Dakota trudged into her apartment and locked the door. The whole ride back, she stared down the maw of her slow but inevitable slide into normality. Teenage idealism might’ve lasted longer if her little brother wasn’t at risk. Truth be told, at nineteen, she’d been every bit as gung-ho as him. She couldn’t decide if she was ‘coming out of the fog’ and growing up, realizing it pointless to fight corporate power… or if the machine had won, sapping her will to fight it.
Stuck somewhere between the idea of taking a shower and actually doing it, she sat on the edge of her bed naked for a few minutes, feeling like a close family member had just died in her arms. Stealing $4,200 from an ATM barely registered at all. As a teen, she’d faked out prepaid gift cards and stolen $100 here, $50 there, and usually wound up terrified for days afterward that she’d get busted, but no one ever found her. Stealing four grand should’ve freaked her out, but everything had become numb.
She started to reach for the game helmet, which made her think about Eric’s quip of sending him a ‘wearing only the helmet’ pic.
The tiniest of smiles happened.
She put the helmet down, showered, and slipped into a tee and sweat pants. While blow-drying her neon blue mane, she devoured a box of pizza rolls after microwaving them. One in three retained frozen cores, while a handful napalmed her mouth.
Once finished, she snugged the helmet on, reclined, and threw herself into Axillon99. There, she didn’t have to worry about a sick society, poor children with guns under their dresses, a stupid little brother living on the street, or the off chance she might go to prison for stealing from a bank.
Frustrated at no one else from the crew being online―surprisingly enough, even Nighthawk was off―she logged on Triani and spent a while flying aimlessly around the pink clouds. Except for not getting tired, the game did an amazing job of making it feel like she really had wings. The new helmet completely blocked off all sensation of lying on her bed, allowing the touch of the wind creeping into all the gaps in the scanty Niath garment to lift her out of reality.
It wouldn’t take much effort at all to wish away the real world and embrace this life among the clouds.
Eventually, she resigned herself that yeah, maybe she had let her conspiracy theory parents push her off the deep end. What she thought had been reasonable compromise might have still been ‘edgy.’ Maybe she had grown up a little. Slinging coffee at an Amazon Café wouldn’t give her the sweet life, but it at least gave her a life. An apartment, all the ramen she could eat, and wearable clothes. She had it better than quite a lot of people in the world.
Still, she’d give it up to be a Niath living primitive in the Celestia Forest.
Right. She glanced at a ‘44’ by pending messages. Some people she’d grouped with before wanted to know if she’d join them for missions. Anyone below level twenty at this point was either levelling an alt, a little kid, or a genuine casual player. She messaged a male Niath, Avalon42, back, remembering he’d been a pleasant conversationalist at least. Probably educated, maybe even a teacher from the way he spoke.
The rest of Saturday slipped by in a pleasant haze of pretending to be a space angel.
Sunday, she went back to working on Fawkes, at least until 3:00 p.m., when Eric came over for real. They hung out for a bit before he took her out for dinner, an Italian restaurant nice enough that her neon-blue hair got disdainful stares. On a lark, after they ate, he brought her to an interactive exhibit for the 2027 Mars Colony mission. The science center designed it mostly for older children, but he thought it would be fun to compare real spacecraft to what they played with online.
Dakota lost herself, zooming around the exhibit for a while like a teenager. When a security guard called her ‘young lady,’ she lost it and cracked up laughing. The reaction hadn’t amused the guy, but the worst thing she’d done was make noise, so he didn’t throw her out. From there, they returned to her apartment and threw on a movie.
While cuddling, she decided to tell him about the guy who followed her home.
He pulled her close. “You should carry something to protect yourself.”
“That’s what I was thinking, but I’d be the one who goes to jail for shooting a rapist.”
Eric sighed. “You don’t necessarily need to go that far. Hang on.” He leaned up enough to get his cell phone out and fiddled with the Amazon app. “Here, what about this?”
She took the phone and looked at a photo of a black canister with a bright red end. “The Habanero Hammer? What the hell is that?”
