by K. T. Hanna
Table of Contents
Title Page
Map of Tarishna
Map of Cenedril
Books by KT Hanna
Chapter One: Limbo
Chapter Two: Darkness
Chapter Three: Reverted
Chapter Four: Stasis
Chapter Five: Baby Steps
Chapter Six: Still
Chapter Seven: Destination
Chapter Eight: Belly
Chapter Nine: The Beast
Chapter Ten: Agenda
Chapter Eleven: Bodies
Chapter Twelve: Arachnids
Chapter Thirteen: Amplified
Chapter Fourteen: Slime
Chapter Fifteen: Minotaur
Chapter Sixteen: Amber
Chapter Seventeen: Stone Cold
Chapter Eighteen: Outside Yourself
Chapter Nineteen: Shot Throught the Heart
Chapter Twenty: Otherness
Chapter Twenty-One: Unfolding
Chapter Twenty-Two: Life Thereafter
Chapter Twenty-Three: Unraveling
Chapter Twenty-Four: Down the Incline
Chapter Twenty-Five: New and Old
Chapter Twenty-Six: Into the Mouth
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Not What it Seems
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Friend or Foe
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Siblings
Chapter Thirty: Color Coded
Chapter Thirty-One: Family Feud
Chapter Thirty-Two: Trust Me
Appendix Glossary
Characters
Murmur
Acknowledgments
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Landmarks
Cover
SOMNIA ONLINE: DISSONANCE
Author: K.T. Hanna
Cover Artist: Marko Horvatin
Typography: Bonnie Price
Formatting & Interior Design: Caitlin Greer
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 Katie Hanna
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1-948983-14-3 (Trade Paperback Edition)
ISBN-13: 978-1-948983-15-0 (Hardback Edition)
ISBN-13: 978-1-948983-13-6 (E-Book Edition)
Somnia Online:
Initializing
Anomaly
Fragments
Dissonance
The Domino Project:
Chameleon
Hybrid
Parasite
Cait
for being my voice of reason
Murmur’s eyes fluttered open, but there was no difference around her. Everything was still black, like dense nothingness more than a color, suffocating. She breathed, drawing the thick air into her lungs while she tried to ignore the pounding inside her skull.
Nothing around her felt solid enough to be a floor, yet she wasn’t falling. Somehow, the area around her conformed, following her every movement. She strained her ears, trying to hear the breathing of her friends, listening for the slight catch, the momentary shudders that dreaming can cause in a perfect rhythm only to come back with nothing but quiet.
Silence, so loud it hurt her head. Her heart beat like a bass drum in her ears and she fought against the panic that started to swell in her gut. But each breath only drew in air that was far too thick to be good for her, almost choking her with its viscosity.
Murmur closed her eyes again, feeling how her eyelashes brushed against each other in a grating fashion, like she’d had mascara caked on for days. Not even her hair was lighting up, and the little Tiachi wasn’t responding to her mental prods.
Dread began to trickle down the back of her throat, down her cheeks, slowly suffusing her entire body. She could feel herself begin to shake as the darkness began to overwhelm her in its suffocating thickness. If she lost herself even for a moment, it would drown her. So Murmur pushed down on the sensation, tried to lock away the dread even while it tickled at the back of her eyes, threatening to nudge her over that edge.
This time when she opened her eyes, something glistened in the space above her. Almost like stars in a night sky, yet definitely not stars. Sparks flashed across in front of her, like mini flickers of electricity on a motherboard, interconnecting all of the parts of a computer with infinite finesse. She frowned and tried to move forward, her feet heavy, the darkness clinging to her like a lifeline.
“Where are we?”
She heard Sin’s whisper off to her left, and Mur’s head spun in that direction, hope flourishing through her. The others were here? How had they gotten sucked in? Maybe all of them were in a coma now, except the thought was whimsical and highly unlikely. She couldn’t see her friend, only hear her, and even the voice sounded impossibly distant for how close they’d been earlier.
She opened her mouth to respond, but script flashed through the night sky, just like it did in Hightower, just like it had in these ruins. Were they still in the ruins?
You are neither here, nor in-between. Your consciousness has been moved to a different location in order to complete the necessary game shut down initiated by the death of Akelu. It’s only a matter of time before this portion of Somnia will be recalibrated and return you to where you should be.
“Well,” Havoc muttered somewhere off to her right, his voice fighting through the darkness with a dull and muted sound. “That’s just fucking fantastic.”
Beastial chuckled into the void, the hollow sound adding to the beat in Murmur’s head. “Eloquent.”
“He can be as eloquent as he wants,” Merlin’s tone sounded subdued, and she wished she could see the faces of her friends. “We need to figure out if there’s any way we can speed up the getting out of here.”
But where was here, and how had they gotten here in the first place? Murmur looked around, her eyes slowly getting used to the pitch black, counting her friends for the first time, and it was only then that she realized that Shir-Khan, Leeroy, and Snowy weren’t with them.
