Quest for Vengeance

by Benjamin Douglas

  Nemo and Meatloaf shared a glance and shook their heads. “Man,” Nemo said, “the sooner you stop acting so surprised about everything, the sooner you can just move on with your life.”

  “Oh yeah, sure. My life of forced servitude? How’s that working out for you?”

  He cursed me out and walked away with his bucket of pebbles.

  Meatloaf chuckled darkly. “Don’t mind him,” he said, “he’s been here almost since the beginning. Stuck in this place. Anyway, the designers didn’t mean for Hard Labor to be used as a player-vs.-player device.”

  “No?” I hacked at my rock again. “Could have fooled me.”

  He scooped some of the loose rubble into a pile with his shovel. “I was in the beta. Got in trouble for a bit of bad behavior in there, a little PvP play of my own—nothing this sadistic, but you know, killed a guy, stole his shit, blah blah. Wasn’t a sanctioned duel. Anyway, I did a stint in one of the legit camps.”

  My face scrunched up. “There are intentionally labor camps in here?”

  “Oh, sure. Gotta have some way to discourage the bad actors. If every time you login for the next week you’re stuck digging latrines or mining for iron ore, you tend to find the inspiration to keep your nose clean.”

  I guess it made sense from the developers’ perspective, but it didn’t make me feel any better. I’d never been one to love authoritarianism. And then there was always the possibility of abuse, like what was happening to us. “So what, these guys hijacked the system corrections tool to enslave us?”

  “More or less. A little more to it than that, I think. I mean, they must have someone in deep that was able to do some hack-wizardry, from what I’ve seen of this place. But in essence, yeah. The system seems to think this is a legit labor camp.”

  I chiseled at the stone again.

  This was some bullshit. I wasn’t about to be caged up like an animal and then forced to dig out caves of rubble like some centuries-old prison-worker. I wasn’t even a serious player, for crying out loud. I was just here to have some fun and connect with my sister. And these hackers thought they were going to do this to me?

  A whistle blew. Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to form a line to head back to the cells.

  My head burned. If I could have literally seen red, I would have. I was humiliated. I was powerless. And I was done. My fingers tightened around the handle of my pickaxe as I came closer to the goblinoid player who was collecting them from us up ahead.

  Get ready.

  “Pickaxe,” he lazily said with his hand outstretched. Fangs handed him the tool. “Shovel.” Same. “Bucket.” Same. “Pickaxe.”

  I glared at him. He wasn’t even looking at me. Fuck him, I thought, raising the pickaxe above my head. The tool-collector never saw it coming.

  “Gaaahh!” I cried out in fury as I penetrated his temple and buried the tip deep in his skull. His eyes widened in surprise and he tried to speak, but all that came out was a gurgle. Then he slumped forward, lifeless.

  “Fuck this place!” I yelled, tearing the pickaxe free and hefting it over my head. I charged up the tunnel, moving alongside the line of bewildered prisoners. I couldn’t tell if they watched me in awe or amusement or disgust. I didn’t care. Fuck them, too. I was going to find Angie and get out of there.

  I erupted from my tunnel and into the cavern where the cells were housed. Angie was there, in her line, and when she saw me, she grinned from ear to ear. “Hell yeah!” she yelled, aiming a strong kick at a little goblin that stood near her. Before he could react, she raced to join me.

  “Let’s go!” I said.

  We ran across the chamber, almost making it to the exit tunnel before the ogre appeared. He stood, glaring at us dumbly. Shit. Any moment he would open his mouth and bellow, and we would be frozen with that nasty debuff, unable to escape. Or maybe he would take this opportunity to bash our skulls in.

  My eyebrows clumped together when he just folded his arms and smiled instead, his rotten fangs riding up over his face. “Door’s that way,” he said, gesturing at the tunnel ahead. “Go on. Be my guests.”

  “Uhhh…” Angie slowed a bit, but I wasn’t planning to stick around and see what would happen next. Instead, I grabbed her by the wrist and tugged.