“Pepper spray from hell. Hit a dude in the face with that shit, he’ll be crying for his mother. Wears off eventually, and won’t kill.”
“Hmm.”
He took the phone back and committed the order. “There. Decision made.”
“Pepper spray? I dunno. Don’t some guys eat that stuff on purpose?”
“Well, only a bullet is a hundred percent effective, but that’s got other problems.”
She laughed. “Yeah.” Her mirth died quick. “I went to visit my brother yesterday. Saw this little girl. She couldn’t have been older than eight and she was carrying a gun.”
“Jesus,” muttered Eric. “Why?”
“That’s what I’m wondering. What could make a kid that age want a gun?”
He raised both eyebrows. “Maybe the Girl Scouts have resorted to more aggressive marketing for their cookies.”
She poked him in the side.
“Ow.”
“That’s not funny. This kid was practically in rags. Barely affords clothes, but she’s got a little gun.”
“Might not even work. Maybe she found it? Could be a toy she hopes will fake someone out?”
Dakota shrugged.
Eric’s phone chimed, indicating a drone had just dropped off the package on the apartment building’s stoop. “Be right back.”
He ran out into the hall, returning a few minutes later with a box. The Habanero Hammer can wound up being bigger than it had looked online, like the handle of a full-sized Maglite.
“Damn, this thing is heavy. Should I spray the creep or club him with it?” She read over the instructions. “Flick the safety cap up and push the trigger. Stream’s got a fifteen-foot reach.”
“Go for the face,” said Eric.
“Right.” She got up and put the can in her bag. “So, you wanna do the sex thing or log into Ax?”
Eric scoffed. “Good grief, woman, you have to ask?”
She grinned and slipped her thumbs under the waistband of her skirt.
He pointed two fingers to the right. “I’ll grab my helmet.”
Dakota gawked at him.
“Hah! Your face.” He strolled up to her. “Just kidding, Babe. Ain’t nothing I’d rather do than be with you.”
She leaned up to kiss him. “There will be retribution for that.”
Eric grinned. “I expect nothing less.”
She dragged him across the apartment to the bed.
Dakota woke up, draped over Eric. The warmth of their naked bodies pressed together shrouded her in a degree of comfort that came dangerously close to loss-of-job. She snuggled into him, fully ready to tell the Amazon Café to go to hell; she’d rather stay in bed.
She didn’t quite manage to drift back to sleep by the time the alarm went off.
“Ngh, what time is it?” moaned Eric.
“Five thirty,” said Dakota. “I’m opening.”
“Damn, girl. Even the devil ain’t up at this hour.”
She gave him a squeeze. “You saw my horns last night.”
He grunted.
“Ugh. I’d tell my boss to screw off, but I like Hal. What time do you have to go in?”
“Gotta be there at nine.”
“I’ll reset the alarm for eight.”
Eric emitted a moan that sounded like an attempt to convey thanks.
She rushed a shower, got dressed, and jogged the four blocks to work.
Much to her pleasant surprise, Kavan and Ange
l813 logged in later that day around 6:00 p.m. She’d had a good few hours of solo mission running on Fawkes and got her experience bar within spitting distance of hitting level forty.
Eric usually logged in around seven since it took him about a half hour to get home from work. She rushed back to the Stormbringer, hoping to talk the others into chasing down that next map location. While chatting, planning, and waiting for Rallek to show up, Kavan found a ship mission not too far out of the way that he wanted to do on the way to investigate the second set of coordinates. They discussed taking the datapad to that Dar Cevu guy, but Fawkes didn’t trust it.
“Should be pretty easy, little extra experience,” said Kavan. “Check out a distress beacon.”
Fawkes shrugged. “Okay, cool.”
“Ugh,” said Nighthawk. “Those missions always turn into a huge ship full of aliens that jump out at you. I hate those.”
Kavan bowed his head with a slight nod. “If it’s one of those, we can skip it.”
“Cool.” Nighthawk smiled.
