by Damien Boyes
“I need them to get my memories back.”
“From Decimation Island?”
She nods as if no further explanation is necessary.
“How?”
“Shad.”
“Go on…”
“He’s got a plan. We’re gonna hit DI, and we’re gonna get my memories back.”
“With the arena skyns?”
“It’s a hostile island full of lethal robots. We need all the help we can get.”
That’s…
I can’t even process how insane that idea is. “All this to get your memories back?”
“No.” She pauses as she works through what she’s about to say. “My memories are just a side quest. Shad’s running the main story.”
I’m almost afraid to ask. “Which is what?”
She fixes me with a defiant look as she says, “To beat Decimation Island, once and for all.”
AniK@
400:00:01 // 100 Players Remain
It’s a Western Tower launch, and you rejoin your skyn as it’s soaring over the bay toward the coast. You’ve got the marshes to the north and the jungle to the south and all the pirate stuff in between, but the Sunken City Blues hotspot in Elephant Bay is one of your favorites in the whole game. It’s a retro-futuristic city built fully underwater, and features a quest line about a charismatic madman and the downfall of his egomaniacal aquatic dream. It’s hell to get in and out of, the enemies are hulking bots and NPC psychopaths, and it ends with a terrifying race to escape the flooding city, but the loot is totally worth it. Completing it grants a full set of level-four armor, a buttload of safe-time, muscle tonics, and a good choice of weapons. They aren’t the best guns in the game, but for a single run it’s well worth the trouble.
If you can survive that is.
It’s not solo-able though. You can’t just drop straight in and hope to finish it, even as well kitted as you are. No, you need a team.
There’s no other option, eventually you need to trust someone.
You angle your wingpack down toward Skull Island in the middle of the bay. As you blaze toward the ground the stream of parachutes continues above you, players stretching to land directly on the far side of the bay in Buck-An-Ear Cove, this lobby’s starting location. You’re headed there too but not quite yet. You want to give them time to land before you make your entrance.
Once you hit dirt you ditch your wings and gather your gear and spend a few minutes looting up the basics before you hop a boat across the bay to the town. You pass three tall solar ships anchored off-shore, each of them representing a different faction you can choose to align yourself with in the Buck-An-Ear Cove storyline. Or Admiral Grant is further out, off the coast, if you prefer playing with the “good guys.”
Buck-An-Ear is nearly vertical, built up and down a craggy slope on the edge of the island. The buildings are an assortment of stacked shipping containers with rickety spun plastic rope bridges and ladders joining them all together. The main road is a wide wooden scaffold that zigzags up from the dock to the top of the incline, where a town square and a high stone watchtower look out over the bay.
Every game has a starting town, but survivors don’t often make an appearance in them, so when you stroll into the square with the camo unit on your chest and Stingers on each hip and four hundred hours in the bank, the crowd takes notice. The NPC pirates don’t care who you are, but the players do—you can tell by the looks you’re getting and the excited buzz that rises in the square. Some of them want to kill you, you know that for certain, and some pretend they don’t even notice, but most see you as their best chance to make it through their first hundred hours.
The LFG board’s outside the Rusty Screw, a ramshackle tavern overlooking the bay, but you blow right past it, feeling every eye in the place following you. Sure, you could pull some names from the looking-for-group board, but you prefer the personal touch. Besides, it’ll play better with the fans this way, and right now the audience in your head is massive and expecting bold moves. After the end of the last game your following must have tripled, and it feels like everyone in the world is riding along with you. You’ll need to hit a few sponsored drop locations this round—with this many people following you, the loot’s gonna be sweet.
You step up onto the front porch of the tavern, spin on the wooden boards, and face the crowd. They all stop what they’re doing and watch, hushed.
“I’m looking to run the sunken city,” you call out to the crowd. “Anyone want to join me?”
A good number of them toss up their hands and rush forward, hoping to be chosen. They’ll have seen you play, know what you can do. And you’re only on game five, so that’ll give them plenty of time to surf in your wake before they’ll need to turn on you. Teaming with you will get them to game three at least. A deal like that—they’d have to be fools to pass it up.
The crowd pushes forward, jostling for position, all wanting to be chosen. You’ve been successful in your tubing career, but you’ve never been popular like this.
If you’re not careful, you just might get used to it.
GAGE, FINSBURY
16:52:41 // 11-JUL-2059
| 19:11:35. Friday, July 11, 2059.
“Hold up,” I say. My head’s spinning. Anika’s glowering at me but I don’t even know what we’re talking about. “How do you ‘beat’ Decimation Island?”
She sighs, steps over to the couch, sinks down, and stares into the fire. I come out from behind the countertop and take the chair beside her, wait for her to continue.
“You know the entire island’s run by an AI, right?” I nod, not wanting to say anything to derail her. “Shad’s figured it out—Jefferson Wood has opened it up and is selling access to it.”
I’m still not following. “What’s that mean?”
Anika purses her lips. “Every day millions of people play Decimation Island, billions of hours over the years, and the whole time the AI has been watching, learning how to fight, how to kill, and now Wood’s selling those skills to anyone who wants them.”
