Level Up Bitch

by N M Tatum

  “I will take this opportunity to program the system for you. Inform me as to when the garbage bots can begin clean up.”

  “Thanks, Cleo.” Cody’s face burned hot, the way it had when he’d tried to talk to girls in high school. Though, those instances had never been as successful as this one. If only Cleo was a real person.

  Cody informed the team that he’d bought them some time. He moved down to the bottom level to assist Reggie with teeth removal, since there were more Rapoo down there. He decided to take a slight detour, making for the bridge before descending. He wouldn’t have been able to live with himself if he passed up the opportunity to glimpse the command center of one of the most advanced ships in the galaxy.

  It didn’t disappoint. The bridge was about the size of Sonic and decked out in the most advanced tech Cody had ever seen. Joel would have been losing his mind looking at all the toys in here. But what Cody was really interested in were the computer systems. He knew better than to open them up and look under the hood—Cleo had made it quite clear that was a bad idea—but he could still admire the setup.

  He walked through the bridge, running his hands along the chair and consoles and workstations. He didn’t talk about it much, but he’d once considered joining the Navy. He went to a recruiter’s office after he and the guys had lost the VPRs, and professional gaming became a pipe dream. He was so close to joining up. It was the thought of Reggie and Joel that stopped him. The thought that he would be out here, sailing the stars, light years away from them. Rarely seeing them. If ever. Thinking about it now, Cody felt embarrassed at how codependent that seemed. But he also wouldn’t have made a different choice, if given the option.

  Still, it was hard not to think about what his life could have been. He could have been a systems analyst on this very ship. He could have helped develop Cleo, or a system like her. Worked on her at least. It was rare that he regretted his decision, but now was one of those times.

  He suddenly lost interest in studying the computer system. It would only stoke the regret. As he turned to leave, something caught his eye. Something outside.

  He thought it was a trick of the light, maybe the reflection of the instruments on the inside of the viewport monitor. So he moved closer. So close that his nose nearly pressed against the glass. His breath cast a cloud over it. Maybe that fog is what made the thing look like a living nightmare.

  It was massive. At least, he thought it was. It was so dark around the edges, he couldn’t quite make out where it ended, and the void of space began. He guessed it to be half the size of the Cleopatra. It looked like a rock, like an asteroid or mountain come to life. Long, spindly legs protruding from the center. A ring of red lights along the bottom. Teeth, pointed and glistening like diamonds. A plume of gas rose to the top, like from a volcano.

  “You do not have clearance to access the bridge,” Cleo said.

  Cody jumped. He spun around to face the captain’s chair as if she would be sitting there. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…I just wanted to see what it was like. I’ve never been on a ship like this.”

  “Curiosity is not a valid excuse for breaking protocol. Please exit the bridge immediately.”

  Cody turned back to the viewport. Nothing but black stretching on for eternity. The thing was gone.

  “Yeah,” he said to Cleo. “Okay.”

  He ran off the bridge, more afraid of the flying mountains in his imagination than what Cleo would do to him if he disobeyed. He raised the team on comms.

  “Hey, does anyone have a view of the bow right now?”

  They all answered in the negative.

  “Why,” Sam asked, sensing the urgency in his voice.

  “I saw something.” Cody debated whether to tell them exactly what he saw, or thought he saw, fearing he’d sound insane. He couldn’t verify what it was. For something of that size to vanish from view so quickly was impossible. He doubted whether he really had seen it.

  He opted to tell them anyway.

  Joel’s laughter reverberated in Cody’s ear. “Sure, I saw that. I see flying mountains all the time. Big ones, with crab legs, and smoke puffing out their heads. I saw Godzilla and Mothra sharing a beer the other day. Didn’t I put that in a report?”

  Cody fumed, but he was angrier with himself than anyone else. What had he expected? It did sound crazy.

