I motioned the others to come out. Foggs was tense and prepared to fight. Jurgen was in shock: he must have recognized her. Charon couldn’t quite grasp this latest development so he tried to stay calm, wary of not scaring the weird “human”.
“Arbido, there aren’t any extra clothes in that stash of yours, are there?”
“Don’t bother,” Kimberly’s eyes twinkled with a new dose of madness. She didn’t seem at all scared by my friends’ arrival. “Gear won’t help. I’m not cold,” the words fell from her lips, barely audible. “Thanks anyway,” she closed up again, deep in thought. Apparently, she didn’t consider us a threat.
No idea how she’d managed to preserve a semblance of sanity and recover her neurograms in order to survive.
In the meantime, Arbido reached into his inventory like a magician and produced an old checkered plaid, threadbare in places. Cautiously he approached the girl and threw it over her shoulders.
“Kim, you know this area well, don’t you?”
“You tell me why you came here first and where exactly you want to go,” she wrapped herself in the plaid but continued to shake.
“We need to get back to the real world. They stopped servicing our in-modes.”
She waved her hand at the edge of the precipice. “One step, and all your problems will be solved.”
“Meaning?”
“You need to fall to your death. What’s the point in clinging to life? Back on Earth, it’s even worse. You’re strong. One thing you need to remember is that for the first few minutes, your neurograms will be floating around your avatar. You shouldn’t be afraid. Just do it,” the way she was instructing me, you’d think I was about to jump off the cliff already. “Something might go missing but trust me, a dozen lost memories is a small price to pay.”
So that’s how it was, then? She’d found another way to go digital? To become part of Earth’s mutilated cyberspace, adding to its agonizing technosphere?
She misunderstood my hesitation. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. There’re lots of neurocomputers servicing the testing grounds. I know what I’m talking about. Your identity matrix will survive. But you’ll need to act fast. You must remember your name before your neurograms dissolve into cyberspace.”
“Thanks for the tip. I appreciate it. Still, I don’t think I’m ready yet. We need to recharge our in-modes and go back. Would you like to come with us?”
“No!” she seemed to know exactly where we meant. Her gaze alighted on the Founders’ navigator. “I’m not going back there! No way!”
“But don’t you understand? Here the Reapers will get you sooner or later!”
Her fingers closed around her piece of steel.
“Okay, I’ll help you,” she suddenly acquiesced. “But first you need to tell me why you want to go back. Is it because of Liori?”
The abyss spewed out a discharge of dull green mist. A groan resonated from the rocks. The several in-mode capsules which were fused into the cliffs flashed their indicator lights.
“Do you love her?” she asked.
“I do.”
Kimberly shrank as if I’d just hit her. She shrugged the plaid off and walked over to the edge. The hot wind attacked her rags, tearing at them with a renewed force.
“I’ll help you,” she whispered without turning. “For this I want the neurogram of your love. This is my price.”
Arbido shook a sympathetic head. “Zander, I want you to think well first.”
“I only want a copy!” Kimberly stared into the abyss. “I want to be loved too. Even if it’s like this... Even so...”
I didn’t know what to say. The reason for my hesitation was the simple question I’d suddenly asked myself: what was love, really?
Was it a passion? Or physical attraction? Or sex?
None of those. What I felt for Liori had nothing to do with it. The words I tried so hard to summon up were all weak, unable to describe my true feelings for her.
Did that mean I had no idea what love was? That in all thirty-eight years of my existence I’d not once experienced it?
It feels so empty and cold without you...
You couldn’t have said it better. Empty and cold. As if your heart had stopped beating.
Anxiety. Hope. My desperate desire to see Liori, to look into her eyes and realize that we were back together.
“There’s no such thing as a neurogram of love,” I said softly. “It can’t be reconstructed. Sorry, Kim.”
She turned around. “I know. I just wanted to hear your answer. I’ll help you.”
“What, just like that, no questions asked?” Arbido demanded. “Sorry girl, but you’ve no idea who we are or where we’ve come from! How can you trust strangers?”
“Shut up,” Foggs hissed.
“He’s right. You can’t trust strangers,” Kim now stood on the very edge, the green haze clinging to her bare feet. “This mist is everywhere now. I’ve learned to tap into it. I can listen in to mnemonic frequencies. This is how the Reapers seek out Neuros.”
Arbido recoiled. “Does that mean you can read our thoughts?”
“Not all of them. Only the strongest,” her gaze burned a hole right through me. “I know what happened to Liori. You keep thinking about her. Wait here.”
She turned round and walked slowly along the jagged edge of the cliff until her outline dissolved into the acid-green mist.
* * *
“Arbido, are you raving mad?” Foggs attacked the old man. “Put your mind in gear before you speak! Better still, shut the fuck up! What if she doesn’t come back?”
“Quit aggroing,” Arbido snapped. “I couldn’t help it. She looked too much like my daughter.”
Jurgen walked over to the edge, scooped up the green mist and froze, as if listening in.
Charon used the opportunity to get closer to one of the in-modes. He emitted a nervous growl, then began keenly studying this sample of human technology.
I perched myself on the edge of a fire-licked hillock. Two-tone clouds swirled overhead: a depressing combination of acid-green laced with crimson. But what was that now?
