“A bottle of Jack? I didn’t know you were that kind of lady.”
“I’m not. You’ll need a weapon if we’re attacked while we are here. I figure a bottle of Jack will work.”
Cid returns with a bottle and a single shot glass.
“Make it two.”
“Bottles or shot glasses?” he asks.
“Shot glasses.”
Moments later I’m pouring a shot for Frances.
“Let’s make a toast,” I say.
“To what?”
“To the damage we did to those Reaper goons back there.”
She sets the shot I’ve just handed her on the bar and gives me a motherly look. “You really don’t know what we’re up against, do you?”
“Don’t give me this shit, Frances. You keep up the mysterious act and parcel info out in baby bytes.” I wince as the shot slides down my throat. The idea of alcohol is sometimes as powerful as the alcohol itself. My hand wraps around Jack’s neck and I squeeze another shot out.
“You’ve become an animal in here,” she says, watching me throw the shot back.
“You’d become an animal too if you were trapped in here for nearly two years.”
“It’s been nearly eight,” she reminds me. “You seem to be suffering from a form of virtual amnesia.”
“According to you!”
“And your calendar.”
“Just… just… ” Instead of arguing with her I pour another shot. Damn it feels good to pretend I’m becoming intoxicated.
“Relax, Quantum.”
“You still haven’t told me why you’re here,” I say.
“I’m here to help you.”
“Help me what?”
“Get out of The Loop.”
“What if… ” I pause, weighing what I’m about to say next. Screw it, let the words flow. “What if I don’t want out of The Loop? What if I like it here?”
“Well if you like it here, I can go now.” She stands.
“Wait!” I look down at my fingers, which are now wrapped around her arm. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
Frances sits, brushes off the front of her tight black pants. She’s a hotbody, but I have more on my mind than sex. Strange to say, but there are more important things in life.
“Take another shot,” I tell her.
“Okay.”
She opens the bottle and takes a swig.
“That’s my girl!”
Frances smiles at me again. There’s something about her smile that I recognize, something that reminds me of the real world. Two flashes come to me. In one, I’m kneeling in front of a girl who looks like a younger version of Frances. In the other, I’m settling into a large vat of liquid wearing a NV Visor.
“What is it?” she asks.
The concern on my face must be evident. “Who are you?” I ask, knowing that it’s sometimes better to ask than answer.
“Frances Euphoria. And you?”
“Quantum Hughes,” I say. “Wait, why are we telling each other our names.”
“You asked first.”
“But who are you? Why are you here?”
“I keep telling you, Quantum, I’m here to help you.”
~*~
But what if I don’t need help? What if I am secretly afraid to leave The Loop, afraid to see what has happened to my body in the real world? I must be puny by now, a small fry. In my calculations it has been two years. In Frances’ (and for some reason the current in-game calendar) it’s been eight. Either way, I’m likely a shell of my former self by now, a husk, a whisper, a wraith. Not that I was every jacked up or anything, but two to eight years in a digital coma has to have taken its toll. My Loop-life may not be half-bad to what I’ll face on the outside.
As Frances speaks, I glance down at my hand, noticing the way the blond hairs are arranged in swirls near my wrists. My eyes move to my fingers, to my groomed nails, which never seem to grow in The Loop. Who is cutting my nails in the real world? Who is taking care of my body? Am I really in a dive vat in a digital coma unit in The People’s Republic of Ohio? Of course I am, but who then has been looking after me for so long? A nurse, you idiot, I think, and to please this pessimistic voice, I take a long drag from the bottle of Jack.
“…that’s why we need to get to The Badlands, to search for this logout point.”
“Wait, there’s a logout point in The Badlands?” I ask. “But that place is Nowheresville… ”
“Yes, that’s what I’ve been saying for the last few minutes. Haven’t you been listening?”
“Sorry, I was thinking about something.”
Cid stops by. “Wow, you two sure know how to put a bottle back. Would you like another?”