“Where are the pets?” she asked, half to herself and half out loud.
Havoc started. “Not here, apparently.” His words rang with consternation as he reached the same conclusion she had.
“So, it’s just us, in our bare forms from the game with no assistance.” Jinna mused, his hand thumbing at the grey beard his dwarf still possessed, if the moving figures in Murmur’s sight were anything to go by.
“That in a nutshell.” Sinister mused. She twisted around too, swimming closer through the thick air to Murmur, and cast something at her friend.
Murmur glanced out of the corner of her vision, noticing Sinister’s small HoT on it.
“Well, I guess our spells still technically work then?” At least her HUD was easier to see in this stifling darkness.
Their shapes began to move around in front of her like slugs pushing through black tar, slow and deliberate in their movements. The eerie stillness didn’t escape her, and for a moment she wondered if this was what it was like to be buried alive.
“Mur?” Her name echoed through to her from all different angles, not just in here with her, but out there so much it was bouncing around in her head. Murmur squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath, seeking to calm herself as much as possible, but then her name resounded again.
“Wren?” This time it was louder, reverberating through her mind, bouncing off the sides to create more echoes of sounds, like bells ringing in a discordant harmony. She fought to focus on
the one point, on the one thing that could be real, the originating sound. None of her friends would be calling her name out, not her real name. They all called her by her character’s. So, was this in her head, or in Somnia, or coming to her from the real world? She just didn’t know anymore.
A hand rested lightly on her shoulder, and Murmur fought against opening the eyes she’d closed, or had she closed them? Was it just that dark?
“Mur?” Sinister’s voice was soft and close to her. Harlow. Right there, waiting for her, always there. Reliable. “Are you okay? I mean, you went silent, and haven’t answered any questions for like, minutes.”
“What?” Murmur wished she could see her friend’s eyes, because there was no way she could have lost time, was there?
She didn’t remember closing her eyes or thinking about sleep or elsewhere. Yet in here, where it felt like she was swimming through tar, nothing seemed real.
“No, I didn’t hear you. I heard...” But what did she hear? Surely her mother wouldn’t be at home after the weird glitch that happened to the system. Did they even know, though? Not even Tel had known about Riasli originally, so it stood to reason that maybe they’d disappeared into this eerie black hole, and no one was the wiser. What would happen to them? To her friends mostly. Not much could happen to Wren. She was stuck in a containment capsule anyway, but would the others need them too if they couldn’t get out of this mess?
“Murmur?” Concern reflected back at her in a chorus of voices. Havoc, Sinister, Veranol, Rash—all of them. Their voices ricocheted through her head, reflecting off each other only to cascade through her mind.
“What?” She struggled to whisper out the words, to make sense of what was happening.
“You wouldn’t answer. Are you feeling okay?” Havoc’s voice held that deeply troubled resonance she remembered him having when they were younger, when he acted more like a big brother, protecting her.
“I’m fine. But it’s thick. So muddled.” She coughed, unable to fully breathe the thick miasma of air that was trying to invade her lungs.
“Mur, it’s not real.” Sinister’s tone held an edge of panic, infectious in its very presence. Murmur fought against the urge to absorb it into herself.
“Can you heal her, Ver?”
Murmur heard her friend speak softly, and she frowned, because she couldn’t feel any damage, just so sleepy. She knew Sin said something else, and that Ver replied, but she couldn’t quite make out what it was. Her head was so noisy with voices leaking through, saying things she couldn’t quite grasp, though she was sure she heard her name a few times. Murmur frowned and tried to move, but her limbs felt sluggish and heavy, just like her head was full of wood shavings.
Storm Entertainment
Somnia Online Division
Game Development Offices Artificial Intelligence Server Room
Early Hours, Day Fifteen
Shayla finally managed to push her way into the server room. The sea of technicians behind the housing units of the main three AIs buzzed with tension, their voices low and hushed as they discussed possibilities for the shutdown. Where there should have been green lights flitting through different patterns while the servers calculated loads and balances, there was a flurry of red and orange instead. Not offline, yet not properly online.
And with the people who’d followed her into the room right now, she didn’t have the luxury of talking to the AIs like they were real. She couldn’t risk it; none of them could.
Shayla knew he was there even before he spoke, from the way the skin on the back of her neck crawled to the soft brush of breath just that little bit too close to the skin of her shoulder. The more time he lingered around them, the more she felt the discomfort. At some stage she was going to have to deal with it, with the discomfort, with the intimidation that was part and parcel of their replacement assistant. But now wasn’t that time. She took a breath, cutting him off before he had the chance to know he’d rattled her.
“What is it you want, James?”
She could almost feel the pause, but he cleared his throat slightly, and pushed on. “What exactly are we looking for?”
