Two in the Gut

by Siege, Matthew

  I thought the conversation was over. I was desperate for it to be, but Desmond wasn’t finished. “Sasha?”

  “Yes?”

  He didn’t answer right away. He used the pause as a power play, wielding it like a weapon. I refused to be the one to break it. “Your father has made a wonderful world for you to explore. I’d love to find you in the game, Miss Redhook.”

  I don’t know how I would have responded, but the next thing I heard was the phone being handed back to my mother. An instant later her ridiculously chirpy voice was in my ear, and she was cranking it up to eleven. She was far too proper and well-mannered to have remained in the room while Desmond and I were speaking, but I didn’t know if she suspected what was happening just below the surface.

  I’d explain it to her later. After.

  Her voice got even more chilly, and that scared me. “Sasha, you should come down and hold your father’s hand for a little while, sweetheart. I think that might help him.”

  “What do you mean? Has something happened?”

  Again that pursing of lips. “Everything’s fine now. Last week was a bit rough for him, but the doctors assure me that things have stabilized again. Desmond isn’t worried, so I don’t think we should be.”

  Again, with this asshole. I despised him, and he obviously had my mother convinced that he was some benevolent guardian. “Well, I can sleep so much easier now that I’ve been reassured that Desmond isn’t worried about my comatose father’s health. And what do you mean it was rough, anyway?”

  “Nothing. Just… Don’t be a stranger, okay? It’s been months since he’s heard your voice in person. Promise me you won’t leave it too long?”

  There it was. That was as close as she was ever going to admitting to both of us that dad wasn’t going to just magically wake up.

  Early on, she and I forged an unspoken agreement that we’d just keep pretending things would one day be the same. We weren’t naïve enough to believe it, but it was a lie meant to protect us from having to confront reality. The fact that she’d broken our contract cut deep. “I’ll do my best.”

  I heard beeping in the background, and then a second and a third machine kicked up a chorus. Desmond was shouting for the doctors, and the words he used echoed around me through the black of the void as I fell backward back into the void that led from the phone app to Headshot proper.

  He’s changing something. Stop him!

  …changing something. Stop…

  …changing something…

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sasha,” I said, for what felt like the millionth time. It was pointless, but after being a passenger in her mind throughout that last conversation, I couldn’t just let her be alone without at least trying to reach her.

  She didn’t hear me, of course. She was one hundred percent in Headshot again, inspecting the window she’d climbed through to access the hospital room. A heavy dusk was falling across Silicon Valley, which meant that either there’d been another time skip or she’d been standing in this room for hours. Another Headshot bug? This game was starting to crawl with them.

  I’d given up on Sasha ever being truly aware of my presence. The times that I thought I’d been able to bridge the gap between us could be chalked up to nothing more than simple coincidence.

  So what? It didn’t matter if she couldn’t hear me. I felt supremely guilty after watching the exchange between her family and Desmond without her knowledge, and an apology poured out of me. “Listen, I’m so sorry. I had no idea he was in a coma. I don’t know what I thought, but it sure wasn’t that…”

  “It isn’t your fault, Ryan. You couldn’t have known. I buried that deep.”

  I’d been so desperate for a reply for so long that, now that I’d gotten one, I was too stunned to know how to respond.

  She turned around, and I saw that the Lori stuff was gone. She was Sasha again – red hair, athletic build, green eyes that looked like they could look right through you.

  But they weren’t looking through me now. I took a step to the side, and her head tracked me. “Holy shit. You can hear me! And you can see me too, can’t you?”

  “I can. Have you been with me the whole time?”

  I nodded. “I made it into the Eternals’ Guild Vault just last night, just before the server reset.”

  There was a spark in her eye as a smirk played on her lips. “To dodge the wipe, huh? Smart. There’s no way they’d have coded for that sort of exploit. Not even my dad would have seen it coming. But the brick’s tied to me, personally coded by Blake Redhook himself. The server reset must have spliced the algorithm into yours. Wherever I went, you were forced to follow. Not that I’m mad. I’m tired of being alone in here.”

  That was high praise, at least. “I had no idea what would happen. It was stupid, I guess, but I was so damn pissed at how it all went down that I wasn’t really worried about the repercussions. Oh, by the way, your buddies double-crossed me. I was there, at the Computer Science Museum. I had the brick for you, but all I got was an ambush for my trouble. Missile launchers, assault rifles, the whole nine yards.”

  “Harker?”

  I shrugged. “I think he was one of them, but I can’t be sure. The only ones I got a good look at were beneath me when I found a way in through the Museum’s roof. I killed them, but they were the ones that can’t log in still. Harker, Will and Bonbon weren’t amongst the corpses.”

  She shook her head slowly. “I’d like to say they were just misguided, but I can’t. Not with a straight face, at least. Deep Dive got to them.”

  “That’s a safe bet,” I agreed.

  “Just like it’s a safe bet that the last time one of the developers–“

  “They call themselves Divers.”

  “The Diver that got handcuffed… I was fading fast, but you were helping me, right?”

  I held up my hands, palms up. “Right. I’d have done more, but the Divers were the only guys I could affect. Other players, like the Eternals or the Nuggets, they could just brush me off like I wasn’t even there.”

