The Lag

by Alex Bobl

  "Just shoot!" he shouted to the reluctant Elfa. "Smoke the bastard! Do your karma a favor!"

  She didn't budge. Attila realized that she too was looking up at the sky. He raised his head. The horizon glowed crimson, the distant Citadel enveloped in a menacing shroud of thunderclouds.

  A storm. A Magic Storm! It couldn't be. If it's not one thing it's another! First the ambush, the chase and the broken portal, and now the Storm!

  "Five hundred," the Elfa snapped as she fired another arrow. Beast dove into the bulrushes, avoiding it. "Then I'll get you to a safe place."

  "How's that for Pioneering brotherhood?" Attila yelled at her in helpless indignation.

  "You wanna be brotherly with a ghoul," she snarled back.

  He looked at the legionnaire's body, his face buried in the ground. For some reason, it wasn't fading. It should have disappeared by now. That was weird. Could he be still alive — wounded? But then he'd surely have attempted to move.

  "So? Is it a deal?"

  "Yeah," Attila answered. "What's up with the corpse? Why is it still there?"

  The girl ignored the question. "Come along, then," she commanded.

  She slung the bow across her shoulder and grabbed at the low roof, pulling herself up.

  "Why there?"

  She didn't answer. He was forced to climb along.

  Soft moss carpeted the roof. Attila sprawled behind the chimney which was unnaturally wide, three times the size of a regular one. The blue diamond of the holographic icon hovered overhead.

  The Elfa loosed off three more arrows and received a fireball in return. She dropped to the roof next to him. An enormous clot of fire whizzed just above their backs. Attila's hair crackled with the heat.

  He rolled over to his side to look back. This particular Storm was weird. A crimson tidal wave was sweeping over the Dead Canyon, hatched with lightning: a whole wall of branching vertical bolts of blindingly bright discharges. Was it the Storm of the Millennium or something?

  "What are we doing here?" he shouted to her. "Enjoying the view?"

  "Do what I do," the girl leaped to her feet. She sat on the top of the chimney and slung her legs over the edge. "Down there there's a Crimson Hole!"

  He nearly jumped with joy. What incredible luck. The fact was, you couldn't build a buglessly perfect game without leaving certain loopholes behind governed by their own laws of physics.

  The girl jumped down the chimney. Attila peered into its black mouth, then looked back at the crackling sheet of lightning. It was approaching fast. The Storm would consume them in a minute.

  Ah, whatever! He just hoped he wouldn't get stuck in the chimney. The Elfa was considerably slimmer than he was. Still, he couldn't quite work it out. There was no way the hut's flimsy walls could protect them from the storm. They needed a cellar — preferably, a concrete bunker...

  The air around him flickered, filling with interference. Vibration set his teeth on edge. It felt as if the whole enormous game world was shuddering in a bout of fever: not just the hut and the marshes around it, but the very fabric of reality seemed to be convulsing, erupting in spasms.

  The howling of the storm grew stronger. The wall of lightning kept approaching.

  Down the chimney was probably better. Attila threw his arms over his head and jumped.

  He sensed the change in the texture of reality in the dark. He now was in... actually, where was he? He couldn't tell in the pitch black darkness.

  "Have we gone through into the cellar?" he interrogated the dark.

  A series of rapid flashes illuminated some walls and a low stone ceiling overhead. A rectangular opening gaped at its center. Far above he could make out the red-tinted square of the chimney's top. Slim blue charges of lightning snaked in the corner of the little room, casting a weak light on their two faces.

  Attila recoiled, flattening himself against the wall. "This is a Magneto! Are we inside the oven? Is it hollow inside? How stupid is that?"

  "The Magneto is the entrance to the hole," the Elfa explained. "It's not dangerous, I assure you."

  "Are you raving mad? I'd rather die than enter it!"

  The whirling and crackling sounds outside grew stronger, amplified by the chimney. Their two shadows flickered and writhed on the wall.

  "I tell you it's a bug!" she said. "I discovered it once when I was trying to get away from the ghoul. So I... don't matter. Just follow me."