Rallek phased into existence at 7:08 p.m. “Hey all. Wow, everyone’s on.”
Angel813 stretched in her chair, yawning. A pastel blue puffball with dragon-like wings appeared in her hands. After a moment of gazing round at everyone, it took flight, orbiting her. It had a long, prehensile tail, and made cute tweeping coos. “Yeah. I took some time off work. I need to de-stress. Had a ninety-year-old man grab my boob yesterday, and before you say adorable, he knew exactly what he was doing.”
Fawkes frowned. “Once a perv…”
“Yeah.” Angel813 waved as if flinging crumbs off a table. “So, I took a week off. Maybe he’ll be dead by the time I go back.”
Nighthawk laughed.
Fawkes stifled a giggle. “Wow, dark.”
“He’s ancient.” Angel813 examined her nails. “And he’s an asshole. Not saying I want him dead, but at that age, waking up in the morning is an achievement.”
Kavan explained the mission he wanted to do, and showed on the star map how minimal a detour it would be from the coordinates they found on the crashed fighter. Everyone agreed, so he jogged off to the bridge.
The flight out to the location of the distress beacon took about twenty minutes. Nighthawk used the time playing the in-game auction system, buying and selling items for profit. Rallek read over several different build compositions for technomancers. Soft chirps and tiny giggles emanated from around Angel813 as she summoned a legion of small vanity pets. Some resembled normal cats, but the vast majority were outlandish: a pink-furred thing with giant ears and bigger eyes looked like the physical embodiment of cuteness. She had a few rabbit-ish critters, one with grey fuzzy antlers, and a handful of furballs-with-eyes.
“Heads up,” said Kavan over the PA system. “We’re approaching what looks like a derelict starship. We’re also about a four-minute flight away from your coordinates.”
Fawkes ran to engineering. Rallek and Angel813 darted up and down ladders to the turret pods, and Nighthawk hauled ass for the fighter hatch. Once she skidded to a stop by her engineering table, Fawkes attacked the subsystem control panel and rerouted some power from shields to sensors. A brief but intense detection pulse revealed nothing cloaked. Her sweep wouldn’t have shown the exact position of any hidden ships, but she would’ve known that cloaked vessels existed nearby.
“I got nothing on the screen,” said Fawkes over the comm. “Just a”―she glanced at the readout showing a silhouette of a large loaf-shaped ship with numerous sections flashing red―“Cassini class passenger ship. Looks like the engines are dead, and it’s sustained quite a bit of hull damage. Probably pirates or something hit it.”
A small indicator light winked on.
“Incoming transmission,” said Fawkes.
“Wow, you guys really get into this, don’t you?” asked Angel813. “When did I walk onto the set of Star Trek?”
Kavan laughed. “Well, this game is pretty damned immersive. Feels like we’re really here. Might as well sound the part.” He cleared his throat. “Put it on the viewscreen, lieutenant.”
“Wait, Fawkes is a lieutenant?” asked Nighthawk. “I’m a fighter pilot. I should be an officer.”
Rallek’s chuckling came over the comm as well as echoed in the shaft up to the turret.
“Help me, please,” said a young female voice. “I’m Anastasia Hayden. My father is Frances Hayden of the Galactic Senate. Please don’t leave me stranded on this ship.”
“I smell bullshit,” said Rallek.
Nighthawk snickered.
“What’s a senator’s daughter doing on a shot-to-hell passenger ship out here? And how is she the only survivor?” asked Rallek.
Kavan dropped the starship captain voice. “What happened down there?”
Fawkes opened a viewscreen, patched into the feed. A dark-haired girl of around twelve in a clingy blue light-armor suit, her face smudged with grime, stood in a smoke-filled room where furniture lay scattered about and small fires burned in the background.
“Something attacked the ship. I heard the shooting and screaming, so I crawled into the vents to hide. It was awful! Everyone’s gone! There’s a couple androids still here, and they’re mean, but they can’t get in here. I hacked the door.”
“Androids attacked that ship?” asked Kavan.
