Code Jumper

by Zachariah Dracoulis

  “Better.” Quinn said with what sounded like happiness but could’ve been sarcasm, “You’re in the base game.”

  As soon as the words were said it felt like an immense weight had been lifted off my chest, and I can’t honestly say why, but it made me smile, and even laugh with relief as I looked out over the massive forestland.

  It was like coming home.

  “H-how?” I stammered between laughs as I wiped the joyous tears from my eyes, “I mean, I know we had to end up here at some point, but just… how?”

  “Well, I’d say it has something to do with the fact that you’re getting closer to Messiah.” Quinn suggested, her voice absolutely brimming with delight, “From here it looks like it’ll be a pretty straight-forward shot to him.”

  “Fan-freaking-tastic.” I said with a smile so wide it hurt, “So where’s this clear shot?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure,” Quinn replied somewhat disappointedly, “but I think the Don might have some idea.”

  “And why do you say that?” I asked as I turned to my car excitedly with my hands on my hips like Peter Pan, she was exactly as I’d left her, and boy-oh-boy was she perfect.

  “Because it looks like a great deal of the world’s information passes through him…” Quinn said, her enthusiasm starting to wane.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I didn’t get a reply for a few seconds, instead getting subjected to the same silence as the one in the basement, before she finally let out what I guessed was an involuntary curious little chirp.

  “Quinn?” I asked after she’d decided to continue with her silence.

  “Oh, oh sorry, um… Sorry! God, I just keep… I don’t even know what I’m looking at here, should that really be…”

  Quinn continued to go on like that for a while, and I left her to do so in the hopes that she’d eventually reach a point of mental clarity that was sufficient enough for her to finally engage in a proper conversation.

  That did not seem to be happening any time soon.

  “You ever gonna finish that thought?” I asked as I walked over to the car and turned the stereo off before the next song could start.

  “Hmm? Oh, yes.” Quinn replied after clearly not fully hearing me, “I… um… I’m very confused.”

  At first I didn’t see the significance in that, people get confused all the time, even Quinn had had a few moments where she’d been thrown off by something I’d said or done, and back in the ship she’d even shown signs of confusion in regards to figuring out how to get the information to me.

  That was just it though, Quinn wasn’t stuck with some frustrating puzzle she had all the pieces for, it was more like she’d been given half the pieces and no picture.

  “Hun?” I let out with as much care as I could with a single word, “How about you just walk me through it, step-by-step, alright?”

  “I… I don’t think I can. I’d need some kind of rudimentary understanding to even begin to start forming a fully realized idea of what’s happened in here since we’ve been gone, and even then it’ll still be mostly conjecture. It just… it doesn’t make any sense…”

  “Okay,” I replied calmly, hiding how much it concerned me that Quinn was seemingly as clueless as me, “then throw a guess at me.”

  I’d figured it’d be like autocorrect, I’d request a random option based on the simplest evidence and hey presto, I’d have a basic answer that I could start to work with.

  Instead, what I got was a cold shiver up my spine that most definitely wasn’t mine, followed by an incredibly uneasy breath in my ears from Quinn.

  “Eddie, there are Code Jumpers.”

  I raised my eyebrow curiously, “Um… alright then, where?”

  Quinn hesitated, either due to the fact that she didn’t want to seem like a paranoid idiot, or because she genuinely didn’t want to share the information with me for fear that it’d panic me, but she did eventually surrender to the request.

  “Everywhere.”

  PART THREE

  A WHOLE NEW WORLD

  “Okay, explain it to me again.” I said as we drove down the winding mountain road, “Code Jumpers are everywhere, but they’re not? Am I getting that right?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it any better than that,” Quinn replied with no small amount of frustration, “it’s like… They’re like you, that’s what it looks like anyway, but at the same time they’re not. Like, picture the difference between say… I don’t know, Gandalf and Darth Vader. Both have magic, but it’s different.”

  “First off, the Force is not magic, it’s a-”

  “It’s space magic, alright?” Quinn snapped, cutting me off, “And it’s most certainly not our most pressing issue right now.”

  “Okay, alright, you’re right.” I replied without really meaning it, the distinction between the Istari and the Jedi being rather important to me. which distracted me from the actual point, “So what you’re saying is…”

  “That they may be more powerful, or less, or something completely different. Look, the fact of the matter is I don’t know what they are, and the more I look into the neural net, the more confused I get.”

  “And what’s the story there? You mentioned something about it being closed off?”

  “Yes, about that…” Quinn trailed off, “That’s another thing that I’m not quite sure about, but it looks like the base game has been cut off from the rest of Re.Gen, at least this section of it anyway.”

  I was still having trouble wrapping my head around the whole thing, but as soon as Quinn put it in those words I had an idea, “Wait, is that what that dude was talking about in that TDM match? The guy who was saying I was just making the rounds or something like that?”

  “Probably, though I can’t begin to speculate on something as complex as human thought processes.” Quinn said, giving the first real compliment to humanity I’d ever heard her say, “My point is that it appears that no one’s been able to come in or go out of the base game for quite some time.”

