Too Young to Die

by Michael Anderle

  Tina made no reply to that. She swallowed as the lift began to move. The Master of Ceremonies had announced the Twins first and half the stadium seemed to cheer wildly while the other half booed. Surely, with as much noise as there had been, there couldn’t be many people sitting silently. Now, Tayr was being announced, and though there was less interest, he could tell that they had their fans.

  “Our third team has become a fan favorite after only two matches in this arena,” the Master of Ceremonies said. The covering over their platform slid back and light flooded in. Cheers began, along with a few boos.

  “Aww, yeah,” Justin said.

  “What?” Tina looked deeply confused.

  “We’re being booed,” he explained. “That means we’ve made it.”

  “I think you may be confused about how humans show emotion.”

  “No, no, think about it—you see a cool act, someone wins at a sports game, and you get into it, right? It’s easy to cheer. But when you hate someone, that’s when you’ve seen them enough to learn about them and care about them. We’re not simply some extra team anymore.”

  “Uh…huh.” She looked dubious, but as their platform reached ground level, she plastered a smile on and waved. “That’s weird, the countdown hasn’t started yet.”

  “No team has an advantage in this match,” the Master of Ceremonies announced. “However, there is one difference between this match and the others…”

  The whole arena seemed to hold its breath, and Justin realized he was doing the same.

  “Magic is unrestricted in this round,” the man shouted.

  “Yes!” Justin yelled. He pumped his fist in the air.

  “You can use magic?” Tina asked him.

  “Hell yeah. I can set all kinds of things on fire—and reveal hidden things. And make a sword of fire. Oh, hell yes, I am so here for this.”

  “Good. That’s good.” She danced nervously on the balls of her feet. “One more thing, Justin.”

  “Yeah?” He darted her a glance but he barely paid attention. The countdown had begun in the sky and he scanned the vague outlines of the landscape.

  “This doesn’t change the plan,” she warned him. “Remember that, Justin. It doesn’t change the plan. We find a defensible location and we wait. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Yes.” Justin looked at her and nodded. “Of course. But we have magic once we get there.” He held one palm up and made a fireball.

  “Oh, shit.” Tina’s eyes widened. “You actually can make—” She broke off as the walls disappeared.

  He had never been to Scotland, but this was how he imagined it. The landscape seemed made half of rolling hills and half of jutting outcrops of rock that were mossy on one side and chalky white on the other. The air seemed to hold mist, cold as it broke against his skin, and he noticed different parts of the landscape appear and disappear.

  For a split-second, he wondered if the people in the stands saw the mist or not.

  Justin exhaled a breath and did the spell to reveal hidden items. He pictured a wave ebbing away from a beach, leaving shells and sand in its wake, and he was pleased to see several caches illuminate. Three were near his platform and a second-tier one was equidistant between their platform and the one that held Tayr.

  “There,” Tina called and pointed at an outcrop. “That looks like a place where we will be defended from two of three sides, and it has high ground. You hold it, I’ll get the weapons.”

  “Good. There, there, and there.” He pointed to the first, second, and third-tier caches. The third-tier one was close to the first-tier.

  They nodded at one another and leapt down from the platform. The ground was surprisingly slick under his boots. He grimaced, regained his footing, and raced forward. As he ran, power coiled in his palms and his magic bar in the top left of his screen, which had been rendered in gray during the past matches, now glowed a steady blue.

  Magic, at last. He was excited for this. The question was, which of the other teams had magic users?

  He watched from inside the tumble of rocks as the Twins pushed directly toward him. “Tina! We’ll have company soon.”

  Tina called something in return, which he hoped was an agreement. She didn’t sound panicked, anyway.

  Dexi and Callie looked annoyingly sure-footed on the slick ground. He couldn’t make out their faces but he knew it was them. The two figures practically oozed arrogance as they ran. If they had stopped to pick weapons up, he hadn’t seen it.

  Tayr circled behind the Twins—or, at least, he was fairly sure he saw flickers of people. He leaned forward and wished he had a spell for distance vision. He yelped when Tina arrived behind him with a clatter, and she dropped prone to avoid the fireball he barely refrained from throwing.

  “No own goals,” she admonished him.

  “Right. Sorry.” He gestured for her to look. “Tayr’s trying to pick the Twins off.”

  She settled beside him. “Finally, a use for the fact that I can barely see at close range.”

  He gave her a horrified look. “How do you fight one-on-one?”

  “I aim for the blur,” she said and failed to reassure him at all. “Okay—Tayr has two of their people trying to flank. They’re quick. I’m not sure where the third one is…oh, yep. She’s hanging back behind the left flank. Man, if they can pick the Twins off…”

  “That would be good,” Justin agreed. “So, what did you find for weapons?”

  “Fist weapons, a short sword, and a battle-ax with a water potion.” She sounded deeply satisfied. “We may be trying a totally crazy thing, but at least I’m well-armed for it.”

  “It’s not crazy,” he muttered. “Also, what’s going on out there?”

