by Parker Tiden
"Welcome to the greatest tournament on earth!" Blondie continued into his headset as the crowd roared. "Your battles will be broadcast across the globe. The final, to be played in a little less than 48 hours, will reach 500 million people! A world record!"
"Yah! That's gonna be us, I tell ya!" George shouted as I returned to my station. He was ecstatic, totally in sync with the crowd in the nerd-pit.
"What are you on?" I countered.
"You'll see. It's all about mindset," George continued, undaunted.
"Then we're in trouble," Nick said. "One of us is not in the mindset."
"And that would be?" I tried. Silence. "Me?"
"Bingo," Nick said, still staring at his screen, not man enough to look me in the eyes.
"She'll come around," said Jamaal, "right?"
"Do we have a surprise for you!" Blondie shouted from the stage. "We have a new setup this year. We have 2500 teams battling it out in this qualifying tournament. Of those 2500 teams, only 128 teams will make it to the next round and have a chance to make it to the finals the day after tomorrow." The crowd roared again.
"We have an accelerated process this year. In 25 minutes, the battle will begin. And I mean battle in the singular." A less than enthusiastic applause from the crowd. "Instead of one on one battles, we will have the biggest deathmatch in history! A free-for-all massacre, the likes the world has never seen."
"What the..." George tried. Followed by scattered cries of surprise.
"At exactly four pm, we will start the clock. Teams will have exactly three minutes to get to wherever they think is a good spot. After these three minutes, your weapons will be activated, and the killing begins. No re-spawning, no second chances—if you're dead, you're dead. However, to make things interesting, we have tripled all your HPs. Remember, only the top 128 teams will go on to the next round."
"This is whack," Jamaal said, clearly stunned.
"See that giant ticker there?" Blondie said, pointing to the number "2500" up on the screen behind him. "When that reaches 128, then, and only then are you safe. Alphacore estimates that at least half of the teams will be goners within the first hour. The game will go on for as long as it takes. If you look above your head, each station has a green light just above it, that will turn red when your team is out."
"You better not put those electrodes to your brain today, George. You'll be lobotomized, man." Jamaal said.
"That's exactly what I'm shooting for," George said before lifting his shirt and attaching the electrodes to his nipples.
"OK..." Nick said as he shook his head and popped open a Jolt. "We have 15 minutes to revise our strategy.”
"Strategy? It's pretty simple. We gotta be boring, boring as hell," George said.
"He's right. We need to play defense," Jamaal said.
"That's exactly what I was about to say. We let everybody else head-shoot themselves to eternal glory, while we sit back and make s’mores, and then we swoop in to save the day," Nick said, booting up his computer, putting on his headgear and flipping down his visor.
"Hmmm..." I contributed.
"What? You've got a better idea?" Nick asked on the cusp of mansplaining.
"It's just that everybody will be thinking the same thing and employing the same strategy. How can we be different and unexpected?"
"Different will get us killed," Nick said, irritated. "Ready, player one... two, three, and four? Let's hit it." We all spawned into Alphacore and got ready for the mayhem.
Nuffian, Jarno, Girth, and Luna all stood in the town square, with more characters spawning in all the time. Pretty soon, there would be 10,000 of us here, making up the 2500 teams Blondie was talking about—enough to get virtually claustrophobic. Speaking of Blondie, he too had a character, a huge talking-head the size of a small hot-air balloon, hovering above the square spewing instructions and unhelpful anecdotes.
All the teams had access to a rough map of the battleground arena—it probably wasn't much bigger than central park, with a central village and scattered farms, industrial complexes, and some forest on the outskirts. It would sure as hell be crowded, at least in the beginning.
"We have another surprise for you!" Blondie’s head boomed. The appetite for surprises with this crowd seemed limited, given the subdued reaction. "You are used to being able to use various modes of transportation in Alphacore. I am excited to announce a world premiere! For the first time ever, you will be able to use transportation in the battle zone!” Nerdish gasps from the crowd in Alphacore. "You'll be able to use your trucks, cars, hovercrafts, your tandem bicycles, horses, and mules to kill!" the talking head continued. "You’ll find vehicles scattered around the battle arena. Beware, there are not nearly enough for all of you. It's first-come, first-served."
