by Damien Boyes
A flick of your head shows OVRshAdo and his squad in pursuit, but still above you and a kilometer or so to the south. If you push the dive as hard as you can, you’ll land thirty seconds before them. That should be enough.
Weapons don’t work in the air—it wouldn’t be fair for a survivor carrying over an AR from the last round to get twenty kills on unarmed freshies before they even landed—but once your feet hit the ground all bets are off.
You skid to a stop on the concrete surrounding a cluster of square two-storey buildings, cut your chute, and immediately pull the Redeemer from your wingpack. It only has six shots left after the last game, but six is enough.
Even with the optic set to maximum zoom you can’t quite tell who’s who in the squad zooming down toward you, so you settle the crosshairs on the head you think belongs to OVRshAdo, wait for the aim assist to zero in and account for movement and wind, then flash green when it’s ready.
You exhale and squeeze the trigger and the target’s head blows off. The body tumbles in the air, then spirals as it plummets toward the ground.
AniK@ downs survivor HumanBacon. 99 players remain.
“One-tap dirt nap, y’all,” you say to the crowd. “Make ’em think twice about gunnin’ for me.”
The remaining three scatter in different directions and swerve erratically to avoid the next shot, and at the rate they’re coming you only have time for one more. By the time you settle in on your next target and the Redeemer calculates the trajectory they’ve put some distance between you, and even when the assist glows green and you pull the trigger, the shot goes wide. Then they’re below the tree line and you lose your angle.
You’ve bought yourself some time though, and quickly scout through the buildings, looting a level-one helmet and vest and snagging a backpack and a light SMG before you rotate north, heading toward the forest and away from where OVRshAdo and his crew landed.
It’ll take them a few minutes to regroup and get themselves looted. Especially knowing that you could be anywhere, watching them at range and ready with a headshot. They’ll need to be cautious as they move, which means you should be able to outpace them.
You keep to the trees, stopping every few hundred feet to sweep the Redeemer behind you, checking for any signs of pursuit, and by the time you’ve gone an hour and haven’t seen anyone, you figure they must have given up. For now at least. OVRshAdo’s down a teammate and he’ll be pissed, no way he’ll let it slide.
But that’s something you can consider later, once you’re geared up and have the luxury of considering how you might potentially die, instead of worrying about what’s immediately behind you.
Not how you wanted the game to start, but you sent OVRshAdo a message, and you’re still alive.
Now you just need to keep it that way.
GAGE, FINSBURY
7:52:23 // 9-JUL-2059
This isn’t good.
“His wards are about to drop,” Anika yells, ducking a swipe from a blazing tentacle. “Get ready to hit him with the glaive.”
I grab the star-bladed weapon from under my cloak and incant a charge into it, and the blades radiate ancient runes in a brilliant green light. Anika’s ahead of me, wearing a muscled-up purple-skinned behemoth warrior and swinging a flaming sword that’s bigger than she. Her target’s a floating black kind of squid monster—the raid boss, supposedly an incredibly powerful inter-dimensional priest-god, but she’s kicking its ass.
I’m an elf. A tall, female elf. I’m wearing form-fitting armor, carrying a bow, and have the power to sing spells and charge up weapons with my songs. Anika chose her for me, and every time she looks at me she laughs. I think she likes seeing me strutting around on long legs, and every time she smiles at me I forget why I’m here.
This is not good.
We played Decimation Island for almost seven hours, made it to the survivor’s circle twelve times, and even had a six-round continuation streak. Turns out we work well together. She called the shots and I did what I was told and watched her back. We didn’t talk much at first, but after a few kills we loosened up. She’s quick and dry and very good at what she does. The last time I felt this comfortable with someone I was in the Forces.
And with Connie.
How did I let this happen?
We quit DI and it was three in the morning but we both got the sense neither of us was ready to call it a night, and Anika suggested hopping into a Chronophase raid.
I’d never played it—it’s a long-form roleplayer with a convoluted storyline about time traveling wizards that seemed kinda like nonsense to me—but she had enough XP bonuses and legendary gear lying around to level me up a character high enough to join her. We’ve been playing ever since.
While we haven’t talked a lot—neither of us are what you’d call chatty—we’ve talked enough. There’s lots of downtime in DI when you’re looting or chasing the zone, and I told her about my time in the Forces, and Connie, and sketched out a retelling of the official version of all the shit that’s happened to me since I went reszo.
It’s all public record. She already knew most of it though—she’d looked me up. I think it might be why she agreed to meet in the first place: she saw living digital had fucked me just as hard as it had her.
This was supposed to be a job.
She told me about growing up in the foster system and condensed her decade of rising through the feeds to become a tubing superstar and then going reszo into three sentences. She talked a little more about deciding to walk away from her tubing career to have a kid, and how his death feels like a dream, like it happened to someone else. She’s missing forty-four and a half days’ worth of memory, all the time she spent in Decimation Island, and her son died while she was playing.
