Two in the Gut

by Siege, Matthew

  She gave me a little smile. “That’s not so bad.”

  “Granted, that’s twice as many as there was an hour and a half ago, but we’re going to need a lot more viral growth than that if you expect to fight back somehow. You can’t just wave a magic wand here and build an army. When 11 o’clock hits, we’re goners. All hell is going to get thrown at us. I’m talking grenades in the windows, rocket launchers from the rooftops, tanks or APCs or whatever people scrounged up from military bases smashing in our front door. It will be a fucking nightmare, and the Divers will be coming up with ways to make it even worse. They know that the person that’s been crashing the system is in here. They might not know it’s Sasha Redhook yet, but that won’t stop them from cracking this place open like an egg. And they won’t even break a sweat doing it.”

  I was hoping against hope that my little speech would’ve brought her back to her senses, but all it did was make her square her shoulders and plant her feet. “We’re digging in. And if you don’t like it, then I’m digging in on my own. You can log out. I won’t hold it against you. What you did to avoid your character getting wiped by climbing in the Guild Vault was clever, and I’m sorry it meant that you had to stick around all Sunday. Maybe in a few hours when Monday hits you’ll be able to log back in and ambush the Eternals the way you intended. Maybe not. I don’t care, because all I hear from you is that this isn’t your fight. Fine. But it’s mine, and I’m going to fight it.”

  I just sat there. I went through a lot of those stages of whatever that you’re supposed to go through when something shit is about to happen. What are they? Grief, Pissed-offedness, Bargaining, Fear? I didn’t know for sure. The only thing I was certain of was that the last one was supposed to be Acceptance, and I sure wasn’t there yet.

  But that didn’t mean that I was ready to ditch her. What Deep Dive was doing was wrong, and I got the feeling that unless we could stop them, nobody else was going to. I was old enough to have watched a lot of bad things that should have been shouted down or stopped dead in their tracks, dragged out into the light of day and ridiculed for being evil get voted into practice instead, or ignored because acceptance is easier than ownership.

  She was a fighter, and so was I. My whole life had been spent with one person or another assuring me that I hadn’t lived up to my potential. Maybe they were right, though it was never that I didn’t care, I just didn’t know what to care about yet.

  But here I was. I’d found it, and I’d be damned if I let these assholes walk all over it. If they could manipulate this game into some brain-skimming tool to ascertain the will of the masses, the real war would be lost before people even knew that the first shot had been fired.

  “I’m staying,” I told her. “But I really hope you have a plan.”

  Sasha grinned, and at that moment I could’ve run over there and hugged her. “Of course I do,” she said. “But you aren’t going to like it.”

  THIRTY

  She told me her plan. Then I made her tell it to me again. As soon as it became clear that she hadn’t been trying to bullshit me the first time around, I pretty much had no choice but to interrupt her. “Let me just stop you right there. Are you serious?”

  “Deadly.”

  “Sasha, I thought you were a gamer.”

  “I am!”

  “Well, prove it, then. The first rule of a multiplayer game is Never. Split. Your party. That’s it. It’s been like that since Dungeons & Dragons, since people were rolling the dice and not walking around in some genius’s comatose brain. Sorry…” I said, catching myself at the end there.

  Sasha was frustrated with me, but at least she didn’t take offense at what I’d just said about her dad. I hadn’t meant it to be a slight. It was just that I was still coming to terms with the organic ‘server’ we were in. Humor and deprecation had often been the only way that I knew how to cope, and I was having a lot of trouble turning it off right now.

  I was glad that she didn’t think I was making light of her situation. I didn’t want to be arguing with her the whole time, but this heated discussion we were locked in right now was too important to give in to.

  She clicked her tongue at me, acting like a disappointed grandmother. “You’re not thinking straight,” she told me. “So let me break it to you as gently as I can. What are your skills? Go on, check your menu. But since you haven’t been bragging about them, I’m going to guess that you don’t have any. Because if you did, which I don’t think you do, the only abilities I would guess that you had would be the same ones that I do. Your character was ‘created’ at the same time as mine, right? But what good would that be? Two engineers might be a bit better than one, but that’s the situation, is it?”

  Just to spite her, I checked my menu again. I still didn’t have any skills or abilities, so she was annoyingly right about that. That was happening far too often, and it was starting to get old. “Just because I can’t help you booby-trap the place or whatever you’re cooking up, doesn’t mean that I should go out there.” I hooked my thumb at the outside world, where the sun was almost all the way down, and the crowd was beginning to gather.

  She shrugged. “True. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, either.”

  I went over and looked out the window. A strange blue box had descended around the hospital on the minimap, and if I strained my eyes hard enough I could see it in the air out there as well. It was three blocks away from us. It had to be the safe zone created by her dad, the one that Deep Dive would bust through at 11 to release the hounds. “Are we even sure that I can get through that?”

  Sasha gave me a wink. “You’re not asking the right question. The right question would be ‘if you can get through it on the way out, who’s to say that you can return?’ Or would you prefer to be stuck out there with them?”

