Two in the Gut

by Siege, Matthew

  Reezer had a solid build, dark hair cut down in a shallow buzz, darker eyes and something shifty in the way his smile seemed to be commenting on everything without bothering to say a word. “Why bother?”

  Sasha shrugged. “I thought it might be a good place to skill up, you know? I figured that it was quiet in there, and I had a couple of minutes to kill before the rest of my Guild got here.” I didn’t trust him, and I was glad that she’d just not so subtly let him know that she wasn’t alone. If a powerful Guild decided to make your life miserable, they certainly could.

  Reezer chuckled. “But they aren’t here yet, are they?” He looked at her for a second while he waited for a reaction, but then spoke before he got one. “A bunch of people are having problems logging in. Might have something to do with all that bullshit that went on last week, maybe. I guess it doesn’t matter what. The point is, counting on your guildies ain’t gonna get you very far right now.”

  Despite all that, now he had to decide if it was worth risking a week of being harassed just for a little time in the limelight now. I didn’t know which way to go, mostly because he looked to be one of those guys who didn’t think before reacting. It was obvious that he thought he knew better than everybody, in all situations.

  His next words proved it. “But you’re shit at playing, right? You won’t last long pulling shit like you’re trying to do with this door. I mean hell, I saw the sparks from more than a block away. And is that smoke that I’m smelling? Damn girl, I should probably have just stood back and watched you set yourself on fire for shits and giggles…”

  “Maybe you should have.” She gave him a sidelong glance and trapped him with his ego. “It must be pretty easy to stand over there and tell me you know what you’re doing. It’s a lot harder than it looks, you know…”

  “Bullshit.”

  Sasha got a little bolder, rolling her eyes at him. “Says you. I’m the engineer. Trust me, soldier boy, this keypad is out of your league.”

  Reezer didn’t like being spoken to like that, and when he stepped forward, I was pretty sure that was the end of Sasha. Instead, he reached out and snatched the battery from her. Sasha let it go. There was no point in a contest of strength, especially not when I got the sense that he was doing exactly what she wanted him to do.

  Once the battery was in his possession, he grabbed the wires and clasped it in his arm in imitation of what she had been doing. She’d been graceful enough to support it on her hip, but he clutched it to his chest like it was a baby he was afraid of dropping. Even better, Reezer had to pocket the gun to make it happen, but he was confident enough in his control of the situation that the action didn’t seem to bother him.

  “All yours,” Sasha said with a sigh. “Though I’d have given it to you if you had just asked nicely.”

  “Let me guess,” he asked, ignoring her snark. “You were trying to hotwire it?”

  “Obviously…”

  Reezer shook his head in mock sadness, the way you do when you’re stuck trying to explain something to a particularly stupid child. “You should have skilled up on something a lot more basic, first. If you had, you’d be able to hotwire it and hack it in the same step. Makes it quicker, though first, you have to not be a dipshit.”

  It was hard not to tell him that she fucking knew that already, but Sasha bit her lip and simply nodded slowly. “Thanks. I’ll know for next time. Does that mean you can get in?”

  He examined the keypad, clearly assessing the same sort of mental menu she’d been looking at when he’d interrupted her. “Hey, how come your name is hidden?”

  Sasha shrugged. “Somebody else asked me that earlier,” she lied. “I guess it’s bugged. Deep Dive sure does have a long way to go with this game, don’t you think?”

  I tensed up. I didn’t think that Sasha had gone hostile to him, which meant that he was picking up on whatever cloaking feature she’d implemented as part of her source code. I didn’t know if he bought the response, and I decided that I couldn’t wait any longer.

  I balled up my fist and took a cheap shot at him, connecting solidly with his temple. He didn’t know I was there, and so Reezer didn’t have a chance to dodge.

  He didn’t have to. My fist and even part of my arm passed right through him, and the lack of impact threw me completely off balance. The next thing I knew I was sprawled flat on my face, the ground kissing my cheek.

  For the first time in what felt like forever, I was pretty glad that Sasha couldn’t see me. Whatever my powers were, they obviously didn’t extend to other players. I had a gut feeling that it was because I was more closely connected to Sasha and therefore her Deep Dive pursuers.

  Which meant that right now, she was on her own.

  It was pretty obvious that Reezer didn’t feel so much as a puff of wind from my attack. He just patted the gun in his pocket and gave Sasha a wink. “You suck at this, so I’m going to do you a favor before I shoot you. Don’t ever say that I never gave you anything, okay whoever you are?”

  Sasha clammed up, which was probably the best idea she’d had all day.

  Unfortunately, Reezer was beyond caring. He was the type of guy whose main reason for talking was to give himself a chance to bask in the joy of hearing his own voice. “At least you might learn something.” He eyed the keypad again. “Good thing for you that I came along. Even with your failed attempts, I should be able to teach you a thing or two. You might think a lot of yourself because you’re the engineer, but I picked up some skills myself, so far today.”

  True to his word, he grabbed the wire, ran it along the correct terminals and grinned as the keypad lit up like a Christmas tree before buzzing a happy little sound of permission and retracting the heavy deadlock into the door with a satisfying thunk.