  Still, he didn’t like being ridiculed. As a silent act of protest, he bypassed every dead Rapoo he saw as he made his way to the ship, allowing the others to rip out the teeth.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Reggie always worried that his ShimVen pincers seemed a tad creepy. They had a Vietnam era-trophy vibe to them, tucked into his belt. He told himself they were strictly utilitarian. That they made perfect weapons. But partly, they were awesome trophies.

  Even so, they didn’t even come close to matching the creep factor of the thousands of teeth piled in the middle of the cargo bay.

  “That is disgusting.” Joel stared at the teeth, trying to motivate himself to get started with the work he’d imagined using them for. But they were too disgusting. “So gross.”

  He’d been an hour looking at the mound of molars and incisors and come no closer to working with, or even touching them. After the hours spent removing them, he couldn’t bring himself to handle them again.

  Cody’s voice sounded over the general comm. “Whatever you plan on doing with those teeth, you better do it fast. I’m setting up the dark web link in ten minutes. I have no idea how fast they’ll sell, but I want to at least know how many you plan on using so I can give an accurate count to the buyer.”

  A shiver ran up Joel’s spine, like a fuse that, upon reaching its end, caused him to gag.

  “All right. I’ll start in on it.” He pulled on his gloves and pulled down his goggles.

  Peppy slept in the corner of Joel’s workshop. His wounds had healed quickly, but he was still tired. Joel almost had to carry him onto the ship. Peppy had done most of the heavy lifting on Cleopatra. Still, Joel was surprised how hard he had crashed. It had seemed, up to then, that Peppy could handle anything and then still want to play fetch.

  Joel could have used the company. Or just any distraction, really.

  That’s what he thought before touching the teeth, before putting them under a microscope and studying them. Once he did that, he wouldn’t have noticed if Peppy started doing backflips. The teeth were fascinating. They appeared to be as hard as diamonds, but that wasn’t wholly true. Only the enamel was. A thin coating on the teeth that made each one into an impenetrable dagger.

  He performed every test he could think to run to measure the durability of the substance. Burned it. Smashed it. Locked it in a blast box with a grenade. Each time, the tooth came out looking as if nothing had happened.

  Everything beneath the enamel was useless. Luckily, Joel found a way to remove the enamel. He placed a tiny chisel at the root, where the tooth was formerly connected to the Rapoo’s gum and hammered it down. The tooth cracked. Joel shook the tooth shards loose, leaving the diamond-hard, yet razor-thin shell intact.

  He found the shell to be plenty pliable, but still impervious to damage. A rush of ideas flooded into his head. Diagrams bloomed like flowers. Armor. Weapons. The possibilities were incredible. And overwhelming.

  “Reggie, I am in dire need of your assistance.”

  “You’re not in the bathroom, are you?” Reggie answered over comms.

  “My workshop. But now that you mention it, give me five, and we’ll rendezvous back here.”

  The tips of Cody’s fingers hummed with energy. He hadn’t had a reason to surf the dark web in a while. He forgot how much he missed it. Such a collective of miscreants and hackers and anarchists couldn’t be found in the physical world, only the digital. It was dangerous and exciting.

  And, to his surprise, a place that put him and Sam on equal footing. She was just as adept at navigating it as he was. Maybe she wasn’t as versed in the technical side of it—the networking, t
he pinging from various shadow satellites, masking the call signature—but she was just as good, if not better, at navigating the cultural side of it. If the dark web was a physical place, it would be that bar they’d found her in. It would be any of a hundred back alleys where you hoped never to run into a person like Sam.

  “Try that room,” Sam said, pointing to the list of chat rooms on the monitor. “I’ve used that one a lot. There are usually some high rollers in there. People interested in acquiring rare items. I was once hired to capture a Plutonian Nebula Whale using that room.”

  “Aren’t those extinct?”

  “Nope. There’s one left.”

  Cody ignored the self-satisfied look in her eyes and opened the chat room. The monitor immediately went black.

  “What happened?” Sam asked.

  Cody sat back. He cracked his knuckles and rolled his neck, like he was expecting a fight. “Initiation. I’ve never accessed the dark web from this IP address before. They don’t know me, so they’re going to make me prove that I deserve to be here.”

