Nothing.
Chapter 3
“Wake up. Duke, wake up!”
Finally, I thought.
“You were having a nightmare. Were you dreaming about the return of the demons again? That old legend?”
I opened my eyes, staring up at the ceiling of a shack. My heart lurched. My vision was filled with the game’s status bars and menu options, several more items than before.
I still hadn’t logged out.
Maybe I couldn’t leave because I was in a loading screen.
“Quit game. Quit game,” I said.
“What do you mean?” the voice said. It was raspy, young. Like a twelve-year-old boy who smoked three packs a day. “You were dreaming again, muttering in your sleep about the demons returning. Ha. As if that would ever happen. Dray says they were all defeated a millennia ago.”
“Quit game. Quit game,” I repeated.
A tiny, red notification appeared in the upper left of my vision. It disappeared as promptly as it came.
Log-off currently unavailable.
That was it. No other explanation.
I sat up in bed, groaning. The purple bar indicating my soul power was all the way to the top. The bar above that, showing what I assumed to be my life, was also all the way to the top. As I watched, the little heart by the bar pulsed, and a red -1 appeared. The life status bar went down just a tiny bit. By my estimation it would take at least a day for it to run all the way out on its own.
“Are you okay?” the voice repeated. I looked to see another decayed, zombie-like creature staring at me. Jesus. These guys were hard to look at. Even the young ones were gross. Over his head the words Bloff – Cousin (Level 4) appeared in black letters with a yellow glow around them.
This was an NPC. A computer-controlled, non-player character. This was still part of the game setup.
“Honestly, Duke,” my virtual cousin continued. “Your obsession with the old ways is going to be the death of you. There’s no need for battlefield surgeons anymore. The old veterinarians go out there when one of them steps on a thorn or something. Aunt Bernadette’s warning that the demons would come back is nothing more than the mutterings of a crazy, old woman. She’s been filling your brain with nonsense. Let’s do our daily health check. First…”
My cousin’s speech was cut short when a human burst into the room.
He was a tall, long-haired, armor-clad human. His legs appeared to be covered in some sort of science fiction power armor while the top half of his body was a mismatched leather jerkin. He wore what appeared to be a laser rifle over his shoulders. He looked like one of those AI-generated RPG characters you’d get after entering “1980’s wrestler mixed with a science fiction barbarian.”
Floating in green letters over his head was Anatoly – Player (Level X).
“Anatoly,” I said, jumping up. My NPC cousin simply stopped talking.
“Duke,” Anatoly said. “You chose a worm surgeon, I see. That’s good, good. We’ll need to get you a familiar right away to keep your health from flatlining you.”
“I’m having trouble logging out. The pain threshold in this thing is completely out of whack.”
He nodded. He waved his arm. It appeared as if he was fiddling with a menu, but I couldn’t see it.
“Sorry about that,” he said. His voice in this world was much more sure, confident. “This is a developer build, and the pain threshold is hacked past the limit. Here, I’m lowering it down to two. My friends like to play with it jacked up. This build is programmed so only the game captain can adjust the pain threshold. I’d had to purchase a developer pass just to do it.”
“I can’t log out either,” I said.
“Were you using the ‘quit game’ prompt? That’s disabled too. We switched it to ‘I’m a wuss.’ Sorry about that. I should have told you.”
I relaxed. Everything was okay. It was just an unfamiliar game and an unfamiliar rig.
I laughed. “I’m not gonna lie. I panicked there for a minute. I did the rig-level ejection routine, but it didn’t work, either.”
“Huh,” he said. “That’s weird. That should’ve worked. Were you in a loading screen at the time? Sometimes it doesn’t catch it when the data is transferring like that.”
“I was.”
“Well no worries, now. I got you.” He waved his hand then started typing in the air. “I’m the king of this domain, so if anything goes wrong, I can get us all out with the snap of a finger.”
“Cousin, we really need to do our daily routine,” Bloff said.
“So,” Anatoly said. “Normally you’d follow your cousin around for another hour or so, and he teaches you a lot of the basic stuff. He has you go outside the city to gather some berries, and you get attacked by a small demon. It’s all still part of the tutorial. But that’s not going to work because you joined a game already in progress. New players aren’t really supposed to join this late in the season. I had to break a bunch of stuff just to make it so guys like you could join. The damned AI is determined to keep me from doing some of it. Anyway, you step outside the city now, you’ll get roasted alive in seconds. You’re level 1, and those are end-game level demons out there. So instead I’m going to take you to the town square, open up a portal, and zap you to my base, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. I have to get you a brand first, though, so every time you log back in, you’ll end up back at my base, and you won’t have to go through all this stuff again. Sorry it’s taking so long. I guess I forgot how long that first intro part took.”
I shuddered, remembering the feeling of the bug demons eating me alive.
“So, I understood about half of what you said,” I said. “But I’ll follow you to your place and take a look.”
“Good man,” Anatoly said. He looked me right in the eyes, unlike the IRL version. I’d almost swear it was a different person, but he had an odd gait to his walk, something I’d noticed earlier. He also started chewing on his fingernail. The quirk followed him from the real world to the virtual one. “This way.” He turned and strode out of the shack, his finger still in his mouth.