  “Keep going!” I yelled.

  Just as we crossed the entrance to the tunnel, we sprang the trap.

  “Oh!”

  The short monosyllable just barely escaped my throat before the tall, thin spike impaled my chin and shot up through my head. Before my vision went dark I had just enough time to see the spikes drill Angie to the ceiling beside me. This must have been what had happened to Fangs when he’d tried to get out, I realized.

  This game was hell.

  CHAPTER 7:

  GOBLIN FODDER

  _________________

  March 14, 2049

  Janus Industries

  Letter to the Board

  RE: Confidential issue in beta

  CONFIDENTIAL: This letter is for Board members only.

  A matter has come to our attention in Section 309 RE: player complaints over player-vs.-player violence. I wish to assure the board at this time that Section 309 is doing everything in our power to develop a solution that will best serve the players and Janus’ needs. This issue I strictly confidential. It is of paramount importance that potential investors are not made aware. Let’s not air the dirty laundy. Give us a few more months, and I’m sure we can clean it up.

  Please see and review attached report.

  Aaron Sarten, Project 309 Leader

  Section 309

  Janus Industries

  ___

  Seven days.

  That’s how long it took me to finally give up.

  Nope. There would be no forced logout. No one was coming to the rescue. It didn’t matter what I did, or whether I lived or died; I couldn’t exit the game. Game? Hah! Some game. This wasn’t a game. This was hell itself.

  After getting impaled in the tunnel trap, I’d done my time in frozen purgatory, and respawned at the runestone, debuffed. A couple of grunts had ushered me back to my cell and I’d been tossed into the mind-numbing routine of Hard Labor.

  We worked. Hard Labor brought my strength and stamina up a point per day of use, as promised. They gave us four hours to sleep or meditate in our cells so we wouldn’t be ground to death. Sleep in-game… it was basically just deep meditation. If I’d had any use for mana, I suppose it would have regenerated then. My HP always did. But it wasn’t a deep, urgent need the way it was in the real world. In here, it was more a necessity to escape the boredom of sitting cooped up on the hard stone floor for four hours at a time. Twenty hours of Hard Labor per day, seven days so far. My strength was up to 10pts, stamina up to 11pts. Cool, whatever. That was definitely more than I’d have had if I hadn’t been forced to work here. But the stats I cared about remained low. The only other skill I’d leveled had been Night Vision. At level 4, I now had a 20% increased chance of seeing well in the dark. I was surprised it hadn’t leveled faster, since I’d been underground a week. But there were usually a few torches here and there.

  What about my real body? I asked around, curious. After all, some of the other prisoners had been camped practically since the game had launched. That was a week and a half real-world time, three weeks here in Hero Online. How were they still alive? No one could survive without water for a week. Could they?

  Images of my dehydrated body lying in my own waste on my bed, a string of drool hanging from my mouth, plagued me.

  The next day we got a new cell-mate. Must have been a Wednesday because Nemo wanted to call her Hump, but she put the idea out of his head pretty quickly with some decent hand-to-hand unarmed combat skills. She was a level higher than the rest of us, and he grumpily allowed her to choose her own epigram. Jane, she asked for, so we called her Jane. I decided not to openly challenge her lack of creativity. I’d seen her fists in action.

  Jane had been playing since t
he beginning—she’d actually been in the beta, too, though she and Meatloaf didn’t know each other. She’d been out there for weeks just grinding and leveling and exploring, the way the game was supposed to work, and had been able to logout and back in regularly before getting captured by our malevolent landlords. And she brought news.

  It was practically an epidemic.

  “So wait,” I said, “you’re telling me they’re going around to people’s houses and—”

  “Yep.” She nodded, pacing the cell. “For really severe cases they do an IV and station a healthcare provider right there in the home. But if your body’s well enough to travel, they take you to the tents. They’re huge. Imagine a stadium, but shorter, all enclosed in a white tent, like an old-timey circus, but everything’s sterile and medical. Rows and rows of gurneys, everyone hooked up to IVs and feeding tubes, sometimes respirators. You’re there, I’d bet money. All of you. Shit, I’ve only been in here a day and I’m probably there, too.”