  It was not physically possible for Reezer to have been more pleased with himself. “See? That’s your lesson for the day. I’ll even give you another one too since you obviously need it. In this game, you run. You don’t stop and chat. You don’t make nice. You run like hell, especially when you see me coming, you got that?”

  Sasha nodded obediently. The guy was too full of himself to notice that she wasn’t looking at him, though. She only had eyes for the keypad, and I watched her double-check that the game remembered how poorly she’d done on her previous two attempts to break in.

  Sorry. Your last Hotwire attempt failed, and you don’t yet know enough to improve on the measly 19% chance of success you continue to enjoy. Would you like to give it a shot anyway?

  Completely out of the loop, Reezer shrugged at her. “Let’s have a little fun. Remember how I said you needed to learn to run? Well, I’ll let you run right now if you want. You can have a head start. Let’s see if you can find a way to be faster than a bullet, shall we?”

  As quick as a flash, Sasha reached out and grabbed his wrist. He was still clutching the wires in his hand, and instead of doing the smart thing and simply letting go of them, he tried to overpower her to get to his gun.

  That was a mistake. She was stronger than him, and in the second it took him to fully realize that he was never going to win the struggle she had already turned him around and slammed his body against the brick wall, pinning the heavy truck battery to his chest.

  And before he could react, she used her superior strength to guide the wires in his hand back to the keypad.

  BOOM! The concussive force of the battery’s detonation threw her backward onto her ass, but not before I saw the white-hot light of the acid-laced explosion make part of Reezer’s flesh go semi-transparent with a surge of electrical energy. He slumped to one side, a smoking crater in his ribcage and a surprised look on his dying face as she picked herself up off the ground.

  Sasha didn’t waste any time claiming the pistol from his pocket, and once she was sure that the player was dead, she hopped up and hurried back to the pickup truck. Now that the door to Reboot was open at last, she needed her books.

  She also needed to find a way to secure the inside
of the shop before this asshole respawned, but one thing at a time…

  SIXTEEN

  Player Reezer and the guild Tiny Nuggets of Death have been flagged as actively non-hostile to you for the next hour in game. While Headshot rigorously supports PVP combat throughout all aspects of Survivor Sunday’s scavenging period, you did not initiate combat. By defending yourself successfully, you have bought yourself time before the inevitable revenge. Use it to fortify your defenses or make yourself scarce.

  I got the game message through her, and I watched Sasha nod knowingly to herself. She’d never really been involved in the Player Versus Player side of things. It was silly to think like that of course, since the entire game was based on PVP, but what she meant was that she’d never had it out with anyone else on the Survivor faction.

  Even when she’d crossed paths with the Zombies, she’d only taken a shot at one of us when it was absolutely essential to extend her time in the game. After all, we weren’t the real enemy. We were free players, and that made us about as expendable as they came. That didn’t mean that she bore us any ill will. Sasha had a single-minded goal in here, and that meant she was willing to do whatever it took to stick around.

  I understood. It would be hard for her to care much about the Zombie’s game experience if she intended to drag Headshot down into a useless pile of quivering code and simpering software. We’d be nothing more than collateral damage.

  Sasha had already retrieved her backpack by now. Reezer’s corpse was gone, but the compact handgun he’d been carrying was now in her pocket. She rushed inside the rear door of Reboot and slammed it shut behind her. Once it was closed behind her, I was pretty glad to see that the thick deadbolt could be operated by hand from the inside. It was big enough that it took two hands to operate, but that just meant it was all the more secure.

  I was glad that she’d put those extra points in strength because if she did need to override the hack attempt on the keyboard manually, she’d be able to. Sure, there were probably ways to get in here if somebody were willing to try hard enough, but they wouldn’t be able to do it quickly or it quietly. That was all that mattered.

  That, and the hour of game time that Headshot had just provided her before Reezer and his buddies could come back and attempt to exact revenge. She wasn’t sure if they would, but she was determined to be ready just the same.

  With that in mind, Sasha took stock of the little electronics repair shop that she’d finally managed to occupy. It was even darker in here than it was outside, but the little flashlight she’d stumbled upon in the library proved itself invaluable once more. Now that we were relatively safe inside it was nice to be able to shine it around without worrying that the light would be seen from outside. Those heavily tinted windows were going to prove themselves to be a godsend, and for the first time since she’d logged in, I felt like we’d been given a moment to relax.

  I sat down in a patched-up leather chair that had certainly seen better days and took a breath. I know I was supposed to hate Headshot, now. How could I not? I’d seen firsthand her dad’s work be pretty much stolen right out from under him. And on top of that all, I already knew that Deep Dive wasn’t exactly looking out for their players.

  But it was hard to despise it. The game brought a new level of exhilaration and adventure to what was on offer with other titles, and it would take at least a couple of years for the other developers to catch up to this level of Absolute Reality.

  More, if Sasha’s dad was the kickass coder I got the feeling he probably was. It could take a generation for the competitors to reverse engineer whatever advances he’d made.

  I glanced over at her and saw that, now that she’d had a chance to catch her breath, she was smiling from ear to ear. Maybe I’d done something to break the spell, but as soon as I caught her having a little fun the smile instantly soured to a frown.

