by Hugo Huesca
As an answer, the drone bobbled once, like saying, “Probably double that,” and then his attention returned to me. I thought I knew what he wanted to say. Perhaps I was already imagining things.
“I’m as lost as you are, bud,” I said with a shrug. “As far as I’m concerned, Rune should have died with the Signal.”
At least there was no Keles around.
But in this morning the fears of last night were far away. I felt brave enough to venture a conjecture.
“You sure you don’t know anything, bud? You’re a Core subroutine, aren’t you?” I asked as I recalled the conversation I’d had with David Terrance. “It’s OK, there is no illusion to maintain anymore. What’s the Core telling you?”
As a response, 401 stood frozen in the air for a moment, long enough to make me worry. Then it shook side to side to make it clear he was trying to tell me something.
“What? That’s a negative, I think. You’re saying you won’t check?”
More side to side shaking.
“Another try. No Core?” He stopped his swaying. “Is that what you’re saying, 401? Nothing on the other side of the curtain? Silence over the radio?”
401 shook up and down. The Core had been the mind behind all NPC subroutines. If 401 was right, that mind was now gone.
In a way, this didn’t surprise me. I’d seen the Core go down. I saw how it had shut down.
Whatever this world was, it wasn’t the Rune I knew anymore.
“But how?” I asked aloud. “How is it possible…?”
Computers didn’t have an afterlife, and the virtual worlds created in them didn’t survive once the power was cut off.
I walked briskly towards the shoreline and sat just two or five feet away from the waves breaking on the sand, in front of my Teddy. The current had a different timeline than the Earth’s sea, and I could see my ship had inched a bit farther into the water during the night.
“I’ll have to anchor it down before the current drags it away,” I said aloud. The cargo bay had some antigrav harnesses and other equipment I could put to good use. It’d take me all day, perhaps more…but what else could I do?
Next to me, 401 buzzed in confusion, like it was asking why would I bother.
“Here’s what I think happened,” I told the drone without taking my eyes away from my ship and the way Validore’s sun shone over the fuselage. “David shuts down the Core, then the Signal follows suit. All the instant-access memory is dumped away. This kills Keles, cuts out the game’s connection to the servers, and powers Rune off.”
401 was a great listener. I suspected that Rylena built him with that purpose in mind.
“So far, so good, right? But something didn’t go as we expected…” I made a gesture all around us. “Rune Universe—the game—was a layer atop a layer, if I understood David’s meaning. The people that built the game never understood the Signal, had no idea what they were toying with. And in the end, all the NPC behavior and the emergent quests took everyone by surprise…because the Signal adopted this new layer. It had a lot of processing power to play with.”
I sighed, thinking I was missing something crucial to my explanation. Like it only approached the truth, but was far enough from it to make an ass out of myself.
“So our Core shuts down. But after I activated the Signal on Earth, the game got an expansion, remember? People were saying it was almost as big as the real universe. In theory, there was nothing stopping us from reaching our alien friends without using the Core…only the colossal distance, and that we didn’t know where they were.”
Of course, there probably wouldn’t be anything on that virtual planet when we reached it.
Probably.
“So there could be a connection somehow. From Rune to all the other worlds with an active Signal out there…And perhaps they, too, have a lot of processing power to throw around.”
Perhaps enough to maintain the software of a far-away Core that had suddenly died out.
I exchanged a glance with 401. “Who knows? Maybe it’s a very good thing that we took Keles down. Perhaps he was more of a threat to the entire universe that even he realized. If Rune could’ve reached other planets merely because it expanded far enough to reach them…”
They had no idea, I thought as I recalled the envoy that had come to warn our Alien friends. To them, all connection to other Signals stopped once the Core was down.
It meant not a single alien species in the entirety of the universe had thought of hooking up the Signal with a videogame and going to play in it. Until us.
I didn’t know if I should weep or feel furiously proud.
“To be honest, I’m probably wrong,” I told the drone. “I never understood those things very well, and Terrance and Beard are gone.”
401 shifted uncomfortably in the air and inched closer to me, like he was trying to comfort me.
“I’m okay,” I told him. And it was true. The longer I spent in Validore, with the sand around my feet and the breeze that brought with it the promise of mountains and vegetation, the more alive I felt.
The water felt real. 401 felt real. The air felt real.
What the hell did I care that this was just a virtual mirage?
I felt real.
“If you’re still around,” I told my friend, “then there could be other NPCs… Hell, perhaps without the Core to control their… their subconscious, I guess…they may be as real as David or me.”
The Terran Federation could still be around, and the survivors of the battle with Keles could be licking their wounds back on Earth.
Perhaps one day one of them would scout Validore. I knew I could wait. I had all the time in the world.
The drone by my side didn’t seem as convinced. He was frozen in the air, as if deep in thought. He looked down as if he distrusted the sand beneath my feet.
A splinter of doubt soured my mood. I remembered something. An endless sea made of bytes of maddened, dead, hateful alien minds extending as far as my eyes could reach.
All across the real universe, civilizations thought they were safe from them, that they were gone for good.
“If the Signal doesn’t work as they thought it would,” I said to myself, “perhaps they’re wrong on other things, too.”
Could we really be sure that Keles was gone for good? No one knew yet that Rune Universe extended farther than humanity’s Core. The proof of it was that 401 and I were alone.