“No, they’re our androids. Whoever attacked us made them go crazy.”
Wow. This AI’s pretty natural. A lot more so than most quest NPCs.
The girl leaned closer to the camera, her face filling the screen. “Will you please help me? I want to go home.”
“You must admit, Anastasia, that it’s a little strange for a senator’s daughter to be on a commercial ship at all, much less be the only survivor,” said Kavan.
“I know.” She looked down. “You must think this is a trap or something. Please, scan the ship. You’ll see I’m the only person on board. I booked passage under a false name. A body double was on our private ship as a decoy.”
Fawkes dialed up a scan of the derelict. Sure enough, she read forty-seven active androids and one human. “Scan checks out.”
“All right. Hang on kid, we’re coming in.”
Anastasia clutched her hands together at her chin and beamed. “Oh, thank you! Please be careful.”
The massive passenger liner had a docking bay large enough to carry a small army of corvettes. Kavan swung the Stormbringer around toward the starboard aft and approached the gaping hole where a door had once been.
“We’re gonna need bubbles for this,” said Rallek.
Everyone’s armor had the ability to project atmospheric-retaining force fields around the head. Players referred to them as ‘bubbles’ due to their appearance. While not terribly realistic, the developers opted for that rather than bulky space suits for ‘fun’ reasons.
Of course, they had a downside in the form of a time limit from power consumption. A player could handle being out of atmosphere only forty-five minutes before the ‘battery’ ran out and they dropped dead.
Fawkes grumbled internally, arguing with herself between the amount of time this mission appeared ready to consume and the sorrowful face of a young girl in danger. She usually got emotional over fictional characters, so that didn’t surprise her. But saving this nonexistent kid cut into time that could be used racing other players to ten million bucks. Well, two million, after the split with the crew. Probably more like 1.2 after the government stole their share.
They disembarked the Stormbringer into a cavernous hull full of chewed-up shuttles and a handful of fighter craft. Broken bits glided around, spun in place, or caromed off walls, still in flight from the explosion that destroyed them.
“Crap, I hate zero gravity,” said Angel813. “So hard to dodge.”
Everyone’s armor included a basic set of ‘maneuvering jets’ that the game controlled in much the same way as walking. A player had only to think of using them, and they worked. After messing around with a Niath, Fawkes took
to the zero-g maneuvering with ease since it shared much of the same ‘feel’ as flying. While the winged alien handled like a sports car, the motion control thruster system steered more like a box truck.
They made their way to a large door on the inner wall. No sooner did they open it than a pack of rickety androids attacked in a flurry of laser blasts. Flashes and sparks snapped from the wall over her head from near misses. Fawkes yelped, ducked, and ran for cover behind a bulkhead strut, unable to engage stealth due to the intense brightness of the light plus the narrow confines of the corridor. She popped out and took a shot that hit a plastic-shelled android in the shoulder, knocking it away from its cover to the floor.
Nighthawk peppered it to death before it could even sit up.
“That innocent little girl is going to be some kind of space demon I bet,” said Rallek. “It’s going to be ‘Oh, thank you for saving me; now die!’” He roared.
“Hah. Yeah, she was rather… pleading,” said Angel813.
“If I was her age stuck on a ship like this, I’d be whiney and beggy, too.” Fawkes popped up again and shot an android square in the face. The one next to it pivoted and tagged her in the chest with a burst. The annoying-but-not-painful hit slammed her into the wall. Her health bar dropped by twenty percent. “Oof. Well, these guys aren’t too bad.”
The familiar whir of one of Angel’s medi-bots glided up behind her.
They made relatively short work of the ambush, and proceeded down the hall toward where the sensor sweep had picked up the lone human occupant. A third the way up the length of the passenger liner, they found a still-operational door with intact atmosphere on the other side.
“Good,” said Kavan. “No more time limit.”
One hallway full of combat androids led to another hallway full of combat androids. The fights never quite felt dangerous, but didn’t reach boredom levels of ease. About twelve minutes after disembarking the Stormbringer, the crew reached a locked door.
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