Hope Engine

by Andrew Lynch

  I heard gunshots from the way we’d come.

  ‘Is Angie–’

  ‘She’ll reboot in a fresh corpse, focus up!’

  Gone was the friendly, subservient Daniel from earlier. It hit me full force now that I had let two people kidnap me based on a few pleasant words. They’d taken me from everything I knew. And why? Because they’d said a few words. Because I thought I knew them? Conmen can say a few words. Or they’d hacked the HOPE engine with some program called Thorn? Now there were gunshots, creepy masks, and stun batons. I’d made a huge mistake.

  In front of us a door opened, flooding the dim corridor with white light, and two white uniformed guards burst out.

  Daniel rushed me forwards before they could raise their guns. They tried to shout an order, but we were already too close. He kept me unable to move in his grip, and the world became a blur as he whipped me back and forth. I heard electric cracks and the sound of meat smacking meat.

  The door closed, bringing with it the darkness. The underlighting flickered back into life. I looked down at the two guards. My vision fuzzed with static before resolving itself into a hovering display. As I looked at the guards, they had… stats. Like I was still in a game. Both showed flashing red heads and arms with 0% next to them. An armour symbol that had been cracked in half.

  ‘How… how am I seeing this?’

  He pushed me further down the corridor.

  “You can thank me for that”

  ‘Thorn?!’

  ‘He’s working for you already?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘Huh? Yeah. What does it mean?’

  ‘Means you’re a weapon. Also means we need to get you out of here before–’

  The sound of metal cutting air fluttered past me, and I saw metallic sparks shoot up around me.

  ‘Fuck! Run!’

  I didn’t have a choice as he pushed me forwards, and my options were sprint or fall.

  The shooting stopped, and Daniel slowed and turned. He muttered to himself. ‘What the… they’re just waiting?’

  ‘Daniel, what’s happening?’

  ‘End of this tunnel there’s a door. We’ve got a guy waiting for us. Look, you can see it.’

  As if on cue, lights lit up the end of the corridor, and sure enough, there was a grimy looking metallic door.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Daniel whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lighting up means…’

  The door slid open soundlessly, despite what the rust would have led me to expect.

  The strangest light I’d ever seen filled the end of the hall, perfectly silhouetting a slim human form.

  ‘Shit shit shit,’ Daniel whispered to himself. ‘Okay, look. You need to get past him and get outside. The team will take care of you from there.’

  Outside? The strange light was… natural light? Then and there, I knew I’d never seen it before. Not even in some half remembered childhood. Had I ever been outside? Had I ever left my government apartment? My fake apartment?

  ‘But look, you’ve got the Thorn chip. It’s so much more than a weapon, but right now, we need it to be a weapon. If this prick construct goes for you, you need to–’

  The silhouette jerked its arm, and a blur flashed past me. Daniel’s grip relaxed, and I heard him thump to the floor behind me. I heard a clatter of metal on metal half a second after and looking back showed that the blade hadn’t entered flesh. His mask had deflected it. He was just unconscious. Shit damn it, Daniel. What do I need to do?!

  ‘Hello, Subject.’ The voice was male and smooth. Cocky and sure of itself. The accent wasn’t one I‘d heard before, but it dredged up memories of a land that had fallen long ago.

  ‘You’re not my…’ my voice trailed off as I remembered I wasn’t in a fantasy game anymore. He didn’t mean I was his subject and he was my lord. He meant test subject. ‘Well. Hello, Construct.’

  He smirked and stepped forward. ‘Whoever taught you that word? It’s a bit dated.’

  As he closed the distance between us, my HUD locked onto him. That was the Thorn chip activating, giving me extra information. But I didn’t know this world’s systems and I couldn’t figure out what everything meant outside of the construct being at full Life. There were different coloured bars and numbers hovering around this construct. Whatever it really was.

  The man-thing continued walking slowly towards me. ‘A construct is something artificial. A social construct, for example. It has rules and laws that govern systems, but when broken, it falls apart. Beings like me? We don’t ever fall apart. You can’t break our system.’

  I looked behind me to see if I could run, but the guards were still there. ‘You’re not artificial then?’

  He smiled. ‘You know so little of the real world, Subject. Real answers would mean nothing to you, and what’s the point in lying?’

  My mind raced as I realised I was trapped. ‘Does that mean you can’t lie? Is that a system of yours?’

  He winked at me. ‘You can’t worm your way out of this. Turn around and let the nice bio officers put you to sleep. You’ll wake up back in your training program.’

  Training program? Did he mean Tulgatha? As the door had shut, the blue under lighting had restarted itself, and flashed on. I could see him fully now. He was wearing loose grey trousers that gripped at his calves. That was all. He was, in a word, perfect. Perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfect face, perfect body.

  I wanted to back away from his perfection, for while it was beautiful, it was also terrible. He was perfect, but he was horrifying. He radiated lethality. A perfect killing machine. One of the guards shifted his foot behind me, reminding me they were there, and I stopped retreating.

  I had to get past him. Follow Daniel and Angie’s plan, even if I didn’t know what was going on here. All I truly knew was this construct was not on my side. I looked at the prone form of Daniel. 80% Life, head armour flashing red to show it was broken, and a status effect. Unconscious.