  She grabbed his hand and yanked it hard. Attila barely stayed on his feet. He stumbled in after her. The lightning clung to them, stinging and burning.

  Chapter Four

  He fully prepared to die but nothing happened. The blinding blue light soon expired. He took a few more paces, obeying the girl's pulling hand, and found himself in a strange place. It looked like a dug-out devoid of doors or windows: its walls, floor and ceiling made of compacted earth. In the corner behind their backs, charges of lightning snaked out of the Magneto. Apparently, this was the only entrance into this in-game wormhole.

  "We're in the cellar beneath the hut," the Elfa explained. "Or so I think."

  A narrow plank bed stood by the wall next to a small table and a stool. An oil lamp burned on the table. One wall was lined with shelves piled with weapons.

  "Who lit the lamp?" Attila asked.

  "It's always been like this."

  "Could it be... well, I don't know... some leftover location fragment? It probably used to belong to some discontinued quest or other."

  She shrugged and perched herself on the stool. She looked perfect — even though she was only a well-generated avatar. Girls like that only belonged on magazine covers.

  The funny thing was, she was probably totally different in real life. To splurge this amount of money on her appearance, she must have been emotionally unstable and insecure. Now she was playing the tough chick, sharp-tongued and hung with weapons. Which meant that in real life she was probably a sheer troll with a dog's face and legs to match, taking her revenge on disinterested men by either ignoring them or visualizing them in place of the mobs she smoked. Talking about which-

  On the wall near the Magneto hung the head of an enormous rat the size of a dog. Next to it was nailed the head of a blind wolf followed by a huge wild boar. The Elfa apparently hadn't bothered to stuff them properly even though the game offered the choice of leveling up taxidermy. The boar's eyes had leaked out; its snout was shriveled, its right fang broken. You couldn't fell one of these with a single shot: its skull could sustain a direct crossbow hit. You had to shoot it in the eye before it got the chance to sink its fangs into your stomach, ripping it and trampling you down.

  And next to these, a chimera. An amazing creature. Even now, chopped off and nailed to the wall, its head was almost invisible, its outline glistening like a transparent lump of molten glass. The chimera itself had long been dead, of course, but its natural invisibility magic still affected its severed head.

  Further along the wall hung a gnoll's spotted skull, its skin dangling in shreds, followed by shriveled rats' heads. The collection was crowned — literally — by the enormous domelike skull of a grummer: a highland giant about eight foot tall. Gryad harbored all sorts of giants: voloths and grummers, cyclops, ogres and titans... The latter were technically gods so few players ever had a chance to meet them. The grummer's dark bulbous head pouted its fat lips, its vicious little eyes staring into space.

  Attila whewed. "Did you smoke them all?"

  "I'm a hunter," she said wryly. "Of course I did."

  "Jeez. You a High Elf? You're such a goody two-shoes lot. I thought you loved all sorts of critters. That's a strange racial choice, if you ask me. A High Elfa leveling hunting! That's what they call going against the flow, isn't it? What's your name?"

  He couldn't believe he'd said that. Asking for a player's name! Normally, all you had to do was point the cursor at a char. At least that's how it used to be. But this full immersion thing demanded you introduce yourself properly.

  This was th
e way virtual worlds were going. Gaming conventions were blurring; game developers kept stripping the traditional interface of its control and communication functions which gradually became the players' domain, its slots and buttons turning into actual skills and abilities. For many people, virtuality might soon replace real life, turning millions of humans into motionless capsule-bound bodies wound with wires like the ones he'd seen in an old movie.

  "I'm Yanna," the girl said.

  "I'm Attila."

  "Whatever. Where's my money?"

  "Wait. Keep your hair on."

  Yanna removed her weapons and laid them onto the shelf by the bed, leaving only a dagger on her belt. Attila saw the other weapons piled upon it: two bows, a heavy crossbow, a couple of quivers and a hunting knife.

  Attila perched on the end of the bed and stretched his aching legs. The girl, once finished, sat next to him and elbowed his ribs. "So?"