  The screen lit up. Lines of code rolled down the screen faster than Sam could read them. Though the bits her eye managed to catch before they disappeared off the bottom of the screen looked like a foreign language.

  “What is this? What’s happening?” she asked.

  Cody looked like he’d been possessed. He typed feverishly, striking the keys like they owed him money. His eyes were open as if held so by tape, quickly growing red and glassy. He refused to blink, for fear he’d miss some crucial line of code.

  “Proving that I belong,” Cody said, his voice strained.

  After nearly a minute of the frantic, unblinking attack on the computer, Cody struck his last key and fell back in his chair, exhausted. He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. It felt like fire running back into his brain. When he pulled his hands away, his eyes were even redder than before and streaming tears.

  Sam shrugged. “Did it work?”

  In answer to her question, the screen returned to the way it was before the initiation—a list of chat room names.

  Cody clapped and threw his hands into the air. “Hell yeah, it did. That was amazing. I haven’t done that in a long time.”

  “Was that a fun thing that you just did?” Sam asked. “Because it looked very unpleasant.”

  “Yeah, I loved it. My brain kicked into overdrive. My fingers tore through the keypad. The code flowed out of me. Shit, I miss that.”

  Sam nudged him and pointed to the name of a chat room, pulling him down from his high.

  Cody opened the one she’d indicated. There was a good amount of traffic inside. People peddling the sorts of things you’d expect to find in a dark web chat room—weapons, vehicles, stolen tech, information. And some bizarre things: endangered animals, soil samples from quarantined planets, genetic material from celebrities. This was definitely the place.

  Cody and Sam spent the next hour getting a feel for the room. They watched, figured out the big players, separated the ones with actual money to spend from the gawkers who had no intention of buying anything. Then they started chatting them up. Dark web users weren’t big on pleasantries. Cody and Sam cut through that bullshit and jumped straight to establishing themselves as players. They merged their credentials. Cody listed off notable hacks and proved his knowledge of computer systems. Sam bragged about her mercenary resume, jobs she’d done for frequent dark web users. Offline jobs that were big enough to have notoriety no matter where she mentioned them.

  Together, they were the most badass person alive.

  They gained attention quickly once they proved their credentials. That’s when Cody announced there would be an auction.

  He sent pictures of the teeth and video of Joel conducting his stress tests. Interest piqued. At Sam’s suggestion, they divided the massive mountain of teeth into four separate lots. The bidding war bubbled below the surface, just waiting for the auction to start.

  Cody and Sam smiled, sensing something amazing was about to happen.

  “Then let’s open the bidding, shall we?”

  A dull pain pulsed behind Reggie’s eyes. He was elated they’d found a buyer for the teeth. Well, not just one, but many who were willing to drive the bidding up high until the Notches walked away with a handsome sum of money. However, now the tension was setting in. The stress he hadn’t dealt with yet.

  He rubbed his eyes again with the hope of pushing the pain away. All he did was set a swarm of bright spots dancing across his vision.

  Joel noticed the act, Reggie’s seventh attempt at pushing his eyes into his skull, and the subsequent groans. “I know I make this look easy, but it actually takes a bit of focus.” He placed the chisel at the root of another tooth. “What’s with all the moaning and groaning?”

  Reggie looked at him like he didn’t know what he was talking about. But that expression quickly faded when he decided not to pretend. “I’m tired. I’ve got a headache. Just need to drink some water and go to sleep.”

  Joel cast him a skeptical look as he shook the broken shards of tooth loose. “We’re all tired. But you’re supposed to be Charlie Chipper. All prancing around, swinging his basket of flowers through the meadow on the way to Grandma’s house for a plate of fresh-baked cookies.”

  Reggie blinked several times. “What are you talking about?”

  Joel tossed the enamel casing into a pile. “You’re the positive one. The heart of the team. I’m the smartass. Cody’s the nerd. Sam’s the badass. Don’t upset the dynamic by getting mopey.”