  “Come on,” I said to her. “I know it’s hard, especially with what happened to your dad, but even you have to admit that this is fucking amazing.”

  She didn’t hear me, of course. And me saying that out loud showed me exactly how dense I was being. I knew that Deep Dive was up to no good, and I was a fool if I let myself get seduced by the beauty of the program that was being used against me.

  Sasha was right to keep her head in the game. Even though Headshot had originally been designed to be one thing, it was now something very different. I had to remind myself that her dad had been a world-class coder. That had rubbed off on her, and she looked at everything with a programmer’s mind. She spotted the flaws and cataloged them. Maybe she’d exploit them and maybe she wouldn’t, but her brain was unable to ignore them.

  It was probably both a gift and a curse, though I doubted that Sasha would wish it on her worst enemy. It was one thing to be able to see the patterns and spot the mistakes, but Sasha couldn’t ignore them. She physically couldn’t. I couldn’t help but notice the way they drew her eye. It was likely one of the many reasons that her dad had involved her so heavily in his work. Even when she was only eight or ten, he’d been running lines of code past her. At that age, she wasn’t anywhere near as good at creating as he was, of course, but I got the sense from their interaction on that security footage that what had started as a fun little game to pass the time had quickly become an integral part of his work process.

  Sasha could see things quicker than he could, especially the mistakes. I’ve known people like that in the past. It was sort of like a superpower, but not everyone around them saw it that way. It was also the sort of thing that would have slowed her down in the real world, made it tougher for her to navigate unspoken social contracts, but I could sense that it often proved invaluable when she was inside Headshot.

  It looked to me like this place was well set up to repair just about any portable or wearable on the market. Better yet, its purpose wasn’t just to sell the parts and leave you to it. Here, they sold a service. You dropped your broken shit off and, a couple of hours or a couple of days later, depending on the complexity, you picked it up again. That meant that they didn’t waste space advertising junk or have a bunch of shitty cases or other crap meant to waste a customer’s money and clutter up shelf space.

  Over near the interior front door, the one that looked like it would stand a good chance at repelling a fairly well-armed invader or two, there was a little desk. The computer perched atop it was obviously only there so they could log orders and take payment.

  Now that the lull was over I watched Sasha get up and go over to the employee side of the desk. Everything on that side of the shop was designed solely to make the repairs happen. I hadn’t been thinking what type of gear would be in here, but now that I saw all manner of equipment and spare parts lining the wall, not to mention myriad layers of electronic loot, my mouth started to water.

  As usual though, Sasha was one step ahead of me. She knew what it took to get ahead in here like nobody else, and I was still getting used to how this side of the game operated. There was a gleam in her eye, and when she shrugged off the backpack at last and lay that big, valuable tome on the desk in front of her, I knew exactly what her plan was.

  It was time to get some skill ups.

  Most people would’ve rushed this part of it, but not her. She was able to put that urge firmly to one side as she flipped through the book. I hopped up and rushed to her side. This was completely unlike playing as a Zombie, and I wanted to learn as much as I could.

  My heart sank. I’d been expecting a catalog of kick-ass schematics and incredible blueprints, but I didn’t get that. I wasn’t even rewarded with a long list of teaser titles that would’ve at least hinted at what you could build if you invested the time and had the raw materials.

  A Mechanical Engineering skill of 80 is required to learn this schematic

  An Electrical Engineering skill of 60 is required to learn this schematic

  A Practical Engineering skill of 90 is required to learn this schematic

  A Quantum Enginee
ring skill of 180 is required to learn this schematic

  And so on right down the line. Some of the plans, like that last quantum one that had such a big requirement, had to take way more than a week to get right. Whatever it was would require an entire guild to get behind, not a lone girl on the run who should be worrying more about keeping her head down than inventing a hover car, or whatever.

  Headshot wasn’t going to let us cheat, either. The lower level items came complete with useless, blurry pictures populated entirely by wobbly lines that no patent office in the world would have accepted. The more difficult ones didn’t even give you that. They had nothing but black squares where the illustration should have been.

  Obviously, once you could craft the item everything would be made clear. Until then, it was a waste of time. This book was meant for someone that had a lot more skill points and time on their hands than she did.

  I was biting my lip out of frustration, but Sasha only shrugged. She wasn’t worried in the least, and when she pushed the big tome to one side and got out the other books that had shared the backpack with it, I realized that their job was to skill her up high enough so that she could at least make something good.

  As she stacked them up, taking them one by one out of her bag and reading their covers, it looked like she was pleased to see that she’d chosen well. I didn’t know what the skill caps were, but once she digested the text, she’d be far better off than when she started. Better yet, I highly doubted that she would be required to read them cover to cover. She’d probably only have to flip through them for five minutes or so, since anything more than that would go from fun to a chore.

  Headshot had a total of six branches of engineering, and after twenty minutes or so all the lesser books Sasha had stolen had given up whatever gains they were going to. The books weren’t reusable. Once the information had been converted to skill points, they were useless. Things like that made sure that the economy of Headshot on the Survivor side stayed healthy.