  “But how do they know who—”

  “It’s like…” She paused, looking up at the short, rocky ceiling. “It’s hard to explain because it’s hard for me to understand. I’m not a coder. But I think there’s some sort of signature Janus can read when a player gets locked in the game. And Janus monitors all the player and game code, and they have your address with your personal information, so…”

  “So they break into our apartments and force-feed our bodies to avoid the biggest wrongful death suit in history,” Nemo spat. “God. I don’t care. You know what? When I get out of here, I’m gonna make sure they go down for this. All the fucking way.”

  Meatloaf winced. “Technically it’s a small group of bad actors who are—”

  “No, that’s bullshit!” Nemo got in his face. “Janus made this thing. They should know how to fix it. They’re culpable!”

  “It’s not so small either,” Jane said. “Not anymore. The hackers are organized. At first, the news portrayed it just like you said—a handful of rogue players—but there’s been a development on that.” She looked from face to face. “Any of you ever hear of The Noose?”

  “You mean that thing Nemo’s going to put around the neck of the president of the Janus board of directors?” I quipped. Nemo snorted quietly, stomping away from Jane.

  “I have,” Fangs said.

  She nodded at him. He sighed.

  “Started as an elite group of world-class hackers. Very select, very secretive. Social issues were the thing for a while. Not your average seeding-chaos or anarchy, but trying to make real change. Then something happened. Got too powerful, I guess. You know how power corrupts.” He tilted his chin up, showing his fanged mouth. “Last I heard, they’d skimmed enough money from the top percent to buy their own island. Heard talk they planned to found their own fucking country.”

  We were all silent a moment. It was the most I’d heard Fangs speak since I’d come in.

  “They bought it,” Jane said. “And they founded it. It’s called Newland. Not very creative, I know.”

  “Takes one to know one,” I muttered. She shot me a look, but went on.

  “They released a declaration of cyber war just Monday. Took responsibility for the main hackers’ initiative, the forced imprisonment and logout denial of other players.” She shrugged.

  “Ok…” I said slowly. “So we’re not just victims of the nastiest PvP scheme of all time… we’re… prisoners of war?”

  “Technically.”

  “Damn,” I whispered.

  “Agh, it’s all Janus’ fault!” Nemo strode to the bars and slammed a fist against them, rattling the iron. “They could just shut the game down and pull everyone out, but they’ll let some upstart foreign power literally enslave U.S. citizens before risking a loss to the bottom line. Fucking America!”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple,” I said. “If it were, why wouldn’t they just disconnect the players who’ve been camped?”

  Jane shook her head. “Whatever it is, it’s not simple. I can’t believe Janus would risk such extreme liability by letting this play out if they actually had a clean way to end it.”

  “Whatever.” Nemo sat down with a huff. “Fucking capitalism, man.”

  I pursed my lips. “But why are they doing it?”

  “Dude, money!” Nemo got in my face this time. “MUH-NEE. They don’t want to pull us out. Shit! They want to leave us in long enough to fatten up our subscriptions! We’re a cash-cow, bro!”

  “No,” I shook my head, backing away from him, “not Janus. I mean, why are the hackers… um, Newland, I guess… why are they doing this?”

  I looked from face to face. Nemo wore an exasperated expression, as if the answer should be obvious. Meatloaf shrugged. But both Fangs and Jane frowned thoughtfully.

  “Look,” I said, “what are they farming here? I’ve been down there with you guys hacking away at rocks for a week now, and I haven’t seen any gold or diamonds or mithril or whatever. Just a lot of bland-looking stone. And we’re not cutting it away like masons; we’re just blasting it down to pebbles. What is the point? They just trying to open up some space? Or maybe they’re just sadists? I don’t get it.”

  Fangs licked his lips, an unsettling sight. “I have a theory,” he said, “but I don’t know enough about the game mechanics to know how strong it is.”

