The Feedback Loop (3-Book Box Set): (Scifi LitRPG Series)

by Harmon Cooper

  Part of me wants to laugh, the other part of me wants to select General Thompson’s eponymous shootin’ iron – item 247 – and declare my independence.

  “What’ll it be, Quantum?” Cid asks with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Silver Select in one hand and a pair of frosty-cold Löwenbräu Oktoberfestbiers in the other. He’s a big ol’ boy, but he’s all forearm – more Popeye than Bluto.

  “Glenfiddich all around!” Burly says, next to me now with his finger in the air. “We thought you’d never come back, Quantum.”

  “Well, here I am.”

  Pip and Scotty are on the pool table now, rolling over one another as they scramble to land the first slug. Snap! The Quiet Man reverses his cue stick, tests it for balance, and breaks it across Pip’s back.

  “What was that? My poor, aged Nursie strikes with more authority than that!”

  “Jorum of skee ‘ere’s to glee!” Burly foregoes pouring the shot into a shot glass and slaps the bottle in my hand. I tip it in a salute, raise it to my lips, and take to it like a baby to McStarbuck’s Genuine Synthetic Kosher-Vegan-Halal Almond-Soy Breast Milk Substitute. “That’s me boy, that is!” Burley says, clapping me on the back.

  “Nothing like getting zozzled with the old, honored enemy!” I say as I put my arm around Dolly’s waist.

  Pip and Scotty have stopped fighting now and are arm over shoulder singing, “One pleasant evening in the month of June, As I was sitting with my glass and spoon, A small bird sat on an ivy bunch, And the song he sang was The Jug of Punch!”

  Burly rips the bottle from my hand and takes a monster swig. “That’ll do,” he says with a sigh, “that’ll do.”

  “Where’s Aiden?” I ask Dolly, already feeling the effects of the giggle water.

  “Here.”

  Morning Assassin appears behind the bar, in a black apron and a white collared shirt. My hand comes up and he grabs it. I pull him in close, our elbows on the bar now as if we’re arm wrestling.

  “What the hell are you doing back there?” I ask with a growl.

  “Waiting to kill you.”

  “Well, go ahead and do it already, Bucko.”

  He raises a bottle with his other hand.

  “That’s the best you can do? I’ve got a forty watt phased plasma rifle with your name written all over it.”

  His hand tightens around mine. “Oh yeah? Well I have a chainsaw under the bar.”

  “A chainsaw I gave you!” I say, laughing. Burly wraps his arm around my shoulder and shoves the whiskey bottle back in my hand. I tilt my head back, throw more of Barfly’s surprisingly high quality gargle down my neck and keep an eye on Aiden. One can never be too safe in The Loop.

  I finish the bottle and burp. “Damn, it’s nice to see you,” I say, letting go of Morning Assassin’s hand.

  “Same Quantum,” he says. “So are we getting thoroughly ethylated tonight or what?”

  “That’s the plan!”

  “Two bottles of whiskey,” he tells Cid the bartender, “the best you got.”

  “You paying?” I ask. “I’m not made of mazuma.”

  “I’ll put it on your tab,” says Cid, tipping his fedora at me.

  Chapter Eleven

  Light cuts through the drapes. Feedback fills the space between here and there, glitterbombing the inside of my cranium. I blink my peepers open and the feedback sprays from my ears, champagne showering the mattress and nearly popping my head off the pillow. Feedback an old friend that deserves a kick in the jewels; feedback a salesman with one hand in your pocket and the other around your neck.

  “Where … ?”

  One look at the water-stained ceiling tells me exactly where I am. My hotel room at the Mondegreen. Instinct takes over and I wince-roll out of bed. Morning Assassin will be here any minute and I’d better be ready for him. Inventory list. My AR 15 appears in my hands, item 58. I pop the magazine in and pull back the charging handle, feeding a round into the chamber.

  Through blurred vision, I sit with my back against the bed and my assault rifle aimed at the window. The window smashes and glass peppers the air. Like clockwork, Morning Assassin rolls in carrying a plastic bag full of cactuses and a bottle of lemon juice.

  “A bag of cactuses?” I ask skeptically.

