Spellcraft

by Andrew Beymer

  I hated those bastards with a passion for what they did to Diana, and I was going to make them pay.

  “You say so,” Kris said. She glanced around the throne room. “Um, did you notice the game is still frozen around us?”

  “Well yeah,” I said. “But I hadn’t really thought past using the game’s rules against the gamemaster.”

  “I know I keep saying this, but I still can’t believe that worked,” Kris said.

  “I sort of can’t either,” I admitted.

  It’d been a calculated risk. I’d watched plenty of videos of gamemasters at work in Horizon games, and I’d noticed a pattern. They always used powerful attacks when they were booting players from a game, and it was always a modified version of a powerful attack that already existed within the particular game the GM was patrolling.

  After that it’d been a short logical leap to figure that maybe GMs were confined to using attacks from the games they were porting into, but with a little code injection that kicked the targeted player out and banned them on top of the impressive fireworks. And if they were using attacks from the games they were porting into then what happened if one of those attacks was turned around on them using, say, an item that was designed to counter one of those attacks?

  I’d just proved it killed the bastards. Maybe banned them, too. Which went above and beyond anything I’d hoped for when I first came up with this scheme. I’d thought I might give a gamemaster a bloody nose. I’d never dreamed I’d kill one.

  “Well we should probably…”

  The room turned a darker red around us.

  “Attention players,” a voice boomed through the room. A disembodied voice that notably wasn’t attached to any gamemaster entering the game to pass judgment.

  “Uh-oh,” Kris said, looking up.

  Though looking up wasn’t strictly necessary. That booming voice had come from both everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and that meant it was being piped directly into our heads. And out onto the live feed, which was gravy for me. I wanted the world to see this.

  “We thank you for taking the time to play this fabulous module from Horizon Online Entertainment. The creation of this module helped to employ thousands of people working on entertaining the future!”

  I rolled my eyes. That response was so rehearsed that I could practically hear the unspoken trademark that came at the end of “entertaining the future.” It was so canned that I could almost hear the cats meowing at the speaker’s feet as he opened it up.

  All their customer service assholes talked like that, and that disembodied voice booming through the game was still a human customer service representative getting ready to spank the naughty players who’d now circumvented both their module and their attempt to ban us.

  They wouldn’t rely on an AI routine for something like this. Though to be fair they didn’t use AI routines for much of anything when it came to customer service. Not when they could make their wage slaves recite scripts for far cheaper than it cost to develop a decent customer service AI.

  The end result was about the same in terms of actual customer experience: not great.

  “We regret to inform you that we have determined your particular play style to be detrimental to the game experience that so many of our valued clients have come to expect.”

  “Detrimental to the game experience my ass,” I shouted into the frozen room, some of the anger I’d kept bottled up over Diana finally exploding out. “Your play experience was going to have me beheaded, and there was no way I could get out of it. You assholes are all the same! You kill people in your games and in the real world! My sister died because one of your modules fried her brain!”

  Whatever asshole was on the other end either couldn’t hear me, or they chose to ignore me. Again it’s not like it mattered. What I was shouting was getting out to the wider world, and that was my true audience.

  Not to mention the Horizon assholes on the other end of this wouldn’t want to admit anything since the lawsuits surrounding gamers allegedly killed or turned into comatose vegetables while playing Horizon modules were still working their way through the courts.

  Working their way through the courts very slowly, too, since the phenomenon of justice going to the highest bidder had only become more and more pronounced with each passing year. Yeah, a slick CSR wouldn’t touch an admission of liability like that with a twenty-foot range wireless headset.

  “You are hereby banned from all future Horizon Online Entertainment games. Scans of your unique brainwave identification have been taken, and any further access to our systems will be met with harsh punishment.”

  The pronouncement hung in the air. For a normal gamer it might’ve been the end of the world, but I wasn’t having any of it. If this was going to be my last chance to twist the knife at those bastards then I was going to twist it nice and good.

  “A permanent ban? That’s getting off light considering some of the shit you’ve pulled. Did you had to stop lobotomizing and killing people with your brain zaps after all the bad publicity?” I shouted.

  “The litigation for those accusations is still ongoing. There is no proof those troublemaking assholes were harmed by the measures we put in place to stop them, and even if they were, they were poking around where they didn’t belong!”

  I blinked. I hadn’t expected them to respond. Scratch that. I hadn’t expected them to respond honestly. That’d never happened before. They’d never even acknowledged the people they killed or turned into vegetables without at least a dozen layers of lawyers between them and whatever statement they were making on the subject.

  The booming voice seemed even more angry than usual. I sensed something. It started as a tingle running along my arms and the back of my neck. There was something new going on with the person behind the booming voice.

  I’d listened to enough recordings of those assholes doing their customer service thing, and been on the business end of their little spankings often enough for that matter, that I knew what they sounded like when they were on a script.