  We all looked at him expectantly. He cleared his throat, and his voice came out somehow even raspier than before.

  “I’m sure by now you’ve all noticed we’re grinding two things down there. Rock, yes, but also XP.”

  That was true. I hadn’t given it much thought because I assumed the gains in experience were so small and slow as to be negligible compared to what I’d get if I were free and grinding mobs instead.

  “Yeah, so?” Meatloaf shrugged. “Hardly any.”

  “For any one player, that’s true, yes,” Fangs said, “but what if you were a hacker and you could stick a bit of code on each player so that you could siphon a little bit of XP off the top? Not much. Just a fraction for every point gained. Get enough players tagged, and—”

  “Ohhh,” I said, “like in Office Space? The bank-skimming scheme?”

  Fangs nodded.

  “Shit,” Jane whispered.

  “But if that’s the case,” I said, “then why lock us up? Why camp us and make us dig a hole in the ground? Couldn’t they just skim XP from random players without the players even knowing?”

  Fangs shrugged a noncommittal shoulder.

  “Maybe,” Meatloaf said, “or maybe the players would have to be bound to a specific location. Maybe that’s how the code gets altered.”

  “It’s an interesting theory,” Jane said, “but I have another. Tell me you guys at least know about the lottery?”

  We did not.

  “Geez. Ok. So just a few days into gameplay, Janus announced a world event called the lottery. Said they had seeded seven unique deeds in the game. Land-deeds.”

  Meatloaf let out a low whistle.

  “The deeds, if you can find them, are up-for-grabs,” she went on. “As you may know, any land-deed is already a valuable thing. Aside from the obvious—that is, you own a little piece of real estate and you can build a house or store your shit or whatever on it—a deed is also one of the key requirements to founding a settlement, which is bound to be an important phase of gameplay as players’ characters grow and the world narrative matures.”

  “Yeah, so, what?” Nemo said, “you think we’re digging in the ground for some scroll?”

  She shook her head. “The deeds in the lottery are special because each plot of land they bestow contains an invaluable treasure, some kind of power-hub nearly guaranteed to fast-track any guild or community to prominence. In essence, the developers are trying to seed the first major cities of Hero Online. I’m not saying we’re digging for a scroll. I’m saying, what if Newland already has one, and we’re digging for the buried treasure?”

  I recalled the dark marking over the e
ntrance to Newland’s hideout. “X marks the spot,” I muttered.

  ___

  Another week passed. Another slow, boring grind with my pickaxe. Our new knowledge of our captors and our guesses at their possible motivation did nothing to alleviate the continual humiliation of forced labor. They treated us like shit, too. That ogre patrolled the cell cavern and debuffed us all on a regular basis. The goblins jeered and laughed. Every prisoner was joke fodder to them. But perhaps because I’d managed to kill one of them on my ill-fated escape attempt, they seemed to take special delight in causing me misery.

  It started with the bread.

  “What’s this?” I asked, holding the stinking, putrid thing. It wasn’t hard as a rock, as usual. It was a sodden, soggy lump. I checked the stats.

  New Item: Worker’s Bread

  It’s stale, it’s old, it’s rotten to the core, but what did you expect, a five-star meal? This hunk of low-quality food will provide sustenance, and that’s all that counts. Or at least, that’s what you should tell yourself.

  Would you like to add this item to your inventory or use it now?

  Warning: this item is already expired.

  Warning: this item has been contaminated and is unsanitary.

  “Contaminated and unsanitary?” I looked from the bread to the dark-haired dwarf who had slopped it in my hand. He grinned, a golden tooth glinting in the torchlight.

  “Nah, that’s good bread, that is. All I did was soften it up for ya.”

  I took a sniff.

  “You pissed on it.”

  He shrugged. “Didn’t have any ale. Had to use something.”

  “You pissed on my bread.”

  “You said that already.”

  I’d forgotten you even could piss in the game. I hadn’t had to. Must be some kind of racial trait, or maybe an optional character piece. Whatever.