I knew that if my friends and family had had any idea that I was still around, they would have come roaring back.
For that matter, can I still be sure that those dead minds are really dead? David had thought so. He had said that their individual data was so far scattered that them joining in the correct configuration would take more than the lifespan of the real universe.
They were destined to spend millions of years dreaming madly.
Thing is…they, too, had nothing else to do but wait.
I reached down and grabbed a fistful of golden sand and watched it pour down between my fingers, like an hourglass.
Even if I was wrong, even if I had no idea what I was talking about… the risk was too high to just go with the warm and cozy option and forget about all the nasty things lurking in the darkness.
Here, alone in the middle of a virtual reality as big as to be infinite, completely cut off from the people I loved, I realized I still had a choice to make.
“I imagine that if someone found a Paradise,” I told 401, “it would look very much like Validore. We could stay here, bud. I think I could be happy in this place, eventually. Content, at least.”
401’s blue eye focused on me.
“But my family is still out there,” I whispered. “And I don’t feel like being content just yet…”
A faint smile appeared on my lips, followed by a feeling so unexpected it made me shake with anticipation.
I was hungry. Not for food, mind you. Turns out, even in the end of the world there are still adventures to be had.<
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I couldn’t wait.
“So, how’s your database holding up?” I asked 401.
Already, my mind was racing. Making plans and discarding them, counting what little resources we had at our disposal, figuring the best way to put them to use.
“I’m thinking we race the Federation, 401. Let’s go meet them instead of waiting for them to find us. We’ll need some schematics, though. You’ve scanned enemy ships before, haven’t you? We could use them as a starting point.”
Sure, the amount of damage the Teddy had suffered was brutal. I was sure at this point it would be easier to just build a new one if we were in a spaceport. The repairs for sure exceeded my meager points in Engineering.
Even if I could, I’m not going to let this ship die. It means too much to me.
And I had time to grind. I had an entire planet to scout for materials.
401 caught my meaning without a problem. For the first time since he had come back online, the scout drone buzzed with happiness and energy. Seconds later, he knitted a hologram of blue light almost in front of my face, as tall as I was.
I recognized it the very instant it caught my gaze.
My smile gained a savage edge. “Ah, Rylena, you beautiful genius! I hope the other Cole marries you!”
She had put the plans of the Teddy inside 401’s database.
I could hear her whisper to herself, Just in case we end up stranded on an alien planet. She’d scratch her chin right after and start gathering other tools to store in the Teddy’s cargo bay for such a contingency. She’d put them somewhere safe. Perhaps a reinforced crate.
It was almost like she was right here with me.
“Let’s go, 401,” I told the drone. “We need to anchor the Teddy against the current. That’s step one. Next, we’ll have to…”
As I slowly built a working plan for us, we marched in the direction of the Teddy. In front of me, the sea and the sky were like an extension of the same surface, an endless pink that looked like cotton-candy.
I reached the sea and started swimming towards my ship.
The adventure wasn’t over yet.
Not on my watch.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It has been a ride, hasn’t it? We have just worked our way through more than 1,000 pages together, if you’ve read the entire Rune Universe trilogy.
I’m not sure how this trip has been on your end. I hope you had fun, because I certainly did. For my part, writing the four books in the Rune trilogy (counting the prequel) has been one of the most enjoyable ventures in my life. Also, hard as hell. Some scenes were so difficult to write that they felt like dragging my fingertips through glass. But even those, I feel they were worth it. I’m glad I got to write them, and I’m glad you got to read them.
Although our involvement in Cole, Kipp, Irene, and their friends’ adventures is done, I hope that’s not the end of our own adventures. If I’m able to, I plan to spend the rest of my life writing badass books with great plots and larger-than-life characters, and I strive to improve my writing with every new book. If I can keep to that promise, I hope you enjoy the new tales I have to tell you. Believe me, there are many of them, and my only regret is that I can’t pull a Digital Dorsett and divide myself in two or more, because that’s the only way I could hope to tell them all. I can only promise you that I’ll write the best of them, and that I’ll do my best to do them justice.
It won’t be long, I already have a couple manuscripts I’m working on.
In the meantime, until we see each other again, remember
The Adventure Continues.
And from the bottom of my heart, thank you for playing Rune Universe.
-Hugo Huesca.
ALSO BY HUGO HUESCA
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Table of Contents
Dedication
1. Chapter One
2. Chapter Two
3. Chapter Three
4. Chapter Four
5. Chapter Five
6. Chapter Six
7. Chapter Seven
8. Chapter Eight
9. Chapter Nine
10. Chapter Ten
11. Chapter Eleven
12. Chapter Twelve
13. Chapter Thirteen
14. Chapter Fourteen
15. Chapter Fifteen
16. Chapter Sixteen
17. Chapter Seventeen
18. Chapter Eighteen
19. Chapter Nineteen
20. Chapter Twenty
21. Chapter Twenty-One
22. Chapter Twenty-Two
23. Chapter Twenty-Three
24. Chapter Twenty-Four
25. Chapter Twenty-Five
26. Chapter Twenty-Six
27. Chapter Twenty-Seven
28. Chapter Twenty-Eight
Acknowledgments
Also by Hugo Huesca