  She got quiet, and I’d been in her head for long enough to suspect that she was running back through the events of the day, trying to work out what I knew and what I didn’t.

  “Let me save you as much time as I can,” I told her. “If your thoughts were strong enough, I think I got them too. But it isn’t as if you were an open book. Lots of who you are is buried deep, just like you said. But I saw the security footage. All that stuff about how Deep Dive began.”

  “That was my dad’s program reminding me of why I was here. It happens all the time. I think he wrote it with the intention of letting it scan my emotions and cheer me up when I was down, but I guess he repurposed it when the lawsuits started and his intellectual property became an asset of someone else’s corporation.”

  “That’s rough. Emotional blackmail from beyond the gr-” I caught myself, but there was no way that she didn’t know where the end of that sentence had been going.”

  Shit.

  “He isn’t dead,” she snapped. “If you were listening in on that call, you damn well know that.”

  “I do. I didn’t mean it like that. Not really.”

  I watched her, and for a second she let her shield slip to one side, and I saw that all of this hurt her so badly she could feel it in the marrow of her bones. “Will you help me, Ryan? I can’t do it on my own. I tried to tell him that on the call, but… I’ve let him down often enough, you know?”

  I started to answer, but something tugged my attention to the doorway. We were still in the hospital room, which apparently was the same room her dad was currently occupying in the actual Good Samaritan. Was something there, or was I just being paranoid?

  Sasha was already in motion though, and she and I quickly became an effective unit, a duo that had swapped enough secrets to act with singular intention in times of crisis. That big handgun was out and ready for action, and I reached over and slid the ax from the strap that secured it to her ba
ckpack.

  She didn’t stop to see if I was ready. I was, and she knew it.

  There wasn’t any underlying bullshit. Tactically, it didn’t matter that she was a girl and I was a guy. She had a gun. If we met anything in the hallway, being able to squeeze off a few rounds at it before it closed the distance would be invaluable, and my suddenly corporeal avatar standing in the way with an ax in my hands wasn’t going to be much use.

  Besides, a quick glance at my menu revealed exactly what I’d feared. I didn’t have any stats, skills or earned abilities. I had both of my hands, and the reflection in the blurred shine of the chrome rack that held the doctor’s clipboards by the door was clear enough to show me that I wasn’t my usual Zombie self.

  I was just Ryan, as usual. I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how much help I’d be.

  As usual…

  Sasha stepped out into the hallway like she’d cleared dangerous places before, and I figured that she’d probably stormed into way more than that. I was right behind her, glancing the other way just in case the noise had been meant to distract us. I was hoping that we weren’t up against something cunning enough to do that already, but the Red Zone was populated almost entirely with players who knew all of the tricks, and then some.

  There was nothing in either direction. It was dark in here though, so both of us wordlessly checked the length of the hall in both directions before returning roughly to where we’d started.

  I was just about to reassure her that I’d probably been hearing things when the sound reached my ears again. She heard it too, and now we were near enough to the source to work out exactly where it was coming from.

  The room beside the one we’d just climbed into. She tried the handle. Locked. I cocked my eyebrow at her, and she gave me a nod. I figured I wasn’t holding the ax just for looks, so I took a step back, aimed, and split the cheap hospital door in three swings. Another one knocked it off its hinges, sending it tumbling into the room.

  I’d been expecting more hospital beds, maybe a stash of something worth looting; medicine or surgical tools. Instead, I was greeted with row upon row of servers, stacked all the way to the ceiling. I lowered the ax and stepped inside, Sasha going left and me going right. The walls were covered with technical equipment so advanced that I’d never seen anything like it.

  I let out a low whistle. “Another bug?”

  “What do you mean?” Sasha asked, rounding the corner of yet another tower of drives and processors.

  I waved at everything in the room. “This isn’t hospital stuff, right? All of this crap belongs somewhere a million miles from here, NORAD or one of the space stations or…” When I’d started that sentence, I had no idea where it was going, but as my voice trailed off, I realized exactly what I’d left out.

  So did Sasha. “Or Deep Dive Studios. The AI that keeps Headshot chugging along would need a setup something like this, even though I’d have to guess that it’s overkill.”

  I nodded encouragingly. “Okay, so let’s assume that Deep Dive does use something similar. Why is it here? I don’t think it’s a bug either, but that doesn’t mean that I know what your dad is trying to tell us.”

  She made a face at me. “What does my dad have to do with it?”

  “It’s his game. I figured that he’d be the one to leave us any breadcrumbs we found.”

  “And just how in the hell do you presume he would do that? The accident happened almost three years ago, way before Headshot hit Beta, and he’s been in a coma ever since. No way, Ryan. Whatever is happening in the game now has nothing to do with him. His genius made the framework, but the day to day stuff is run by a myriad of other components.”

  I was listening to her, but I had a nasty habit of not watching people during their monologues. Instead, I’d let my gaze sweep across the room. I don’t know what I was looking for, but I kept going back to the cabling. On a hunch, I followed the bulk of the wiring to its destination, and then stopped in my tracks when I saw where they disappeared.