The town square, about the size of four football fields, had been sealed off. We were corralled like cattle. The characters came in all shapes and sizes. There were standard issues characters that looked like they were straight out of a D&D manual, but there were also custom-built characters, some the size of refrigerators with full-body armor, others lithe females with capes, still others, mutants with pig faces and horns and ammo belts strapped across their chests.
All the characters seemed to be coalescing towards the outskirts of the square. No surprise, considering that everybody had three minutes to high tail out of the kill zone. But I wasn't buying it. There must be some other way.
"Let’s do the opposite," I said.
"The what?" Nuffian wondered.
"The opposite. Let’s go to the middle of the square, while everybody else is going to the edges," I tried.
"That's loco, Luna, we'll be sitting ducks.”
"ONE MINUTE BEFORE THE GREATEST BATTLE IN ONLINE GAMING HISTORY BEGINS!" the head in the sky boomed. "THE WORLD IS WATCHING—MORE THAN 100 MILLION VIEWERS WILL WATCH YOUR HUMILIATION OR YOUR TRIUMPH." A huge counter filled the sky and started to count down towards zero.
We readied our weapons, checked our supplies, and took in the scene—thousands of characters pushed towards the edges of the town square like tweenies at an Ariana Grande concert.
Jarno came to my rescue, "We may be in the top ten percent skill-wise, but given the setup, that doesn't matter much. There are too many factors outside of our control, the stray bullets alone could undo us. It's a mathematical nightmare. I'm with Luna here, we need to be unpredictable."
Nuffian turned towards the head in the sky—30 seconds—and took a deep breath. He lifted his machine gun in one hand towards the sky and turned to us. "Beyond fear!" he shouted, turned, and started to sprint towards the middle of the square. Jarno, Girth, and I turned to each other and smiled. "Beyond fear!" we shouted as we took after Nuffian.
Ten seconds flashed in the sky. We stood back to back, weapons ready, right smack in the middle of the square. Five seconds, three seconds...."GO, GO, GO... TO YOUR DESTINY!" the head in the sky boomed. "THREE MINUTES UNTIL WEAPONS ACTIVATION." Total mayhem erupted as thousands of characters scrambled to get the hell out of town as a new counter appeared in the sky. We stood where we were.
"What now, Luna?" Nuffian asked—not clear if he was being rhetorical.
"We're not going to be alone for long," Girth said, worriedly scanning the horizon.
"Where's the deus ex machina claw from Toy Story when you need it?" Jarno chuckled.
Two minutes to weapons activation. The crowds were thinning out along the perimeter, but there must have been hundreds of warriors milling about, still within the square—a clear and present danger to us. We were utterly exposed. "My thoughts on unpredictability haven't quite germinated yet," I said.
"Great," Nuffian said, almost resigned to his fate.
"So much for being a team leader," Jarno said, checking his sniper scope. "Oh shit!"
"ONE MINUTE TO WEAPONS ACTIVATION," came from the head in the sky.
"What, what?" Girth said.
"We've got company!"
I heard a wasp-like buzzing in the dista
nce, and then I saw it. A motorcycle with a sidecar was coming straight at us. On board, four seriously messed-up warriors. It looked like a scene straight out of Mad Max, except that these guys couldn't afford a truck. They hung off the speeding motorcycle at various awkward angles, ready to kill.
"Shit, shit, shit, ten seconds..." cried Jarno, throwing himself on the ground and taking up a sniper position.
I raised my MP5. Girth whipped out his weapon. Nuffian nestled his trusted Kalashnikov into his shoulder.
"Good knowing you guys," Girth said.
The motley crew on the speeding motorcycle were closing in fast, with us in their crosshairs. We braced for impact.
"WEAPONS ACTIVATED!"
