Thief in the Game Page 6

  I brought the phone, in case it there was more we could get from it later on. As we made our way back up the narrow corridor to the elevator, Tag said, “Submarine, right?”

  “We’ll find it.”

  “You are going to tell me, aren’t you.”

  It was more of a statement than a question. “Yes.”

  “Like I said, I’m a thief, right? So you dangling a NeuRoCrown like that and not saying what you want in return only makes me suspicious. When I get suspicious, prices rise.” I pressed the button for the elevator. The doors slid open and we stepped in. I pressed the button for the next level up. “I know you want something, and whatever it is, the sooner you level with me the better chance you’ll have of being able to afford it.”

  I was starting to like Tag. I hoped that my emerging plan wouldn’t kill him.

  Neurological connection

  THE LEVEL ABOVE WAS just a single room. As the professor had said, it was a lab, with machines dedicated to replicating pharmaceuticals. The room had large windows, and blue and green light spilled in from the illumination in the lake outside. The lab had no light of its own. There was a station near the entrance with a machine labelled ‘Analysis.’ A square grid of sixteen empty test tubes waited, sealed with white rubber caps.

  I took out the syringe of serum. Tag held up a hand and said, “Wait. The juice is out in here, isn’t it?”

  There was a light switch on the wall I pressed it. Nothing happened.

  Tag said, “It’s going to be something on one of the other floors, isn’t it.”

  “There are another ten, right?”

  “Logically it should be on the floor above.”

  “Why?”

  Tag said, “Do you think there’s something more important and demanding of juice down here than the pharmaceutical reproduction and manufacturing facility?”

  “Submarines?”

  “Good point.”

  “I haven’t seen any submarines.”

  “Me either. Still, the power outage. Shall we try to guess where it is, or take the elevator up the floors one by one?”

  “One by one from here up has to be the worst way to look.”

  “Unless it’s the floor above, where it should be.”

  “True. Okay, we’ll try there first, and I’ll choose next.”

  On the way back to the elevator Tag asked again. “You want me to wear a cortical rig so you can do something. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Something that involves me being neurologically connected.”

  When the elevator doors opened on the next floor up, two wolves leaped straight at us. Tag got one with the crossbow. Instinctively I’d kept the shotgun ready, so that made an awful mess. While we poked around the empty offices on that floor, Tag said. “I’m assuming there’s some risk in what you’re planning.”

  I said there was.

  “Some risk to me, I’m guessing.”

  I agreed.

  “My mom can’t do without me.” Said Tag, “And she’s given up everything for me.” We searched the last of the rooms. Nothing. I knew it. “Will you take care of her? If something bad happened to me in the thing that you’re planning, would you take care of my mom and make sure she was properly looked after?”

  I said that I would.

  “Juice is just not a problem for you, is it.”

  “No.”

  “So, it’s a life and death thing.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the only thing you can’t buy. Well, not easily.”

  “You really are pretty smart, Tag.”

  “You mean it, though? You’ll really take care of my mom? Even if it’s expensive?”

  I said that absolutely, definitely, I would. And I meant it. Of course I did.

  We got back into the elevator. I chose the third floor from the top. If I were designing this part of the game, that’s where I’d expect players to look last.

  “Okay,” Tag said, “Order up the kit.”

  “Don’t you want to know what it will involve?”

  “Will it kill me?”

  “I really, truly hope not. But it’s not impossible.”

  “You’re taking a risk too, right? A big one.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  Tag’s delivery address was all that I needed, and I patched an order together. Top of the range sim/stim headband, cap, converter, thin gloves and a neck piece for added spinal reading. I told Tag, “Should be there in ninety minutes or less.”

  Now that Tag was coming along to the idea, I was starting to feel protective. Like the risk could be too big. the risk to Tag, not to me.

  The elevator doors opened. The floor was completely dark apart from light flashing in the cracks of a door far away to the right. We both put on night-sights and I made sure I had some grenades ready and racked the shotgun.

  A long, narrow hallway appeared in the green, enhanced image. The door on the right was at the far end. Along the edges of the hallway were untidy piles. Looking harder, they seemed to be body parts. Legs mainly, some organs and a few bones. From behind the closed door was a crackling sound and something harder to identify.

  Tag crouched at the door while I stood behind and pushed it open. Four turbines occupied the long room, and one huge, tentacled creature. In the center of the large room, the huge slimy thing writhed. Electrical sparks and crackles came from where it seemed to have tentacles jammed into two of the turbines.

  On the ends of the other tentacles were what remained of the owners of the legs in the corridor. The tentacles looked like they stretched up through the abdomens and chests of the three scientists, and up until the tips came out of their mouths.

  A thermic lance and backpack were at the far end of the room.

  I instinctively fired into the middle of the monster and Tag shouted, “NO!”

  Where I hit, a black gooey hole opened. It pulsed for a moment and the monster shook. Where the hole was, a new tentacle formed and stretched out, snaking toward me. Tag said, “Don’t fire again.”

  I recoiled as the tentacle waved and stretched closer. “What do I do then?”