  I cracked my knuckles, a habit that I hadn’t been able to use in Headshot for a while since I’d had to chew the left one off in my Zombie form. Now that I had them both again, it was taking my brain a little while to come to terms with the additional limb. Which meant, of course, that this game was royally fucking me up. Not for the first time, I wondered what type of lasting psychological damage I’d suffer if I stayed in for as long as I intended.

  No time to deal with that now. There was beginning to be a long list of things that I’d rather not turn my mind to, and I put this one at the bottom. “But I’m not a spy.”

  A little half-smile ghosted across her face, and she knew that she’d already won. I was coming around to her way of thinking, and part of my process was simply complaining about the minutiae. “You don’t need to do much. Pretend to be a Survivor. If somebody asks you a question you don’t know, play dumb. There’ll be a ton of noobs hopping in to see what the ruckus is about, so you won’t be alone in your ignorance. You look human now. Let’s use it.”

  “But…”

  She held up her hand. “I know. Maybe some of you rubbed off on me, and I can read your mind now, but I can already hear what you’re going to say. And you’re right. You don’t belong in the game right now, and the trace program might find you. But I’m betting that Deep Dive’s resources are focused on the patch. They’ll have their hands full trying to paint my dad into a corner, and you’ll slip through the cracks.”

  She was probably right. And even if she wasn’t, learning what the Survivors were planning was worth the risk. “So I just… mingle?”

  “Yep. You’ll be safe, Ryan. I can’t imagine that the devs are going to let there be PVP out there. The friendly fire would be insane even if things went right, and there’s always a bunch of assholes who want to mess up a big gathering of players like this. A random car bomb or a whole bunch of crazy kids with guns would spoil their entire army, and they’re not about to let that happen.”

  It was all so simple to her, wasn’t it? But then again, it’s always simple to the person giving the commands when they’re not the one expected to carry them out. “And that’s it, huh? I just sneak over there,
get chummy, and then return loaded with exactly the information we need to turn the tide?”

  I was expecting a witty rejoinder. She and I had been having a pretty good back-and-forth ever since I’d materialized in the game, and for a girl that I’d hardly met until this morning, I was speaking with her as if she was one of my closest friends. Screw that, I told myself, the two of you are way closer than that. Not that that’s hard since you don’t have a lot of friends in the first place. But if you spend a few hours in someone else’s mind and see some of their secrets, camaraderie takes a shortcut.

  But this time Sasha didn’t fire back. She rarely hesitated to bat my comments back at me, and when all I got was silence, I sought her gaze with mine.

  She was tired. Exhausted really. All of this was wearing her out, and I had to keep reminding myself that the woman I saw in front of me hadn’t set out to be some rebellious mastermind. She didn’t particularly want to be a white hat hacker bent on saving the world. She was a twenty-three girl asking too much of herself. I didn’t know where her life had been going before this, but it wasn’t going there now.

  The world had conspired to take her dad away from her and she was doing what she could to get him back. That was it, but it didn’t magically make it easy or simple or painless or successful.

  And she was scared.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just so used to you coming up with the plan lately that it seemed to fall to me to play the devil’s advocate. Somewhere in the last couple of hours, I guess I turned into an asshole. I don’t want to shoot down all of your ideas. I just want to help.”

  She pressed her fingers to her temples and then sighed. “I know. And I know you’re trying, too. I’m sorry I dragged you into all this. Even the Eternals chose, either because they were looking for some adventure in their life like Harker or happened to be too naïve to care about the circumstances, like Bonbon. You didn’t sign up for this. You’re just like everybody else, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You want to play the game. I’m sorry that I have to destroy it.”

  I waved her words away. “You don’t need to apologize. I get it. And I’ll help you, like I said. And you’re right; we need all the information we can get. Me going over there and playing superspy isn’t a bad idea. I’m expendable, and I get that. If I get killed or kicked from the game, so what? The server probably doesn’t even know I’m here anyway, and when I’m gone, I’m gone. It’d be stupid for me to stay behind if we have a chance at learning what the other side’s up to.”

  “Thanks,” she whispered.

  “Don’t mention it,” I said, pushing myself away from the window and taking a quick look around me in case I was missing something I should be bringing with me. “Here goes nothing, I suppose. The back of the hospital is pretty well shadowed. I’ll leave through there and then loop around to where most of them are gathering.”

  “Good idea,” Sasha agreed. “And Ryan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, huh? You didn’t turn into an asshole in the last few hours.”

  I smiled. “Thanks.”

  “You’ve probably had at least a couple years of practice.”

  I chuckled and shook my head at her, and before I could give her a stupid little wave or any words of meaningless encouragement, I turned and went downstairs, following the emergency exit signs until I found the night.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I might not have had any abilities assigned to me by Headshot, but this game couldn’t take away my instincts. I’d been playing as a Zombie for long enough that it was second nature to pick my way quickly through the deepest of shadows. I’d certainly be better concealed if I still had my Low Light Vision and Hide In Shadows perks, but I’d learned my lessons well on that side of the game.

