – there’s no telling if she’ll gut me again just for the hell of it.
“A seat at the bar,” I say as I plop down in my favorite spot in the far corner. A glance around the gin mill I call a second home tells me something is off. Aside from a couple of generic NPCs playing pool in the back, the place is empty. Cid the bartender knows just what I want before I’ve even placed my tookus on the stool.
“Thanks for the beer, Cid.”
“My pleasure. For the lady?” he asks slyly.
“A bottle of Jack, the biggest you got,” she says.
“Coming right up.”
He hobbles to the other end of the bar to find the bottle. Cid’s got the greaser look down; his hair has been combed so many times it has formed a permanent crease in his hairline.
The Feedback Loop (3-Book Box Set): (Scifi LitRPG Series) Page 5