A roar, a lumbering shadow, a crunch, and the motley crew disappeared in a swirl of dust. We had been so focused on the motorcycle that we hadn't noticed the black semi hurtling in from our left. The team that had hijacked it obviously thought that the motorcycle crew was the bigger threat, and had made a B-line straight for them, wiping out the entire crew in one metal and bone-crushing swoop.
Stunned, we stared at the semi as it began to turn back towards us. I was just about to open up on it when I looked down at my feet. I was basically standing on it, our last best hope of survival in the form of a metal grate. I bent down and tried to pull but it didn't budge.
"Girth! Grenade! Now!" I shouted, pointing to the grate. Jarno was only a couple of feet away from me, trying, and failing, to take out the truck driver with his sniper rifle. Like the pro he was, he didn't question me in the heat of the battle, but simply lobbed a grenade towards me. "Fire in the hole!" I threw myself as far away from the blast as I could. The ground shook. The grate arched high through the sky and came to a clattering stop on the ground a mere foot from me. With our guns blazing, we backed towards the hole and, one by one, dropped down, not knowing what awaited us.
I looked up from the screen. We hadn't been battling for more than ten minutes, but the counter had started to count the dead. We had started at 2500 teams, we were already at 2046. 454 teams wiped out already. I saw red lights dot the hall, indicating which teams had been annihilated. I looked up above me, our light was still green. I knew it would be, but I just wanted to double-check.
Jamaal peeked up too, "I would expect an logarithmic curve. With the death rate steep to start but flattening out, with the last few deaths being the farthest apart."
Back in Alphacore, we were still below ground. The truck maniacs had obviously felt it more important to hold onto their semi than follow us down here. Down here, in the upside-down, it was what you would expect—dank, dark, claustrophobic, and not a little scary.
"Why don't we just take it real slow and let trouble come to us? Every second longer we last, the greater our chances," Girth said as we walked in single-file along a narrow alleyway and into a larger room.
"And the more likely our skills come to play, rather than us being messed up by random shit," Nuffian chimed in from the front. I was bringing up the rear.
Could it really be that easy? Suddenly, Nuffian held up his fist at a right angle to signal us to freeze. "Holy mother," he said. "Frag city here."
The rest of us came up next to him and peered out over the room. There on the ground, in piles, were the dead. There must have been upwards of 20 bodies, freshly fragged. There was something not quite right with the bodies but I couldn't figure it out. Suddenly, a grumbling roar could be heard from the depths of the dungeon.
Girth: "You can't be serious!"
Nuffian: "Bastards!"
Jarno: "No one said anything about NPCs!"
Me: "They're using monsters to flush out hiding wimp fools like us! Not much of a spectator sport if they didn't."
We took a tunnel that led off to the left, away from the roar, and ran. Nuffian first, me second, and Jarno and Girth bringing up the rear. I could sense something behind us, gaining. "Girth, we need some of the grenade action again, please." Girth lobbed a couple of grenades behind us and kept going. The grenades came flying back out of the darkness and detonated not ten feet from us. The blast knocked Jarno and Girth down, and lopped off a sizable chunk of their HPs. I turned around towards them and opened up into the blackness behind them. Sending volley after volley of MP5 rounds at something, I hoped. Nuffian stood beside me and followed suit with his Kalashnikov. Jarno and Girth struggled back up to their feet and staggered towards and passed us.
"We need to get the hell out of this dump," I said as I fired a final round into the blackness and followed them at a run.
Corporate Bastards
The call came in the afternoon. For once, Tristan was asleep in his bed at home, after working the night shift. He grabbed this cell off the nightstand. “We just got a call from local PD.” It was Maria. “A South Asian male was found very much dead in his car, under the 101 overpass. His brains were all over the windshield."
“And you woke me up why?” he asked, realizing as he said it that he sounded like an a-hole.
“According to a preliminary ID, the guy works—worked—for Alphacore.”
"Start-up envy? Fomo?" Tristan was already up and pulling on his pants with one hand.
