Masters of Strata (Deepest Dungeon #2) - A LitRPG series

by G. D. Penman

  “You’re dead.” Martin didn’t mean to say it, but the words came tumbling out anyway.

  “Dead, am I? You believe in ghosts now? I’m not dead any more than you are. I’m right here in the Objective Psyche, the same as you. The only difference is that you can still go back into Plato’s cave, if you choose to. Back into the lower world of shadows.”

  Martin gawked at him. Maybe he would have found it easier to think on his feet if he didn’t feel like the ground beneath those feet kept lurching sideways. “What?”

  “You didn’t dig into the theory like I asked you?” Klimpt shook his head. “That’s a crying shame, we don’t really have time for a crash course in philosophy and psychology. I wish you’d done the reading, son.”

  Martin’s silence stretched out. This had to be some cleverly coded NPC. Updated until the final moment with the things that Klimpt had been thinking and saying. It begged the question of who coded it, of course, and whether this was simply an elaborate ruse to make Martin admit his culpability in the old man’s death so that he might be handed over to the police. Eventually, when it became apparent that Martin had nothing to say, Klimpt said, “The long and short of it is – this isn’t a game. This is the real world, and the place you were before just reflects it.”

  That was just absurd enough to shake Martin out of it. “I’m pretty sure I know what a game looks like.”

  “Oh, that dungeon of theirs is a game, don’t get me wrong. The Masters have thrown a game in here. But underneath the nonsense they’ve built, this is still the wellspring of life, of sentience. Without it, we wouldn’t be human. Just automatons. Disconnected meat puppets that trundle through the motions.”

  Martin pressed his palms into his eye and the patch of scar where his other eye used to be. Maybe this was another hallucination. Maybe staring out into the void for so long had driven him mad. That seemed more plausible than all of this. “The more you explain this, the less sense it makes.”

  Klimpt clucked. “I told you to do the reading.”

  “I was too busy running for my life.”

  That seemed to stop Klimpt in his tinkering for a moment. “Ah, my countermeasures were insufficient? That is unfortunate.”

  Martin came over to the heap of scrap and found a pile without any jagged edges to sit down on. “I had to jump out a hotel window. I was not on the ground floor.”

  “You are here now,” Klimpt shrugged, “and that is all that matters. ”

  Martin did his best not to bite down hard enough to make his eye boggle. “I’m pretty sure it isn’t.”

  “Son, you were the one who came looking for me.” Klimpt huffed and then turned to face Martin head on. “You came to me for the secrets of Strata. You wanted to know what I know. Will you listen to me now when I tell it to you?Do you know how many days I have been hiding out here in harm’s way, waiting for that Master on your heels to stop watching your every move so I could pull you out? You came to me for the secrets of Strata. You wanted to know what I know. Will you listen to me now when I tell it to you?”

  Martin fell silent. This was what he had wanted days ago when he made it to Klimpt’s house. He forced all memories of that day away and nodded. Answers, finally.

  Klimpt leaned back a little on his swivel chair, his eyes closing as he launched into his speech. “Sleep is a great healer. Our bodies know this, they are designed to slip into a coma when the damage dealt to them is too great. Yet the means by which we…”

  Martin cut him off. He needed answers. Not to retread the same information over and over. “The NIH is designed to induce comas without the risks of anesthesia. You made it as a medical device, then the company turned it into a video-game platform.”

  Klimpt’s lips pursed for a moment, then he went back into storyteller mode. “They called it lucid dreaming at first. A side effect of the induced sleep. Then the mass trials began, and they realized that, the dream… it was shared.”

  “This is where you lost me.” Martin interrupted again. It wasn’t intentional, but it was apparently going to be necessary if he wanted to get through this. “How can dreams be shared? They’re just our brains doing some back-end processing that we understand as visual and audio information.”

  “Jung had his theories of a collective unconscious. Similar ideas hardwired into all of our brains, explaining why uncontacted cultures had the same concepts as connected ones. Why dragon myths appeared everywhere around the world, yet no dragons could be found. Here be dragons.” He tapped at his temple. “Some believe that sentience is something distinct from the workings of the chemical sacs within our skulls. These fringe theories purport that the human brain is a transceiver for this higher intelligence, and that human sentience is through our connection to this separate force. Some even go as far as to call it the divine.”

  Martin sat silent, believing precisely none of what he was being told. It didn’t matter if it was true. It was what Klimpt believed was true, and that helped Martin to better understand everything that came next. He hadn’t believed Norse Mythology was true either, but the information contained within it still got them through Dracolich ahead of everyone else.

  “Maybe because the sleep state that the NIH generates is artificial, everyone is on the same wavelength. Maybe the brains of everyone on that wavelength network together to provide all the processing power that this place needs to render. The brain scans we took showed activity all over the place, even regions that had nothing to do with anything the subjects reported seeing. It is possible that this is all just a collective hallucination given form, but I do not believe it. There are things in this place that do not make sense without… I’m getting ahead of myself again.”