She can’t be saying…
“You’re telling me the AI running Decimation Island is behind Killr?”
She blinks at me. “You know about that?” Her lips part in a faint smile. “How am I not surprised?”
“I’ve seen it up close. A squadron of well-armed reszos running that stuff could take on the whole Union Army. The cops don’t have a clue where it’s coming from.”
“Wood’s covered his tracks, but Shad traced the shyfts back to their source. It’s the island, he’s sure of it.”
“And he’s decided to take it on all by himself?”
“Not by himself—Zara-Zee and Huggy and I—though I guess we’re a man short now, thanks to you.”
“That explains the stolen skyns, but how do you figure you’ll survive an island full of hostile bots? And how do you even get them on the island? From what I understand that place is locked down, no one in or out.”
“Private rocket launch,” Anika answers, as if the solution were obvious. “Shad sourced a surplus Chinese warbot drop module, but instead of bots it’ll carry the skyns. We’ll come in from low orbit and blend in with the drop from the next live game. Believe me, he’s got the run all planned. He’s been working on it for months.”
It’s almost too much to believe, and for a second I wonder if she’s still playing me, but I don’t think she is. It’s a story too far-fetched to be made up. “That’s insane.”
She smirks at me. “Isn’t it?”
“Why’s OVRshAdo care so much? All the planning, the expense, what’s he getting out of this?”
She just shrugs. “The whole world’s a game to him, and he’s seen the new meta. Decimation Island is putting its finger on the scale, making it too easy for anyone to win. He doesn’t like cheaters. If beats the game at its own game, he becomes a legend.”
“He’s in it for the glory?”
“For the lulz,” she clarifies.
Jesus. “When’s all this supposed to happen?”
“Next live game starts Sunday at midnight local, three in the afternoon DI time. We drop then.”
“Sunday? What about your novi fight?”
Her shoulders rise and fall. “I never wanted to be a Gladiator. Too real life for me.”
I sit back in my chair, watch her watch me. “Well, shit,” I say eventually. “Now what?”
She rolls her eyes. “You tell me. The only way this works is if we take the island by surprise and cut off the transmission tower before Wood knows we’re there, and broadcasts the AI off the island. If you go to the cops we’re done. For now, the AI is confined, but if Wood finds out it’s in danger he’ll have time to get it off the island and all this will be for nothing. I’ll lose the chance to regain my lost time, and the Killr shyfts keep right on flowing, forever and ever, amen.”
Dammit. This was hard enough when it was just about Anika stealing the arena skyns and putting Dub’s ludus jeopardy, but shit got complicated real fast. She’s staring at me, waiting for a decision, but I have no idea what to say to her. She figures that out for herself a second later when I still haven’t answered her.
“Guess I’ll be hearing from you, one way or another,” she says, furrows her eyebrows, and then winks away.
My vision stays fixed to the place she was standing, her somber face still clear in my vision. What the hell am I supposed to do, now? Turn her in, condemn her to a stock, and risk losing a shot at shutting down the source of the Killr shyft—
Or trust her, and risk being wrong about her again?
AniK@
452:50:10 // 75 Players Remain
Huge raindrops slap against the broad green leaves of the jungle surrounding the village. It’s been raining for hours now, and while your dropsuits are designed to handle heat and moisture, you’re still soaked through. The sky is a slate grey and the light is washed out, shading everything with a sense of foreboding doom.
Your rain-soaked skyn is the least of your concerns right now though. You’re on the hunt, deep in the final stage of the Raptorwolf Rampage hotspot. You’ve tracked the animals to a small settlement near the lab and they’re close. There isn’t much to the village, only a dozen or so buildings in a clearing in the jungle, right near where the salt marshes begin. There’s a small open-air market and a church and a community building at the north end, two rows of four rectangular concrete longhouses down the middle, and a large barn and fenced-in stockyard at the south. The buildings of the muddy village are abandoned, and the villagers are clustered in the church, hoping you’ll save them from the vicious raptorwolf pack.
Your team came in from the north and took up positions on opposite sides of the church, you and Warrack on the west, Gerbil-Of-Doom and AVmei on the east. There are six raptorwolves, and even with your full squad that’s no joke.
You’re moving slow, playing cautious. Raptorwolves are designed to be smart and ferocious, and given the slightest opportunity they’ll have your guts in the mud. They hunt in packs and come armed with razor-sharp teeth and sharp metal front claws that’ll rip straight through even your level-four armor. They’re prowling somewhere through the village, searching for food, but you have no idea where. With the gloom and the deafening patter of rain all around you, you can’t see far or hear worth shit, but the mud is chewed up with claw marks. They’re close.
Luckily you don’t need to see them—you’ve come prepared. Taking out the raptorwolves won’t be a cakewalk, but no one should die in the process.
“Launch the drones,” you think, and through your team vision you see the green outlines of Gerbil-Of-Doom and AVmei on the other side of the church pull bots from their packs and toss them into the air. The copters hover for a moment while they adjust their sensors, then zip straight up to give you eyes in the sky. The rain will mess with their vision, but their radar will still work. They should help find the raptorwolves before the raptorwolves find you.
