“What’s your name, by the way? Balancing force doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. That’s more of a job title, no?”
“It’s a function. A responsibility. You can call me Gelian — that was once my name.”
“Okay, Gelian. Can you fly? We have quite the trip ahead of us.”
“You can fly with real-world items?” Gelian asked in surprise.
“The things you learn how to do when you’re trying to get rid of the game,” I replied, shrugging as I flew into the air.
“And you don’t even need Ulbaron... Who are you, Mark Denvin?”
“You said it yourself — I’m a fire elemental. An angry fire elemental. So, are we going?”
“Well, angry fire elemental, didn’t you wonder how you were able to carry Lirkun away wiiile it had a piece of real-world equipment on it?”
“You know about that, too?”
“I know about everything that happens in this hexagon. But you
didn’t answer my question.”
“I’m not sure what you want to hear. Yes, I can carry around real-world equipment. Lirkun had something on it, which meant I carried the whole lot away together. What’s the issue?”
“No issue, of course, unless you count the fact that players can’t fly with real-world devices. But other than that, it’s great.”
“Oh, so you don’t know how I’m able to?” Apparently, Gelian didn’t know what absorbers were capable of. “I can trade you what I know for the Tsarter base. You aliens love finding out new things.”
“Absolutely not. I’ll learn all about it when the release results come out, so the base is much more important. Let’s go.”
All I could do was sigh when my attempt to buy off the base on the cheap failed, heading off after the balancing force. The Tsarter base wasn't far from the border with my hexagon and looked like a fortress. Real, stone, and with towers, the kind tourists used to fawn over, it had been modernized to fit the new reality. The stone was unscannable. The moat had been filled with a smoking green liquid, presumably some kind of acid, and there was an impenetrable protective dome that looked very similar to the one covering the owner’s lair. The only difference wras that the one in front of me had been generated by the game. When wTe got to within a hundred meters, lightning began flashing out to greet us. It started off without much force, though that changed as we got closer. Changing our tactics, we were forced to fly over to the central gate, the only entrance in the area. The drawbridge was raised, the grate was lowered, and no living beings were in sight. The lightning stopped as soon as we got below the level of the walls. The dome evaporated, too.
“Get to work!” Gelian somehow folded all four of its arms in and around each other. They looked like a ball of snakes with drooping heads, though I couldn’t tell howT the player pulled it off. Walking over to the edge of the ditch, I felt the caustic mist attack my protection. Against my hermetic seal, however, it was powerless. Can anything get through it? My first plan of attack was to turn into Lirkun Po, giving me a strong chance of having the gate recognize me and open on its own. But, from what I could tell, it wasn't automatic — I was supposed to do something. It didn't care that Lirkun had just walked up. Okay, let’s try plan B. My device control got to work, and I ordered the gate to open.
You’re trying to hack into the Tsarter base’s outer defensive circuit.
Sum total of your skill levels: 880.
Sum total of the outer defensive circuit’s protection: 800.
Probability of successful hack: 9.1%.
My jaw just about dropped when I realized how high Villian had gotten the base’s defenses. Each of the protection parameters was at level 200, which was nearly impossible in our release. It took an entire minute for the random combination to fall into place.
Attempt 43... Successful,
***
You connected to the Tsarter base’s outer defensive
circuit.
As I’d learned from bitter experience, I immediately blocked all security protocols, not looking for anything to explode or break. And it was only when I started digging into the details that a sense of pride washed over me — everything would have detonated in just five seconds after I hacked in if I hadn’t thought ahead. Players were supposed to show an access card to the defensive circuit’s scanner. If they didn’t, the site locked down, defenses were restored, and Armageddon was unleashed on anyone outside the walls. The earth was littered with explosives I hadn’t even noticed. A certain someone definitely wouldn’t have survived if they’d gone off.
“I’m not seeing you make much progress,” Gelian said sarcastically, but the gate started swinging open right then. The outer defensive circuit included the mines, gate, and walls. There was no access to the inside of the base, which meant there were multiple circuits. Their storage, if its really here, probably has a dedicated security system.
Or a dedicated creature there for security. As soon as we walked in, my scanner picked up an enormous red spot — something big, alive, and whole was about ten meters underground. It looked bigger than the male
African elephant I'd seen at the zoo a few times. And if I compared it to the game, only destroyers were larger, though the thing I was looking at wasn’t made of metal. That immediately raised two questions: what did it eat? And where did it do its business? Villian definitely would have come up with a cleaning system, otherwise the entire underground would have been filled with the monster's waste. And I needed to find that system — I didn’t feel like breaking through the main entrance.
There wasn’t much of the original inner courtyard remaining. The stone pavement had been replaced by a smooth covering equipped with sensors, and a couple tall towers armed with automatic ray guns were presumably there to fend off an attack from the outside. Meanwhile, the enormous palace, a proud Gothic throwback, had been turned into an ultramodern mix of iron and darkened glass. I’d seen similar buildings on my way to visit the general. With the exception of the underground giant, there were no living beings to be found, though I couldn’t see through the walls of the main building. A simple mesh was blocking my scanners. At least, it was simple for me if very real for the game community and their equipment. A chill ran down my spine — the owner itself had participated in the construction. At least, it had dedicated materials from its personal supply, shipped them over, and offered the use of its robots. I had to wonder what kind of surprises were waiting for me on the other side of the locked doors. Something from the real world? Nothing inside me wanted to keep going.
