by Damien Boyes
Her weapon slides from her hands and she collapses, dead.
OVRshAdo betrays Pizdaty. 10 players remain.
Round complete.
You head is spinning as OVRshAdo kneels beside you. “I didn’t come to finish you,” he whispers. “I’m here to help you win.”
GAGE, FINSBURY
17:16:53 UTC+11 // 13-JUL-2059
I fall for two seconds and hit the floor with an echoing thud.
Shad’s nearby and he grins at me, his face barely visible in the light leaking from above. He seems to be enjoying this.
“Fucking glorious,” he thinks at us, but I just shake my head and pull my sidearm to cover the hole in the ceiling as Anika drops through.
“I’ll watch for bots,” she says, drawing her pistol and activating her helmet’s external lights. “You guys find us a way out of here.”
“On it,” I say, and switch my lights on to see where we’ve landed. The room is big, probably fifty meters by fifty, and filled with all sorts of goodies.
One side of the room is lined with charging stations and dormant bots, while the other is arrayed with racks of guns, ammo, and armor. This must be where the bots come to resupply the weapons in the game.
A big curved tunnel runs east and west out from either side of the room, and two smaller branches cut off to the north and south. There’s probably a web of tunnels under the whole island, leading from one hotspot to another. Wouldn’t surprise me if we can get all the way to the Control Center from here.
“We got guns!” Shad cries and then gets busy rearming himself.
Behind me Anika fires and a prowler crashes to the floor.
“Let’s move it, guys,” she says. “Bots are coming to kill us.”
I drop my empty assault rifle and replace it with a heavy battle rifle and fill my pack with ammo. Then I gather up another AR, load it, and bring it to Anika with a bunch of magazines.
“Got you something,” I say out loud as I hand it to her. She holsters her pistol and takes the weapon from me.
“Aww,” she purrs. “You shouldn’t have.” Another bot silhouettes its head across the hole in the ceiling and Anika lifts her new weapon and clears it with a loud burst of fire.
“Over here,” Shad calls from across the room. “Found us some wheels.”
I leave Anika to watch the hole and jog over to Shad. He’s sitting in the driver’s seat of a long low transport he found tucked away in a corner of the room. It’s nothing special, like a cross between a pickup truck and a golf cart, but Shad’s got it running and that’s all we need.
Unlike everything else on the island, it’s not automated, got a steering wheel and everything. It was probably left here for emergencies, in case something drastic happened and a human was required to intervene. A thick layer of dust shows just how often that’s been necessary.
Luckily for us it’s sat here plugged in so the battery’s all charged and ready to go.
I jump in the rear while Shad backs it out and points us facing west down the wide tunnel.
“You boys ready or what?” Anika asks. Her gun’s been rattling as the bots try to breach the hole, but so far she’s kept them at bay. Still, we can’t stick around.
“We’re waiting on you,” Shad replies.
Anika stops shooting, and when her gun falls silent I notice a rising hum in the room. Then my pulse goes into overdrive as rows of red circles light up in the darkness as the dormant bots power on.
“Grab some frags on your way past,” I add. “We’re gonna need them.”
A moment later Anika races up and dumps a whole crate of grenades in the back of the cart and hops in beside me.
“Move out!” she yells, then turns and rips the top off the crate and hands me a few grenades just as the first bots launch from their charging stations.
Shad floors it and we shoot off toward the tunnel while Anika and I take turns priming and tossing grenades. I lob two into the ammo crates as we zip past, and a few seconds later they detonate, setting off more explosions as the boxes of grenades go up next.
We drop frags until we’re into the tunnel and then I swap to my weapon, but they don’t seem to be following. The angry red eyes recede, and it seems like they’ve given up the chase.
We zip down the tunnel for a few breathless minutes, waiting for another attack, but nothing happens, and somehow that’s worse.
The tunnel’s surface lights up around us as we drive, so while we can see each other just fine, directly ahead and behind is completely dark. Anything could be waiting for us, but right now we’re alive and I’m grateful as hell.
Once it looks like we’re in the clear I lower the battle rifle and turn to Anika and my skin flushes. More than anything else I want to slide her visor up and kiss her, but I keep my cool.
“Thought we were done back there,” I say, suddenly breathless and nearly giddy with relief. Turns out I’m not as okay with dying as I thought I was.
“I never doubted it for a moment,” Anika says as she leans into me and bumps me with her shoulder. “Still, we’re not out of it yet.”
“We’re doing pretty fucking fantastic if you ask me,” Shad offers from the front of the cart.
“Tell that to Zara,” I say.
“Ahh, she’s fine,” Shad offers over his shoulder. “Probably already restored to her skyn and pissed she’s missing the fun.”
“Fun,” I mutter to myself. “Right.”
Anika cocks a look at me. “What’s going on with you?”
“What?” I say, tamping down on my excitement at not being dead. “You mean apart from us nearly dying back there?”
“Tell me,” she demands, her voice firm.
“What are you talking about?”
Her eyes narrow. “Out with it. You’re acting weird—” Then she straightens. “You made a save point with Standards before we cast in, right?”