  “Don’t forget the lemon juice.” He squirts the bottle. “I figured it’d hurt more.”

  We both start laughing.

  “That’s not a bad weapon.”

  “I get bored in here without my arch nemesis.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “How’s the real world, anyway?” he asks as he sits down on the corner of my bed.

  “That’s a damn good question. I should be there right now; I’m sure Frances Euphoria is on her way to my hotel to pick me up.”

  “How is she?”

  “Mean as ever. She ain’t a redhead in the real world though; she has short brown hair.”

  Aiden says, “I can’t imagine her like that.”

  “You’re telling me. Stranger than fiction up there.”

  “So that’s why you’re here?”

  I’m silent for a moment as I process his question. “I guess it is why I’m here,” I finally say. “I was two beers in last night after a day in a different Proxima World and I figured what the hell. Plus, there is a pair of Feds giving me a hard time up there. I guess I just wanted to escape, needed to escape.”

  “Sometimes it’s all we can do.” Aiden’s brown eyes flicker as he says this.

  “How do you escape in here?”

  “Three Kings Park, watch some flicks, head off to The Pier to check on Dirty Dave. Get a massage in Chinatown. You know, the usual.”

  “He still making weapons out there?” I ask.

  “He is. Why? You need something custom?”

  “Maybe. I’m having issues in this Proxima World called Steam. They penalize my life bar if I have anything that isn’t world appropriate. You should see how obsessive these steampunkers are about keeping to their rules.”

  “Steampunkers?”

  “Long story. Think no electricity in a futuristic Victorian setting. They can have weapons as long as they aren’t electric, which rules out some of my better toys. Well, I suppose they can be electric, but it must be powered by steam. Also, my mutant hacks, the ones you traded me for that chainsaw, don’t seem to have any effects on the Steam Enforcers.”

  “Steam Enforcers?”

  “Big robots five stories tall with enough armor to give an armadillo a stiffy.”

  “So you need something world appropriate to take these enforcers down?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Dirty Dave’s Mayhem Mart?” he suggests.

  “What are we waiting for?

  “Repopulating hack it is.” Aiden extends his arm to me and I latch on.

  ~*~

  Everything pixilates into view. The sun is still in the sky above The Pier, adding a sheen to the oily waters. The water lashes at the sides of the dock and spills over, signaling that a storm is brewing. A storm is always brewing in The Loop, the vice-ridden netherworld’s belly of the beast.

  “Quantum.”

  Dolly steps out of a sudden burst of light, still in her black dress. This quickly morphs into something more Pier appropriate – a pair of tight black jeans, a black V-neck t-shirt and black slippers.

  “Where did you go last night?” I ask. I still haven’t pieced together how I got back to the hotel, but I assume Dolly had a part in it.

  “You were drinking with your friends; I decided to let you have your fun.”

  “So how did I get back to the hotel?”

  Aiden raises his eyebrows. “That would be my doing.”

  “Wait a damn minute … how many days have I been in The Loop?” I have the notion to pull up my inventory list and find my logout point, item 555, the star-shaped piece of paper that allowed me to finally leave the City of Filth.

  “Relax. Everything is fine in the real world. It’s morning there,” Do
lly says, “same time as it is here. Logging back in yesterday reset everything. The glitch no longer exists. If it did, you still have the logout point.”

  “Frances will be at my hotel soon.”

  Her eyes dart away. “Forget reality. I’m here to help you with your weapons issue, so you can get a leg up in this other Proxima World.”

  “How did you … ” I turn to Aiden. “Just how much information do you two share with each other?”

  “She sees everything I see, hears everything I hear.” A smile twitches across his face.

  “Is this … the same for you, Dolly?”

  “No,” she says, reading the look of apprehension on my face. “Our lovemaking sessions are private.

  Aiden cracks up.

  “Keep it up, pal,” I tell him. “You might find your foot in a bear trap and a Molotov cocktail up your ass.”

  His hands come up. “Take it easy, buddy. If I could come to your world, I’d be chasing tail as well.”

  “Chasing tail?” Dolly asks.