“Not now, Cid,” I say. “We’re busy.”
“No problem, Quantum, just checking.”
“You can go now,” I growl.
He scuttles away and Frances shakes her head at me. “You really know how to treat people here in The Loop, don’t you?”
“They aren’t people.”
“We can debate that later. We need to get to The Badlands… ”
“But The Badlands are vast, I mean, they are much larger than the city. Hell, they surround the city. I bet they account for at least fifty percent of The Loops playable area.”
“Sixty-two percent. This is why we should start searching now, before more Reapers come. We must find the logout point. It is the only way out.”
“Why is there a logout point anyway? You said I’m stuck because of a glitch, right? Give me the lowdown; start from the top.”
“The designers put a manual logout point in each Proxima World, just in case they got stuck during the creation process. They did this while they were developing the dreamscape, while they were still tweaking the neuronal algorithmic core. Remember, Proxima Worlds were designed from the inside out. That is, before the virtual big bang.”
“Virtual big bang?”
“After the initial worlds were created, the Proxima Galaxy began spawning other worlds and caretakers – NVA Seeds – for these worlds, essentially a combination of entropy and dream-structuring through procedural generation. A virtual big bang, if you will. Every world created has the ability to create another world. People can buy these and turn them into whatever they’d like.”
“Right.”
“In the real world, you are here,” she points to her forehead. “The prefrontal cortex, the home of your ego. Your pleasure centers are in the middle of your brain and your consciousness is behind your eyes, the orbital frontal cortex. When you dream, these things basically shut down, leaving us with the amygdala, which is when the neuronal visualization algorithm kicks in, activated by sensors on the NVA Visor you’re wearing in the real world.”
Another sip from the bottle and I tune back in to Frances.
“With your orbital frontal cortex knocked out, you can basically do anything in a dreamscape. This is why the Proxima designers created the advanced abilities bar, to limit what you can and can’t do and how long you can do them for. Different worlds call for different advanced abilities and different sizes of these bars. The bars in epic fantasy worlds are longer. C.N. – I mean The Loop – is supposed to be gritty, supposed to be slightly surreal yet modeled off real life. This is why mutant hacks are banned here.”
“You said that the designers created manual logout points in various Proxima Worlds.”
“Yes, they did or the NVA Seed, the world’s caretaker, did.”
“Why didn’t they release the locations? That would have made sense.”
“There is a master list, actually.”
“Well who has it?” I ask her. “Shouldn’t we just ask them?”
Her eyes grow serious. “The Reapers have it.”
“How did they get it?”
“By killing all the original Proxima Galaxy designers.”
“In real life or in the Proxima Galaxy?”
Frances shrugs. “No one knows for sure. Both pro
bably.”
“So why don’t we just capture one of the Reapers and give ‘em the third degree?”
“As distasteful as I find it, we’ve actually tried that, and it never works – they always just log out. Anyway, only a few of the higher ups in the organization have access to the list.”
“Well, we could bait the higher ups?”
“We should probably try and just find the logout point ourselves. I’ve been able to do it before, in a different Proxima World.”
“What kind?”
“It was a dinosaur themed one called Jurassic Virtual.”
“Whoa, did you ever fight a T-Rex?”
“No, but I rode a stegosaurus.”
“That’s the second coolest thing I’ve heard in two years.”
“Eight years.”
“Two years.”
“How many days according to you?” she asks.
“Five hundred and forty nine days.”
“That’s just a little over a year and a half…”
I shrug. “Closer to two than I’d like.”
~*~
Cid stops by, smiles at us through missing teeth. “Did I hear you two were going to The Badlands?”
“Shouldn’t you be bartending?” I ask.
“No one to serve.” He hunches over the bar. “What’s this about The Badlands?”
“Nothing,” Frances says for me. “We should be going, Quantum, before the bad guys show get the word on our whereabouts.”
She squeezes my arm.