  “Does it have anything to do with the Rapture?” I asked, not actually wanting the answer.

  “No,” Quinn replied quickly, “it would seem that it happened quite some time after the Rapture went off.”

  “Good, good…” I breathed with a weak smile, the knowledge that what I’d done hadn’t stretched even further than I thought filling me with relief, “So, what do we do from here?”

  “Well, like I said before, I think the Don might have some idea of what’s happened.”

  “That’s right, you were saying something about a bunch of information passing through him, then you sort of trailed off.” I said as if I hadn’t been obsessing over what she’d said about Callomezi throughout our entire conversation.

  “Yeah, sorry about that.” Quinn replied shamefully, “There’s just so much to go through.”

  “Don’t worry about it, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve gotten confused and forgotten what I was saying… well, I probably would’ve never had to become a Code Jumper.”

  Quinn let out a little laugh at that before pressing on, “Okay, well, yes. From what I’ve seen the Don had a lot of information going through him.”

  “Had?”

  “Yes, it looks like part of the reason I was getting so confused is that I was combing through the archives.”

  “And why were you doing that?” I asked, trying not to sound too judgmental.

  “Because that’s what I normally do,” Quinn said matter-of-factly, “I find all the previous information on a subject, then work up to the present. The issue here is that there was so much information that I simply couldn’t comb through it all, and unlike with our previous ‘excursions’ here, the present code seems to be constantly changing.”

  “Isn’t it always though?”

  “Not like this, not at these speeds, and not with this level of complexity. It’s like something… I don’t know, it’s like something got unlocked.”

  Doing my best
not to focus too much on what that could potentially mean for little old me, I turned off the mountain road and started following the signs to the nearest highway, “Alright, so the code’s more complex, we can work with that. For now I think you’re right though, we need to get in contact with the Don.”

  “About that…” Quinn replied, making no effort to hide how irritated she was, “for some reason I’ve been unable to get through to him, not through any of the regular channels anyway.”

  “Any idea why that may be?”

  “If I was to hazard a guess I’d say it has something to do with the fact that we’re basically using a crank phone in the age of the cell. There’s every chance in the world that the Don doesn’t work with the conventional communication systems anymore.”

  “Alright, then we go to him.” I said, hoping to God that not too much had changed, “How long’s it going to take to get to his old restaurant?”

  Quinn took a few seconds longer than normal to calculate the route, but once she had she seemed pleasantly surprised with the outcome, “An hour, two tops.”

  “Really?” I asked, looking around at the mountains, “How’s that?”

  “I have no idea. Again, this place has changed a lot since we were last here, and from what I’m seeing you’re presently in the desert that used to be outside the city limits.”

  “That’d explain the confusion…” I trailed off, realizing that whatever counted as my internal GPS would’ve justifiably been thrown off by the change of topography, especially with the height.

  “Like animals returning home to see a parking lot.” Quinn said with more gravity than I thought she was capable of, “I’ll see if I can do anything to fix that brain of yours, make it so it’s a bit more malleable to the changes. Do you mind being left to your own devices for a while?”

  “Not at all,” I replied before turning the stereo back on, “not at all…”

  NOBODY LIKES A TICKET

  The highway was pretty dead, considering, and while I had thought I’d be fine driving around with nothing but my music to keep me company, it turned out that I’d grown to become codependent.

  It wasn’t something I was particularly proud of, but the twenty minutes of silence from Quinn had made me start to feel like I was clawing at the walls.

  “Hey,” I said, finally giving in to my weakness, “why do you think Messiah didn’t set up shop here?”

  A few minutes went by without my question being answered, and due to my discomfort with the idea of bothering Quinn, I’d kept my mouth shut.

  “What was that?” she’d finally asked as if no time had passed, shocking me so much I nearly swerved into another lane, “Something about… Oh, why didn’t Messiah come here instead of the Glitch World?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I replied, struggling to catch my breath after her sudden, out-of-the-blue response, “It just makes more sense to me.”

  “Well, while I’m sure it makes sense in that it offers a lot of connections, I don’t think it makes sense in terms of staying safe.”

  A smile spread across my face, the joy of having someone to talk to again making my brain feel like it was being utilized, “How do you mean?”

  “The automated security system,” Quinn replied, her tone inferring that she was still incredibly focused on the task of fixing my head, “I believe it would’ve found him in a heartbeat. The Glitch World gives him access to everywhere he needs access to without the heightened security presence.”

  “But what about all these faux Code Jumpers?” I asked, ignoring the fact that I kind of felt like a car getting the spark plugs changed, “Shouldn’t they be getting hoisted by the system?”

  “I mean… probably, I haven’t really looked that much into that side of things, sorry.”

  I wanted to ask her why she hadn’t, but I had the feeling that if I did she would start to and all of a sudden we’d be back to the point where she was struggling to get words out.