She woke up back in her body after ending her own run, and even though a thousand hours had passed and her son was dead and she was at the center of a media frenzy, it felt like she had just closed her eyes the moment before. Her entire life changed in the blink of an eye.
At least now, with the Gladiator auditions, she has something to focus on. She can put everything else out of her mind and take each day one step at a time. Sounds like something Shelt would say.
The only time I ever felt even a twinge of doubt about her was when I asked about OVRshAdo. We were talking about her run and I asked if she was still in contact with him. They’d nearly won the game together, and I figured they’d want to keep that going. She paused for just a second, and I don’t know if it was a trick of her avatar or what, but when she answered there was an odd hitch in her face. She said he’d left her a message, inviting her to tube together, but she hadn’t responded, and when I asked why she just shrugged and said she just wanted to put it all behind her, OVRshAdo included. Then she changed the subject.
Other than that one slight hiccup, in the twelve hours we’ve spent together I haven’t seen one thing to explain what Dub would be worried about. And I don’t know why she didn’t react to the invasion back at the Humanitech gala, but I can’t believe the woman I’ve spent the last half-day with is hiding something. No more than anyone else, anyway.
She’s stoic, sure, and she doesn’t take shit from anyone, but that doesn’t mean she’s plotting something. After tonight, I’m positive she’s clean. The question is: where do we go from here?
The sound of rending spacetime pulls me back to the game. The squid-priest’s shields are down and Anika’s yelling at me to finish it with the enchanted glaive.
I reach back and hurl the bladed weapon, and it streaks through the air and smacks the squid straight in its single dinner-plate-sized eyeball. The black flesh quivers for a second then explodes in purple fire, sending chunks of goo everywhere and leaving behind a black-metal sword hovering a meter off the ground.
“Nice shot, soldier,” Anika says. “You want the loot?” She means the sword. From what I understand it’s fairly rare and could be worth something in the auction house.
“It’s all yours,” I
say. “Besides, you did all the work. I just stood here singing at it.”
“And what a lovely voice you have,” Anika says as she plucks the sword from the air. It shimmers for a moment then disappears, and a silvery portal opens in its place. We’ve been fighting on a hunk of rock hovering in space, surrounded by a purple-pink nebulae haze, and the portal’s our only way back to the quest hub where we started.
“That was fun,” I say. Exhilarating even. But I figure most of that had to do with the company.
“Yeah,” she answers. “It was.”
Then things get weird. It’s like I’m back in high school—she looks at me, and even though I’m staring back at an eight-foot-tall wall of purple muscle and jagged teeth, I can read her intent clear enough. She likes me.
And dammit, I like her too.
Shit. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
“We should do this again,” she says.
“We should,” I agree. “After your fight, maybe?”
She hesitates. “Before, maybe?”
“Yeah,” I say, and the words come out almost against my will. “Even better.”
“Cool,” she answers, then looks down at her big hairy feet. “Well, I gotta go. Training starts in three minutes.”
“Right,” I answer. Twelve hours gone and I barely noticed. “You’d better get out of here. I’ll talk to you soon then, I guess.”
“You will,” she says, then blows me an awkward kiss from her meaty lips and springs through the portal. A moment later I see GulfGaytR’s status switch to “offline.”
I stay behind for a moment, listen to the cosmic wind blowing through the craggy rocks, stare out at the neon night, and try to make sense of what the hell just happened.
GAGE, FINSBURY
9:03:51 // 9-JUL-2059
I’m back in the cabin, my head swimming with a potent mix of shame and infatuation. When I returned, Connie came out of the bedroom to greet me and asked me how it went and I didn’t know what to tell her. It’s like I’m cheating on her except she’s eager to hear all about it, encouraging even, and I can’t take it. I mumbled something about it going fine and she didn’t press and after a few minutes disappeared back into the bedroom.
Now I get to figure out how to handle this mess I’ve made.
At this point I’m ninety-nine percent sure that Anika’s clean. Apart from her reaction at the heist, I’ve seen nothing to back up any suspicions that she might be up to something. If anything, it’s the opposite.
While I haven’t known her that long, in the time we spent together I found her to be even-headed and deliberate and remarkably self-aware for someone her age. Yeah, she’s aggressive, but not mindlessly. And, no, none of that means she can’t be running an angle of some kind, but I don’t get the sense she is. I think she’s a naturally reserved person who’s been through a ton of shit. We all have. We’re all fucked up, and she’s no different.
When I was restored the second time and woke up as Gibson, people called me shady too, thought I was hiding something—though in the end it turned out they were right. I was, I just didn’t know it.
And if I was, she could be too. That’s the one percent. If it could happen to me, it could happen to anyone. I’m not quite ready to go back to Dub and exonerate her, but there are only four days until the novi trials, and if she’s hiding something she’s a good enough liar I won’t get anything out of her before then.
No, I’ve only got one lead left to work: OVRshAdo. Anika’s wound tight, completely in control, but her momentary hesitation when I asked about him was a radio burst in a sea of static. It’s the one thing that stood out. Maybe it’s a holdover from them spending time in the game but not remembering it—there are plenty of rational reasons to explain away why mentioning his name would give her pause, but I have to be sure.