Counting to three before she opened her mouth to respond, lest she yell at him, Shayla smiled grimly. “We are trying to figure out the cause of the crash. Since the technical coding seems to be having no problem right now, we are making sure the servers haven’t overheated somehow and caused a short in the programming, thus causing them to shut down.”
It was a flimsy reason. Shayla had rushed here while Laria tried frantically to restore life to the servers from the main console. Rushing into the main server room had been foolish, but she’d needed to check if the AIs systems had failed, if they’d disappeared.
She couldn’t quite explain her complete relief that they appeared to be in perfect working order. Granted, they were sorting out whatever had gone wrong, but at least they weren’t towering smoky infernos of former top of the line equipment. However, it didn’t solve their dilemma. “Report on server status.”
Rav’s voice lacked his usual character when he responded. It came out hollow and impersonal, robotic. Maybe he knew there were too many people lingering around. Shayla blinked. An AI playing a role was even more interesting.
“Servers are currently offline. Reboot protocol initiated. Launching target zone in forty-two minutes. Reboot for the majority of Somnia incoming in three minutes.”
“Excellent,” she ground out as best she could. “Reasons for prolonged downtime.”
No one else in the room probably realized it was hesitation but Shayla, and then only because she’d spoken to the AIs so often already. But Rav wasn’t confident, even though he sounded just as robotic as before. “Glitch in sector CL 429, Ruins of Cenedril. Routine maintenance did not detect this defect. Area is cordoned off and will bounce players who attempt to enter the structure back until it can be rectified.”
Shayla nodded her head, fighting against the icy feeling in her stomach. Even with the engineers fiddling with the backup and bulk servers, in the room right there in front of them, Rav had managed to get her a message. Only she wasn’t sure what to do with it.
How on earth were they going to keep it quiet that the twelve people inside the damn structure were currently still in there? The only players who’d been in the Ruins of Cenedril were Fable—and Wren’s guild, if she’d understood it correctly, were currently still locked into the game world.
She watched the AIs, counting down the seconds herself. It was going to be the longest forty-two minutes of her life for that damned zone to come back online. They had to get the servers back up, had to get everything back to the way it was. With any luck, maybe enough people would complain loud enough about the eighteen minutes of downtime that their investors, and the higher ups in the company would be too distracted to notice the zone no one but Fable had been in. Maybe they wouldn’t notice the ruins and their out of sync downtime.
Maybe they wouldn’t find out that certain characters had never been logged out, that their brainwaves were still connected, still actively playing a game in a world that was supposed to be offline. Shayla almost laughed out loud. Like her luck would ever stretch that far.
Whirring filled the room as the servers booted back up. Beeps clung frequently in slightly differing tones, creating a discordant melody that made her shiver. The techs in the actual server partition heaved a sigh of relief, but Shayla could still see the frowns of confusion pinching their brows and the questions on their lips that were just waiting to be asked.
She knew she wasn’t going to like the inquiries that would come with this, the whole nitty and gritty investigation that she knew Davenport would launch. The fact that the effected grid wouldn’t be up for almost another hour didn’t help much.
The fact was that Somnia had gone offline, in a time when servers no longer required rolling reboots. In a time where all upda
tes could be made without taking the game down and halting people’s playtime. And most of all, in a time where every little aspect was examined down to the smallest detail because of their financial investors. Everyone, and anyone, knew that there should have been no reason for a game as advanced as Somnia to go offline.
Now she had to figure out how to spin it, before her and Laria both lost their jobs, and thereby any chance to help Wren.
Somnia Online
Jirald’s Bedroom
End Day Fifteen
Jirald blinked at the rogue and dread knight in front of him as the countdown continued in large yellow numbers across his vision. Log out? Shut down? What the hell did that even mean? Not to mention the two asshats standing in front of him getting in his way of his dungeon. Their dungeon? What was that bullshit all about? He could feel the tension mounting in the cave, and Masha wasn’t even speaking, which meant the cleric was trying to maintain his own temper. While he rarely lost it, Jirald knew if he did, it’d be bad.
“Well, then.” Risk heaved an outwardly heavy sigh. “I guess we don’t get to fight yet. Such a shame. This place will be riddled with gnomes again when we log back in, I’m sure.” He sat down, motioning to his followers to do the same. Karn was the only one who didn’t seem to want to draw back.
Jirald couldn’t make out the other rogue’s face behind the mask, but it wasn’t difficult to tell they were leering at him. Specifically focused on him. It wasn’t until Jirald began to lower himself and sit that the other rogue followed the example.
Please log out now. You will be able to log back in momentarily as soon as the servers have been reset.
You have: 60 seconds
Jirald frowned. Log out took thirty. He was going to wait until the system hit thirty-five seconds to go before he logged out, because he didn’t trust that rogue. His guild mates began to disappear around him, all of them but Masha who sat to his right diagonally behind him. Watching and waiting, perhaps having the same face off with Risk that Jirald was having with Karn.