  He took out his Book. She did so, too. "My game bank account number: triple seven, Yankee Yankee one-seven," she spelled out. "Come on, send it."

  "You sound like my school teacher," he grumbled as he entered the number. His heart bled as he confirmed the transfer of five hundred gold. Great job, Game Master. So much for today's windfall.

  A message in a fancy frame popped up on the screen,

  The operation you requested has failed to complete.

  Attila cussed and tried again. Same result. He shrugged. "Doesn't seem to work."

  The girl's doe eyes widened. "Pardon me?"

  "The bank doesn't seem to work."

  "No way! Are you trying to rip me off? You think I'm stupid? Let me try."

  The grimace of anger looked cartoonish on her doll-perfect face. Gasping with impatience, she tried to activate her PM box. To no avail: it was dead, too. As was the game chat. Attila had never used it: a lone player, he'd never had friends worth mentioning, but Yanna did have a list of contacts — all of which were unavailable.

  "WTF!" she jumped back to her feet and began pacing the room.

  Attila didn't like any of it. Still, he tried to keep his cool. After all, he'd escaped the legionnaires and rescued the Eye which was now safely tucked away in his bag. A buggy hole like this one was a good hiding place: even legionnaires couldn't always locate them. And if this jittery girl didn't get his money, so much the better. Now he had to wait for the admins to fix the glitch and log out, preferably without paying her first. A hundred he'd have understood; a hundred and fifty even, but she'd been trying to fleece him like a Moscow cabbie!

  He decided to give it another try and opened his Skype Messenger. It sort of worked, although his contacts' online status icons kept changing color from green to yellow: fading completely, then turning to green again.

  Yanna craned her neck, trying to see his manipulations with the book. "Where'd you get Skype from? I thought Gryad didn't have it?"

  "It doesn't. I do. But at the moment, it doesn't make much sense. Look at the icons. It's probably glitchy because of the Storm. It was weird, wasn't it? Or maybe it's the glitches that caused the Storm. Relax. Once everything's back up, I'll send you the money."

  The girl tried to look calm. Still, her lip-biting and sleeve-tagging betrayed her feelings. "Hope we're not stuck here for too long," she said.

  Her voice seemed to come from afar. Attila's ears were blocked — also as a result of the Storm, he guessed. His brain felt like jelly. And that was here, in the hole — outside on the surface his head might have already burst like a watermelon.

  Attila pressed his hands to his ears, then let go sharply. With a painful pop, his eardrums twitched. He gulped. That didn't work, either.

  "I shouldn't go out if I were you," he said. "Have you been in Gryad long? How many Storms have you seen?"

  "That's none of your business."

  So much for the conversation starter. He shrugged. Himself he only remembered one Storm — and that was ages ago when he'd first come here. Storms were part of the Dead Canyon's plotline. They came from the Citadel. According to the storybook, they came to our reality via the Great Portal opened by the Conclave of the Seven Wizards in order to combat the dark hordes they'd inadvertently let out of the Citadel's catacombs.

  The Storms were capable of affecting the very fabric of reality, creating new monsters and even changing the world's geography by occasionally closing old locations and opening up new ones. In theory, that was the developers' way of explaining away certain changes they'd introduced like the discovery of new locations or the arrival of new mobs and aberrations without disturbing the world's balance.

  All Storms had one thing in common: the powerful surge of magic anomalies killed all players who had weak magic defenses and failed to take cover underground.

  Attila made another attempt to get to know her. "Where are you from? I'm from Moscow in case you're interested. You?"

  "St.P," she said reluctantly.

  "You studying?" he asked, convinced she was still at high school.

  "Yeah," she said. "I read medicine. Why?"

  He cast her an incredulous look. Did she really? Then again, what difference did it make? Not to a cripple like himself, anyway. This player could be male for all he knew.

  "Why were the legionnaires after you?" she asked.

  "I was trying to sell some software. It was a trap."

  "What kind of software?"

  He slapped his pocket. "This one here. It's a flying thingy that sends a picture to your Book — or to your goggles. I made it."

  "Yeah, right. Pull the other one."