"Suicide ruled out, bullet angle doesn't match. Alphacore's got their own team on it as we speak, backtracking his last few days. This is fresh, blood still warm."
"Remember that head of operations person at Alphacore?" Tristan said, grabbing his shoulder holster. "You know, what's her name..."
"You mean Kalminski?"
The front door of his two-bedroom shut behind him. The hallway was dank and unwelcoming, someone less jaded might even find it threatening, but a federal income and child support payments do not an apartment in Palo Alto afford. He had settled for West Oakland in a two-bedroom. He wanted the extra room should a judge ever allow Charlie to sleep over. His job wasn't exactly nine to five, so his commute wasn't too bad. "Yeah, right, Kalminski. Call her and let her know we're coming over? I'll start driving now. Meet me in Menlo Park." His car was almost as shitty as his apartment, he noted as he got behind the wheel of his 86 Caprice Coupe. Airbags are for suckers.
"Should we notify Maxwell at intelligence?" Maria asked.
“Now, why would we ever want to do that?”
Local PD homicide had taken lead on the investigation, which was as it should be. But not much progress could be made without Alphacore corporate. The security guard reluctantly waved Tristan and Maria through when they had shown their badges at the Menlo Park headquarters. They were led through what looked more like a futuristic playground than an office where actual work was done. There was even more facial hair here than at CGU. They were let into Kalminski's office immediately, not what he was expecting given his previous run-ins with Alphacore Corporate and their lawyers.
Kalminski stepped off the treadmill whirring under her stand-up desk, and met them halfway. She wore black leggings, a hoodie-covered sports bra, and dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had a post-workout sheen about her.
"Sorry if we interrupted your workout," Tristan said.
"Casco," she said, "in case you forgot, Alphacore is not an arm of the federal government."
"Last time, you gave us bad intel with crappy consequences for both of us. This time, we need the good intel," Tristan said, getting right to the heart of the matter.
"Our customers count on us to keep their information protected. There is only so much we can give you without breaching that sacred trust."
"Christ, Kalminski, I've heard that one before, and quite frankly, it makes me want to puke. So," Tristan continued, "what was that techie of yours up to? What's his name…” scrolling through his notepad, "yeah, here it is... Ganesh Bail."
"It's only been, what, an hour? What do you expect? We know nothing. We have 5000 programmers."
"Maria!" Tristan shouted suddenly without taking his eyes off Kalminski.
"Right behind you, boss," Maria answered timidly, stepping out from behind him. Renata Kalminski was an icon
to some. She'd written some memoir chockfull of unsolicited advice on how women should live their lives and become just like her. As if her lifestyle, with a private nursery attached to her office, and chauffeured cars, could generate insights for a middle-class mother in Bakersfield. Amy had read it just before she left him, he had yet to prove a correlation, let alone a causation, but had his suspicions.
"Maria, tell Kalminski what you told me about Alphacore's future."
"You mean, that thing we picked up?"
"Yeah, that thing," Tristan said.
"What are you getting at, Casco?" Kalminski interrupted.
"I really loved your book," Maria said, "I only have the Kindle edition, or else I'd have asked you to sign it." Kalminski's eyes said ‘whatever’, so Maria continued. "We've picked up information regarding a possible Microcorp bid on Alphacore," Maria continued.
Kalminski, suddenly not so laid back anymore, said, "What does that have to do with anything?"
Tristan was glad to clarify, "A breach in Alphacore's security, and the possible collateral damage on Alphacore's growth potential among its core demographic? I don't know. You tell me if that has anything to do with anything."
"Are you threatening to leak a confidential homicide investigation?" Kalminski said.
"I don't recall saying anything like that," Tristan said.
Kalminski fell silent for a second, that fast brain of hers doing some quick calculations in order to triangulate the course of action that would have the greatest likelihood of saving her ass. "Listen, Casco," she sighed finally, "all we got so far was that Bail had, before getting his brains blown out, accessed our user data and attempted to identify one, or several, of our players."