Thief in the Game Page 2

  The words:

  LEVEL UP

  HEALTH: RESTORED

  + 2 x First Aids Packs

  + Weapons upgrade on : towel

  + turbo jumps ability

  And the Vulcan’s Finale logo drifted up in front of me as the ominous, majestic music stirred and roused.

  Obsidian plinth

  THE WORLD SHINES BRIGHTER. Through the boughs of surrounding trees, the air sings gently. If I had a simsuit, I would feel a cool, soft breeze. Well, a simsuit and some bodily sensation to take advantage of it, of course, I know. Still, I’ve gotten so used to reading sensations in numbers, it almost seems the same.

  Statistics flicker as my health restores, my reputation rises like an express elevator, and all my kills and skills consolidate. I just have time to see that I still have two 9mm pistols, a Glock and a Colt, both full, and three spare clips for each, a crossbow with 3 shafts, a flywhip, and the T’ck’s ax. That and the towel is all. No real firepower.

  The light sparkles, diffuses then the world falls away to darkness.

  I’m in the echoing gloom of a dark, high, rock chamber. Reddish, the rock gorge rises like a high cathedral. That’s not where my interest focusses.

  On the far side, atop an obsidian plinth, the jeweled box shimmers. The jeweled box. The most precious object of this whole quest. The last drop of serum to cure the worldwide plague is supposed to be in that box. About thirty feet away, across the stone floor.

  Around the floor of the plinth is a wide stone step. the plinth itself is tapered and the jeweled box atop it is in a pointed, clear case. A hunch tells me, I know how this is going to go.

  It’s never going to be as easy as walking across the floor, I’m sure of that. Warily, I look around. Much rock, rising jagged to a point. Right above the plinth with the box. Flicking the flywhip as far as I dare, the steel cable whispers as I shoot at the far wall of the chamber. As soon as it grips I grab the whip handle with both hands and press the button to retract the cable.

  Already, a crack shoots across the stone floor beneath me and it starts to crumble, tumbling away, falling into a widening canyon. Far away at the bottom of the gorge, a lake of fiery lava splashes, rising. Flapping beasts arise with steel wings, rock bodies, razor beaks and burning eyes. As I swing out across the chasm they soar up at me.

  In the pitch darkness at the high point, the rock face of the vaulted chamber roof begins to crack.

  The pterodactyl-bat-bots or whatever the living fuck they are, are fast and they’re snapping closer. Somehow, I don’t think the Colt or the Glock are going to make much of an impression on them. No other options, though. I’m not going to be able to load and fire the crossbow without letting go of the flywhip.

  I don’t know for sure that I can even keep hold with just one hand. There’s no alternative. The beaks look razor sharp, and they’re snapping dangerously near. With the Glock in one hand I swing on the wire as wide as I can. One beast comes frighteningly close. It seems a shame to waste the bullets, but I punch a fast volley right at its eye. They leave a pleasing iridescent trail and sputter off his eye like burning shale. His beak stretches wide and I get a shot right at the back of its throat.

  Useless. The bird doesn’t flinch and I’m only just able to body-swerve out of the way and it scrapes past me. I holster the gun.

  The floor beneath the plinth is splitting and falling away, and the plinth starts to shake. Well, I’m sure I know where all of this is going. The other three birds are close to my heels. If I can’t beat them, may as well join them. I grab the rising pterodactyl leg of the bird as it passes. Click to release the wire, retract it and hang on to the bird thing.

  The bird’s head flips around, angry. I get the Glock out again and shoot its beak. Its head shakes as it’s beak shatters, satisfyingly. It makes fierce, furious cawing noises but I hold on and pay no attention. The big show is going on below.

  As the last of the stone floor turns to plummeting rock, the plinth shakes and the blast of a rocket engine fires up below it. It shudders and starts to rise. The angry birds follow it. Have I made a fluke, or did I guess this situation right?

  The plinth with the case with the jeweled box is propelled upward, accelerating into the darkness above. Brighter cracks appear in the vaulted rock. The bird follows the rocket. Up, faster and faster, we soar, turning and shaking though a narrow column of darkness. Rising higher, we accelerate toward an impossibly small, round opening.

