Rune Source: A Virtual Universe novel (Rune Universe Book 3)

by Hugo Huesca

  “How narcissistic can you be?” Wily’s voice was as loud as I was quiet. Tiny flecks of spit hit me in the face as he yelled loudly enough to quell all the noise in the hall. “You’re but a kid! You can’t surely pretend to lecture me about morals! Not after the decision you took without consulting anyone! Accepting or denying us this line of research is not your call to make—”

  He got a bit too close to me while he screamed. Faster than you can say, “reasonable self-defense,” I shifted my weight backward and tensed my neck. Back in Lower Cañitas, we called this the starting position for the classic move known as “the headbutt.”

  Before I could bring it to bear, though, Foreman was suddenly occupying the remaining space (which wasn’t a lot) between the doctor and I. He placed one reassuring hand behind the doctor’s neck, without any outward sign of aggression.

  “Back away, doc, please.”

  Wily did so, pale and stuttering. He backed away fast and I could tell why. Foreman’s hand was as thick as the doctor’s neck.

  Hey, Foreman, are you related to John Derry?

  “Thank you. Now, whatever you think of Cole, you’re factually wrong about one thing. The fate of Digital Dorsett is very much in his hands. The UN Emergency Council named the ‘original’ version of a Rune copy the legal holder of all copies’ rights. Provisionally—until a better solution is drafted. So, if Cole says no, I think that’s final.”

  Wily took a step away from Foreman. “I see. Such a shame you’re wasting this opportunity, Cole.”

  “Here’s five fingers,” I told him, showing him my open palm. “Now there’s only one! Guess what it means?”

  The old man left for a corner of the room, fuming. He took out his phone, I guess to tell his bosses about his failure. As he walked away, he passed near Doctor Sommer, who was nursing a broken nose.

  “Seriously,” Sommer told the man. “Chill out a bit.”

  3 CHAPTER THREE

  THE NATURE OF SELF

  THE NPC’S name was Paulson. He used to be a Federation soldier before he retired to take care of his family’s growing mining business. He had two children and had been married two times.

  I had been following him for a real-world week.

  I was sure I had reached and crossed the obsession line without even realizing it, but I still didn’t care. I needed to know, even if all the evidence I’d ever seen pointed to how impossible it was.

  Paulson’s life was boring and quiet. Which pissed me off to no end. He was right now working on a tax form. I’d spied on him so much that I was now the leading expert in a useless variant of accounting. It was useless because only NPCs in a videogame used it.

  It didn’t stop Rune from twisting the knife deeper.

  Your Accounting skill has leveled up! (3rd Level). Congratulations on your dedicated study! Your personal Quest: Figure out the nature of your own mind, is moving along nicely.

  Moving along nicely? I thought bitterly as I dismissed the prompt. It’s not moving at all!

  I took my gaze off the screen and set the miniature spy drone in Paulson’s house on energy-saving mode.

  Tax forms!

  I passed my hand over my razor-shaved head and sighed. Yes, “obsession” was a good word for it.

  But I needed to know.

  “Are you feeling okay, Cole?” asked Beard. He was sitting next to me in a floating chair that let him bridge the height distance between us. “This is what you wanted to see, wasn’t it? An NPC doing life things besides existing only around players.”

  Hearing my name on my friend’s lips sent a pang of mixed feelings through my virtual brain. Anger, because I knew technically the name didn’t belong to me. Gratitude, because Beard knew this and didn’t care. Shame, because I was still letting it get to me. And fear. Because the organs and hormones that created feelings in a human body were, in my, a bunch of strings of very complex code.

  I existed on mirages. As if I was built with smoke and mirrors. And yet, I thought and was aware of the fact. But I was also very, very sure that I was eighteen—no, nineteen now—years old, and had the memories and personality to back that claim up. I also knew that, in reality, I was less than a year old and that those memories were of someone else.

