Code Jumper

by Zachariah Dracoulis

  “How very… forward-thinking.”

  I snapped my fingers at one of the boxes, causing it to sprout a handle and go from weighing the same as a full-grown man to weighing the same as toddler, “How’s this for forward-thinking?” I asked before grabbing the handle and starting to spin.

  “What’s the endgame here?” Quinn responded as I went faster and faster, “Take off and fly through the roof?”

  “Nope,” I grunted, my grip loosening as the box began to feel like it was pulling away from me, “this!”

  Before Quinn could say another word, I’d sent the box flying toward what I assumed was mostly plastic and, right as it was about to collide with it, snapped my fingers, turning it into a ton of solidified fire which, upon impact, smashed through and melted a massive section of the clear wall into little more than a puddle.

  “Why do you always do that?” Quinn asked, utterly unimpressed with my amazing skills.

  “What? Be awesome?”

  “No, snap your fingers. You could do just about anything, wiggle your nose, wink, clap, yet every time you snap your fingers, and usually your solutions are incredibly convoluted and weird.”

  There was so much to process following that, ranging from my feelings being hurt about her being disinterested in what I’d done, to me questioning most everything I’d ever done within the realm of Re.Gen.

  And then I remembered that there were other things that I needed to focus on, like, you know, the fact that I had to save the world.

  “You’re not saving the world.” Quinn corrected, making me jump and nearly hit my head on the overhanging jagged plastic as I stepped through the hole I’d made, “Just a lot of people.”

  “What?”

  “You were just thinking about how you’re saving the world, and how you’re basically a superhero now and get to live out one of your lifelong dreams, specifically the one of actually going on a quest.”

  “Well…” I said as I took a tentative step towards the humming tear in space, “do you blame me? I mean, look at me. Stepping toward the unknown, going off to fight a psychotic megalomaniac in a thrilling battle in a weird dimension? Tell me where I’m wrong in my thinking.”

  “For one thing he’s not a megalomaniac, he genuinely believes that he’s ‘saving’ these people, it has nothing to do with power.” Quinn replied without missing a beat, “And for another this isn’t a quest. You’re being forced by members of the government to go stop a terrorist, not liberate the peoples of Klundira from the tyrannical rule of an evil wizard.”

  “That was weirdly specific.” I muttered before taking another step, avoiding the burning box which was leaving a great deal of scorch marks around it despite the lack of an active flame, “And quests don’t have to take place in a fantasy environment.”

  “All the best ones have at least one dragon,” Quinn stated flatly, “that’s a fact.”

  “Not arguing with you there, but just because this isn’t one of the best types of quests,” I replied as I shuffled slightly closer to the portal, having gotten close enough that another proper step would mean going through, “doesn’t mean it isn’t a quest.”

  Quinn stayed silent for a moment as she thought about what to say next, then let out a gasp, “You’re stalling!”

  “Hell yeah I’m stalling.” I spat back through gritted teeth, “Have you seen this thing? I could go through and get turned inside out, or horrifically burned, or just not come out at all. It’s scary.”

  “So that’s in then? You’re gonna stay in here forever with your… fire cube? Perhaps give yourself some kind of cancer as you breathe in the plastic fumes?”

  “It does smell a bit funky, doesn’t it?” I said, giving the broken wall another look as it bent and melted around the hole, “Ugh, fine, just… scan this thing, would you? Scan ‘em all before we go through them.”

  “I can’t believe you think you even need to ask that of me.” Quinn replied proudly.

  “Just do it, alright? I don’t need the ‘I’m so great’s from you.”

  Every part of my being wanted me to go through the portal, to go through the interdimensional doorway like I’d seen so many heroes do in the past.

  “Oh hurry up, would you?” Quinn snapped, “The world’s counting on you.”

  And that’s all I needed.

  I took a deep breath, regretted it immediately as my lungs filled with plastic smoke, and stepped through the portal.

  It was… an interesting experience.

  FUN WITH PORTALS

  I’ll never forget what it was like going through the first portal, the pull the moment my foot touched the event horizon, the feeling like my organs were being turned into mush and then formed back into their original state, and, of course, the smell.

  It was like a smell from a memory that you can’t quite recall, you’d know it if you smelled it, but even then you wouldn’t be able to identify it as anything.

  “That was…”

  “Nauseating, agreed.” Quinn said as if she genuinely had an upset stomach.

  The first thing I noticed in my new environment was what I was wearing, which basically looked like a neoprene suit covered in white scales.

  “Hey… Quinn? Why am I dressed like a high-tech stormtrooper?”

  “Stormtrooper?” Quinn laughed, “You look more like a surfer put on a high-tech bicycle helmet then covered himself in glue and rolled around in a bunch of dead coral.”

  With a fresh wound in my soul, I started to look around at my tight surroundings and started to get an idea of where I was.

  “Weird suit, I’m guessing some kind of energy weapon on my back, and a sci-fi broom closet?” I said as I tried to feel for a door in the tiny room I’d found myself in, “I’m gonna take a stab in the dark and guess that I’m in some kind of FPS?”