  I can’t believe that the little rocket is going to get through, much less me and the bird. The rocket slips exactly through the space. The bird’s head points forward and its wings fold back. We pierce through the round hole and up, into the air. Outside, we are high above a glittering city at night. A city on an island. Manhattan. The bird shakes me free and I grab at the pointed side of a building and hold on as I slide down to land with an unsteady bump.

  ~~

  The building sways. Not much, but enough to make me aware of how high I am standing in free night air, a long way above 42nd Street.

  Breathless, I’m on the stylized steel head of an eagle. I’m on one corner at the top of the Chrysler building. And the rocket with the jeweled box is away, a blooming flicker disappearing skyward.

  Something makes me lose my footing and I crouch, holding on to the slick metal eagle’s head. A slight figure is disappearing down toward the street. Lithe, agile movements. Slender, snaky hips. This character is attached to a live person out in meatspace. When I see that it’s not a game mech, I know what’s coming before I check my inventory.

  Damn.

  They stole my flywhip. I don’t have many options from here. The chances are there’s a way to get inside the Chrysler Building, and a route to a portal or something. Probably via many perils and adversaries. But I have a faster idea. Besides, I want to get a better look at the thief.

  I step off the gargoyle and plummet. On the way down, I’m able to get a shot of my stealthy little stealer’s stats and, best of all, an IP address and an IMEI. A mobile. That’s not surprising. Nice kit, as far as I can see from the data. A sim jacket, partial at least, VR visual immersion, a glove and, surprise, a hand-held controller. A pretty serious player for sure. I set a ‘follow’ tag. I don’t have a bot to track the player, to follow them around and report on their identity, but the tag will alert me any time that IP or any of their sim kit is nearby.

  Then I meet the pavement and I’m glad I can only read the feedback and I can’t actually feel it. Not like the live players can. All I hear is a loud, dull thrum and my whole field of view is red flashing words.

  PAIN – HEAD

  PAIN - CHEST

  PAIN - LEGS

  PAIN - SKULL BREAK

  PAIN - SPINE BREAK

  PAIN - PELVIS

  aaaand so on. It reports BIG pain in every body part. Then it’s all very dark.

  Retake

  IN A SHIMMER, I get a brief, pristine view of the pretty rolling hills and my stats as the level restart appears. No flywhip. Damn!

  It fades again. As soon as I’m back in the rock chamber, I see the plinth and I leap toward it. The floor starts to shake and roll and crack away beneath my feet. Way below, hot lava glows, spurts, splashes, and sloshes.

  I step on a flagstone that turns to a boulder as it tumbles down and away. I just grab a jagged edge as it’s crumbling, haul myself up and I’m safe. Up on what’s left of the floor I leap as hard as I can for the plinth. I make it just as the last of the floor tumbles away. The bird-bat-bots are rising, flappy, snappy and fierce.

  With a pistol, I shoot their beaks as they come at me. Good on-target shooting and having their beaks smashed seems to deter them. They snap at me with the wide, fractured remains, but they’re no threat. The plinth begins to shake. More angry pterodactyls rise from the chasm. I crack off some more shots, then I have to reload.

  With my feet on the narrow step, I want to cling to the plinth before it starts to rise, but one of the birds with a broken
beak attacks me with his claws. I grab the ax and hack at its legs. It doesn’t give up until I’ve chopped off both of its feet. The rocket shakes the plinth as it begins to rise.

  The hole at the top of the cavern opens and I stop to realize that I’m just centimeters from the jeweled box. Unsteadily, I stand. The glass or whatever it is is thick. I fire the Glock at it. Nothing happens. No, something happened. I see that I fractured my wrist.

  Maybe there’s a magic in the ax. I swing it at the glass. No magic occurs to make the glass disappear.

  My view is partly obscured, though by a red flashing sign;

  PAIN!

  And it alternates with;

  RIGHT WRIST!

  I have no health reserves to spare, so I’ll just have to concentrate through the red sign and the dull noise. It’s not too loud.