  Yeah, it was the mother of all existential crises. And it would be very easy to feel better about it if the goddamn videogame where I lived (where I was emulated) didn’t have a hard-on for keeping players on the right side of the curtain…

  “You know this proves nothing,” I told Beard with a tired voice. I tried, really tried, not to let my friend realize the extent of my frustration. But we both knew.

  “Well… It proves that the Signal supplies code for Rune Universe that isn’t directly related to players.”

  “Or that its processing power is high enough that it can create said code when it realizes we want to look for it.”

  It was the oldest riddle in the book. If a tree falls in a forest when no one’s around, does it make noise?

  What the hell happened to NPCs in a game with infinite computing power when no one was around to watch them?

  What would happen to me if no one was around? I forced my mind away from that line of thinking. Contrary to current appearances, I wasn’t trying to become suicidally depressed.

  I had found out lots of things about my condition. For example, during the first week of…well, my new existence, I had been terrified of dying in game. Because I didn’t really have a real world, and the game was all there’d ever be for me. So, I had good reason to believe I was in a messed-up, hardcore, one-life-only, die-in-the-game-die-in-real-life situation.

  I’d decided not to die at any point so I wouldn’t have to find out if my fear was correct. I only needed to stay in the Argus Space Station and work with the PDF to Translate the ongoing conversation with our new Alien buddies.

  Of course, I got killed by a wild blaster shot while a player was trying to finish some assassination quest for a pirate group. That’s the problem with walking around without a helmet. But in my defense, I never wore one in real life.

  This event taught me several things. First of all, dying in-game wasn’t really a thing. I felt the Rune-style pain of the blast, and before I could lose my virtual shit, I lost control of my body. I was invisible, calmly floating above the charred remains of my corpse. It was later pointed out to me that it was trivial to copy the body “graphic” and add a death animation, so it wasn’t even my real body lying there. I was just made invisible and immobile. After all, there’s no need to program death when making a videogame, and the developers at Nordic had just gone with the industry’s standard procedure.

  Turns out, respawning is merely a matter of showing a death-menu (You have died!) and relocating your body graphic to the respawn point. I was moved instantly to virtual Earth, in the research station where I—the other Cole—had appeared the first time he logged in.

  The moving part had been the only nasty part of the procedure because all the others happened so fast I didn’t have time to think about it. It lasted a single second. I was beneath Rune Universe, inside the underlying Signal. It was an infinite expanse of black and green framework with the game itself being a cluster of stiff-looking graphics thrown together in a flat map above me. I’d seen similar things in older videogames where the players glitched and fell through the map.

  Scary part? Players could simply walk away if they glitched like this. But what if it happened to me? I would fall forever through an infinite void.

  Forever, being, forever. Look again at the part about me not being able to die. Yeah, I had a new power-armor suit now, and a lot of virtual insurances on my ass, courtesy of friends and family. No point poking the devil with a stick.

  Let’s not think about the fact that you’re standing on a floor made of the same fake material your body is.

  “Cole, you there?” asked Beard. I gasped and looked at him, realizing I’d just spent a couple minutes lost in thought. “I lost you for a b
it, buddy.”

  “Sorry. I was thinking of this.” I smacked the table in front of us and we heard a clang reverberate through my Argus house. “This thing right here. To me, it feels real enough, but it’s just a graphic, man. How did you put it that one time? A bunch of coordinates in the form of ones and zeroes.”

  “Yeah,” said Beard with a guilty frown. “I do regret using those exact words.”

  “I’m made of the same stuff,” I told him. I poked my own arm with my finger. It felt… real enough. The Device had scanned my brain with all the nerve-endings and stuff that implied. My own body was more complex than most of the NPCs and players, because those were made (at least at the start) by Nordic. This body had been made by the Signal’s own unfathomable algorithms, extrapolated from my own brain. Then stuffed like a barely matching piece of cardboard inside Rune Universe.

  It had taken me a month to figure out how to summon my inventory screen, for example. And, of course, it was empty. I was technically an NPC, too, judging by it.