How did she figure that out? I press my lips together and consider lying to her, but shrug instead.
“You fucking idiot,” she says. “How much time?”
I hesitate but she glares at me until I say, “Year and a half, give or take.”
Her face hardens but Shad laughs from the front seat.
“Hard-core mode, I love it. I run real-time backups so I don’t lose a second, but you’re on an eighteen-month run? What a fucking unit! You know, I didn’t like you at first but you’ve fucking grown on me, mate.”
“You son of a bitch,” Anika explodes, but limits herself to a harsh whisper only I can hear. “Why didn’t you tell me? No way I’d have even considered—”
“Exactly.”
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” she says. Her eyes are burning and her jaw is so tense I can hear her teeth grinding through her helmet. “It is not my fault if you die.”
“Right, and remember that,” I tell her, but no way she’ll let me absolve her. It’ll just be another thing she carries around. “Or how about none of us dies and we don’t have to worry about it?”
“That simple, is it—” Anika starts, but Shad interrupts her.
“Quit’cher bickerin’,” he says. “Something’s coming.”
He doesn’t slow, but we can sense it—the sound of the cart whirring in the tunnel is different. We raise our weapons and a moment later the tunnel opens up and rises into a huge cavern. The walls stretch out and around us, and we pass rows and rows of dimly lit medpods filled with lifeless game skyns. We must be passing under the Northwest Tower. If the island is preparing another trap, this would be a good place to spring it.
I swing my weapon up and get on my knees, ready to open fire if the pods should open and a bunch of skyns peel out after us, but Anika drags me back to sitting.
“Uh-uh,” she orders. “You keep your head down, understand?”
Appreciate the concern, but not a chance.
I lean close, keep my voice measured. “This isn’t the first stupid thing I’ve done, and I promise you it won’t be
the last, but this only works if we’re together. You watch my ass, I’ll watch yours, and we’ll get through it.”
She takes a breath. “We’d better,” she finally says. “’Cause if one of those bots kills you before I get the chance to kick your ass I’ll be fucking pissed.”
This time she doesn’t stop me when I get up on my knees and raise my weapon. We keep a tight watch on the dark medpods as we curve around the base of the tower, but everything stays quiet, and then we’re back into the tunnel on the other side.
“Won’t be far now,” Shad says once we’re again cruising along through the bubble of light.
“We got a plan?” Anika asks.
“Shit no,” Shad snarks. “But I expect we’ll be at the coast in a few minutes, probably end up at the Sunset Wild hotspot. Hopefully the tunnel keeps right on going all the way to the Control Center, but if not, we’ll figure it out from there.”
That’s as close to a well-thought-out strategy as we’re likely to get, so Anika and I settle down and watch for trouble. We kneel in the back of the cart, thighs pressed together as we watch our rear. The cart’s humming and the tension between us is getting thick, but then the tunnel walls open again and we’re into another room, one similar to the storage room under Aurora City.
The island must know what direction we’re heading, for sure will have defenses waiting, but the rows of bots remain silent as we pass through and into the tunnel on the other side.
The floor angles down and the pressure squeezes on my ears as we go under the water separating the main island from the Control Complex. We drive in silence, the wheels humming, our nerves straining in anticipation of something happening—an army of bots or an explosive ambush or sniper shots from down the tunnel—but nothing does, and that only makes it worse. The longer the island waits to hit us again the less we’re gonna like it.
Eventually the slope levels off and then rises again and a few minutes later a dot of light ahead of us widens as the narrow tunnel opens onto a massive staging area, somewhat like the supply caches we’d passed under the hotspots only a thousand times bigger. Except this room isn’t quiet.
Hundreds of bots are moving equipment around, automated forklifts hauling crates and floaters buzzing all around, but we drive right past. They don’t seem to notice us, and their lighting remains a neutral blue.
It’s like driving through an insect hive, except instead of food and larvae there are crates of gear and weapons, rows of dormant bots, and thousands of medpods all stretching off for hundreds of meters on either side of us, enough kit to outfit a respectable army.
Shad whistles and I feel it too. All these bots and skyns … If they were armed and loaded up with Killr and pointed at a target ...
“We need to take this place out,” I say.
“No shit,” Shad replies. “Get ready, we walk from here.”
He slows the cart as we approach the end of the road. The ceiling slants down and the walls angle in until we coast into a circular hub joining two other paths. I didn’t notice when we first entered, but the room is shaped like a triangle with pathways along each wall and the one we came in on running up the middle. The scale is magnificent, bigger and more efficient than anything I witnessed in the Forces.
We hop out of the cart, weapons low but ready, and our footsteps echo in the cavernous room.
“Shall we?” Shad says, gesturing toward the only other way out: a wide hallway beyond the concrete bollards keeping the cart from going any further.
I move to take the lead but Anika shoves past me and goes through first into a squared-off concrete-lined passageway. Pipes and cables run along the ceiling, and it’s wide enough for us to walk side by side, but we stick to single file and creep along until we reach a T-intersection and have to make a decision.
“Which way now?” Anika asks, peeking back and forth in each direction. The corridors are identical, no signs or markings. Likely the bots already know their way around.