“Why would they get the word?” I get the drift and turn to Cid. “Say, you weren’t going to drop a dime on us, were you?” My hands already on the bottle of Jack, ready to break it if need be.
“Easy, Quantum,” he says, backing away.
Frances stands. “Let’s go.”
We’re outside Barfly’s before I can start any trouble. The sun has hidden like a coward behind a clump of sinister clouds, returning the ambience to Devil’s Alley that I’ve grown accustomed to. I feel the urge to retrieve the Glock from my inventory list and shoot at the burning little beacon of false hope.
“Taxi?” I ask.
“The Badlands border Devil’s Alley, do they not?”
“They border everything, from Chinatown to my favorite stomping grounds.”
“We’ll start there, in your… favorite stomping grounds as you say.” A floating orb appears in front of Frances. She presses a button and the terrain of The Loop appears in a circular grid of light.
“That’s pretty fancy.”
“It’s called an atlas sphere. This will make it easier for us to remember which portion of The Badlands we’ve already checked. Each portion we clear will appear red. This is us,” she says, pointing at two blinking cursors. “I’m transferring you one now.”
“I want to be green.” An icon appears in front of me, indicating that item number 549 has been added to my inventory list.
“The user of the atlas sphere always appears green on the atlas. That’s why yours is blue.”
“Got it.”
“Our atlas spheres are linked. Any information that appears on mine will appear on yours. Let’s get started here.” She presses her finger into the center of the projected map. “From the small amount of data we have, it appears as if the logout point will be stationary.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that it could be anywhere, attached to anything. We’ll have to clear the entire area.”
“How long do you think that will take?”
“No telling.”
Frances walks ahead of me past a pile of cans. Some of the cans lift into the air, smashing into her body shield.
“What’s with The Loop anyway?” I ask as I swipe one of the cans out of the air. “Why is it attacking us all the sudden?”
“The Loop has basically gone into a defense mode. It feels…” Her eyes head north as she thinks of the right word. “It feels threatened by my appearance, by the fact you may be leaving soon.”
“Threatened?”
A bottle smashes into Frances; the green grid of her shield lights up, protecting her body as she walks. “For some reason, the NVA Seed that monitors everything in The Loop likes you; it doesn’t want you to leave.”
“Likes… me?”
“Yes. I suppose has an affinity for its only player would be a better phrase, but you get the picture. The Seed likes that fact that you are here and it doesn’t want to let go.”
“So I have both Reapers and the world itself after me?” I chuckle at this thought. It’s strange when something of pure science fiction lays such a heavy hand on a person’s life.
~*~
A large rat appears in the window above the backseat of an abandoned car, eyes us curiously. I access my Beretta 92 with an ECO-9 silencer – item 501 – from my inventory list and fire a shot. I miss and the rat disappears.
Frances laughs and I fire one more shot at the gas tank. The explosion that follows is red, tipped in orange and white. A perfect explosion, like most of the explosions I’ve either witnessed or been killed by in The Loop.
“You sure are a tough guy,” she says.
“That rat could have been spying on us… “ I say.
“Actually,” she turns to me, “you’re right, it could have been.”
I see the flicker of flames in the distance. The entrance to this part of The Badlands crosses over a drainage ditch filled with broken bottles. I was once tossed by an NPC down there – boy did it do a number on my back. I offed myself that day just so I didn’t have to feel the injury any longer.
“There.”
I point at a pair of boards that cross the moat of glass. The board on the left looks a little rotten, but my guess is that it’s strong enough to support our weight, at least one at a time.
“What is it?”
Frances Euphoria hesitates. “I’m not a big fan of heights,” she finally says.
“Even in a VE dreamworld?”
“Especially in a virtual entertainment dreamworld.”
“Just use your advanced abilities.”
There are two bars constantly visible in my field of vision. One is my life bar, which is blue. The other is my advanced abilities bar, green. I’m so used to seeing these things that I no longer notice them, unless they’ve been partially depleted.