  What was she like! He felt like giving her a slap. "I made it," he said, trying to stay calm. "You don't have to believe me if you don't want to."

  "You wanna say you're a game master? A cheat master, a programmer? A hacker, to be precise. Is that it?"

  "Sort of."

  "Then you should know, Mr. Game Master, how come the portal stations don't work. What's going on, for crissakes?"

  He shrugged again. "No idea. The whole game is based on the principle of portal stations. They just can't fail. It's like... like gravity stopped working on Earth, you understand? The stations are firmly rooted in the world's laws. You have any idea of the kind of money involved? They just can't afford a glitch like that. They would lose their partners."

  "Could that mean there're serious problems with the game?"

  He shook his head. He didn't like the way this conversation was going. "I shouldn't jump to conclusions."

  "Why not?" she stomped her foot. "Did you see what kind of Storm it was? It's not at all like the stuff I've seen on YouTube."

  "It was unusual, yes. Visually at least. But if it happened, it means that the game still works. What do you mean by serious problems? Had the game shut down, we'd have exited it automatically. But that's not the case. It's exiting that's the problem. Actually," he snapped his fingers, "I've only just realized it. This shouldn't be happening! Portals can't just shut down. It's never happened before."

  "Aha, so you can't wrap your melon around it, Mr. Smart Programmer, can you?"

  "He's the one with the melon," Attila pointed at the grummer's skull. "Mine is called a head. But you're right, I can't wrap it around all this. This is surreal. As in, impossible."

  "So do you think the Storm could have damaged the portals?"

  He gave it some thought. "Dunno. I can't tell."

  "You're not a programmer, you're a noob."

  Attila shrugged. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. Yanna did too.

  "I can't think straight," she admitted. "It must be the Storm. I need a break. I've been in the game for the last twenty-four hours. Right. Clear off now. Go sit on the floor."

  "Why?"

  "Move to the floor, I say. Don't make me lose it. This is my bed. Can't you see it's not big enough for two?"

  He rose. The girl peeled off her boots and stretched out on the bed. He sat on the floor with his back to the wall. After a while, he tried to lie down. He turned this way and that, trying to find a
comfortable position. "What if I have a blanket?"

  "What if you don't," she mumbled. "Mind putting the light out? There's a snuffer on the lamp. I need some sleep."

  Attila rose, snuffed out the lamp and lay back down again. Then he removed the bag from his belt and shoved it under his head. The floor was cold against his back. There was no way he could fall asleep.

  The bed rustled. A blanket dropped onto his head.

  "Thanks," Attila wrapped it around himself and closed his eyes. His head felt like a whirlpool of murky jelly. Whatever had happened to the portals? What if this one was simply out of order? Could the other ones be working still? Why had he and the girl thought they were all down?

  No, it didn't make sense. He didn't have enough information to draw any conclusions. Besides, he could always use the emergency logout if he really wanted to. It wasn't difficult: when you logged in in full immersion, there was a pop-up window that explained to you how you could do it. But if he did so, the girl would probably lay her hands on both the Eye and the Triton's Fork. No, that wasn't an option. He would get some sleep and then he'd check other portals. By then, the admins might have already fixed the chat and the bank system.

  He fell asleep without noticing it. And when he awoke, it took him some time to work out where he was. For a moment he thought he was still within the crumpled car, Mom bleeding to death by his side.

  With a yelp Attila sat up, bashing his elbow on the wall. The pain sobered him.

  "Baby's scared? Baby had a bad dream?" the girl scoffed. Her voice was sleepy.

  This bodylicious bitch! He sprang to his feet, bundled up the blanket and threw it over her head. "Wakey wakey, Big Ears!"

  She pulled the blanket off her head and jumped up, clenching her fist. "You do that again and you're toast!"

  He chuckled. "What's wrong with you? No need to be so aggressive. So how do we get out, back via Magneto? Is it going to take us back inside the oven, do you know? Do we need to climb the chimney again?"

  Yanna pulled on her boots, not bothering to answer. She walked over to the shelf and began putting her weapons back on.