by Deck Davis
“The happiest.”
“Mine are neutral; lines of code.”
“That’s why you’re so keen to experience stuff with me, right?”
Bee dipped down and then up, her way of nodding. “I know why I’m here, Tripp. I know why I was created. The hardest thing about coming from nothing, just being conjured into existence, is being aware of the fact. When you think back, you have your memories of your camping trips. I just have a void because until I was made, there was nothing. That’s why I want to see things here. After every play through I experience, some things that I see escape the mind-wipe like ants fleeing insect spray.”
“You’re building up memories.”
“That’s the plan.”
It was strange, the effect that games could have. Talking to NPCs, learning about their lives. They were purely digital – if you left the game, they were gone. They weren’t real.
Then again, what was real? When Tripp eventually left Soulboxe, he’d still remember Bee. In that way, part of her would breach from game to reality because he carried her in his head. If something wasn’t real, he wouldn’t be able to remember it.
That made everything he did here so important. This wasn’t just for fun, it wasn’t a getaway from reality. This was his current reality, and the things he did would stay in his head beyond the game.
Better make the most of it, he thought. After arranging his tinder on the ground, he was ready. He had his flint, a rock, and he also had his kindling set up for when he teased out a few flames.
“Let’s see if I still have the knack for this.”
Knowing how persistent you had to be to light a fire this way, he settled down, ready to work. Then when he touched the flint near the tinder, a spark shot on its own, and a flame crackled.
Weird, I didn’t need to do anything.
Not wanting to waste the chance, he added kindling and before long the fire was strong enough that he could add bigger branches without smothering it. The smoke dispersed into the air, smothering the smell of the grass with its bitter aroma.
“I thought it was going to be harder than that,” he said.
“It’s the balance between grind and fun,” said Bee. “Soulboxe has been through 877 builds, and they still aren’t happy that they’ve nailed it.”
Tripp thought they’d done a pretty good job; he couldn’t have started his fire without gathering the flint and wood, but he didn’t have to spend hours grinding for a spark, then guarding the precious few flames like they were his children.
Not only that, though. Now that he had a real fire burning, he had gained something else.
Campfire Built!
Uses remaining: 4/5
A campfire is a place to cook, to rest, and even to meet. If you wish, you can have your campfire appear on public maps within a ten-mile radius. Player-spawned campfires are non-PVP zones.
As cool as this was, one word caught his eye – PVP.
Player versus player.
These were places where people could battle not just the game’s NPC monsters, but each other, too.
Killing dragons and goblins only got your adrenaline pumping so much, and some people needed to take it to the next level. They needed to match up against a fellow player and pummel him to the ground and then cast a fire spell to char his corpse.
There were entire regions in Soulboxe that were PVP-enabled no matter what your preferences. If you didn’t want to fight other players, then you stayed out of those places. As well as that, you could fight players in non-PVP zones, but both of you had to agree to it.
“Bee,” he said. “This is a non-PVP zone, right?”
“I know as much about the map as you do.”
He looked around. Endless plains, bleached skulls, little sign of civilization. If anywhere was ripe for being a PVP zone, this’d be it.
The thought reminded him how pathetic his bone dagger was.
At least he had his steel armor and his campfire. If campfires were non-PVP zones, and if he got 5 uses from each, then he was safe as long as he stayed near the flames. He’d collect more tinder and kindling and keep it in his inventory, and he should be able to travel without too much trouble. He’d just have to stay alert and set up a campfire if anyone sketchy got too close.
“When I’m done with the campfire, how do I use it again?” he asked.
“Pack it up and put it in your bag.”
“Put a live fire in my bag? I’m no health and safety officer, but that doesn’t seem wise.”
“This is Soulboxe. You just need to will the campfire to extinguish, and it will be storable as an item until you deplete it.”
Warmth spread through him now, and not just from the fire.
He had a base. Like the description had said; it was a place to cook, to rest, maybe even to meet other players. If Godden’s Reach was a PVP area - and more importantly, because he was an orc - he was going to need a friend or two sooner than later.
“You’re not as much of a newbie as I expected for someone on their first play through,” said Bee.
“I did a lot of reading before I came here.”
“Ever felt redundant? What good is a guide when the person you’re assigned to is a know-it-all?”
“Aw, don’t be like that. Trust me, there’s lots that I don’t know. Besides, you’re here for the experiences we’ll have.”
“Right!” said Bee.
“On that note – something just occurred to me,” said Tripp. “You’re my guide. You can read my notifications, see my character screen and inventory. We’re linked, aren’t we?”
“Like twins conjoined in the mind.”
“Then while we’re on the subject of exploring, how about you swoop around for a few miles and circle around the plains. Wherever you go, my map will be updated.”
“Correct! Although, I can only go a maximum of 500 meters away from you for now. That distance will increase as you level up, but we’re limited since you’re only level 2.”
“Good to know.”
“It’s getting dark. How much kindling did you get?” said Bee.
“Enough for a couple more campfires. Each one has five uses, so I’m not worried about running out.”
“One use is 1.5 hours,” said Bee. “You’ll probably use this one up and then have to light another to get us through the night.”