  “They’re…wait, where are the Twins?” She sounded panicked and scanned hastily behind their hideout. “Shit, shit, shit, where did they—”

  “Oh shiiiiiit.” He elbowed her. “Tina…Tina, look. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”

  “What?” She looked where he gestured and her eyes widened. “Oh, no. Oh, Tayr…”

  Tayr was still gaining ground, but the Twins must have known their opponents were there all along. Using the rocky ground and the constant dips and swells as a cover, they had hunkered down and hid to allow their opponents to pass them. Now, the Twins were the ones to creep up from behind, while the Tayr members slowed and began to inch through the mist. They were close enough that even Justin could see them clearly.

  He readied a fireball as he watched. He had a unique opportunity in that everyone he could see was someone he wanted to strike. Tayr seemed to have realized what was happening. They spun to look around, while the Twins used every opportunity to close the distance.

  When the spell came, it was strong—a gust of wind that knocked all three members of the other team from their feet.

  “Well, fuck,” Justin said. “I should have known the Twins would have magic. Who are these guys?”

  “If it helps,” Tina pointed out, “they’re probably saying the same about you, what with you coming out of nowhere to get to the final of the tournament.”

  “That does help, thank you.”

  Unfortunately, any thoughts of a boost disappeared when the Twins fell on their opponents without mercy. Armed with daggers, they clearly excelled at close range. Callie’s style was completely different from Tina’s, her strokes shorter and sharper compared to his teammate’s swells and powerful movements, but they were equally beautiful in motion. The woman made short work of her first opponent and turned to face the one Justin had fought yesterday who carried the battle ax.

  Dexi had eliminated the third member of Tayr with a rush of water that tumbled her with the force of its undertow. She was now encased in shimmering blue and water dripped from her.

  The woman he had fought knew she had no chance, but she clearly did not want to surrender. She feinted left and whirled to throw her battle-ax with power that didn’t surprise Justin at all—not after seeing her ease with the weapon the other day.


  The throw was true. Dexi had to dive sideways to avoid it, and with the magic-user taken out of commission, she hurled herself at his partner. The two grappled and the stronger woman tried to disarm Callie and get her into a chokehold. Her window of opportunity slipped away with every second as the man had begun to haul himself up.

  Justin seized his chance. He scrambled onto one of the rocks and lunged forward to hurl a fireball at Dexi. In his haste, however, he had forgotten how slick the ground was. His boot slipped and the shot went wild. The man whirled and launched a gust of wind at him. It knocked him down, and Callie took advantage of her opponent’s distraction to choke the other woman.

  “Tayr is out of the match!” the Master of Ceremonies called to the sound of groans.

  “Justin!” Tina darted her glance from him to their adversaries. “Justin, are you okay?”

  “Yes.” He groaned and forced himself to stand. There was no time to waste feeling sorry for himself. The Twins would be there in a moment. He shook himself out, tried to remember his grandfather’s stories of marching for days through the forests, and told himself he could sleep when he was dead. “I’m ready. I—”

  “Look out!” She flung herself over him as another gust of wind rattled overhead. Unnaturally strong, it swirled around them and began to pick hit points off them both.

  “Back into cover!” he called. They held each other up as they limped to their shelter.

  The wind couldn’t reach them there. It whistled angrily around the stones before it faded. A moment later, a fireball rocketed at the opening from which they’d watched. The friends ducked before they looked cautiously out again.

  The Twins now ran to their own defensible position. Justin gritted his teeth and threw a fireball with all the power he had. If he could only land one meaningful strike before the man was out of range.

  It hit Dexi and took his health bar down a third, but Justin’s magic now needed to tick back at an inexorably slow rate.

  He sat weakly. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. What do we do?”

  “What do you mean?” Tina stared at him. “We stay here and follow the plan. We have a defensible position and your magic will come back. As long as no one moves, it’s you against him. We’ll see if it’s possible to distract him enough for me to creep out but otherwise, you two will need to chip away at each other.”

  Half-heartedly, he looked over his shoulder and barely ducked in time to avoid a fireball to the face. He swore. “Cowards.”

  “They’re doing what we’re doing,” she pointed out. “And this is a compliment, after all. They’ve never gone on the defensive before. I asked around. They always go straight for the kill. They’re scared of you.”

  “They should be,” he muttered. “Because I’ll fucking take them out.”

  “Justin, for fuck’s sake. Sit and think for a minute—”

  “I am thinking!” he shouted in response. “I’m thinking about the grand prize I need to win to get home. You don’t get it, do you? You can go home anytime you want but I can’t, Tina. I need that key and if they get it, I’ll never get out of here!”

  “Calm down.” Her voice was fierce. “That is all the more reason to play this safe, Justin. Don’t throw away the advantage you have—”

  “No.” He took a deep breath, remembered the sight of the cache that had nestled between the two teams, and ducked out of hiding to sprint toward it. If he and Dexi had magic, it stood to reason that the Master of Ceremonies would have a magic potion. He needed to get it first.

  “Justin!” Tina yelled.

  Totally focused on the cache, he didn’t stop. He ducked incoming gusts of wind with a single-minded determination. No matter what, he would go home. He would win, and he would go home. The key was in his sights and he wouldn’t make the mistake of sitting back while everything passed him by like he had so many times before.