  “And you would be right.” Quinn replied, “Looks like you’re the only player in here and… yep, looks like your primary objective is to reach the bridge, commandeer this vessel, and return it to the RGDF, otherwise known as the Royal Ganthimene Defense Force.”

  I let those words hang in the air a while, hoping that Quinn would realize what she’d just said and correct herself, but she didn’t.

  “Okay, so where’s the portal?”

  “Th-oh! Oh, yeah. Um, I’m not sure.”

  It took a great deal of self-control to not lose my temper and start screaming, but I was getting there, “What do you mean ‘I’m not sure’? Isn’t it your job to know where those things are?”

  “No.” Quinn replied with a scoff before growing some tact, “I mean, no, not really. I could tell where it was last time once we were in proximity with it.”

  “Of course you cou-I could tell where it was! It was behind a Goddamn see-through wall!”

  “Well… exactly. I don’t why you’re expecting so much from me, I was never programmed to go outside the confines of the base game.”

  It was at that point that I started seething, and then flailing around like a chimp in a phone booth with the scent of banana coming from somewhere unknown.

  “Hey, hey, calm down, calm down.”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down! You told me back there that if I didn’t go through the portal I’d basically be Castro mixed with Mao, and now I’m stuck in a freakin’ box with nowhere to go and an AI who has no idea about… about… about anything!”

  “I understand you’re frustrated-”

  “Frustrated!? Frust-”

  “Let me finish!” Quinn barked with a voice that sounded remarkably like my fifth-grade teacher’s, and, just like my teacher used to, successfully silenced me, “I get that you’re frustrated, and maybe a bit scared too, but I’m doing my best. But on this ship? I’m in the dark. The thing’s too big, and there’s too much going on, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept defeat, all it means is that you’re going to have to be creative.”

  I didn’t know what to say, mostly on account of the fact that I’d just been yelled at like
I hadn’t been since I was boy, but also because she made a lot of sense.

  I’d played video games before, loads of times, and while it had been a few years since I had the time or the desire, I was sure I’d be able to dust off the ol’ memory banks and give it a shot.

  “Alright… Okay, I’ll do my best.”

  “Good, now, the first thing I think you’re going to want to do is pull that gun off your back.”

  “How about I find the door first?” I asked before taking a few calming breaths and giving the walls and shelves around me another pat down.

  “No, you should really get that gun.”

  “Why?”

  Now, I’m not exactly sure how long she knew about the five armed combatants closing in on my position, but given her sigh and the dejected “Too late.” I have to assume that it was at least ten seconds.

  I had maybe a second to react as the wall behind me slid up, filling the tiny space with light, but it wasn’t enough.

  A fist drove into my lower back and I slammed into the wall with my helmeted head, resulting me in smashing my face into the clear visor.

  “Thanks for the heads up.” I grunted as I swung my elbow back in clumsy arch and felt a crunch.

  “I did tell you to grab your gun.”

  They, whoever they were, had me locked down in the closet by simply piling in on me, and every time I got anywhere close to turning around I was slammed back into the wall.

  “Can this suit do anything?” I asked desperately after trying and failing to plant my feet on the wall.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know! Can it harden? Is there some kinda rocket boost? Anything!”

  I kicked backward, but instead of hitting anything I just got knocked on my ass as they hooked my other leg and pushed me to the ground.

  “Ah! Here’s something, anti-missile system.”

  “Use it!” I shouted as I started getting kicked and stomped into the ground, the suit protecting me from most physical pain but leaving me open to feel like I was trapped.

  Suddenly, following a strange popping sound, something burst out of my back and the closet was filled with smoke and blinding light.

  It only took Quinn a second to adjust my eyes to light, but that second was long enough for me to be stuck blinking stars out of my eyes while I struggled to get to my feet.

  “Now would be an opportune time to attack.” Quinn announced as I turned around dramatically to look through the smoke at my assailants who had been thrown well clear of the closet.

  “Don’t have to tell me twice.” I said with a smile before tensing every muscle in my body, the suit tickling my skin as it stretched to accommodate, “Quinn, throw on something boppy. This is gonna be fun.”

  “Understood, blink-182’s All The Small Things now playing.”

  “I… Actually, you know what? Hell yeah.”

  SCIENCE-FICTION FIREFIGHT

  Three groggy members were all that remained of my attackers, the others having died in the blast, and as I stood there trying to figure out a plan of attack, they started to rise to their feet, energy weapons in hand.

  At first I thought they were wearing some kind of armor, but it was quickly revealed that they were some kind of mix between man and tree, a single glowing blue eye in the middle of their faces while what I guessed was their mouth was simply a hole in their face that got closed over with bark between breaths.

  The sympathetic part of my brain forced me to suck air through my teeth as I saw that the barky flesh that hadn’t been protected by their blue, leathery spacesuits was covered in small burns and small glowing embers from where the anti-missile flares had hit them.

  Despite my brief moment of sympathy for them, I wasn’t about to wait for a fair fight, and right before they looked ready to start shooting, I leaped into action.

  Now, I’m not exactly a trained martial artist, but I’ve been in enough fights over the years to know what to do when the situation presents itself.

  Kind of.