“You remember you aren’t getting any of the loot here, right?” Gelian asked, and I confirmed the deal we had yet again. Damn it! There was so much there that I could have used — that humanity could have used — that I wanted to tear up the deal. Still, stopping the owner was more important than my own wealth.
Scanning worked perfectly inside the palace, and that let me see what was generating the protective dome as well as how to get into the basement. The latter, from what I could tell, was a small ventilation shaft that sucked air down underground. I decided to head that way a bit later, my attention in that moment entirely preoccupied with a small structure standing against the far wall. While I couldn’t see it because of the main building, my scanner had already come up with a model of the castle. And something told me I had to move slowly, stripping back one defensive layer at a time. Taking off and praying to all the game gods that there wouldn’t be some kind of invisible laser alarm system, I flew7 forward. There was no way I was going to walk across a bunch of sensors without knowing what they were there for. Gelian stayed where he was, even leaving the castle just in case. If something happened to me, the defense system wouldn’t take it out, and I was perfectly fine with it standing off at a distance. I didn’t need it getting in the way.
The tiny structure looked like a caretaker’s shed and didn’t stand out at all. Unless you knew ahead of time that one of the key elements in the defense system was housed there, you wou
ld have walked right on by. It didn’t look like anything important. But appearances meant nothing to me, as I was much more interested in what was inside it. Bells and whistles are for women.
You’re trying to hack into the generator for the Tsarter base’s external dome.
Sum total of your skill levels: 880.
Sum total of the dome’s defenses: 800.
Probability of successful hack: 9.1%,
Twenty tries and a quick move to block the security protocols, and the shed was under my control. I thought for a while before sticking a remote-control device inside and leaving the dome up and running. There was no telling what kind of algorithms were built into the defenses — losing the dome could have automatically marked the base as unprotected and led to it being locked down entirely. All I did was add Gelian and myself to the white list regardless of the fact that Lirkun, whose identity I was still wearing, was also whitelisted.
As I flew back over the pavement, I took the time to see what all was in place. It turned out exactly as I’d assumed — pressure sensors, identity scanners, and other security systems practically every meter. The wires led deep into the main building, which my scanners couldn’t penetrate even from up close. Sadly, real mesh was stronger than a semi-real scanner.
The door to the building featured a biometric lock. I felt an almost irresistible urge to place my palm on it and walk in as Lirkun, even taking a step back to make sure I didn’t give in to it. That was too simple. I couldn’t imagine Tsarter hadn’t thought about protecting themselves from mimicry, which left me only one way in: the ventilation system. There were fewer sensors and scanners there. As Fang cut through the stone and iron like warm butter, the grille and filters found their way into my inventor}'. A warm steam filled the air. It was no air intake; it was where the stench from the basement was vented out.
Getting inside turned out to be anything but trivial — I had to constantly widen the tunnel. And I couldn’t just take a straight shot, either, thanks to the variety of wires and contacts connected to who-knows-what. It was just five meters, but getting through them took me almost half an hour. The wTorst part was the end of the vent. There was a fan working there to pump the air out, and I had to just stick Fang in and hope for the best. It worked like a charm. The blades were lopped off right at their base, dropping down onto the mesh below them, and I made sure I avoided touching the twirling shaft as I crept below it. After cutting my wTay through the filter, I was finally in the basement under the Tsarter base.
The job was halfway done.
The corridor I found myself in was narrow and lined with doors. I didn’t see any traps, though the doors themselves beckoned — my scanner couldn’t penetrate them. And not only that, but it couldn’t get through the floor, either. There was real-world mesh or wires everywhere. It did quite a bit, protecting the building from scanners, keeping out all kinds of diggers, and reinforcing the structure itself. To be fair, I might have had something to say about that last point. If some kind of cataclysm had swept away the building, the mesh would have cut through the stone and stayed right where it was. It would have been completely unaffected. But where are you going to find that kind of cataclysm?
The doors were surprisingly easy to open, and they swung wide without so much as a creak. I was in a storage area. Of course, it wasn’t the kind adventurers looked for, the truth being much more banal. Behind the first door was a refrigerator that held mountains of frozen meat fed into a distribution system. Food for* the enormous monster farther down the hall. Still nervous about touching the ground, I flew over to the next door. It was another storeroom, that time full of something that looked like hay. The next was for fish. Then, came wood. The size of the storerooms was impressive — all of them felt much larger than they should have been given how they looked from the outside. Tsarter had apparently done their best to prepare for the end of the release. Everything was in place.