  Something moves in the corner of my eye. Two bleached people in collars appear, snarling and barking at us. A man and a woman – both with skin melted off their skeletal frames, both with zombiesque patches of hair covering their skulls. Just for show, I equip my newest weapon, the Slice Bang, part blade and part shotty.

  More bleached people surge over a stack of shipping crates. They bite at each other, seethe and claw. They are hungry corpses, rabid animals in grotesque human form.

  “They’re still here?” I ask, twisting my Slice Bang in front of me. I can tell by the look on Aiden’s face that he’d like to take her for a test drive.

  “I was meaning to talk to you about that … ” Dolly frowns, points at them and the bleached people freeze. “The Reapers left them here.”

  “Left them? How many?”

  Their forms waver, as if they’re seconds away from shattering their bonds.

  “Ninety-five.”

  “All in The Pier?”

  “Some have spread to other places.”

  “Can’t you two kill them?”

  Aiden says, “We can kill them, but they just respawn. Trust me; I’ve spent the better part of a week hunting them.”

  “But I thought they died in the real world if they were killed in a Proxima World … ”

  “Yes,” Dolly says, as tiny sparks of electricity ripple through their forms, “but only if you kill them, a human player.”

  I offer my Slice Bang to Aiden, grip first, blade across my forearm – I saw J.E.B. Stuart do it in a 2-D docudrama and I thought it looked cool. “Have at it, amigo. I have enough problems in the real world.”

  “You serious?” he asks, testing the weight and balance of the Slice Bang.

  “Yahoo Serious? Oh NO! Did they get him too?”

  “Nice one,” he snorts. “May I?”

  “By all means, get you some.”

  His face sprouts a predatory grin. “Unfreeze them.”

  For the next minute or so, I watch him slice and bang his way through the small crowd of lost souls. He pivots right, his blade spilling the guts of a bleached person while another tries to latch onto his neck. Shotgun to the face and that one is now digitally extinct. Grandstanding, M.A. flips backwards into the air, landing on a man’s shoulders. Aiden is at his best in the midst of sheer butchery; the look of unalloyed pleasure on his face convinces me that some people – people like me, people like him – never change.

  The only old dog learning new tricks here is the one lying on the ground in a puddle of his own blood.

  ~*~

  Aiden takes care of biz and returns.

  “Geez Aiden,” I say. “Shove a shiv in Shiva and call you the Doombringer. You remind me of … me!”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” He grins, obviously pleased. He twists his wrist and examines the Slice-Bang from several angles. “Nice piece of kit, by the way.” In a slick application of digital prestidigitation, he produces an orange shop rag and cleans the blood from the blade, which I think is a polite gesture and the hallmark of a true craftsman caring for the tools of his trade. “Not too heavy, the right sized blade and the shotty – what other types of weapons do they have in Steam?”

  “Lots of stuff like this,” I say as we enter one of the warehouses.

  Chains hang above us, suspended from loops and pulleys attached to the ceiling. An ancient conveyer belt collects dust behind a stack of boxes green with mold. There are shitholes and then there are the warehouses in The Pier.

  “You know you can bring us with you to Steam,” Dolly says. “I gave you the seed. Did you forget about that already?”

  Aiden doesn’t say anything, but I can tell by the way that he’s looking at me that he’d love a change of pace. Who wouldn’t?

  “I’ll have to think about that.”

  M.A’s hands come to the sides of his face and he shouts, “Dave, open up! I’m here with some friends.”

  “Last time I stopped by he had guards and ED-209s.”

  Aiden shrugs. “I guess he downgraded, by choice or by force.”

  “Yup, I’ve been there before,” I say, thinking of the time I spent hooked on Riotous. It’s a good thing they don’t have that shit in the real world.

  Dolly’s squeezes my hand. “Can’t you just make Dirty Dave appear?” I ask her.

  “I can, but I try to avoid doing that. I like giving NPCs as much freedom as possible. It keeps things interesting.”

  “Well, I have some plans in the real world, that’s why I’m asking.”

  “With Frances?”

  “Yeah, but not like that. It’s strictly work. We’ve got to dive back into Steam, and they kicked our asses and took our lunch money last time. I need better weapons.”

