“How do you feel?” the doctor asked at my release. According to the analyzer, the rehabilitation period of the person named Daniel Mahan had ended and he could be safely released into the wild. The official wild.
“Very well, thank you,” I assured the doctor. Lucia had hovered around me all those four days, trying to detect any signs of aggression or a fit or whatever else would allow her to hold me for some indeterminate period of time, but I kept my cool. The girl couldn’t figure out how I managed to leave Dependence Level Black so quickly, evidently assuming that there had been some mistake—either by the analyzer when it diagnosed me or by the staff as they decided to release me. I really hoped it was the former.
“I have a present for you,” I told her, trying to change the subject. “As a memento to remember one of your patients by.”
Digging in my pocket, I retrieved the wire ring I had made the first day and placed it before the woman. Over the past five days, I had had enough time to look over my work and so now I understood the indescribable surprise on the doctor’s face—before her lay a whimsically wire-wrapped ring, encrusted with several simple sequins within its braided lattice. If you’d ask me to make another one, I’d look at you as if you’d lost your mind. You can’t create a ring like this with your hands. To do so you need fairly elaborate equipment, which the Jeweler’s toolkit did not contain. And yet the fact stood—in a state of full in-game immersion, my mind had guided my hands to do something inexplicable and created this masterpiece. Had I done this in Barliona—I’d earn a point or two in crafting for sure…
“Please sign here, here and here, Daniel,” said the orderly who had brought me from the residence hall. He returned my belongings and handed me the keys to my apartment. “Very good,” he added as soon as my squiggles appeared on the document. “I hope we won’t have to see each other in real life again. Prison isn’t very good for anyone really.”
* * *
Having watched the car with the Corporation logo vanish down the street, I sighed deeply and looked around. Basically nothing had changed over the last year—a cozy green garden with a playground full of children playing, mothers with baby carriages discussing the latest episode of their favorite shows as they strolled among the trees, elderly women with unkind faces seeking to uncover an enemy of the people in each unfamiliar passerby—my home had remained the way I remembered it. All that was missing was Sergei who lived up on the fifth floor. At this time of day he was sure to be passed out somewhere under some bush or else staggering to one in a lazy zigzag. Prolonged unemployment and repeated summons by the Imitators had ground down this once-good person, and now he survived on benefits. Or rather, instead of living, he drank and slept so that he could do the same the next day. The authorities kept a very close eye on people in his condition and at the first sign of aggression immediately shipped them off to the Barliona mines, yet Sergei managed to pursue his chosen lifestyle in the most harmless of ways.
“Good day, Daniel,” said a young man sitting on a bench in front of my building. “My name is Alexander. Do you have a few minutes to spare?”
I shot a puzzled look at the man, who must have been barely twenty and who was wearing a straight-laced business suit despite the warm weather. One didn’t have to be observant or cautious by nature to notice the smallish badge on his jacket which told me that this was a member of the Corporation.
“I do,” I shrugged. There wasn’t any point in hiding and if someone wanted to speak with me, then why not indulge them? “Can we speak here, or should we go up to my apartment?”
“Preferably up in your apartment. It’s a bit hot out here,” said Alexander, loosening his tie and demonstrating that Corporation employees are people too and not the robots they seem.
My apartment welcomed us with silence and a layer of dust that covered basically every surface in it. Before departing to the mines, I had turned off the air filtration system, assuming that I wouldn’t be in the game for that long—and therefore my apartment had become a fairly depressing sight. I can’t say that there was too much dust, but there was enough of it that you would leave your fingerprints on any item you touched.
“Have a seat.” I dug up a bed sheet from the dresser and threw it over the sofa, thereby covering the dust at least a little and turned on the air filtration system. As soon as Alexander leaves, I’ll need to look up a cleaning service, since I won’t be able to manage this mess on my own. “Would you like some mineral water?”
“I won’t refuse.” The smile that appeared on the man’s face was so shy that it seemed as if it couldn’t understand how it had found itself among such masculine features.
“In that case, hang on just a minute. I’ll put in the order…”
As I assumed, Alexander didn’t refuse my offer of food either, so I was pleased with my decision to order dinner for two right off the bat. Like two true diplomats, we were putting off the main conversation until the end of lunch, and instead discussed the heat outside, cars and Barliona.
“Thank you for lunch. In my line of work I frequently don’t have the time to eat,” said Alexander, becoming utterly human and abandoning the last pretenses of being some kind of machine. “Tell me, Daniel, what are you plans for the next several years?”
“That’s quite a period of time you’re asking me about,” I smiled. “I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow and you want to know about my plans for the next few years.”
“I’ll put it differently—are you planning on keeping your character, the one you’ve been playing with in Barliona for the past year?”
“I appreciate you ducking the words ‘prison’ and ‘mines,’” I quipped sarcastically, but seeing the man’s embarrassed reaction, felt a pang of shame—it wasn’t this guy’s fault that I ended up ‘there.’ “Sorry, it just slipped out. I thought that these kinds of questions would be asked during the rehabilitation process, not at my doorstep.”