  On the Survivor side of things, it turned out that walking three blocks in the very last of the light amidst a city that had yet to return to the grid was surprisingly simple. On top of that, the few Survivors I did see from this distance weren’t even looking in the direction of the hospital.

  Once I got closer, I could see why. There was a huge gathering going on, complete with muffled music, aromatic food, and military-grade transports. On top of all of that, what appeared to be a small rave had broken off and taken over one of the abandoned buildings nearby. Even though electricity was in short supply when it came to streetlights, it seemed there was more than enough to go around for the floodlights that were pointing at dozens of tables full of player-made merchandise.

  The atmosphere was bubbling with excitement, and people were getting caught up in the moment. Every player I looked at was more heavily armed than the last, and I imagined that all of that hardware would be aimed at me in a couple of hours at best and a few minutes at worst.

  The blue wall that protected Sasha and I from them was only half a block ahead of me now. It didn’t shimmer anymore, but even though I could tell its shape and its color, it went through this odd pulsing dance, somehow managing not to obscure my vision. I went towards it as fast as I dared and, when I was right in front of it, I reached out to place my palms on the surface.

  Except it had no surface. Not to me, at least. I didn’t stop to marvel at what Sasha’s father was able to do. Instead, I walked straight through it. As soon as I had, I took a few quick glances in as many directions as I had to worry about and then dropped the slinking through the shadows bit. It had been important that I got here without being seen, but now that I was on the Survivor side of the barrier, skulking around like I had something to hide was a surefire way to arouse suspicion.

  I stepped away from the shadows with my shoulders thrown back, and I walked right down the middle of the street like I owned the place. For all that I’d been through so far and all that I was afraid I had yet to endure, this was probably one of the strangest parts of the game for me. It went against everything I’d spent the whole time learning, often through painful lessons. The lizard part of my brain, the one that felt hunted throughout the entirety of Headshot, was screaming at me. It wanted to reach out with its claws and yank me back into concealment.

  I’d never experienced this game without fear.

  There was a multibillion dollar corporation hunting us, not to mention dark and desperate deeds remaining hidden beneath the very program I was in. Then there were the developers and their godlike powers zoning into the game indiscriminately, hot on my trail. All that, and the only thing it took to make me feel hunted was walking past a lone Survivor as he gave me an awkward thumbs up.

  I returned the gesture. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck in a conversation, but this guy nervously pointed in the direction I had come from anyway and said, “That’s fucking weird, right?”

  Had I been caught already? Would my best response be to see if I could shove this guy down and dart back to the safety of the barrier?

  I gritted my teeth and steeled my nerve as I cautioned myself not to turn into the world’s biggest coward at the drop of a hat. I was no more than forty steps away from the damn barrier, and already my first and only plan was to slink back to it like a child that had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  Instead, I cocked an eyebrow in his direction. “If you ask me, this whole thing is fucking weird,” I told him, doing my best to adopt the world-weary attitude that I often had to wear when I was on the bus or at my job, and someone asked me something that I’d rather not reveal.

  He was nodding enthusiastically, and I began to worry that his eagerness to chat could be put down to him being as much a stranger to this side of the game as I was. “You’d think they’d let us see it. I mean, how are we supposed to plan if we can’t even work out where the damn thing is?”

  I turned around to see what he was getting at. On this side of the barrier, the blue wall was solid. It looked like someone had deleted all of the game on that side of the world, and I had to take a few steps back and look down the street to my left to work out if it ended. It did, b
ut I was sure that if I rounded that corner and looked toward the hospital, there’d be more blue wall staring me in the face.

  He wasn’t done talking. “You just touched it, didn’t you? That’s why you’re coming from that direction, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I lied. So much for confidently walking down the center of the street making me safe. I probably should’ve waited to pull that shit until I was farther from the wall.

  “What happened when you did it?” he asked, his eyes as wide as if he had requested a war story from an older relative.

  I did my best to give him the answer he was looking for. “What happened? It hurt like a bitch, that’s what happened. Deep Dive is doing a good job of making it fair. No sneaking in and no head start.”

  He smiled. “I heard a bunch of people talking about the wall, so I thought I’d come down here and see what happened if I tried to shove through. Just to test it out.”

  I shrugged at him. “You can try it, if you want. My guess is that it affects everybody differently. I mean, they’re in our heads, right? It wouldn’t be that hard for them to just summon up some fear that they knew would get us to back off. Fire, acid, snakes. Whatever…”

  And just like that, all the enthusiasm that had been painted on his face faded away as if by magic. I’d burst his enthusiastic bubble, and he didn’t even bother to pretend that it wasn’t the case. “Maybe I’ll just look and not touch…”

  I nodded sagely. “Probably for the best.” Before he could decide that he had several other questions he wanted to ask me, I put my head down, shoved my hands into my pockets and strode up the street toward the rest of the Survivors. The closer I got the louder the music was, and now and then people were firing shots up into the air with a myriad of different firearms.