  Klimpt had actually paused for an interruption this time, and when none was forthcoming, a little smile appeared on his face before he rambled on. “The truth is that we still do not know. That was the first nail in my coffin. I would not approve progress until we could understand the mechanism of the connection. The others, they cared only for what the NIH could do, not how it did it. So I was sidelined. My invention became a work by committee. It was only through politicking that I was able to stay connected with the project at all. I wish now that I had not spent my favors so freely in those days. Perhaps if I still had goodwill left, I could have stopped what came next.”

  Martin sat forward, tail swishing with excitement. “The game.”

  “Not yet. No. Within this realm of endless darkness, anything was possible, yet our explorers were not alone. Even when they were the only ones using the devices there were other things here. We called them nightmares at first. Then monsters. They hunted any who came here. Doing all they could to drive them out. Things pulled from the subconscious minds of the subjects. With power limited only by imagination, our explorers were able to defend themselves against these… non-human entities. But their safety was constantly in question.”

  Martin held up his paws to stop the flow of information again. They had barely even gotten into it, and already his gibberish detector was going off the charts. “You’re saying that there were monsters in here before the Dungeon, before the game?”

  “The Dungeon you see now, and all the rules and strictures that have been forced into place within this realm, are the culmination of the work done by the Masters to contain those non-human entities.” Martin blinked at that phrase. Non-human covered pretty much everyone in the dungeon at this point. Everyone except Klimpt. Had they all been human in the beginning? “That was where they got the name for this place. The containment was constructed, layer by layer from the source outwards.”

  Martin snapped back to attention. “The Heart.”

  “Is that what they are calling it now?” Klimpt’s smile had faded again. He looked haunted now. “Yes, the Heart. The wellspring of life, they built all of this to contain it. Bound it up in chains of rules so it could not simply overrun them. Yet even that was not a permanent solution. If this place was to become colonized, the source of
native life had to be exterminated.”

  Exterminated. It was like Klimpt was carefully choosing his words to make the Masters’ plan sound as evil as possible. Like it wasn’t normal in a video game to kill monsters. “So they made a game to get the general public to do that for them?”

  Klimpt shook his head. “And risk their discovery of this place becoming public knowledge? No. They hired professionals. Called them Beta Testers for this new game of theirs. Unleashed them on the Dungeon.”

  Martin’s ears pricked up again. This might start to explain some of the Master’s enmity toward him. “They couldn’t get it done?”

  Klimpt placed his hands flat on his thighs and let out another sigh. “They swapped sides.”

  All of the NPCs that Martin had encountered that had seemed too human by far beneath their animal surface – was this why? Were they real people, trapped in here? It made no sense, of course. But so much of what Klimpt was saying made no sense. It would explain the adoption of the player race-naming conventions by some of the animal people who were in the game as monsters. Martin had brushed past it with the Anurvans, but since they’d come across the Felidavans it irked him. Another inconsistency that Klimpt explained away in the most bizarre way possible.

  “The longer a person spends in this place, the stronger a hold it has over them. Even the men you know as the Masters were hopelessly addicted by this stage. By the end of this first foray, the Beta Testers were little more than monsters, just as devoted to feverishly defending the Heart as the nightmares it produced for itself. They would not leave. Their bodies withered and died without the presence of their minds, but their minds lived on in here. Still fighting back against any who tried to progress.”

  Martin gawked at him. “Wait, they died?”

  Klimpt nodded sadly. “Hundreds of them.”

  Martin rose to his feet, too agitated to sit still. “You’re telling me hundreds of people died and nobody noticed?”

  “Why would they?” Klimpt shrugged. Still level with Martin’s furry little face while he was sitting down. “How many people die every day without your attention? All that people see is what is in front of them.”

  Martin couldn’t let it go. “The news…”

  “Is written to sell advertising space. Not to disrupt the status quo. All that was required was for the Masters to apply their clever algorithms, and the few stories that might have been connected were buried. All you know of the world is through your little screens, and all of your little screens are filled with lies.”

  The whole of Martin’s world was constructed out of those little screens. Some of the screens were bigger. Some of them were more complex and pumped information directly into his brain. Either way, they were still the lens he viewed the whole world through, and now Klimpt was telling him that they couldn’t be believed. He trusted his computer more than he trusted his own eyes, and he was meant to just… stop? He had wanted to let the old man tell his story in peace, but some things were too viscerally wrong for him to let them slide. “Evidence? You’re asking me to discard all information that you don’t provide. I need evidence.”

  Klimpt shrugged. “Making me disappear? The media blackout surrounding your game? Kid, is that a normal state of affairs?”

  Martin felt a tremor running through him now. Rage or fear or something more primal than either that he’d never touched before. Existential dread. “Not enough. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

  Klimpt patted him on the head and he almost bit into him. One snip of his incisors would open up the artery there on the old man’s wrist. He was only human, after all. Human in a world full of monsters. “Hah, there is some scientist in there under the rat, isn’t there?”