  Here on the tiny ledge of a small rocket blasting for the sky, there wouldn’t be anywhere to take the box, so it figures that I can’t get at it from here. All I can do is gaze at it and wish. I’ve never seen it so close before. The jewels are fiery and lustrous. It’s a marvel of creation, for sure.

  The plinth-rocket blasts up through Chrysler. A great view of Manhattan turns and shrinks below me as the ship ascends. My oxygen level drops fast. Body temperature slipping away. Did I miss a suit and helmet somewhere back there? But, looking up, I’m headed into a huge, open lit space in the middle of nowhere. The lights in the open doorway and the orange, cavernous space inside are all that’s visible of what must be a cloaked orbital platform.

  Inside is what looks like an enormous spherical hangar, with mesh floors, scaffolds and partial levels going a long way up. Around the outside of the doorway is clear, blue-black space and distant stars.

  The rocket hardly slows as it goes in, straight through the doorway in the base. A big pair of doors slide shut behind me. Below, on the floor of the bottom level, a huge tentacled beast slithers around with something awful waving at the end of each tentacle. I keep a tight hold on the plinth. It passes on up until it slams through a narrow gap between platforms, even tighter than the one at the top of the rock chamber. This time it stops, docked into position.

  Is this where I get the jeweled box? I doubt it. It seems too easy. And it would never be too easy.

  From all sides, wide, simian-looking four-armed beasts lumber toward me in armored suits covered with flexing metal tubes. Their faces, revoltingly iridescent, are some grotesque midpoint, halfway between leather and scale. And they carry thick, clumsy-looking sticks. I’m guessing they will turn out to be weapons.

  Yup. They’re weapons. They look clumsy to handle, but the simians spin them through the air surprisingly well, as I notice when they begin whizzing them at me.

  Ugly and ungainly fuckers, they are, but those apes are pretty nifty with the throwing skills. As fast as I can, I duck and dodge.

  The sticks spin fast, rotating in the low-gravity space they spill out radiating sheets of a pinkish, plastic-looking light. I notice that the light slices pretty easily through metal. One of the sticks passes my ear and another is wheeling straight at me.

  I jump to get out of the way and catch the stick. I try throwing it at the nearest simian lumbering, red-eyed and snarly toward me. The spray of plastic light looks pretty impressive and makes a good mess of the deck. He catches the stick and I watch how he holds it as he spins it back at me.

  Getting the hang of it, maybe, just, I catch the stick about two thirds of the way along, which is where the lumbering ape gripped it to throw. He leaps at me. I don’t have time to throw the stick. I just wave it at him.

  The translucent plastic light spray slices him diagonally into two neat parts. Neat until all the bits start falling out of him.

  I’m not going to try throwing again, at least not immediately. I brandish the stick and run straight at a group of four hefty apes. One moves out of the way. The other three hunker into fighting stance. The spray from the stick bisects them, pretty unevenly, it has to be said. The one that got away runs, hooking around and behind me. I turn in time to catch him as he jumps at me. He’s cut in half almost perfectly down the middle.

  As he falls in two, his stick drops. I recover that from him and a quiver with three more. There are about another twelve or fourteen of the creatures in four clumps. I hold the stick that I’m carrying about two-thirds of the way along its length then whirl it at the group of five hairy beasts as they approach.

  Four of them hunker down and are sitting ducks. They’re sliced apart by the spinning weapon. The fifth had anticipated it and peeled away in plenty of time.

  These creatures are acting like they’re being played. Not only that, but like they’re being played by neurobots. The group acts together, like a hive under leadership, but under attack only one of each group has the autonomy to break clear.

  I test this theory on the remaining groups and it holds well. As I approach, one creature peels off and the others become slow and dumb, making them easy meat. The one that peeled off each time uses a similar tack, trying to outflank me. They even hook in the same direction, breaking to their left.

  When they’re all in little pieces, the jeweled box begins to glow. I’m expecting to need a key to release it from the glass case or to solve a puzzle to or a fight off a super-sized simian but no, the glass cover tips slowly off.

  The box itself opens and, inside, is the only syringe of the precious vaccine. The serum that will supposedly save the world.