  Reggie sat on a crate. Peppy wandered over, still dreary from just waking, and rested his head on Reggie’s lap. Reggie let his hand hover uncomfortably over Peppy’s head. Eventually, he relented and scratched behind Peppy’s ear.

  Joel examined his pile of enamel casings and appeared satisfied. He piled them all into a wagon and dragged it to his work table. The way he launched into his work, molding the enamel, testing how it would adhere to their weapons and armor, made Reggie squirm.

  “How do you do that?” he asked. “Jump into it so enthusiastically?”

  Joel stayed focused on his work, speaking to Reggie over his shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

  Reggie slid off the crate and walked to Joel’s side. “All of this. Yanking alien teeth, cracking them apart, it’s disgusting. Our entire job is disgusting. It’s not what I thought I’d be doing.”

  “You think I planned on being an extraterrestrial exterminator?”

  “No, that’s my point. But you seem fine with it.”

  Reggie couldn’t explain his existential crisis in a way that made sense. He could barely wrap his mind around it enough to know how he was feeling. “You don’t think we made a mistake?”

  Joel dropped his tools on the table and pushed his goggles up onto his forehead. “Did I plan to kill bugs for a living? No. Do I regret sometimes that I’m not gaming professionally? Yes. Do I hate the fact that I have to share a bedroom with someone who farts in his sleep? Absolutely. That’s you, by the way.”

  He picked up a pair of tactical, fingerless gloves. The knuckles sparkled. “Did I just make you a pair diamond knuckle gloves? Yes, I did.” He handed them to Reggie, who couldn’t help but smile. “Point being, I think it’s more important to find meaning in what you’re doing right now than pine after what you’ve lost.”

  Reggie slid his hand into the glove. He clenched his fist, stretched his fingers. He walked to the corner of the room and squared up. Then he punched the pipe running the height of the wall. He pulled his hand away, having felt no pain. The glove hadn’t a scuff, though the pipe was dented. He smiled.

  The tingle in Cody’s fingers had spread throughout his body. He was so tingly that he couldn’t keep seated. He hopped out of his chair and paced the length of the bridge, which was not much at all. He did more than pace—he practically skipped. He danced. He skip-danced.

  After having to move out of his skip-dance path several times, Sam gr
abbed him by the shoulders. “Will you sit down?”

  “I can’t. I can’t look at the monitor. This is too intense.”

  “Stop being so weird. It’s just some numbers on a screen.”

  Cody pointed behind him, at the monitor, without looking at it. “Those are not just numbers. Those are huge numbers. And those huge numbers equal huge money. More money than I’ve ever dreamed of having. Well, that’s not true, I’ve dreamed of a lot of money. I read once about a VR room. You walk in, it transforms around you, and you can live inside this alternate reality. Amazing. I’d be a superhero.”

  Sam clapped her hand over his mouth. “My god, you’re worse than Joel.”

  Cody pulled her hand away. “I can’t help it. I don’t do well when I’m nervous.” He returned to his pacing, more constrained now. He pinched the bridge of his nose and looked up at the ceiling. “Just tell me what’s happening.”

  Sam sat in his chair and studied the monitor. The chat room was ablaze with activity, each user outbidding the previous in matters of seconds. There was never a lull. The numbers kept climbing.

  “We’re up to—”

  “Don’t tell me!” Cody bent over, seemingly from a sudden pain in his stomach. “No, do tell me. Wait, no, don’t.” He groaned and clutched his stomach. “I think I just developed an ulcer. Oh, yup, that’s an ulcer. My stomach is eating itself. I’m an old man. I have old man ailments. What’s gout? I think I just got that, too.”

  “Forty million.”

  Cody shot upright, all his ailments gone. He couldn’t feel his body anymore. He was a disembodied spirit looking down on a moment that was too good to be true.

  “Come again?” he asked.

  “The auction is over,” Sam said, pointing at the screen. “It was just two guys, outbidding each other like mad for the past ten minutes. Then one dropped out. Forty million credits. That’s the winning bid.”

  Cody patted his stomach. “My ulcer is gone.”