  Her lips press together. She’s mollified some, but not all the way.

  “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

  She gives me a long, hard look, and sighs a deep sigh that moves her mammiferous attributes in a most distracting way. “All right,” she says. “Because it’s work, and because it’s important, and because it’s you that asks.”

  She twitches her nose, and Dirty Dave steps out of the shadows. There’s something rat-like about him. Maybe it’s his buckteeth and his beady little eyes, his scraggly beard or the way he holds his hands in front of his body as if he were latching on to a giant bread crumb. His mouth opens but no words come out. His body odor is stupefying; it would knock a buzzard off a shit wagon at fifty yards; even the flies won’t come near him.

  “Geez Louise, Davey Boy, ol’ friend, ol’pal, ol’ stick-in-the-mud,” I say. “I’ve seen you look a whole lot better. How much of that Riotous are you doing?”

  “Riotous?” He bares his teeth to me – sharp, yellow, brittle. They look like someone has knit tiny individual brownish-green sweaters for each of them. “You have? You give.” His shoulders come up; his dilated eyes fixate on me.

  “C’mon Dave! It’s your old pal, Quantum! Is this how you welcome an old friend?”

  Dolly steps forward and the NPC’s mouth snaps shut. One look from her and Dirty Dave is minding his Ps and Qs.

  Aiden steps up to the plate. “Dave, we need a weapon that can cut through ensorcelled metal.”

  I pipe in. “Dave, I got big giant magic metal robots five stories tall that nothing I got will touch. You know what I have; all the wowsie-wow stuff came from you.” He smiles and grunts at that; at least some of the weaponsmaster is still in there somewhere. “They’re in a different Proxima world, different rules – so, no electricity although steam-powered analog is okay. No lasers, no high tech; I need something organic, maybe. Something natural, something low-tech and non-electric that’ll cut through magicked metal.”

  “Metal … Magic … ” Dave bites at his nails, blinks rapidly. He mutters to himself, scratches ass, armpits, crotch; belches, sharts in his already befouled trousers. “Yes, I have something. AUS.”

  I sigh. This is a great big fat
waste of time. “A US? A US what?”

  “No. Ay You Ess. Almost Universal Solvent. Dissolves everything ‘cept gold. Cheap and easy to make. Not cheap and easy to store once made, but completely inert until last two ingredients mixed.”

  “Oh – kaay, how do I use it?”

  “Easy to weaponize. Back pack sprayer, two tanks, one with each of last two ingredients. Ingredients mix in gold nozzle, propelled by CO2 or steam.”

  “Good. What will it cost?”

  Dirty Dave’s hand comes behind his back. He glances from me to Dolly.

  “How much Riotous?” I ask.

  “Fifty.”

  “Fifty?”

  “Fifty pounds. Pure. Uncut.”

  “You’re really looking to set the record straight, aren’t ya?” I turn to Dolly. “Can you make this happen?”

  “Normally I don’t … ”

  “Forty pounds and I won’t kill you, take your stuff, and go push the Riotous in Three Kings Park.” I tell Dave.

  He nods excitedly.

  “Dolly?” Taking her hand in mine, I give her that just this once look.

  “Fine, Quantum,” she says, her brow furrowing. “But let’s not make a habit of it.”

  I turn back to the bug-eyed hop-head. “How long will this take?”

  “Two hours, tops.”

  “Swell. Aiden can deliver it to me.”

  “Deliver it?” he asks.

  “That’s right, you can deliver it to me there, in Steam.”

  A grin spreads across his face. “In that case, I’ll get your Slice Bang modified as well.”

  “Modded?”

  “What about AUS shotgun shells?” Aiden asks Dirty Dave. “Yes or no?”

  The scabrous little tweaker gives him the thumbs up.

  “And Dolly … ”

  “Yes?” she asks.

  “I want you to get some weapons made as well.”

  “How many?”

  “Six sets, just in case we need a little back-up.”

  ~*~

  A sudden flash and Dolly and I are back in my hotel room. The bed is made, the window that Aiden smashed earlier has been repaired.

  “Reading my mind?” I ask as I pull her into my arms.