  This didn’t sound like any script I’d ever heard. I sensed an opportunity, and I was going to seize it.

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “I know what you assholes did. You killed my sister with your brain zap, and when the lawyers get done with you…”

  “If that happened then she deserved what she got!” the booming voice said. “A lot of good people lost their jobs because…”

  The sound of a struggle filtered through the line. The struggle sounded pretty damn funny from my end. Everything was pushed through the same filter that was used to give the asshole the big booming voice, with the practical upshot being that mundane office sounds like a keyboard being overturned and used as an improvised weapon were telegraphed through the filter.

  It made a scuffle going down in a cubicle sound like a couple of nerdy vengeful gods taking out their frustrations on one another.

  “I think you really pissed them off this time,” Kris said.

  “Yeah, well it’s the least the bastards dese…”

  I paused as the epic struggle clearly came to an end. I thought I heard someone identifying themselves as being from security or HR in the background, but it was hard to make out much since whoever was talking wasn’t standing in front of the microphone.

  “You are now being logged out of Horizon Online Entertainment,” a voice said.

  This voice sounded sounded slightly different than the previous voice being pumped through the booming sound modification, and the lack of emotion and clipped inflection made all the difference. I figured we were talking to someone a little higher up the org chart than the CSR and then probable middle manager I’d been dealing with.

  “Fuck you and your customer killing company,” I shouted, flipping a double bird into the air that I was sure the asshole on the other end could see. I glanced at the third person view of my live stream and saw my character flipping the bird at the camera in a glorious pose.

  I grinned
. Oh yeah. This shit was pure gold.

  That grin was the last thing I did before a searing pain started in my ears. Kris cried out in pain beside me and went to her knees.

  I reached up to pull the earbuds out even as I knew trying to do that was an exercise in futility. Back in the real world my body was being flooded with the same paralytic nature had created and perfected to make sure people didn’t move in their sleep.

  So while I was reaching in the virtual world for the pair of earbuds that gave me access to that virtual world my hands in the real world were as still as the dead.

  Luckily for me, at least for certain definitions of “luckily,” the searing pain only lasted for a brief moment before the world went dark around me.

  5

  After Action

  I sat up and took in a shuddering breath. Little sparks of pain danced up and down the length of my spine as my nerve endings got used to being back in the real world.

  I was used to a little tingle running up and down my body’s information superhighway when I logged out of the Lotus hardware, but this was the first time there’d been pain to go along with it.

  Not that I felt like I had much to complain about. I knew someone who never woke up to feel that pain dancing up and down her spine, after all.

  I ripped the earbuds out and stared at the things with a nervous shiver running down my spine as though it was chasing away the pain. The sort of nervous shiver that hits everyone when they’ve had a near death experience. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d just had a hell of a near death experience.

  Whatever had happened to Diana had just happened to me. I was sure of it. Only I was also pretty sure the safeguards Lotus claimed they didn’t need to put into place after the last incident had just kicked in to save my ass.

  Whatever HOE was doing to people to kill them or turn them into vegetables, they’d just tried it on me. They’d tried to kill me, and it only added to the seething hatred I already felt for the sons of bitches.

  One thing was for sure. Those gamemaster assholes deserved every kind of punishment they were probably getting right now from their middle management overlords if their response to a little innocent game breaking and international public humiliation was to try and kill me!

  “Motherfucking bastard sons of bitches,” I growled.

  I took a couple of deep breaths before I stood and did a couple of stretches. The hardware kept my muscles twitching while I was logged in so they wouldn’t atrophy or anything, but I couldn’t shake the habit of doing my own stretches to chase away some of the cobwebs that always threatened when I first came back to the real world.

  It didn’t help that this time it felt like some of the cobwebs were laced with fire. Whatever the fuck they’d done to me had hurt, and that had me thinking about how much pain Diana must’ve been in just before the end.

  Those corporate cocksucking motherfuckers were going to pay.

  As soon as I’d worked out some of the kinks I sat down in front of my laptop. I pulled up some of the usual Lotus news sites, and of course right there on the front page were a bunch of stories featuring the third person live feed I’d put out.

  I paused on one of them that showed me getting down on my knees and grabbing at my ears in obvious pain. Then it moved to some “gaming journalist” streamer trying to get some bankshot views by jumping on my publicity.

  “And there you have the final still before the mysterious streamers disappeared from the game module,” the girl said, leaning forward and causing some of her low cut tanktop to fall open which both distracted me and drew my attention in exactly the way she was probably hoping for when she decided to practice “legitimate journalism” in an outfit like that.

  “We have yet to hear anything from the streamers, though many are claiming responsibility on various Lotus forums and social media, and…”

  I swiped away from the feed. The girl was pretty, but I needed to see what other people were saying. Only it was mostly variations on the same themes. There were a lot of wannabes crawling out of the woodwork to claim responsibility. No one had come forward with a first person view of the attack, though, which would be the ultimate proof since I’d deliberately only broadcast a third person view to my live feed.