  “You can’t do anything,” Tag said. “The tip will come after you. Whatever you do will make it worse.” I looked at the nearest scientist’s flopping head and rolling eyes as I wondered how many levels of ‘much worse’ were available.

  “There must be something,” I said.

  “Not without a thermic lance.” Tag pulled out a big, double-headed ax. Last time I saw one of those was back in one of the first levels, in the MidEastFed with the possessed Wa’Habists.

  “Get back as far as you can, make the tentacle stretch.” Tag said. “I’ll have to do it.”

  I backed to the far side of the corridor. As I slid away along the wall, the point of the slimy tentacle twisted and thickened as it stretched nearer to my face. Once it got a hold of me, I couldn’t pull away. It stuck to me like super-glue. Tag swung and hacked at the extending limb with the massive ax, but the beast was tough.

  It slid over my shoulder. Down my back. Distracted, I thought about the irony of my having the appearance of a thin sheet with the physics of a solid body.

  Tag tried to pound the same spot over and over, but the flesh wriggled along and away from the blade. The tip was between my legs and lifted me, shoving my head against the ceiling.

  PAIN

  GROIN

  INJURY

  GROIN

  my readout flashed

  INJURY

  GROIN

  INJURY

  in big red type.

  Tag swung the ax back with both hands and chopped, again and again. Finally, the tip fell and dropped me to the floor. The other end waved wildly and sprayed fluid everywhere.

  I used up a big medipack and it got me up to thirty-eight percent, but my health was still falling fast. It took all the packs I had to get back up to a nearly stable fifty six percent. It was still dropping, but s
lowly now.

  Tag said, “We’re going to have to get past the creature.”

  “To get the thermic lance?”

  “Either that or to hack off the tentacles that it has jammed into the turbines.”

  “The creature is like the one on the orbiter, right? That’s how you know?”

  Tag nodded. I ran for the turbine room and said, “I’ll jump over it.”

  “You haven’t got enough health!” Tag shouted after me, “Take this! You won’t make…”

  But I was already back in the turbine room.

  I jumped. Tag was right. The creature was too big, and I hadn’t the strength left to clear it.

  I landed in the middle of the cluster of evil tentacles. A post-dead lab technician on the end of a tentacle rolled her red and brassy eyes as her fingers grabbed toward me. I wished there were a way that I could get the big ax from Tag. If it were possible to transfer tools or weapons, I hadn’t figured out how to do it, and now was not a good time to stop for a chat about it.

  A tentacle came out of nowhere and loomed over my head. Then it flipped and it coiled around my body. The tip waved and waggled then darted behind me. I was going to be impaled, like the scientists. It nuged at me rear.

  Tag swung from the flywhip overhead and sliced through the tentacle. Its grip loosened and it dropped away.

  “I thought you were going to sell that.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “You could have told me.”

  Tag swung back away, “I was trying to.”

  The lab tech’s hands clawed at me. The little T’ck ax cut through the slimy flesh. But slowly. The elaborately decorated nails on the technician’s bony fingers grabbed me before I was more than halfway through. The other two tentacles thrashed their human arms and torsos at Tag, who hacked at the limbs that attached the monster to the turbines.

  The lab tech shook me with her bony hands and her face was coming nearer to my own. The tentacle that impaled her swelled her throat and it’s point, covered in dilating suckers, stretched nearer. I couldn’t stand the look in her eyes, so I put my towel over her head.

  The tentacle lost its strength immediately and sagged. I hated to leave my towel there.

  I turned from that tentacle and hacked at the two that were attacking Tag. Tag’s health was dropping perilously low, but the creature was definitely losing its strength as Tag’s big ax cleaved it apart and cut it off, bit by bit from the sources of power.

  Making wider swings with my ax I hacked again at the tentacles. Tag saw what I was doing and wriggled to get the creature’s snaking limbe more into my reach. From there we were in synch. Like we had an invisible connection, we attacked like two parts of the same being. Like the flanks of a Spartan ambush. Relentless. Unstoppable.

  Finally, Tag’s ax came clean through the stems that connected the creature to the turbines and it deflated about forty percent. With one long swing I was able to sever the tentacle holding the female lab tech. When I pulled my towel off her head, her face was wrenched in an agonized grimace. And still moving. Her eyebrows were steepled.

  By instinct I took my Glock and put a bullet in her forehead. Her rusty eyes showed a flash of awful relief.

  With the creature destroyed and cut off from the power, the lighting stabilized. An illuminated chart on the wall showed power supplies flickering back to normal on all floors, including the pharma fabrication lab. Two floors below us was a section labelled SUBMARINE BAY.

  Tag’s medipacks were all used up. I had no way to hand over any of mine. Once I’d collected a medipack, there was no way to take it out of the inventory other than to consume it.

  I could not lose Tag now.

  “Unless there are some more health packs to collect, we need to get you to the end of this level and fast.”

  “I know it.”

  While we headed back up the hallway, under the pile of wrecked and gory legs, something metal glinted. A thermic lance. “Damn it.” I cursed under my breath.

  We got down to the pharma lab and I squirted the serum from the syringe into the test tubes in the rack, through the rubber tops. When there was some in each tub, the rack slid down. Through a glass counter we watched as the tubes loaded onto a centrifuge.