  She shouted something, but he wasn’t listening. He thought he saw movement—Dexi, most likely—but he had proved he could avoid the wind and the man must be running low on magic. He skidded up to the cache, stood to open it, and was hurled sideways with brutal force.

  Callie stood nearby, her hands out to throw a spell, and the last thing he saw before the world went black was his health bar flashing red and completely empty.

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Anna Price was nothing if not simple and to-the-point, but between the newsworthiness of the PIVOT pods and the potential future applications, the reporter clearly wanted to take his time. After she had finished her interview, David Yang ushered the founding members of PIVOT in for a group interview about their initial development of the technology.

  Jacob watched Justin’s pod out of the corner of his eye. He wished DuBois was there to oversee what was going on. There was a full medical staff, of course, but the patient’s stress levels were climbing steadily beyond where they had been. There was no medical distress but the young engineer hadn’t seen him like this since Justin first learned where he was.

  He tuned back in time to hear the question Yang asked him. “Were there injuries during the development process?”

  At last, he felt he was on solid ground. He shook his head. “We started very small. We worked up from already-used technologies and we tested them on ourselves. I have to say, having never done testing on people before and being the ones who would go into the machine, I think we probably took far longer with it than we needed to.”

  The others laughed. He didn’t need to stretch the truth at all. Not being sure what would happen with the combination of virtual reality feeds, the team had tested each one stringently and had sometimes rerun all their calculations and diagnostics between trials of the same iteration.

  “Now, you’re laughing,” Yang said, with his reporter-smile, “but I think everyone else is probably glad to hear you say that.”

  “It’s good to do things like that,” Jacob agreed. “I think we wonder about who we might have had a chance to help if we had gotten this technology online sooner—at least, I know I do—but it really does set my mind at ease to know that it’s safe.”

  “Exactly,” Amber added. “We had a few failures in testing but every one of those was running the current too low—never overloading the system. Besides that, all the testing really gave us a handle on the numbers we should expect to see, and that helped us when we integrated the game.”

  “Tell me about the game,” David suggested. He smiled brilliantly at all of them.

  “It’s a fairly standard MMORPG,” Nick explained. “We really lucked out in our collaboration there. It was a game that was already made and that we really loved. The team had run out of funds to keep the servers online, and we were able to keep the game alive and keep playing our favorite game.”

  “It’s a fantasy world,” Amber explained. “The basic premise is very similar to other games—you help people out, get stronger, take on stronger enemies. What makes it so effective as a recovery tool is two-fold. First, it engages social processes in the brain and second, there is a life-or-death component that stimulates the brain to protect itself.”

  “That was perhaps a poor choice of words,” Jacob interjected smoothly. He saw her grimace and hoped the TV crew decided not to show that. “The game isn’t dangerous. It’s simply that the fantasy combat stimulates the nervous system to behave as if it is conscious and responding to threats.”

  “So there’s no way to die in the game?” David clarified.

  Amber opted to keep her mouth shut, for which Jacob was thankful. “Your character can die,” he said, using finger quotes on the word, “which will provoke an emotional response due to the immersion. However, in a healthy individual, this is not—”

  Alarms erupted behind him and he spun in alarm.

  Justin’s monitors flashed red and his heart rate flat-lined. A team of assistants had swung into action and DuBois burst through the laboratory doors in the next moment, wiping tell-tale traces of popcorn off his hands.

  “Wh
at’s going on?” he called.

  “He flatlined,” one of the assistants replied. “Death in-game and his vitals went haywire.”

  “Justin!” Mary ran from the other room, her face pale.

  The TV crew looked at the pod in sudden interest, and Jacob was surprised to realize he felt nothing. He didn’t care what they thought—not while Justin was fighting for his life. He ushered them to the side as he, Amber, and Nick crowded around the pod. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Anna Price watching with remarkable equanimity.

  “Tell me when we’re clear,” DuBois called.

  “Clear!” an assistant confirmed.

  DuBois pressed the button for the defibrillator. Jacob held his breath and watched the jolt on the screen.

  Nothing happened and he exhaled, only to drag in another breath.

  The doctor’s calm demeanor did not change at all. “Tell me when we’re clear,” he said again.

  “Clear,” the assistant called. He was pale now.

  DuBois pressed the button. Again, the jolt burst across the heart rate monitor.

  And, again, the flatline returned.

  Jacob turned away and sank onto a crouch. He wanted to pound his fist against something—anything—but there was nothing safe to punch.

  “Tell me when we’re clear,” the doctor instructed.

  “Clear,” Jacob heard distantly. A moment later, there was a shower of sparks and several people yelled. Amber and Nick hauled their partner out of the way, and three assistants raced in. They called to each other, panicked, but he pushed them aside.

  “You have a loose connection. It’s not meant to take that charge so many times at once.” He reached in, grimaced, and snapped the piece together, wincing at the jolt. He shook his burned fingers, knowing they would sting soon, and stood to see everyone staring at the heart rate monitor.

  With his heart in his throat, he turned and almost collapsed in relief when he saw Justin’s heart beating strongly. He met DuBois’s eyes and nodded.

  “Good work, Doc.”

  “It looks like he got reckless,” the man said. “He—”