  So instead I simply said “Cool, guess we’ll figure it out eventually.” and left it at that like I was totally satisfied.

  Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t regret not asking her, after all I like my mind being more spongy than soupy, but at the same time there was still so much I wanted to know.

  Quinn was gone again though, which said to me that it was probably best that I leave her alone to do her thing, and I was back to driving in relative silence.

  At first I figured that that was just my bad luck, but then I noticed something in my rearview mirror and realized that silence was significantly better than some alternatives.

  “Shit…” I muttered under my breath as the flashing red and blue lights approached me at high speeds.

  “Think it has something to do with your little hurricane?” Quinn asked, apparently taking some time out of her work to be nosey.

  “No, I doubt that they still care about that.” I replied before pulling over to the side of the road, “But it wouldn’t surprise me if they were able to make me as a Code Jumper.”

  “How? Not even the system’s found you yet.”

  “For one thing, I’m guessing that if the code’s become as complex as you say it’s likely that the players could pick up on me before the system, which I’m sure is having about as much fun as you at the moment.” I said, my eyes struggling to figure out whether I was being pulled over by a bike or a cruiser, “And for another, it plays into that theory of yours that there’s something about Code Jumpers that makes people remember them.”

  The vehicle finally got close enough as it pulled up behind me to reveal that it was neither a bike nor a cruiser, and instead was something of a mix between the two.

  “What the Hell..?” I muttered confusedly as I looked at the hovering vehicle and the two heavily armored police officers that climbed out, “Quinn, are you seeing this?”

  “Indeed I am…” Quinn replied, equally shocked as me to see elements of sci-fi in the base game.

  “Is it some kinda glitch or… I don’t know, is it something that has any reason for being here?”

  “None that I can see, the game hasn’t had any updates since the Rapture, and the various AI aren’t about to start tampering with what is essentially the hub of the neural net.”

  One of the two cops came up to my window and tapped on it, the universal sign for ‘wind your window down before I assume you have a weapon and am forced to act in self-defense’.

  My first instinct was, unsurprisingly, to snap my fingers and have their helmets’ black visors crumble inward to their faces, but I decided that if there was any chance that they were the Code Jumpers-but-not that Quinn had warned me about it’d be best to just play the part of the ignorant civilian.

  “Problem?” I asked as politely as I could after winding down my window, “Was I speeding?”

  “Phone for you.” the officer replied with a garbled, almost robotic voice before dropping a small brick phone into my lap and turning away.

  I regarded the phone with confusion for a while, its blue display shining brightly enough that it illuminated most of the front of the car while the caller ID was practically incomprehensible.

  “I think you should pick it up.” Quinn said as I continued to look on curiously, “I doubt that these… officers have much patience.”

  “Yeah, sure…” I replied, but even still it was another few seconds before my hands finally accepted the message I was sending them and picked up the phone.

  “You there?” the somewhat familiar voice on the other end of the line asked right before I managed to put it to my ear, “Eddie? Bud?”

  “Speaking.” I said after another few seconds, though that time it was more due to the fact that I was trying to pinpoint where I’d heard the voice before, and less to do with the fact that my face was having trouble making mouth-words.

  “Hey! How’s my favorite Code Jumper hangin’? You staying outta trouble I hope?”

  And that’s when I recognized the voice, “Callomezi?” I practically laug
hed, “Damn, how the Hell have you been?”

  “Ah, well, I’m a God amongst the mortals, so you could say I’m doing pretty well.”

  “Skipping over what you mean by that…” I replied jokingly, figuring he was simply in his prime and loving the fact that he was the leader of a powerful crime syndicate, “What’ve you been up to? And where’re you laying your fat head these days?”

  “Nothin’ much,” my former favorite client replied, “got most of the work out of the way a few… wow, must’ve been a long ass time ago, and now I get to enjoy the fruits of my labor, sleeping in the penthouse of a skyscraper I get to call my own.”

  “Ha! How’d you swing that?”

  “With that book o’ yours.”

  That’s right about the time I realized that he wasn’t being figurative about the whole ‘God’ thing. It’s also when I realized what had happened after I’d left, and unlike with the Rapture which I could easily pawn off as being Messiah’s fault, the Don basically gaining the abilities of a Code Jumper was all on me.

  “You still there?” Callomezi asked after I let the line go dead for a few seconds too long, “Eddie? Did this thing crap out on me again?”

  “No, no…” I trailed off before trying my best to hide the fact that I was freaking out and putting on a smile, “I’m still here.”

  ‘It’s probably fine,’ I told myself hopefully, ‘the guy’s probably just gone ahead and made it so he has a few personal luxuries. There’s no proof that he had anything to with the game getting locked down.’

  “Okay, good. You feelin’ alright?” Callomezi asked caringly, “You seem a bit… off.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, upping the gusto from my previous tone, “just thrown by Robocop ‘ere.”

  The Don laughed knowingly, “Yeah, aha, those guys can be pretty shocking first time around. They’re good men though.”