  While the process went on, I hunted quickly around the lab. “Of all places, you’d expect to find some medikits here.”

  I was impatient, watching Tag’s health level wane and falter.

  “I could go on ahead to the submarine bay,” Tag said. “In case there are some medikits between here and there.”

  “Good plan.” I wasn’t going to be any less anxious, though. Tag was the best chance I had. I was pretty certain that game death wouldn’t result in any real harm to Tag. Wearing that amount of simsuit, it wasn’t impossible, but it was unlikely. And the ways that I had died in the game up to now, it didn’t look like it would be too dangerous.

  Still I knew that if we were parted, I would lose this chance. Plus, I felt like our success as a team, how well we were able to perform together right now would have an influence on Tag’s decision when I made my proposition.

  NeuRoCrown

  WHILE TAG WENT ON to hunt for first aid supplies, I thought about how to approach my ghastly proposal. Checking the supplier, I saw that Tag’s NeuRoCrown was due to be delivered at any time now. Whether that could be enough of a temptation for what I wanted from Tag, there was no way to guess. I doubted it, but I could only hope.

  My inbox had a favorable reply from Gordon Kiko, the hospital administrator I contacted. On reflection I thought I had offered too much for what I wanted but it got the job done, and I didn’t think it was so much that it would make them suspicious. Not any more suspicious than a request like that would ever be likely to make them, at any rate.

  It was good to see the folks in meatworld jump for juice, just the way I thought they would.

  After what felt like a very long time, a flat platform bot from the fat end of the pharmaceutical fabricator trundled over to me to deliver a cold-box of newly made serum. The box was labelled ‘Distribute with all haste by submarine.’ I guess in case I’d forgotten.

  I ran, still looking out for any possible medipacks all along the way. No luck. I had suspected as much. I had to call the elevator and wait. When it came I hit the button for the fifth floor from the top. As the elevator ascended, I wondered about the other floors.

  The doors opened to a wide space, dark and glassed on all sides. What light there was came through the top of the lake. A small sub was docked on the outside of an airlock. I couldn’t see any health indicator by or near where Tag was collapsed by the airlock. As fast as I could I ran over. Tag lifted a hand to point at a code panel by the airlock.

  Enter 4-digit code

  flashed underneath the keypad. Tag obviously didn’t have long. Thinking hard I wondered where there might be a clue. I looked around. Nothing in the sub bay gave me a hint. There was nothing there except for Tag. I looked again at the package. It would have been helpful to have the code by the note telling me to use the sub.

  Was there something on Professor Lovelace’s phone, I wondered. Wherever the clue was, I was worried whether Tag could hold out long enough for me to locate it. Then I remembered. The memory card. I got it out and looked copied the number, 2947, into the keypad. Nothing happened. I hit ‘enter.’

  The sub lit up and the airlock handle clicked. I spun the handle. Looking down, Tag was absolutely still. It really seemed like it was all too late.

  Putting the cold-box of serum down, I hefted Tag over my shoulder. I kicked the cold-box halfway through the doorway, in case it tried to close behind me and walked along the companionway onto the sub. Inside, there were controls, instructions, screens and cabinets. As fast as I could I searched the cabinets. In the third one were a stack of big medipacks. I dropped Tag practically on top of them.

  Tag’s health indicator returned. It was red and and it read ‘0.0012%.’

  Better than no
health, but I feared that it was too late.

  I sprinted back for the cold box and closed the airlock behind me before I ran back onto the sub.

  Tag was slumped and still, looking pale and greenish, but with thirty-six percent health and rising. By the nest of control screens, a set buttons were labelled

  Destination presets

  and the first said,

  Serum distribution.

  That started the launch procedure and the screen said,

  Undocking sequence

  Disengage

  The sub headed shifted to the side and dipped before it headed down, deep into the lake.

  LEVEL UP

  ~~

  Tag said, “The crown arrived. It really is the top of the line. I’m hooking it up and calibrating it.”

  The headset specs that I had read in the supplier’s catalogue page had a close-fitting skull cap with a fine matrix of sensors to locate signals points to and from the user’s brain. A collar wrapped closely around the throat to connect with the spine from the shoulders to the top of the neck.

  The manual for the crown said that the calibration should be complete in about fifteen minutes. Researching the crown on the net, though, user reports as well as technical reviews all said, to get the best out of the helmet, new users should run the tests on at least four sensory simulation environments, and perform each test three times or more.

  Tag said, “Sounds like a long afternoon.”

  “Some of it might be fun, though.” I tried not to sound over enthusiastic or too gung-ho. I really wanted the connections to be set up accurately. “There are some pretty tough race games, as well as AirBoard Pro XV and the Mad Marxxx Gladiator’s Arena in the recommended test environments.”

  Tag took to it with enthusiasm, and was talented and a great player in all those environments. It was a pleasure to watch, as Tag pushed the helmet sim through tougher and tougher levels of play. Patient and meticulous, Tag repeated every task at every level until contact between the helmet, the software and Tag were all seamless.