Skipping past the last few storeroom doors, I made my way to the end of the hall. The door there, just like almost everything in the castle, was wired, which meant I didn’t know what was on the other side. Just in case, I went invisible as I carefully opened it. A large, fairly well-lit space spread out in front of me, and in the middle was an enormous pool. Swimming in it was...
Sweet mother! I thought they were extinct!
A monster was swimming around in the pool, and it was only what I remembered from school that told me it was a dinosaur. A plesiosaur, to be precise. Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. The holy grail for all paleontologists. The ten-meter-long beast swam through the water, periodically lifting its head to catch food — the very same fish and meat. Automated robots in charge of the area handled delivery.
But what staggered me most was that the plesiosaur was real. Caught somewhere in the depths of the ocean, it had been dragged there as a truly unique trophy. There was nothing else like it. Villian had apparently been hoping for a big payoff.
Once I’d gotten my fill of watching the creature, I flew around the wall, making an effort to stay unnoticed. That didn’t turn out to be an issue — the dinosaur wasn’t paying much attention. It swam, ate, and, as I’d assumed early, crapped. And it crapped a lot. Specially dedicated robots that were also real cleaned the water, as nothing else would have been able to get the refuse out. So, that's why there are so many wires running everywhere. They made sure everything was in place for the enormous beast.
The door on the other side of the room opened out onto a staircase leading to Tsarter’s Holy of Holies. Happily, my scanner worked just fine there, and I was able to quickly identify the control center on the first floor. It was the second room on the left when you left the staircase. Judging by what I saw, it was the most heavily protected spot in the castle — I hadn’t seen anything like it. The door was laced with everything possible, and a few dozen plasma mines just served as a little extra insurance to keep away unwanted guests. The walls were packed with wires adding to the protection inside the castle. A third layer! I had to respect the precautions Tsarter took.
There were red dots on the third floor — about fifty living creatures. Women, the mercenaries’ prisoners. Gelian had promised to bring them out to me, so I decided to put off freeing them. Once I'm done with the control block.
There weren’t many options for getting inside. The right way, the same one eveiyone else used, was one, or I could remember that Fang was waiting for another chance to shine. In my case, I went with the latter option: cutting a path right through the wall. First, I broke into the room next to the control room. It turned out to be a richly appointed bedroom with several safes I didn’t bother checking. They didn't belong to me.
After cutting through the first layer of stone, Fang began to slip. The slender wiring w-as an impassable barrier for it. Villian had known how to protect its belongings, only it couldn't have guessed that a well-equipped absorber wnuld be coming for them. I pulled out my multitool and began looking for something akin to wire cutters. The item printed out quickly, and I got to work cutting through the obstacle — the wiring in the wall was doomed. It bent, unwilling to give in, though layer after layer eventually did just that. When I had enough space to get through, I stuck the wire cutters into the stone in order to force the game to make a small hole. I was pretty sure any alarm system in place wouldn’t be triggered by that move. It wouldn't have been set up for real-w^orld equipment.
Yet again, I felt a wave of pride for being so prudent. Talking with Lirkun had really done me good — Tsarter wras nothing if not paranoid. The entire inner surface of the wralls wTas covered with sensors, scanners, and mines. There were enough to destroy all the stone in the castle and turn it into a wire carcass. The wire cutters had penetrated one of the mines, though the game had kept it from going off, assuming it was
defective and disconnecting it from the circuit.
I had to turn Raptor on to dig through the maze the players had left behind. Three independent modules controlled the different circuits.
On the table, there was a terminal with three switches that turned the inner defenses on and off. And you had to turn them off in the right order, otherwise the whole thing would go off. There was no wait to do that remotely, either. My device control just threw up its hands — I was going to have to do it myself.
Well, that's a problem!
I wras forced to risk widening the hole I’d made by poking more mines with the wire cutters. Once I was sure I could get through, I carefully cut away the stone and finally flew7 into the room.
Player being identified...
You were identified as Lirkun Po.
Access to control point granted.
You have 60 seconds to turn off the protection system. Be
careful.
Ah-ha! I’d known I should leave on my Lirkun identity. No longer hiding, I wrent over to the switches. They were identical to each other. Nothing differentiated them — no numbers, no instructions. A timer appeared to distract me and play on my nerves, and there was no way to get rid of it. Focusing on the switches, I tried to think of anything that would help, my perception finally giving me a clue. What I loved about World of the Changed was how it did its best to mimic the physics on the host planet, not to mention everything else. The switch in the middle was dirtier. Can you say that about something in the game? Regardless, it was perhaps greasier than the ones next to it, which told me the players there had used it first. The green-skinned beasts that made up the entirety of Tsarter had fingers and didn’t always walk around in armor, after all. Okay, so that’s the first one. The one on the right wras next, the one on the left the cleanest of the three.
I wras running out of time, so I decided to just go through with it. If I’m a terrible Sherlock Holmes, so be it. Flipping the first switch, I held my breath. There was no explosion. Bingo! Already more confident, I flipped the switch on the right before finishing with the one on the left. That should be it.
World of the changed 3 Noa in the flesh Page 28