“You are correct, but in your case there’s been a little snag—a fault in the equipment, which for whatever reason transmitted erroneous data to the surveillance system. In fact, this mistake is quite astonishing in your case. According to our system, you entered Dependence Level Black and then bounced back to Dependence Level Green. The Level Black flag remained in the system, since it is a permanent indicator, so you should have been released no sooner than in three months. It was our systems becoming desynchronized that brought you here and no one got around to discussing the issue of your avatar and the funds at his disposal. And that is precisely why I’m here.”
“I see. In that case, I have an answer for you—I would like the Corporation to return the character I was using in Barliona during my sentence back to me. With the same class, name, achievements and reputation. Is this possible?”
“Of course. That’s a standard procedure in which we transfer the account over to the public servers,” Alexander sighed with relief and produced a tablet. “You only need to sign here and here, and the process will be under way.”
“Wonderful!” Placing my signature a second time that day, I returned the tablet to its owner. “In that case, thank you for your visit.”
“Tell me, are you the Shaman Mahan?”
“What do you mean, ‘the’?”
“The one that was the subject of two movies and who was one of the most famous players of Barliona?” Alexander explained, flushed with embarrassment and added: “The one who disbanded his clan…”
“What?!” I couldn’t contain my surprise. “What do you mean, disbanded his clan?”
“Well…you…I mean…Everyone knows that the Legends of Barliona have ceased to exist…It’s been a week now… You deleted all the players from the clan, leaving only you and Plinto who is currently being hunted by Phoenix…”
“May I inquire where you’re getting your information from?” I asked, not quite understanding what was going on. Where was this guy getting these wild ideas? How could I disband that which I had built with such love?
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br /> “On Anastaria’s site,” Alexander grew even more bashful, “there’s an interview in which she says that…But what am I saying—let’s just look at it together. You have a computer, don’t you?”
“Hello, Anastaria,” said the host of some show. Judging by the names and clan logos hovering over everyone’s heads, this footage was filmed in Barliona. “I’d like to address a question that’s on the minds of most players right now—why did you return to Phoenix? Everyone knew that the Legends of Barliona were one of the affiliates of Phoenix, but no one imagined such a massive exodus. Could you tell us what happened?”
“There was a conflict between Mahan and I, and as a consequence the clan ceased to exist. We sold off the clan’s strategic resources. Mahan used the majority of the clan treasury for his personal ends and blocked access to the clan castle. You’re correct to refer to the Legends as an affiliate of Phoenix, and this was why I offered all the players who were dissatisfied with Mahan’s policies the opportunity to switch to Phoenix. As for Mahan, he disappeared. I would guess he transferred the clan funds to reality and is using them as he sees fit. I could be wrong about this. In any case, he, the money, the resources and the castle are all gone. Effectively, the clan has been disbanded. I don’t really want to speak about this topic for now—it’s a bit painful for me. I haven’t been betrayed this deeply in a long time…”
“An unexpected announcement! Okay—let’s put the topic of the Legends aside. Tell me, why didn’t you take part in this year’s beauty pageant?”
“I felt like I should give the other girls a chance…”
Anastaria began to explain her love of humanity and her desire to help the less fortunate, but I stopped listening. What an asshole! Technically she didn’t utter a single lie, but the manner in which she said it all..! Judging by its number of views, more than thirty million people had watched this video over the last five days, which meant that the popular opinion of why the Legends had fallen apart was by now set in stone. No matter what I said—no matter what witnesses I dredged up or videos I showed—the player base would be on the side of Anastaria and Phoenix. That bitch!
“How nice,” I seethed through my teeth. “Tell me, is there any way I can get the video recording of my last thirty minutes in Barliona? It shows exactly who betrayed whom…”
“Of course you can,” replied Alexander, “if you write a letter that…Hang on, are you trying to say that Anastaria lied? That it all didn’t happen the way she claims?”
“That’s the thing…But okay, if you don’t have any more business for me, I’d like to be alone. I need to think about what we just saw…”
The more I considered what had happened, the more I hated Anastaria—and I hadn’t thought I could hate her more. She really was terribly precise—it wasn’t enough that they had robbed me and forced me out of the game, but they’d also manipulated public opinion against me. They made it seem that I had used my warriors to earn my release—actually even worse: that I had used them to pocket the clan funds. Even if I manage to prove that Phoenix set me up, the matter of the money will keep players away from me. Who wants to play with someone who’s known to have embezzled clan finances? I need to see a lawyer urgently!