  Martin got his temper under control in a snap. Murderous rage was not an appropriate response to being belittled. Acting without thinking would ruin his life. Emotion had no place in that. He needed to make rational decisions, or everything would fall apart. “If you want me to throw away everything I know about reality and replace it with your version, you need to be convincing.”

  Klimpt looked at him for a long time until Martin slunk back to the plastic bins where he’d perched himself before and settled himself in place. Then he went right on with story time as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “So with the Beta Testers gone native, the Masters came up with shipping the game, as is. They couldn’t move on to the next stage of their plans until the font was stoppered. And while the life was still flowing from it, nobody could die in Strata, so why not throw up a bounty and see what happened?”

  Martin couldn’t deal with all of this right now. He’d pick over it all later from the comfort of reality. “None of which explains why one of the Masters seems to have devoted his life to screwing me over and stopping me from making progress.”

  “You’re a clever boy.” Klimpt smirked. “I would bet that you can put it together.”

  Martin sat forward again, letting his brain spin freely through all the information he’d acquired. Searching for the odd word or phrase that his thought process could hook onto. He snapped his clawed fingers. “The cult of the Masters, you said that before. Cult. Some of them believe all of this nonsense you’re telling me. But you also told me they’ve been in Strata the longest. They’ve had to be so they could do all the work building the dungeon and… some of them have switched sides too.”

  Klimpt was grinning at him when Martin looked up. Like he was proud of his little student for solving the puzzle. “The Schism. After the game was created and rolled out, a solid half of the creators changed their minds. They wanted the whole thing stopped. They wanted this to be some sort of holy site for the true believers. They thought the font was the source of all sentient life. They thought that if it was finally destroyed the human race would go braindead.”

  Martin sighed. “Are we sure the Heart hasn’t been destroyed already?”

  “Hilarious, I’m sure. Excuse me if I don’t fall down laughing.” Klimpt’s smile faded fast. “Half of them went mad that way, and the other half went mad the other way. They are the ones behind the Crusade. They don’t think the font is the source of all life, they think it is the root of all evil. They think the folks switching sides have been corrupted by it. They want to purify this place. Bring light to the dark places. Remake it in their own image.”

  Martin was loath to apply logic to the situation and possibly make Klimpt stop talking, but once again he felt obliged to. If he left too many questions unasked then the truth could slip away from him through the gaps. “And everyone is just fine with all this? The company? The shareholders?”

  “Shareholders don’t care if everyone involved dies and the world ends so long as money flows. The company… well, let’s just say that the inmates are running the asylum over there. There are boardroom battles being fought day to day over the plans for Strata’s future, but as long as the money flows, there won’t be any intervention from on high. And trust me, kid, that money is flowing and flowing well. Manufacturing the NIH is their only cost, and they can haul in subscription fees from everyone forever without ever splashing out another penny.”

  That didn’t add up either. “What about the Masters’ wages?”

  “Wages?” Klimpt scoffed. “Don’t you get it, kid? They’re dead.”

  It felt like time had ground to a halt again. Martin wondered how many times during this conversation he was going to question his own sanity. Or at least his ability to hear. “What?”

  “I mean, some of them are still out there, the ones who never came into the dark. The ones who run interference for the rest.” Klimpt shrugged. “But the ones who built this place… they couldn’t make them leave either. Same as the Beta Testers of the first crusade.”

  Martin’s tail stopped lashing abruptly after he banged it on a metal shelving unit. “So, I’ve been dealing with ghosts all this time? That is going to need even more exceptional evidence.”

  Klimpt scowled and turned back to his
circuit boards and soldering iron. “If you are going to doubt every word I say, then why did you even come here?”

  Martin snapped. “Because even if you and the Masters are all insane, and think that they are ghosts, or that the Dungeon is the Holy Grail, or that Wulvan are Santa Claus in a fur coat, I still need to know how they think to beat them.”

  Klimpt rolled his eyes. “And how do you mean to do that?”

  “Get to the end of the dungeon, beat the final Archduke, reach the Heart.”

  A wry eyebrow arched up. “And then?”

  This was what it had all been about. All of this build up and backtalk and nonsense. It had been to get Martin on the right team. Klimpt didn’t give a damn about him. He was just a tool. A means to an end. Well, that was just fine. Martin had been a useful tool for other people all his life, why would he stop now that it was getting him somewhere?

  “What would you have me do?”

  “You’re asking me?” Klimpt swiveled back to him. “You don’t already have plans?”

  “It seems to me that this is all a sales pitch. You’re on one side of the crazy or the other, so which is it.” Martin held up his empty hands. Weighing his imaginary options. “Do you want me to kill the root of all evil or save the root of all life?”

  Klimpt looked oddly surprised by the question. “Honestly? I wish I had never created the NIH. Even as the possibilities of this place open up before me in all their infinities, I still wish I had never led others here to desecrate it. Man was not meant to come here. Not like this.”

  “Great.” Martin sighed. “So leave it alone, then?”

  “We do not even know what the font is. To destroy something just because we do not understand it would be…”

  Martin cut him off. “Human. Yeah, I know.”