I followed. My cousin called for me to come back. In the top left of my vision a green message appeared with a chime.
Quest. Discuss daily routine with Bloff.
The line disappeared into a folder. I made a mental note to take a look at it later if I got a chance. I liked the streamlined menu system of this game more so than most other games. This had to be a new, updated UI. Everything except my life and soul points bar disappeared when I wasn’t thinking about it. All of the options returned when I pulled my eyes up into the top corner, just like with the newest PCs. The whole thing was quite intuitive. It only took a minute to get used to it if you were already familiar with the latest generation of Windows VR.
I stepped outside.
Entering Medina.
We entered into a miserable, muddy city. The overcast sky flashed with lightning, illuminating hundreds of bird-like demons hovering over the city. Rain fell in sheets. I noted I could sense the cold rain bouncing off my rag-covered arms, but I barely felt it. This was the sensation setting I was used to.
All of the races were represented in the city, drudging morosely about their daily lives. All the NPCs had their names, levels, and sometimes—but not always—occupation floating over their heads. Some of the wooden buildings appeared to have recently burned to the ground. In the distance, more significant, more opulent buildings stood, but they were obscured by the darkness.
This was a city under siege, surrounded by demons, yet the NPC version of my cousin hadn’t seemed aware of the problem. Multi-player games always had weird continuity issues like that.
I examined Anatoly as we walked. As I focused on the back of his head, a green box appeared with the note Examine Player. I clicked on it, but I received an error message.
“Why can’t I examine your properties?” I asked. I had to shout the words to be heard over the rain. In the far distance, somethi
ng bellowed.
He grunted. “It’s turned off for co-op. You can’t examine other player’s skills or level or anything like that. I can’t even do it, and I’m the captain. We like it better this way. I’m trying to program out the ability to see our names floating over our heads, too. It’s just another item on my list. I’m level 53, by the way. That’s pretty high.”
“So you’re a programmer?” I asked.
He nodded. “I worked for Bart Hughes games for years, programming for the Ortiz storylines. I don’t anymore. My father owns a lot of real estate, and I help him manage it now. Some friends and I are working on a co-op build of this game for fun. The co-op version was never released to the public and is buggy as hell. We’ve had to implement some major changes to make this work, and we’re just getting started. There’s still a lot to do.”
“I noticed the graphics are really good,” I said. “They’re better than anything I’ve ever seen.”
“We’re using the new quantum stacks for the server,” Anatoly said. “Expensive, but their processing power is… it’s unbelievable. I just pushed a new upgrade a couple days ago, actually. The AIs are getting better and better. It will change everything, and not just with gaming.”
We passed out of the poorer part of town and onto a street with more brick buildings. Several shops stood in a row. Some were lit by torches, some appeared lit by electric lights. What a weird, schizophrenic game, I thought. It’s fantasy, sci-fi, and steampunk all smushed together.
Anatoly chattered on about programming, mostly things I only barely understood. “Years and years ago, most of these games were built in a language called C++. Bart Hughes and his partners developed AI-C and eventually AI-Squared before the plane crash. This game was originally built in AI-Squared and then the updated rerelease with AI-Squared Plus. It’s a blessing and a damned cursed for people with a developer license. The problem is the game is built with a learning AI that has a few ironclad rules. That means the game changes itself if you break something. It helps enormously with many, many tasks. You can be sloppy, and it fixes it for you. It’s scary as hell, really. But trying to change stuff after the fact without starting over is a pain in the ass.”
He pointed to a tall building. The top of it was lopped off. “You see that building over there? That spire?”
I nodded.
“There’s a quest in there that’s important to the completion of the game, but only if you’re playing a certain race. The sundered. Those are the robot guys with human faces. The thing is, I don’t really care so much about completing the game. We’re using this world as more of a sandbox. A playground. So I tried to remove that building. I took it away, and there were suddenly two new kaiju added. I have no idea why. No human came up with them. The AI programmed them in itself, changing the game on its own to make it solvable again. That’s one of those iron rules. The game has to be winnable.”
I nodded. I understood nothing about programming, but as an artist, I was very aware of AI-created art. Over the past dozen years or so, more and more complex art-creating AI systems were emerging. And while the more traditional arts were still going strong, nowadays all it took was a simple online query to have something drawn for you. The days of visual artists making a living from selling work online, taking commissions were long gone. Digital artists were all but obsolete. Anything from a line drawing to a full-blown, original oil-style masterpiece could be had in seconds.
And it wasn’t just visual art. AI music had a strong fanbase, and even AI-written novels had a small but growing following. I’d tried reading one once, and as much as I hate to admit it, it was better than some real books. The realization made me feel dirty. And more than a little uncomfortable.