  The thing stopped when it was next to Daniel and looked down at him. ‘You are weak objects. I’ve noticed that when I want your kind to do what I want, pain works well. So well that it doesn’t even have to be pain applied to you.’

  With the precision, poise, and control of a dancer, he lifted a foot to rest on Daniel’s neck.

  ‘Turn around, Subject. Let one of those other bios return you to your cell.’

  There was nothing I could do. I had no weapon or way of attack, and whether that was really the Daniel I grew up with, or someone else, or just an older Daniel after two years of me not being in this world, it didn’t really matter. I couldn’t watch this beast robot kill another person, one that wouldn’t respawn, if I had the choice to stop it. I had to turn myself in.

  “There’s another way.”

  Thorn? You’re talking again?

  “The transition from inside HOPE Engine to the real world is jarring. I’m here now.”

  The construct shifted his weight and I heard a cracking sound from Daniel’s head.

  ‘I’m not joking, and I don’t have time. Turn yourself in or this child dies.’

  What do I do, Thorn?

  “Use me.”

  Just like in Tulgatha.

  I had to get this right, or Daniel would die.

  Some unseen force, intuition or Thorn, made me want to move. Want to act. All I had to do was stop fighting that impulse.

  My hand shot out and despite the metres of clear ground between us, the construct flew back as if he’d been hit by a truck. He slammed against the rusted metal walls, denting the grating and ragdolling to the floor.

  Fuck me.

  ‘Shoot him!’ the construct shouted.

  Thorn let me see what the guards were doing without me turning, just like in Tulgatha… maybe it really was my training program…

  They were well trained. No movement was wasted. They had already been in firing positions. Trigger fingers came out of the resting position, thumbs slipped onto pad scanning safety disarm switches, a
nd fingers grazed triggers. I could sense their guns. Not the barrels, but the circuitry of the bodies, and even the chip inside the tranquilizer darts. I could see the pathways I could let Thorn take and what those would lead to. I disabled all the guns. The guards didn’t need to die.

  I walked toward the construct who had managed to crawl out of the dent in the floor he’d made.

  He pointed a finger at me and I was suddenly aware of the full capability of his body. His hand snapped back to allow a barrel to extend out of it. Seamlessly connected sections of his forearm pulled out on hinged servos, pulling forward the gun body from the bicep, connecting to the barrel. A rotating feed spun in his chest, loading an explosive tipped 2.5 caliber round into the now fully assembled Winchester Rapid Warframe Cannon.

  It had taken 0.4 seconds, and he could fire in another 0.3. It would only take me 0.1 to jam the gun. Or cause all the explosive tips to detonate prematurely. Or make him point the barrel at his own head.

  But I could see that the gun was merely a symptom. I would deal with the cause. Before his central core systems could confirm targeting and agree the firing solution, I shut him down. He dropped to the floor and every part of his perfect body expelled metallic cabling and minute silicon chips, a single one worth enough to feed the world for a week.

  Behind me, the guards began to move, but Thorn gave me a dozen options to disable them and three dozen to kill them. I locked their armour joints from the waist down. They’d be able to crawl out of them given time.

  I had one prevailing thought. I was scared. Not of what I’d done, that had to happen. I was scared of how damn great it felt to do it. I wanted to keep going. I wanted to find the next construct that thought he could stop me. I wanted Thorn to connect me to the next lethal machine that stood in my way.

  I walked down the dimly lit hallway, but I found there were enough active electronics in the walls and the floor that I didn’t need to use my eyes to know where everything was. My senses were spreading, and I could see more and more of the world around me. And what an interesting world it was! Suits of armour running to intercept my position. A destroyed construct lying among broken guns and armour – Angie, her final stand a success. The high-speed combat shuttle touching down outside and the lightly armoured resistance fighters around it.

  I picked Daniel up, and despite my newfound Godhood, I struggled with his weight. I threw him over my shoulder and walked.

  I connected with the final obstacle stopping me from leaving what was, most definitely, my prison.

  With a thought, unfamiliar natural light blinded me, warmed my skin, and felt… right.

  I stepped into freedom.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Andrew Lynch is an author of fantasy and science fiction in his spare time. When not being lured by such productive things that stave off the darkness of being, he is a gamer (PC and board), a youtuber, and a struggling enthusiast (that’s right, I struggle to be enthusiastic!).

  He lives in the well known hive of scum and villainy, London. England, as if that needed to be said.

  On the occasional times he feels the need for luxurious things like food and rent, he’s got one of those jobs where if he told you what he did he’d have to kill you.

  If you’re into the more exotic things in life (wargaming and rants) he can be found on Youtube with the mysterious name of Glass Half Dead.

  If you want to find more of his writing, he has a highly under utilised site which gets irregular updates at http://www.lynchwriting.com

  And yes, Severo WILL be returning for a sequel. I wouldn’t leave you hanging like that!

  Are you a fan of LitRPG in general? Then check out the Facebook groups at https://www.facebook.com/groups/LitRPGsociety/ and https://www.facebook.com/groups/LitRPGGroup/