The infamous Soulboxe nights. Soulboxe spawned NPC monsters in most of its maps, with each region having different kinds. If a region was meant for higher-level players, then the monsters would be beefed up to match. It was a sorry newbie who wandered into the wrong place and got his ass toasted by a dragon.
Here in Godden’s Reach, it didn’t seem like there was much to worry about. Frorargs were quick, but they weren’t killing machines. If he met with a bunch of them then sure, it’d be a problem, but he might as well have worried about being set upon by a dozen angry poodles. He’d seen a giant skull, but there was no other sign of any creatures like it around here.
That meant that Godden’s Reach wasn’t a combat-focused area, and if it wasn’t combat focused, then there were two other things that’d draw people here – exploration and creation.
He reckoned that if he carried on walking, he’d soon hit upon NPC towns and player creations, and then he could really start to delve into Soulboxe. Get a beer and get some food. There was one video streamer who went from town to town just trying the various taverns’ menus and rating their food, as if he was a real critic. Tripp remembered seeing him give a beef pie at a tavern in Rostow a 5/5 rating, and his stomach gurgled a plea for him to go buy one.
First, before he could even think about enjoying himself, he had to survive the night.
“Do you think the night will affect us all the way out here?” he said.
Bee, who seemed to be able to float close to the fire without feeling the heat, nodded inside her orb.
“It affects everywhere except cities, towns, guilds, and player-made sectors.”
&nb
sp; “The campfire counts as a player-made sector, right?”
“Don’t worry, nobody is going to sneak up and drive a spear through your throat. We should head toward a town, though.”
Tripp weighed it up. Here was the problem – at night, not only did the population of NPC monsters in wild areas more than double, but creatures many levels above the norm could also be generated. Forests where the toughest monsters were wide-eyed bunnies suddenly found themselves swarmed with trolls made from lava, or something equally nightmarish.
As a game mechanic, it meant that there was a point in having a day/night cycle other than just immersion, and also that players felt a sense of urgency.
Not just that, but it boosted game economics and fostered cooperation, forcing people to make new connections.
If you were travelling to a game area that took a while to get to, and you were a purist who didn’t pay for fast travel wagons, then you had to plan your journey so that you hit upon a town or tavern by nightfall.
If not, then you checked your map for any publicly visible campfires, and then you approached – warily if it was a PVP zone – and tried to gauge what kind of person the owner was.
Tripp had watched dozens of night-time streams of Soulboxe, and he was aware of what kind of things would come out when the sun fell. He knew that some players took the cooperation part to heart, while others used the cover of the night to conduct themselves nefariously.
He knew how vital campfires could be for people who got caught out in the wild at night and didn’t have time to collect kindling and flint. If he wanted to make friends, maybe even allies, he was going to have to open himself up a little. He wasn’t worried about attracting player-killers; if he stayed near the camp, other players couldn’t hurt him no matter what their intentions were.
Enable campfire public visibility, he thought.
“There – the campfire is a lighthouse for the plains. This way, if there’s anyone around here and they get stuck when the sun sets, they can stay safe here.”
“You’re waiting it out until morning?” said Bee. “That’s a little…boring.”
“Is it boring, or is it safe?”
“Boring!”
“You want exploration and fights, don’t you?”
“Only a tiny bit, ”said Bee.
“We could push on and follow the stream, but I don’t know how far until we hit somewhere safe, and I don’t want to be caught with my cock out when it gets completely dark, orc vision or not. We’ll stay here, enjoy the fire, and get to know each other a little.”
“Get to know each other? Players don’t get to know their guides, Tripp. Some even tether their orbs to towns and issue the stay command.”
“I won’t be doing that,” said Tripp. “It’s not so bad having you around. You might be a little bloodthirsty, but you’re positive, and I can’t get enough of that.”
“Uh oh,” said Bee.
“Uh oh?”
“Look.”
Tripp saw what she meant. His orc vision was so good that even though it had now almost fully settled into night-time, to him it just looked like early evening.
He could still see clearly across the plains, though the grass looked grey, and shadows extended from the lone trees and the rocks and the giant bleached skull in the distance.
What worried him were the shapes headed in the direction of his campfire.
CHAPTER 11
Lucas
“I like killings things. Eli likes killing things. Hell, even Lucas enjoys it.”
When nobody answered him, the teenager looked around the room, hoping someone would end the silence. When they didn’t, he spoke nervously.
“All I’m saying is that if we didn’t, then Soulboxe wouldn’t need swords and stuff. It’s written into our cores that we love violence, and this is a healthy way to release it. Right, Lucas?”
Lucas knew the intern was staring at him, practically begging for approval. He saw him as a blur in his peripheral vision, his head turned his way, eyes wide and waiting for acknowledgment.
He barely had the mental strength to give him the praise he wanted so much. Normally he would, because he didn’t take on interns for the hell of it. He wanted to be a mentor to them, the way Tez Phillips had mentored him when he was trying to break into the industry.
Right now, all he could think about was how much he didn’t want to be there, yet how the future of his world depended on him keeping his ass in his chair.