It’s taken half the game to get here. After you and your new team finished the Sunken City run, you hit a few sponsored loot pylons to collect the drops, then fought your way to the raptorwolves hotspot and picked up the quest line here in the village. You’ve spent the past eight hours running through it, collecting the samples and saving the missing child. You fought artificial predators through the halls of the renegade scaflab and finally made it to the end, where you defeated the rogue fleshmith and genitect team and their cybernetic animal protection. Now all that’s left is to clean up after them.
You pat the pouch hanging at your side, reflexively making sure you still have the pheromone darts you looted from the lab. They’ll make fighting the raptorwolves less suicidal. The animals are drawn to the pheromone’s pungent smell, and once you lure them out it shouldn’t be too hard to finish them off from range.
You shudder as you anticipate the fight to come. This hotspot has always hit a little close to home for you. Most of the Decimation Island hotspots are complete fabrications created for the game. The desolate black rock lava fields surrounding the Moonbase Delta hotspot may give the sense that it’s set on the moon, but being able to breathe ruins the illusion right quick.
But the story behind Raptorwolf Rampage isn’t far-fetched at all—shit like this happens in the real world with a shocking frequency. Even as far back as when you were a kid, slogging your way through the foster system, you’d hear stories about crackpot scientists moving down to the flood-ravaged swamps in southern Louisiana to perform all kinds of genetic experiments, using nothing more than bathtub sequencing kits and basic mobile scaflabs to produce monsters and release them into the wild.
Foster Mother used to threaten to send the naughty kids out into the swamp, where she said they’d be food for the horrible creatures living there. She didn’t need to invent something like the boogeyman to make you do what you were told, not when monsters were real.
Nowadays the Ministry of Standards has a dedicated team for tracking down renegade genitects and fleshsmiths and the horrors they produce, but somehow making a game show out of it still feels wrong. You usually avoid running this hotspot, but as geared up as the Sunken City left you, the team needed better weapons, and the reward for finishing off the raptorwolves is a cache of top-tier assault rifles. Not legendary class, but the next best thing. Variable loadouts with armor piercing and explosive rounds. You’re still only half done this game, but when you’re finished here your team will be ready to take on anyone who challenges you. And that includes OVRshAdo.
You haven’t seen him all game, but you know he’s out there, somewhere. Probably hunting you right now. You can’t worry about him though, you’ve got dinosaurs to kill.
The drones scout above, their whirring rotors muffled by the clatter of raindrops on tin roofs as they search down the length of the settlement. It only takes a moment before they spot the raptors—they’re all the way on the other end of town, feeding on the village pigs.
A bolt of irritation shoots through you, and for a second you almost forget where you are, have to remind yourself that this is just a game, that the pigs and the raptorwolves and even the villagers are all artificial. Bodies printed in tanks and operated by an AI. All just part of the story. Props, designed to be killed.
“Targets pinged out,” Gerbil announces over the comms. “Moving in.”
“Confirmed,” you respond. “Warrack and I’ll approach from the west along the huts. You two come in from the east. Once we get close we’ll lure them out with a dart.”
“Got it,” Gerbil says, and she and AVmei race across the open road between the church and the huts and make their way south, following orders without hesitation. Ever since you recruited them in Buck-An-Ear Cove they’ve been happy to take your lead. Having five hundred hours in the bank must give you some authority—to the newbies anyway. And as uncomplicated as it was to lone wolf it, having a team around you isn’t too bad.
You pull the Stingers out, ready to obliterate anyth
ing that comes at you, then turn to Warrack and motion for him to follow. After you move out of cover behind the church and sprint to the other side of the village, you hug the hut walls, creeping south toward the pens. Your heart’s thudding but the raptors seem occupied with the pigs. As long as the meat lasts, you should be able to take them by surprise.
Your confidence is shattered a moment later, as you’re passing the third hut, when Gerbil and AVmei spin and open fire.
For a second you’re pissed they started shooting without you, but when you glance over at their green-outlined position on the other side of the huts across the village, you see they’re still not within sight of the red-marked raptors in the animal pen. Instead they’re turned around backwards, firing in the direction of the swamps.
It’s not the raptorwolves—another squad’s trying to third-party your quest.
“Warbot!” AVmei yells in your head, and for a second you’re not sure you heard her right, but then a reverberating whine purrs from the other side of the village, and you know that sound instantly: a multi-shot mag rifle. Someone’s finished the Caldera Fortress and won themselves a walking tank.
“We need help—” Gerbil yells, but her words are cut off as an explosion rocks the village, spitting dust and bits of concrete into the air.
OVRshAdo downs Gerbil-Of-Doom. 74 players remain.
Your throat closes. OVRshAdo’s got a warbot, and he’s come to get you.
“Find cover,” you call into the comms, but you’re already screwed. Gerbil’s gone and your team display shows Mei must have been caught in the blast too. Her vitals read multiple wounds, she’s hurt bad. If you don’t get her a heal in a few minutes she’ll be done. Might even be too far gone already.
A frazzled anger burns in your chest. Fuck that guy. Why’s he got such a hard-on for you?