  Into the wall that separated the original room we’d entered from this one.

  Sasha was still talking, but I held up my hand to stop her. “Sasha?”

  She kept on going, running right over me. “It’s a common mistake. That’s what he was afraid of, back when the lawyers were telling him he had a good chance of winning the lawsuits. He was terrified that his name would be associated with what those assholes wanted to turn Headshot into.”

  “Sasha?”

  No luck. “If he’d have gotten a handle on the AI he’d have been able to hold on to Deep Dive. But he couldn’t get it working fast enough, and the stock prices crashed, and the takeover blindsided him. He was sure that he could engineer a working Artificial Intelligence, but he never got the chance. It would piss him off to no end to know that they solved it when he couldn’t.”

  “Sash!” That shut her up, at least. I didn’t feel right calling her by her dad’s pet name, but this was more important than whatever transgression that was. “They didn’t solve it either, at least not really.”

  “Huh?”

  I pointed at the terminus of the cables. “He’s showing us what happened to him.”

  I knew that Sasha had a temper, but when she balled up her fists and took a quick step toward me I was surprised by just how fiery she was. “He isn’t showing us anything, damn it. He can’t.”

  I grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her around to face the wall. “He’s the AI. Well, he’s not artificial, but you know what I mean. He didn’t get a chance to engineer one, but they’re using him instead. Think about it. He’s in a coma, right? Headshot was his baby, and all that brain power is right there for them to tap into. Do you think those guys are going to let that go to waste?”

  The fight went out of her. I think she knew the truth of it too, maybe even earlier than I had. She’d been unwilling to see what was right in front of us, and I didn’t blame her. She took a long, shaky breath. “I’m going to make those fuckers pay for this.”

  “The last thing Desmond said was that your dad was changing things. He must have been adding this, to show us the truth.”

  Sasha shrugged. “Maybe, but I don’t think so. I’ve been looking for this hospital in-game for a while, and I’ve never been able to find it. I think he was hiding it from me. I think he didn’t want me to know what was going on, maybe out of shame but probably to protect me. He’d know that I’d get myself thrown in jail right then and there when I tried to murder Desmond.”

  Okay. I was willing to admit that she knew her dad a lot better than I did. “So what did he alter, then?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t think we’re going to have to wait very long to find out.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  This is it,” she told me. “This hospital is everything. We hold it.”

  “Huh?” How the hell did she want us to do that? Sure, there were two of us now, but a place like this would need at least a dozen to hold it, and even that would be a skeleton crew that would likely be in deep shit fast. And what was the point? I mean, I understood the emotional attachment, but this place didn’t exist… “Are you sure that’s wise?”

  “Not really. How about this. Let’s check the rest of this place out. If we can work out a way to hang on to the hospital, we’ll do it. Agreed?”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Not a great plan, but a plan nonetheless.

  If I let myself ignore how important the actual building was in Sasha’s life, I had to admit that it wasn’t built to withstand an assault. Not even a little. But I’d look around with her. Maybe I could find a way to convince her that there were better options out there, by pointing out the flaws as we went.

  It was a shitty thing to do, but I told myself I was just doing it for the greater good. “Okay, you’ve got a deal,” I said.

  I’d been expecting her to argue. No, that wasn’t really true. I’d been expecting her to ignore me. It felt like I’d spent most of my life wat
ching girls like her, ones that were smart and driven and ready to take on the world ignore me, and I couldn’t say that I necessarily blamed them. Instead, she’d weighed my words and seen their value.

  I could get used to this…

  It was hard to leave the room. There could be more clues here, or some evidence we were supposed to find. But without power, the servers weren’t going to be doing anything, and even if they did it wasn’t like smashing them up or wiping them of data would change anything. They were nothing more than symbols, dreamed up by one brain and pushed down some wires so they could be pressed into ours.

  But there was a whole building to clear, and the sky was getting darker. It wouldn’t be long before the sun set.

  A hospital is a difficult place to sneak around. The floors are hard, and the hallways echo. On top of that, you needed to be careful that your shoes didn’t squeak on the polished linoleum. There are desks everywhere, perfect for an attacker to crouch behind, and some rooms have windows that look into two or three others. Moving unseen is difficult, and then there’s the fact that just about everywhere is separated from everywhere else by door after door after door. Even if most of them weren’t locked, it took forever to go through them all carefully.

  We pushed on though, and I noticed that the more specialized sections, operating theaters, patient admissions, pediatrics; had different layouts, but this part of the hospital was just a glorified hotel. Every room had its own bathroom, and you got a personal room if you were rich and had to share with five or six others if you weren’t.

  When we didn’t hear anything breaking the silence, we kept on going. There was a long, red line painted down the middle of the hallway. She and I followed it. “What are we looking for, exactly?” I asked.

  “I think there’s an internal staircase around here.”

  “You think?”

  She made a face and looked away, sighting down the length of her gun so that she didn’t have to meet my eyes. “I don’t really visit my dad very much. Desmond is there all the time, and my Mom’s... Well, she’s a lot of work. I don’t blame her, but it’s easiest not to go through all of that shit just to watch the guy who raised you start to look more and more like a corpse.”