So I launched the internet and began searching…
“Unfortunately, no one will be able to help you,” said one of our city’s leading game lawyers shaking his head. I had spent basically all the money I had left before being sent to Barliona to arrange the consultation in the hopes of receiving an answer to the question of ‘How much can I get from Anastaria for her stealing from me?’ And yet, the lawyer heard me out, inquired about some details, requested the logs from the Corporation—it turned out that game lawyers could obtain these with the players’ permission—then went through them, examined each episode in detail and finally explained that, unfortunately, Anastaria had acted wholly within the rules of the game. I spent an entire day only to receive an answer I already knew: The dummy was me. No one had forced me to unlock my bag to the girl—after all, one of the fundamental laws of Barliona, the one that attracted players to the game, was that anything that could be appropriated became the legal property of the player who’d taken it. As long as my inventory bag was closed, the Eye, the Chess Set and the other items were my property and if they’d been removed by the devs or some hackers, I’d be within my right to be outraged. But as soon as I granted Anastaria access to my inventory, the items effectively acquired a second owner. I had done this voluntarily—there had been no official pressure on me from the current deputy of Phoenix. So all in all, the dummy was me. The same went for her interview—formally speaking, I couldn’t lodge any complaints against the girl. Had I used the clan funds for my personal purposes? Yes. Had the resources been sold? Yes. Had our players gone over to Phoenix? Yes, goddamn it! Even if I file a complaint of slander, it’d be impossible to prove it—Anastaria had chosen her words very carefully.
The only silver lining in what the lawyer told me was that according to one of the laws of Barliona, if a player signs out to reality against his will, his required presence at various locations is suspended until his return. So if I return to the game and discover that Altameda has ceased to be mine, I’m allowed to petition a court to regain it—although there’d been no precedent for this, since the Corporation made sure to follow its laws carefully. Furthermore, I retained priority ownership of the castle over my spouse or my legal brother—Anastaria and Plinto, that is. This was all a bit of sunlight in the general gloom of my situation.
“Hello, Daniel!” Alexander called me on the phone as I was returning home. “I have good news—we’ve completed the transfer of your character and you may reenter the game whenever you like. By way of compensating you for the recent problems we had with your account, the Corporation would like to make you a small present that, naturally, won’t affect gameplay, but will make your experience a little better. I’m referring to your ability to choose the projection selected by your clan—now, your clan members can receive whatever projection they wish, not only the ones generated by the Imitator. We believe that you and your clan members will welcome this feature.”
“Thank you. That’s very kind of you,” I muttered in reply to such a ‘generous’ offer. Considering that the Legends no longer have any members except for me, the option to change my Dragon projection is about as useful to me as a bicycle is to a dog—theoretically the dog can learn to ride one, but it’s probably safer off on its own four paws.
“If you have any further questions, feel free to call me or my colleagues in the adaptation department,” Alexander went on. “All the best to you and good luck in your conquest of Barliona!”
The phone beeped, signaling that my conversation with the Corporation had drawn to a close: I had been rehabilitated, returned home, given a present and stamped with the official ‘case closed’ seal. From now on I was on my own.
While I had been with the lawyer, the cleaning service had come by and returned my apartment to a civilized state, cleaning it to a pristine condition. Everything that could sparkled, and even my time-ravaged wallpaper glistened with a bright new layer. Nothing suggested that this residence had spent a year in utter dilapidation reminiscent of a bachelor’s lair. Which, in effect, it was.
Having finished all my remaining chores, I sat down on my bed and began to stare at the gaming capsule. On the one hand, I couldn’t wait to get back to Barliona and find out what had happened to my clan during the past week. Was my castle still in one piece? How many people were still with me? What funds did I still have? On the other hand, there was one serious problem: As soon as I return, I’ll start ‘hearing’ Anastaria’s thoughts. I doubt I’ll find the strength to respond properly to hearing her voice in my head and I really wanted to avoid freaking out. The immediate task was to come up with a way to make Phoenix regret what it had done and teach them that they couldn’t get away with humiliating me. And yet, this was not a dilemma that I could solve right this instant.
The capsule offered no answer as to whether I should enter Barliona or not, so I opened my computer and decided to check my mail—I’d been free two days now and still hadn’t gotten around to it. I’d never allow myself such a luxury in the past—the various offers to take part in contests came with time limits for registration and if I didn’t react in time, I’d lose out.
Hello, Daniel! We don’t know each other, but we have something in common—Phoenix. Just like you, I ended up a victim of this clan and now want nothing more than to exact vengeance against those bastards. I don’t know what you’re planning—perhaps, you won’t even want to return to Barliona after all that they did to you—but just in case, here’s a link to a video. You’ll understand why Phoenix wanted to send you to the mines: Watch it and consider it. And if you decide to seek revenge as well—I suggest we work together. It’s not important who I am at the moment and what resources I have at my disposal. All you need to know is that I have the means. Make your decision, Shaman!
Among the hundreds of emails about contests and spam that had made it through my filters, there was this one stunning letter. And the most interesting part wasn’t so much the text of the letter, which said plenty on its own, but the very fact that the letter had found its way to my inbox. It turns out that this person was perfectly aware not only of what had happened to me in actual fact, but also that I was Shaman Mahan, that this was my email and, what seemed quite clear to me, where I lived. The sender’s address was ‘[email protected]’ which told me only one thing—this was a disposable email address intended only to send one letter and receive one answer to it. Very curious…
The Way of the Shaman [06] Shaman's Revenge Page 3