  Cole Dorsett

  -Rookie NPC-

  Inventory

  Social

  Quests

  Map

  Options

  Stats

  Translight Communicator

  0 databytes

  “You know,” said Beard, “there are a lot of fine physicians who suffered an existential crisis, not unlike the one you’re going through…it happens when they figure out in college what, exactly, is reality made of.”

  “Ones and zeroes?”

  “Coordinates.” Beard shrugged. “The way I see it, everyone has to come to grips with their life not being as solid as they hoped it was. It’s just called growing up. Even if you’re really just a simulation of a human being…well, if you’re good enough to fool me, your family, and yourself, then not calling you a real person is just a matter of semantics.”

  I flashed him a smile. “Our Paulson friend thinks he’s a human being, too.”

  “But he suddenly goes deaf every time you try to tell him there’s a real world and this is only a videogame,” said Beard. “Specifically, because someone at Nordic programmed the NPCs to maintain immersion at all times.”

  It was a chat we’d been having a lot lately. I had the suspicion that a squad of PDF-funded psychologists were sometimes right next to Gabrijel Ivanic in the real world, trying their best at keeping their Translator from going raving mad.

  At least I was sure Beard’s intentions were good. And, truth be told, my new existence wasn’t as lonely as one would think in the first place.

  Almost all the entertainment mankind had produced was at my fingertip’s access, more or less. My Options screen, after all, came with its own Internet browser and there were enough mods in Rune to access streams and the like to keep me company.

  Hell, some people spent almost as much time in virtual reality as I did, and they weren’t complaining.

  I smacked my leg in an impatient gesture. “Okay! Enough with the gloom. We’re calling off today’s experiment, then?”

  Beard nodded and scribbled some fast notes in the holographic keyboard by his forearm. “Even if the results don’t tell you what you wanted to hear, knowledge is knowledge. Get enough pieces of the puzzle and we’ll figure it out, eventually. That’s what people do.”

  I glanced at the hologram of Van’s stream. Sis was in the middle of declaring war once again on poor Sleipnir—Jottun—whatever they called themselves now. Apparently, the Emergency Council had pissed her off. I could guess why.

  While she spoke, the cyber-raptor that was her mount and co-host was mimicking her war-like gestures, much to the merriment of her subscribers.

  “You wanna go with her?” asked Beard, following my gaze. “Could be fun. Last time I made bank by selling the remains of Jottun’s spaceships.”

  “I think it’s a girl’s night out,” I told him without looking away.

  That meant Rylena was going to be there. Beard realized this and coughed uncomfortably.

  “Too bad. Perhaps you can help me with my combat exo-suit’s development, then?”

  I had to smile again. A lot, perhaps all, of the reason I’d managed to keep my sanity after being turned into Tron’s wet dream had been my friends and family going to insane lengths for me. It was awkward for everyone. Cole technically was right there. It’s not like they had lost anything.

  It didn’t deter them one bit. Mom visited a lot, sometimes splitting her day between Rune and the real world. She was a terrible shot with the blaster rifle.

  Van visited, too, of course. She was the one who floated the idea of thinking of me as Cole’s twin, which I thought was the best option in the long run. It was made harder, of course, because I was sure I wasn’t the twin.

  Walpurgis and Beard more or less formed a side-alliance with me and Francis, and I was currently learning trap-making from Mai. The CIA analyst had stuck around after the fight against Sleipnir. Now, she was an honorary member of the team.

  Rylena, Cole, and I had one hell of an awkward conversation regarding the elephant in the room. There are only two persons in a couple, and I wasn’t Cole, even if I knew his e-mail password and could order pizza to his address easily.

  So, I stepped away of my own volition. But imagine a conversation with twice the usual Cole stubbornness. Before calmer temperaments had prevailed, a lot of very fucking awkward solutions had been floated around. They had made the sofa anecdote seem like a beloved memory.