  My first attack was a wide swing, but I was too slow and my target was able to quickly duck out of the way before driving the barrel of his gun into my side and pulling the trigger, sending a burst of burning purple energy into my ribs and making me to wince.

  A second pulse hit me in the upper back and I stumbled forward, then another in the other side, and another right into my shoulder.

  “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Quinn asked with what sounded more like annoyance than anything close to concern, “I mean seriously, just use the gun.”

  “Well you try thinking of that when it feels like someone’s rubbed Tiger Balm all over your body.” I growled before pulling the weapon off my back, spinning around, and stopping in my tracks when I saw the gun, “What the shit is this thing?”

  It looked like some kind of white assault rifle, only fatter, more complicated, and glowy.

  “Just fire the damn thing!”

  I didn’t know how to tell her that I honestly didn’t have a clue about where the gun’s trigger was, let alone if it even had one, but then I touched something on the side of the weapon’s handle and a trigger popped out under my finger, just in time too.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, I opened fire, blasting the tree people with quick-firing thick bolts of red which, upon impact, blew chunks of burning bark off of them.

  Instinctively, I dropped to a knee and tightened up my spread as my enemies made a mad scramble for cover in the room that I hadn’t yet been able to get to know the layout of. Two of the chicken-shit pricks managed to make it to the closet in time, while the other ended up getting shot so many times in the back that I’d made a fiery hole clear through him, to which he fell to the ground without a sound.

  “This thing’s fun,” I said, a smile growing across my face before I started to get up to my feet, “I wonder what else it can do.”

  “Uh… maybe kill the two left?”

  “Yeah, obviously, but how?” I asked with the eagerness of a teenager getting their first car before touching something along the bottom of the gun and watching in amazement as it transformed into something that looked more like a combat shotgun.

  One of the idiots hiding in the closet decided that that would be his opportune time to poke his head around the corner and try to get a shot off at me. I’m not even sure if he had a chance to regret it before I pulled the trigger, blowing the top of his head clean off and leaving a smoldering chunk of wood behind.

  “See? If we’d have done it your way we would never have discovered that this thing an turn into a freakin’ shotgun!”

  “Mmhm, now hurry up and finish off the last one, we really don’t have much time.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” I replied as I started to walk toward the closet, still fiddling with the gun looking for next exciting transformation, “how much time do we have?”

  Quinn turned silent for a few seconds, making me think for a moment that perhaps we’d already run out of time, before she finally said “I don’t know.”

  “What?” I asked, absolutely shocked that the one who was supposed to know everything about the mission was missing perhaps the most important detail, “How could you not know?”

  “Because they didn’t give me a timeframe,” Quinn snapped, “all I know is that that large man was counting down, and judging from the time he gave we could have years, or we could have hours.”

  “Well that’s just dandy.”

  I didn’t have long to complain about my lack of intel as, after barely touching something at the back of the gun, the weapon enveloped my arm.

  “Christ!” I cried as it collapsed and whirred its way around my arm, “Get it off! Get! It! Off!”

  “Why?” Quinn asked, seemingly completely at ease with the fact that I was getting eaten by my gun.

  “Because.” I grunted while desperately trying to rip it off, “I don’t want it to-”

  It was at that moment that the rem
aining tree person popped out from behind his cover, prepared to empty his weapon’s battery on me, only to have me peel off my gun and send it flying in his direction.

  Suddenly he’d dropped his gun and started screaming and clawing at his face, the sound being muffled by the high-tech weapon that had latched to and was slowly crushing his head.

  Though hard to watch, I couldn’t seem to look away, and before long, with a disgusting popping sound and a crunch, he froze, standing silently as his arms flopped down to his side and thick green goo leaked down the front of his body and out from the gaps in the weapon’s vicelike grip.

  “That.” I finally finished, staring at the man in a weird mix of satisfaction and revulsion as the song finally finished, “Is he…”

  Quinn didn’t need to answer as, with a final snap and a pop, the alien fell backward.

  “Right, so,” I said, looking around at everywhere but the carnage, “where are we?”

  Even at first glance it was obvious we were in some kind of armory, the long set of racks of guns that ran the length of the room being a clear indication of that. But I didn’t just want to assume where we were, I wanted a detailed explanation so I could stop thinking about the puddle that was forming.

  “Armory, third floor of fifteen.” Quinn finally said, “The bridge shouldn’t be too hard to find from here, it’s on the top floor near the middle of the ship.”

  “Now how would you know that? I thought this was all unfamiliar territory for you.”

  “It is, but there’s also a map right behind you.”

  “Really?” I asked before spinning around and seeing it printed right next to a metal door, “Well, should’ve probably spotted that earlier.”

  I started to walk over to it, thinking I’d successfully avoided looking at the crunchy, gooey mess behind me, when Quinn stopped me, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “I don’t think so…”

  “You sure?”

  After letting the question hang in the air a while, I finally buckled with a sigh, “Ugh, fine.”

  I want to clarify here that I don’t really mind getting messy, that wasn’t the problem at all. No, the problem was the nature of the mess, like seeing a squished cockroach, only with green innards instead of yellow ones, and, if I’m being honest, I couldn’t tell if it was worse or better.