Especially now that I’ve gotten to know her, I’m worried if there is something going on she might not be involved voluntarily. Could be she’s mixed up in something she can’t get out of. I haven’t done a deep dive on OVRshAdo, but I’ve seen enough to know he’s a proud asshole, arrogant and self-serving and skilled enough to get away with it. He’s been implicated in a few scandals over the years—there was an early accusation of cheating at a tournament, and he was banned from more than one game for item duping—but nothing overtly criminal.
When they were competing against each other in DI he ended up knocked from the game and used every resource he had to get immediately back in to join her. Maybe he’s still trying to work her somehow. It’s slim, but I need to be sure.
I get Connie to dox him, but she doesn’t come up with anything, not even his real name or what country he’s from. He’s a gamer who’s spent most of his life on the tube—days in a row at times. As a matter of fact, he’s only been offline four times in the past month, and only for a couple hours each time. Except last Saturday when he was dark for a whole six hours, the longest his feed has been down in weeks.
Six hours that line up neatly with the heist at the Hotel Mundi.
It could be a coincidence, sure, but …
“Connie,” I call out, and she comes in from the bedroom, barefoot, wearing a flannel shirt and jeans. “I need your help.”
“What’s up?” she asks.
“Can you run a biokin cross-reference between the reszos who ripped off the Mundi and OVRshAdo? I want to see if any of them line up.”
After a moment she shakes her head and says, “Based on the movements and his speech patterns, OVRshAdo’s a 73.4 percent overlap with on the guy who was doing all the talking. Close, but not a match.”
“But close.”
“—Ish,” she finishes. “I could find you thousands of people who’d score higher. Starting with someone who has a British accent, which OVRshAdo does, and the man at the heist didn’t.”
“Accents are easy enough to mask. There’s still a chance. It could be him.”
“Sure,” she says with a shrug, giving up the fight. “Could be.”
Good enough for me.
“Is he tubing now?”
“In Decimation Island,” she says. “Nine hours running.”
I’ve got nothing else to do today. Maybe I’ll see what he’s up to.
Just to be sure.
AniK@
268:52:10 // 80 Players Remain
The Redeemer whispers, and a mile and a half away a player’s head explodes.
AniK@ downs MilkDonor. 79 Players remain.
His safe-time rolls onto your wrist, another thirty-five minutes. Puts you up to nearly the hundred-minute maximum. Should be enough to see you through the final zone.
You’re into round three, and this time the game dropped from the Northwest Tower, with the safe-zone open all the way north to the cliffs and along the west coast of the island to the marshes around Pirate Bay. The terrain is flat, and the tall broad-leafed trees provide plenty of cover, but you’re managing to find kills here and there.
And you’re still alive, that’s what matters.
After you took out HumanBacon, OVRshAdo kept his distance for the rest of his game, and you shot your way to your second survivor circle. The last hour was rough, once the zone tightened and the fighting got close, but you’d racked up enough safe-time over the course of the game you could skirt the edge of combat and hide among the bots long enough for someone else to go down first. Not the prettiest win, but a win just the same.
It’s exhausting, lonely work playing the snake game—always on alert, sleeping in stolen minutes—and your audience drained away as the fragger they’d signed up to watch spent a hundred hours perched on rocky crags waiting for someone to walk past her crosshairs, so you didn’t even have the comforting buzz of attention to keep you company. Instead your squadmates were the salt breeze and the night insects and the endless thoughts of Rael, dying in a clinic back home.
You see him every time you close your eyes to rest, his body lying scrawny and fragile, tubes keeping him alive. He must miss y
ou so much. You’re all he’s ever known and you’ve been away from him for three hundred and sixty-nine hours—more than two weeks without his mother, his only person in the whole world.
Does he need you in the night? Do his tiny fingers search for your breast, while his weak cries beg you to come?
You feel the tears threaten and you press your fingers into your eyes, like you’re massaging them after hours of staring down the Redeemer sights and not trying to keep them from spilling over.
Don’t do this to yourself.
You’re out here for him, doing this to save his life. In a few years, after you win and he’s recovered and he’s healthy and strong, you can look back on this time and know you did the right thing. Even though it was hard, even though you wanted nothing more than to jump in front of first player you saw and beg him to put a bullet in you so you could go home, you stuck it out.
At least that’s what you need to keep telling yourself. Whatever it takes to get your through.
He isn’t suffering, that’s what matters. He isn’t in pain. The bots take good care of him, and the nurses promised someone would come hold him once a day.
You gotta stick it out, for just a little while longer. You gotta be strong ‘till it’s all done.
You fill your lungs with air, puff out your chest until your armor’s tight across your torso, then let it out and try to push the negativity out with it. You can’t finish this if you’re second-guessing yourself the whole time. You thought this all through before you came here, and you knew it was going to suck. You knew there’d be moments like this, when you wanted to give up, but there’s no other way this can end.