  I was avoiding them for the time being, for all of our sakes. There would come a time, I hoped, when I could see Rylena as a good friend, in the same way Van thought of me as merely another brother. In the meantime, it was like breaking up with someone who had just chosen your doppelganger.

  “Sure,” I told Beard. “I’d like that. I’ll try not to go around pushing red buttons.”

  “Thank you. No one wants Thursday happening again.”

  I shivered. “Yeah, let’s not speak of Thursday ever again.”

  As we closed down our recording software and other tools set up around the house, my Social screen buzzed with a VIP message.

  Crestienne has requested a communication channel with you. Do you wish to receive it?

  “It’s that time of the day, huh?” Beard said as he watched the transparent window over my shoulder. “The UN is getting really clingy with their chat requests. I wonder if they realize that having the Rivendell Council every other day takes the gravitas out of it really fast.”

  “I can’t really blame them,” I told him. “If I was in their shoes, I’d be jumpy too. I mean…If I’m being totally honest, I’m a bit disappointed our interstellar friends aren’t going to solve the world’s problems or anything.”

  As it turned out, and from what I’d seen, the Aliens had a civilization more or less on par with ours, with different approaches to achieve the same thing. It’s a bit hard to explain (that’s the point of the Translator, after all), but imagine a society where the industrial revolution never happened. Instead of cutting down trees to make houses, they found out a way to convince the trees to grow tentacles and solidify them in a house-like shape.

  The fact that those trees were in indescribable pain was something I kept to myself, since it was the kind of cultural difference that I was supposed to regulate in the first place.

  So, lots of weird, non-Euclidean geometries that more or less functioned as shopping malls, indescribable visages, and untranslatable expressions almost taken from Geiger’s wet dream—chatting happily as midday news’ anchors do.

  Are you getting the picture? No interstellar spaceships, no solutions to world hunger. The other side was as scared of us as we were of them, and every time my mind went to “visit,” I was received by terrified xeno-psychologists, or their politicians equivalent trying to scare me into gifting them the solutions to world hunger, mortality, and late-night reality shows.

  “Well, that only shows you haven’t given the subject much thought,” said Beard as I
punched a message to Crestienne telling her I would see her at the designated time. After all, I had signed the agreement to work for the PDF before I was digitized.

  Lawyers were still figuring out if Caputi’s contract was legally binding. There’d been fistfights over it. I’d guest-starred in Van’s stream that time.

  Then someone had pointed out I wasn’t recognized as a person by any court. Could I even have a bank account?

  Some poor lawyer ventured a tantalizing no. Another one instantly pointed her finger at every corporate hologram dancing on the skyline. Why could EA be a person but I could not? Fistfights reignited.

  It was the little pleasures…

  “I don’t know about you, but it feels right,” Beard confided. “Some god coming down from the heavens to fix the world’s problems is a terrible way to end a story. Makes all that happened beforehand meaningless.”

  “You mean, like the Eagles in Return of the King?”

  Beard’s face was a mask of horror and betrayal. “You monster! Of course Tolkien thought of that, the Maiar…”

  Yup, I thought with a slight smile as Beard and I left the Command Center of the Argus Station to reunite with the PDF’s representatives. It’s the little pleasures.

  Beard’s dissertation on Eagles didn’t stop until we were in deep space.

  4 CHAPTER FOUR

  A NEWBORN'S FIRST STEPS

  THE DEVICE that allowed the digitalization of the first (allegedly) human mind into the Rune framework was extraordinarily complex, but it has been pointed out frequently that mankind was about to reach the point where it could scan a brain without a problem.

  Experiments with simple brains had been ongoing since the early 2010’s, with one of the first recorded examples of such an emulation being the relatively easy-to-program brain of a worm.

  Worms, as it turned out, function quite like a simple machine, with a locomotion system of only 302 neurons. Worms care about the simple things in life, like moving, eating, and—if possible— not dying.