I’m about to suggest a coin flip when Shad juts his thumb to the left. “That way,” he says.
I shrug and start to the left but Anika asks, “Why?”
Shad looks up to a thick black cable bracketed to the ceiling. “That’s a fifty-kilovolt transmission line, and it’s running right to left, which means whatever’s on the other side of it must need a shit-ton of power.”
“The AI core,” Anika says.
“Boingo,” Shad says, then steps past Anika and looks at me. “Stay behind us and cover our asses with that big gun of yours, would you?”
“Roger that,” I reply and fall in behind them.
The corridor only runs a few dozen meters before it cuts to the right. We stop and put our shoulders against the wall as Shad peeks around the corner.
“Well, shit,” Shad says. “Lookee what we got here …”
He swings around and Anika and I follow, and the blue light shining in through the circular window of the pressure door ahead of us is enough to tell me we’re in the right place. Shad spins the wheel in the middle of the door to unlock it, then pulls it open and steps through.
The room is big and white and stretches up like a missile silo. Catwalk scaffolding spirals up the walls, surrounding a lattice of interconnected pulsing blue spheres that hang from the ceiling by a web of silvery optical cabling.
We’ve found it—the AI core.
But that’s not all we’ve found.
Jefferson Wood, CEO of Decimation Island Live, is standing directly below the hanging core with his arms wide and a broad smile on his bearded face. He’s wearing a sharp grey suit and white shirt open at the collar. Four armed combots wait motionless behind him.
“Welcome,” he says, and when he speaks his accent is as burnished as his hair. “Anika Reyes, AKA AniK@, Wallace Williams, AKA OVRshAdo, and … guest. We’ve been expecting you.”
I’m frozen, don’t know what to do next. He knows exactly who we are and has an army at his back. What are we supposed to do now?
But Shad doesn’t hesitate. In one smooth action, he drops his AR, draws his pistol, and shoots Jefferson Wood right between his bright blue eyes.
AniK@
AniK@ // Post Game 8 Downtime
“Your run has been remarkable thus far,” Jefferson Wood asks. “What are your thoughts on OVRshAdo’s surprising return?”
You don’t answer. You’re once again in Camp Paradiso, and, now, more than ever, you don’t want to talk to anyone, let alone conduct an interview with the whole world watching.
Only seconds have passed since OVRshAdo wiped out your squad then offered to help you win, and you don’t know what to think. Thoughts are speeding at you so fast you can’t hold onto one long enough to consider it before it’s gone and replaced by another. Warrack’s death. OVRshAdo’s return and his crazy play at the end. And more than anything else, Rael.
You’ve carried a terrible feeling of dread for days now. You want to believe he’s still okay, but not knowing is driving you mad.
There’s only one thing you do know, and that’s you can’t trust OVRshAdo. No matter what he says or what he did or how much he claims he wants to help, he’s got his own motives and there’s not a chance they line up with yours.
“AniK@?” Wood asks. “Are you still with us?”
Still you don’t respond. You just want to be left alone, need time to process and calm yourself, recenter before the next game starts. You only have two left and then you’ll be able to see your boy again. Two hundred hours before you’re back with the money to save his life. If only you knew he was still alive, if you knew there was still hope, you could go on.
“AniK@?”
Screw this inter-game chitchat bullshit. Right now, there’s only one thing you want to know.
“Is my son alive?”
Wood is silent for a moment, then it says, “We know your son is very important to you, and the world has been rooting for your win. What does your heart tell you?”
“My heart? I do
n’t give a fuck about my heart. I need to know the truth.”
“You’re aware the game seclusion rules don’t permit us to disclose real-world details,” Wood says, “but if you could say something to him, right now, what would it be?”
It wants you to talk, to blather on about your feelings, but this isn’t about you—it’s about the audience. The game doesn’t care how you feel, it doesn’t care who lives or dies, it just wants to entertain—to wring every drop of compassion for your dying son and present it for the audience to lap up. But you can’t take it anymore. You’ve been playing this game for eight hundred hours, and not knowing is killing you.
Finally, the wall you’ve built around the frustration and fear you’ve been carrying around inside you explodes. “Why can’t you just tell me? I know you know. TELL ME!”
“We understand this is an emotional time for you, Anika. Perhaps we shall leave it here for now. Good luck on your continued success in the next round.”
“No, wait,” you shout, but Wood slips out of your head and the other survivors materialize around you.
You want to collapse, to bury your face in your hands and cry until there’s nothing left, but everyone’s watching you and there’s still too much game left to fall apart now.
Feeling the weight of the other survivors’ eyes, you walk through the dining hall toward your spot on the dock, hoping to get a few quiet moments before you’re dropped into the next round—but OVRshAdo’s beat you there.
He’s leaning against the railing, with his arms crossed and the setting sun as his backdrop, watching you approach.
There’s no avoiding this, might as well get it over with.
“What do you want from me?” you ask as you step up to him.
He just cocks an eyebrow and smirks so hard you want to slap him. “Exactly what I told you—I want to help you win.”