Eli shifted in his seat and stood up. He clapped the intern on the back. “Go work on the Delmon Dunes like we talked about,” he said. The door opened, and Lucas’s peripheral vision was one intern lighter.
Now that he was gone, Lucas could go back to dwelling on the fact that he hated the boardroom with a passion unrivalled by any person, at any time, in the whole of human history.
He was also prone to exaggerated thoughts when he hadn’t had much sleep. Besides, Rathburger had promised them a solution to their AI problem today, and that was a reason to stick around.
“It’s gonna knock you off your feet, I promise you,” he’d said on their video-call, his eyes looking intense. “It’s riskier than eating my ma’s reheated leftovers, but it’ll work.”
The boardroom had used to be one of his favorite places. It was where he, Rathburger, Julia and some of the earlier devs would fire ideas at each other. New quests, interesting lore for the game world, game play ideas that could enhance the players’ experiences.
That changed when Rudy came on board. Lore was a foreign word to him. Whenever anyone mentioned game play innovations, Tripp could almost hear the tapping of his mental calculator. Rudy had insisted they strip the Soulboxe posters from the walls, take the masses of lore books to a basement storage room, and use the room for meetings of a different kind.
Rathburger was sitting opposite Lucas, leafing through a notepad full of scribblings that his handwriting made decipherable only to him. The WW2 Enigma machine would have ended up as a smoking mess trying to make sense of his notes.
Adjacent to him was Rudy Beasant and his gaggle of marketing, accounting, and PR assistants. Their presence made Lucas's gut churn.
Rudy Beasant was a squat man. A small, fleshy rock. He was rich enough to hire the best personal trainers and nutritionists around, but he didn’t.
“The guy hired the owner of a greasy burger joint as his chef, and the only exercise he does is lifting doughnuts to his mouth,” Rathburger had once said, not even bothering to check whether any of Rudy’s staff were in earshot.
Lucas and Rudy had never seen eye to eye, because they had different ideas about Soulboxe. It was a classic case of creativity versus money.
Rudy had already poured tons of cash into Soulboxe, and he was getting nervous about seeing a return. Not only that, but if the media were to be believed, Rudy’s businesses weren’t doing so great lately.
Lucas needed to forget all that. He had the feeling this meeting would be a momentous one. It could mean winding up Soulboxe if they didn’t come up with a solution.
Today was about stopping Soulboxe going bust, and he needed to try to get Rudy on his side and maybe even persuade him to invest more capital.
“So, gentlemen,” said Rudy. “Our dilemma is as obvious as a whore in a dockside tavern.”
Some of Rudy’s assistants screwed their foreheads or looked at the ground, and Lucas felt a wave of second-hand cringe. That was the problem with Rudy – he had as much grace as the sailors in his aforementioned dockside tavern.
Rudy carried on, undeterred. “Boxe processes all the game data, spawns fiends, and creates and rewards quests in an unscripted way made possible only by his advanced processing power.”
“His brain,” said Lucas.
“Sure, if you insist on calling it that. Without him, everything in the game would have to be scripted. Is that right?”
Rathburger nodded. “If we script things, we lose any sense of dynamism. Worse, we can say goodbye to what m
akes Soulboxe feel special; its sense of wonder, creation, that anything can happen.”
“Plenty of games get by without it,” said Rudy.
Rathburger rubbed his eyes, a sure sign he was getting irritable. “If we script all the dialogue and quests, we’re not offering anything that our competitors don’t already have.”
“Why would that matter? Lots of games make enough money without a fancy content system.”
“Those are usually mega studios who spend more on advertising than a Hollywood actor does on coke. If we lose our selling-point then we lose market share, since existing players would get used to the standard quests. They’d eventually get bored and look for another game.” He pounded the desk as if was an auditory punctuation mark. “Damn it. This is like watching a child get ill.”
Everyone looked at Rathburger in surprise. Compared to a statement like that, Rudy’s talk of whores was tame.
Rathburger held his hand up. “Okay, that was melodramatic.”
A woman sitting beside Rudy leaned forward and glared at Rathburger. It was Clarice, one of Rudy’s senior marketing advisors who had a great reputation around the office because of the Soulboxe ad campaigns she’d created.
“Do I need to remind you about our HR policy again, Eli? You attended a seminar on last summer about what is and isn’t acceptable to say in the workplace.”
Rathburger glared at her. “Fine, not just melodramatic. Disrespectful, too. I’m not feeling myself. It’s like watching my life’s work burn up, only instead of a fire extinguisher I have a flame thrower.”
“Let’s try to leave emotion out of this,” said Rudy. “Eli, can you tell us what you have found?”
Rathburger closed his notepad and nodded. “Lucas and I discussed this until our lips went numb. Boxe5 is going the same way as the four before him, and at this point, we don’t think a rebuild would work even if we could afford it.”
Rudy nodded. “Quite. I’ll remind you that I am an investor in Soulboxe. This isn’t charity – I need to feel happy when I look at balance sheets, not like I want to tear my eyes out. I understand that one of your proposed solutions was to create an entirely new AI, but we have churned the numbers and found that it’s impossible. The cost would eat up Soulboxe’s profits for the next decade.”