“I’m sure you have enough juice,” I say before launching myself over the ditch. I turn back to Frances. “You coming or not?”
“Actually, I’m still recovering from using my mutant hacks back at the hotel. That was quite the fight.”
It’s the first time I’ve seen fear on her face.
“Are you coming?” she asks.
I hurl myself back over the ditch, stopping directly in front of Frances Euphoria. We now stand intimately close, inches away from one another.
“Come on.” I scoop her into my arms before she can protest and leap over the ditch.
“My hero,” she says, rolling her eyes as I set her down. A taxi passes overhead, veering into a sharp U-turn. It continues back towards Devil’s Alley looking for scum.
Directly to our left is an abandoned Ferris wheel, partially stuck in the ground. To our right is a funhouse, the entrance shaped like an evil clown opening its mouth. The clown’s lips are blood red, its nostrils flared and its eyes white without pupils. With my Beretta still in my hand, I shoot out the clown’s front teeth.
“I’m impressed,” Frances Euphoria says in a way that tells me she isn’t impressed.
An old transient, hunched over and carnie-like, limps towards us. The skin on his face is deformed, covered in pockmarks. A little top hat with a long peacock feather sticking out of its band sits on his head, tilted to the left. One arm is smaller than the other.
“Looking … looking … looking …” he says frothing at the mouth. “Looking! Looking! ALWAYS looking … I am … you are … we are … ARGH! Knife me! LOOKING! Knife me! Blood like a hound keep your voices down … keep th
em down KEEP THEM DOWN!”
“Stop right there, buddy,” I say, aiming my Beretta at him. Frances lowers my arm.
“We’re here searching for something,” she says calmly.
His lips curl and his tongue darts over the tops of his teeth. “SEARCHING! Ha! Search we will ‘til the earth ends and we begin and we begin and we begin ... ” His eyes fill with tears. “WE BEGIN and we WE BEGIN begin and I … and … search and all the … stationery HOLY EYES release I complete I forget … forget … FORGET!”
“I’m taking this one out,” I say. “Something’s wrong with him.”
“Wait … ” Frances approaches the carnie. He shrinks into himself, the fat from his scarred cheeks flopping onto his shoulders. “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.”
He chatters, “Nothing to be afraid of NOTHING to be afraid … to be … scared feared reared seared cleared mirrored weird beard … to BE … or … TO BE OR TO BE! Ah!” His beady eyes lock onto Frances. “AWAY!” he snarls. “Away! AWAY!”
I fire a shot directly over his head; the silencer muffles the report as the bullet cracks past. “ARGH!” He pulls on the brim of his hat as if he’s trying to crawl inside.
“Quantum!”
“Leave this one alone, Frances. I’m telling you, I’ve been in The Loop long enough to know when something ... ”
The carnie leaps forward, sinking his teeth into her arm, somehow cutting through her body shield. She screams and her fist comes back, connecting with his eye. Once, twice. His eye bursts, spewing white acid into the air.
I’m already next to her by the time this happens, cracking the carnie in the back of the head with the butt of my Beretta. Still, he’s unrelenting; he has practically super-glued his teeth into Frances’ arm. I grab his feet, pulling at his ankles. His pants come down and shit trickles out of his ass.
“What in the … ”
I grab the back of the carnie’s head, pulling his body in a downward motion to avoid his digital shit. I’m too busy trying to avoid the crap misting out of his ass to see that Frances Euphoria’s other arm has morphed into a hooked blade. She brings the blade down, amputating her own arm.
The carnie, now on all fours with his pants off and Frances’ arm in his mouth, scurries off towards the funhouse. My finger goes up and my inventory list appears. A Molotov cocktail – item 51 – appears in my hand. I toss it at the clambering carnie and it explodes on impact.
The Feedback Loop (3-Book Box Set): (Scifi LitRPG Series) Page 6