“Anyway,” Anatoly continued, “I ended up stepping back that change. This whole game is a study in the butterfly effect. One of the biggest complaints about the single-player version was that there were too many cutscenes. If you fall in a hole you can’t get out of, if you’re captured by cannibals, if you get thrown in a jail cell, if you’re tortured to death, etcetera, the game would speed up time, and you’d watch it all happen in third person. It took almost two years, but I finally got rid of the game’s tendency to reward failures with a scene. It had all sorts of implications. One of the results was the game getting more dangerous, not less so. I don’t even know why. But I made it work. It also fixed some weird continuity issues with the co-op version of the game. Now the passage of time makes sense. Just don’t get arrested by the Medina guards while you’re here.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“So in the single-player version, if you get arrested and thrown in jail, you usually have to pay a fine or serve a couple days behind bars. But you don’t really serve that long. You watch a quick scene, and you’re out. And time has passed, just like any other game. In the co-op version before I fixed it, the game did the same thing, which had a tendency to put things out of whack. If we both planted an apple tree side by side, for example. The tree takes five in-game days to bloom. You can plant the tree, get arrested a minute later, get sentenced for five days and come out and harvest your apples right away. Your tree will be fully-grown when you get out because as far as you and your property are concerned, five days have passed. But for me it’s only been ten minutes. My tree will still be a shrub even though the two trees are side by side. I fixed the issue, but when I did, it made it so players arrested for five days are now actually trapped in that jail cell for five days. You serve your sentence in real-time. There’s nothing anybody can do. It sucks. It’s no fun. So if you get sentenced to five days in jail, you pretty much just gotta log out and come back five days later, otherwise your character is just sitting in a cell. I’m chipping away at the problem. The good news is I managed to make it so only the town guards in Medina and this one other place called Little Cibola can arrest you. So if you do ever make it to any of the small villages, the guards there won’t be able to throw you in jail. They’ll just kill you.” He laughed. “But, I did have to disable the ability for players in captivity to escape. There’s a whole system in place with lock picking and killing guards and all that, but for right now it’s offline while I fix something completely unrelated. Also, something else broke making the fines just outrageous. Now the fines are something like ten times the previous amounts. I put the wrong decimal somewhere. So the moral is don’t get arrested. Once you’re in there, you can’t get out.”
“Don’t get arrested,” I repeated. “Got it.”
“So anyway, right now I’m mostly focused on making it so all of us can be human players if we want. None of this only one of each race bullshit. It’s the damnedest thing. You’d think it’d be an easy change, but the moment I implement it… Oh, here we are.”
We stopped at a building near the end of the row of businesses. An old, wooden sign hung over the shop that read simply, “Pets Plus.”
“So, I don’t know what you read or were told during character creation, but you picked a race called a worm surgeon. Not too many people play that race because resurrection magic requires souls to power. It’s easy early on in the game, but later when you’re doing deep dive surgery, there are a lot fewer things to kill. Most of the demons you face later on are big and don’t go down easily. So instead of having to fight 50 level-one demons, you fight one level 50 demon. A level 50 gives a lot of soul power, but it’s like getting a big paycheck once a year instead of smaller ones every week. You gotta learn to conserve it. Your life force is constantly going down, and you have to use your soul power to heal yourself. So it’s a losing game.”
He entered the shop. I followed.
Entering Pets Plus.
“However, there’s a trick,” Anatoly continued. “You can get yourself a certain type of familiar. It will give you enough soul power to keep yourself alive. It won’t give you much more than that, though. Normally you wouldn’t be able to afford or capture one of these for a while, but I’ll get you one now.”
The shop was filled with cages of monsters. The very first cage had what looked to be a miniature warthog. It snarled and smashed against the bars. As I focused on the angry little pig, a menu box appeared over the creature.
Snagglesnort.
Race restriction.
You cannot bond with this pet.
50,000 teeth.
“Teeth?” I asked.
“Teeth is money,” Anatoly said. He put his hand in a pouch and pulled out a handful of glistening, white teeth. “You won’t have to worry about that.”
“That’s a little fucked up,” I muttered.
The next cage was a peacock, followed by a cat, followed by a trio of rats. The rats were the first ones that weren’t race restricted.
Vile Rats.
15,000 teeth.
I could click on their name, and additional information popped up.
Excellent thieves and scavengers, vile rats work in concert to attack and perform tasks. If one is killed, it will not regenerate until all three are dead.
Health: 500 each
Nil magic
Deep Dive: Yes
Shared Experience: No
Skills-
Poison Enemy
Parasite Hunt
Plague
Vaccine administration
During combat and surgery, vile rats will retrieve and return any loot from fallen enemies.
I could further click on the skills to learn more. For example, “Vaccine administration” allowed me to give medicine to one of my rats, and then he could find his way to the kaiju to administer it. That was probably a useful skill if one had to apply a lot of vaccines.
But Anatoly wasn’t here to purchase me a trio of rats.
“So you’re basically undead,” Anatoly said. We passed the proprietor of the shop, one of the tree-like dryad characters, who stood quietly behind a table, eying us with black orbs burned into the bark-like skin. We pushed through a curtain into a damp, dark room. The floor turned to dirt. “You’re like a lich mixed with a vampire. Your race is kept alive through resurrection magic. As a result, your flesh imparts no nutrition to those who require flesh to survive. Ah, here we are.”
Kaiju- Battlefield Surgeon Page 3