  Some worried that Horizon might’ve done something to seriously hurt me and Kris given how we’d been acting there at the end.

  Even more importantly, there were a lot of people talking about the gamemaster’s admission of guilt. I grinned at that. Oh fuck yes. It was going to be tough for those bastards to wiggle their way out of that one. Though I’m sure they were going to throw plenty of lawyers and money at the problem to try and make it disappear.

  I sighed and thought about getting a snack, then decided against it. That’d mean dealing with my parents. I didn’t want to see my mom staring listlessly at the TV like she had since Diana’s accident, or listen to my dad talking about how I was out of here when graduation came around.

  No, time to do what I did best when thoughts of an unwelcome future threatened. I put the earbuds in, not even feeling much hesitation when I did it despite the fact that they’d nearly killed me just now.

  There’d been a time, right after Diana went into her coma, when I’d been terrified of using the things. The terror had returned when she eventually slipped away into that unknowable nothingness that awaited everyone in the end.

  Only as with all dangerous things, sort of like what driving had been like before the computers took over, using something often enough and not experiencing the supposed dangers firsthand was enough to trick my brain, that really wasn’t all that far from the primates humanity had come from evolutionarily speaking, into thinking the risk wasn’t all that great.

  I hit a button and felt the always strange sensation of the game taking over. My muscles moved without me controlling them and I laid down on the bed. My eyes closed, and when I opened them I was at the top of a tower that had a view of an impressive fantasyscape.

  I recognized the massive fantasy city out the window. Buildings seemed to be sculpted of stone rather than built. It was on an island that split a massive river to either side, and off in the distance a mountain speared the sky with smoke rising from the top as it always did.

  I smiled. Kris always had been a big fan of the works of Robert Jordan, and later Brandon Sanderson after he’d inherited that mantle and ran with it writing like a fiend that had some scholars speculating to this day that he was actually an early test case of a storytelling AI being perfected and released to the world.

  “I wondered how long it was going to take you to get here,” Kris groused.

  I wheeled around and grinned. Kris sat in a chair that looked more like the best modern equipment gaming could offer than something I’d expect out of one of the greatest high fantasy epics to come out of the latter half of the twentieth century. I moved over to sit and one of those chairs appeared under me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was checking some of the feeds.”

  “In the real world?” she asked.

  Kris looked at me from around a translucent screen hanging in the air in front of her that was far more impressive than my small laptop screen in the real world. She’d muted the sound, but it was obvious she was watching videos of our incident with the Horizon Online Entertainment gamemasters.

  Not that there was much of anything else on all the usual gamer feeds right now. Even the most successful streamers were busy filming reaction videos to get a slice of our action, because nothing had really happened in this day and age until everybody and their mother had recorded a reaction.

  I grinned and waggled my eyebrows.

  “Are we making the news?” I asked.

  “You bet your ass we’re making news,” Kris said. “But you knew it’s all over the usual feeds. People can’t shut up about what we just got those Horizon assholes to admit to.”

  “Good,” I said, my voice harsh. “They deserve it for what they did to Diana.”
<
br />   Kris flinched, and a quiet rage boiled behind her eyes. She’d been close to Diana too, after all. Closer than me, in many ways, for all that she was my sister.

  “I get it,” she said. “They’re the soulless evil corporation that all our favorite scifi authors warned us about, but is poking at them really a good idea even if they deserve it? I’m pretty sure they just tried to kill us.”

  “They did try to kill us,” I said. “And they would’ve covered it up just like they did the last time it happened.”

  Kris looked down. There wasn’t much of a response to that, after all. Killing us wouldn’t be anything to Horizon after what they’d already done. The empty room down the hall from mine was proof of that.

  “I’m going to keep giving them shit until those assholes come out and admit to everything they’ve done,” I said. “They keep hiding behind their lawyers and their money and I think we all know where that’s going to get us.”

  “Nowhere,” Kris growled.

  “Exactly,” I growled right back at her.

  I knew there wasn’t much chance me or my family would ever see any sort of justice for my sister through the usual channels. Not when the courts could be bought by the highest bidder. Even with what they’d just admitted to out in public.

  “Right. We need to start working on the next job,” I said. “That one was good. We actually got one of their assholes to admit something, and we got it on a livestream. That’s gonna be everywhere.”

  That was another trend that kept right on going from the late twentieth and early twenty-first. Maybe the courts had been bought and paid for, but there was still one court that could influence things: the court of public opinion. I felt like I’d gotten a pretty good handle on pulling those levers.

  The formula was simple, even if creating that formula could be tricky at times: do something audacious enough that it got people’s attention, then put a message behind it or get the asshole you were targeting to admit something they shouldn’t while the world was paying attention.