  I’ve been cheated, I know it. Or I cheated myself. There must be a more spectacular ending to the last level than this. I missed something, and it’s not just the flywhip.

  I’ll need to go back, probably three or four levels at least. But not now. Now there’s somewhere else that I have to be.

  Dataspace

  THERE’S NO DIRECT WAY to get here. Not one that I ever found, at least. It’s purposely hard to find and obsessively secretive. Precisely my kind of a place. For some reason it’s called ‘Hope’s.’ I never found out why. A sign at the entrance portal says ‘Hope’s’ in a flowery kind of type. The name is oddly positioned on the sign. Like it was going to say something else. Maybe it still is. The zone is freeform and about as far of off the grid as it’s possible to get.

  If you looked up a legal definition of unCert code, it would be an exact recipe for Hope’s. Just entering is a violation of terrabytes of data protection ordinances. It can only be reached through a ‘shadowweb’ protocol and it’s off in a zone where only scriptkiddies, hackers and serious gamers go – of course that also means the kinds of people who stalk those marginal types are likely to hang out here, too. But it has a derelict appearance, at least from the outside, and that gives it a kind of invisibility.

  From outside, Hope’s looks a total mess. Like a virtual equivalent of a million overstuffed boxrooms. A lot of it looks like that on the inside, too. Like a project that’s not properly constructed. Something a student may have started in an addled frenzy over a couple of weeks. Then abandoned when it all got too hard or life intervened. Everything about it seems incomplete, like it might not quite work. As if it might be sketchy with bugs, and hacks, and viruses. Which, of course it is.

  Inside is a vast and seemingly shambles of idealistic structures, signs proclaiming ‘you can do anything here,’ and all the usual trappings of un-thought-out anarchy. It’s a clutter, a mess of graphics, signs, messages and portals that look just how you would expect an amateur ‘free zone’ to be.

  Everything you see is really obviously ‘open source’ and ‘collaborative architecture.’ I.E. it’s a mess. A huge playpen of geek toys is how it all looks like to me. And, when I was alive, I was a geek. Maybe I lost the taste some, but this is still the part of the net where I feel most like I could be at ‘home.’

  There are serene, open spaces that people have made into their own. Social places, areas for meditation and quiet recreation away from the grit and gore of the world outside. That’s not where I’m going. I head for the n
oisiest mass of flashing signs and too-bright sideshow graphics.

  Deeper in, past the initial noise and clutter is a place that’s so uncertified and off-limits, even the people here call it unCert City. Just straight up, calling it what it is. Clusters of low-rent marketing scams promise unlimited juice for almost no effort. Ready to go, ‘set and forget’ businesses that will run themselves and pour endless juice through your accounts and domains, more than you ever dreamed possible. People believe it and buy it.

  The customers in here are not those people, though. People come here to buy that snake oil, take it out onto the wild web, wrap it up with some fashionable ideas, the fears or desires of the moment and sell it on. A fad diet or some celeb’s workout, or the latest hot, marginal stocks and bonds thing. They’ll sell the shit out of it to the eager marks in meatworld, juice up and then come running back for next week’s model.

  Behind all of those ‘get rich quick’ schemes and other shady promises are the less showy ‘technicals.’ Zones and stalls where less glamorous, more practical software, hardware, and hybrid tools are crafted and sold. Offers of machine intelligence data scrapers and web crawlers next to Virtu wireframe kits. Independent traders, rogue coders, unCert makers of every kind create components like vehicles, armor, and upgraded weapons, as well as all kinds of bots and agents. Hardware, too. Businesses here sell all kinds of meatworld tech but none of that would be any use to me. Not yet.

  Deeper inside are makers who craft the more complicated, expensive, customizable ‘environments.’ Virtu platforms to suit every taste and need. A lot of them are thinly veiled Virtu-sex bots and online brothel aggregators. Some people buy them as businesses, others want their own virtubots. The biggest producers claim that their bots will actually run full-sized meatbots.

  Big hit games makers send scouts here for in-game mechs, characters, weapons and spells, or high-end trick moves. Mass Critico are rumored to have had cheat codes developed by one of these guys, then hidden them in pop song downloads.