A black twister spiraled through the clouds. Several black specks broke away from it. In falling, they acquired human shape, then exploded in flashes of cold light, breaking apart until there was nothing left but fading clumps of green mist.
I immediately thought of the looters we’d met by the river bank. They’d been about to throw Arbido into a well, confident that they would get some neurograms for their trouble. So that’s how it worked, then?
The Neuros (which apparently meant humans) were now hunted and thrown into wells, caves and crevices, sacrificed to the Reapers. The fading clouds of green mist that the twister had brought were meant to be a meager reward for the murderers. Snippets of human memories and simple emotions would be shared between low-level NPCs while the players’ identity matrices would end up in the location’s gloomier depths where the Reapers would be awaiting them.
A digital apocalypse. Kimberly’s words had pinpointed the essence of the global disaster.
Jurgen walked over to me. “I’ve seen it.”
“Then you’d better tell me how it could happen.”
“I don’t think that the Corporation has anything to do with this update.”
“Tell me how you see it, then,” Arbido was listening in. “There’re always some crazy idiots lurking in the wings, some unappreciated prodigies seeking notoriety!”
“Still, the entire scope of this is mind-boggling,” Jurgen replied. “You can’t write an update like this on a kitchen table. Whoever did this was familiar with the Founders’ technologies,” he cast a meaningful stare at my sword. “And these Reapers too — they don’t at all look like unhinged mobs. I sensed their hatred — it was something irrational, almost absurd. It was as if they detested our guts. Zander, if you get the chance, can you please ask Kim how it all started? It’s pretty clear that the root of the problem lies in the testing grounds. I just fi
nd it strange that Corporation workers were the first to die.”
“All right. I’ll try and speak to her. But this mist, does it really work as some kind of neurogram conductor?”
Jurgen rose and returned to the edge. He reached out his hand. Immediately the green substance wavered and grew several tentacles which threatened to entwine his wrist and touch the flat of his hand.
“Does that mean that there’ll be more attacks?” Foggs watched everything that was happening, drawing his own conclusions. “These Reapers, they’re going to find us in the end, aren’t they?”
This was a rhetoric question. But at least now we had an adequate weapon against them.
* * *
Kimberly didn’t come back until much later. We’d already begun to worry when she appeared out of the mist and silently motioned us to follow her.
Soon the in-modes disappeared from sight. The shallow slope was now intersected by a web of crevices, their bottomless sides cutting through the islets of hard ground. A strong hot wind blew in our faces.
“Some terrain,” Arbido looked around him. “I wouldn’t say no to a levitation scroll. Shame we don’t have a wizard who could cast us a bridge. No wonder the Reapers use portals!”
“It’s over here,” Kim pointed at a narrow crevice.
“What’s this, a staircase?” Foggs studied the steps cut into the rock. “I’d never have noticed. Who made it?”
The girl ignored his question. Silently she began to descend.
The mist closed in, gradually transforming into darkness. Our torches could only illuminate a small area around us.
A twixstworld.
The word gave you the shivers. Here, virtual realities merged into each other, creating a new digital universe ruled by synthetic identities which placed their sole value in neurograms.
The number and variety of the NPC inhabitants of these phantom worlds were legion. Someone had poisoned them with human emotions, creating ersatz identities to whom this poison had become a drug. The lived to feel — their only purpose being to syphon off a great variety of experiences, each stronger and edgier than the next.
The stairs cut in the rock soon ended in a small landing. Now we had to jump from one rock ledge to the next to get down. Here, however, Kimberly’s behavior became strange. She leaped onto a narrow ledge and pressed her back to the rock, edging her way step by tentative step over the precipice until she disappeared from view behind a large cliff.
“Zander, are you sure about her?” Foggs didn’t look happy. “Where’s she taking us?”
A blood-curdling shriek ripped through the silence, its infinite echoes trapped within the crevice. The dull green mist below rippled and bubbled up.
“Let me go first,” I said.
I wasn’t as agile as Kim. I took a leap but miscalculated and hung over the drop, trying to pull myself up.
My armor scraped against the rock, hindering my effort. Once again the authenticity levels had tricked my muscles into shaking from the desperate effort.
The treacherous ledge, chipped and crumbling, skirted the cliff until I reached another landing which listed dangerously to one side. A bit further on, a cave entrance gaped darkly in the rock.
Gasping, Kimberly crouched over the bodies of two Reapers. I couldn’t hear what she was whispering. The red-hot piece of steel in her hands gleamed weakly.
The cave entrance exuded cold but the thin layer of ice that covered the surrounding cliffs was melting quickly.
“Kim, you okay?”
She panted, unable to speak. The brief but desperate combat had stripped her of her last strength.
Foggs appeared from around the bend first, torch in hand. Charon came next, followed by Arbido who clung to the Haash like a child.
I dropped to my stomach and offered Foggs a hand, helping him clamber up.
“Phew,” he crawled away from the edge and wiped the perspiration off his forehead with the back of his hand. Then he noticed the bodies. His gaze met Kimberly’s who could barely stand. The Reapers’ corpses leaked green mist which began to envelop her.
Foggs leapt to his feet realizing she was somehow trying to stop the neurograms from dissolving. “What can we do?”
“Finish... them...” she croaked.
Two swords whooshed through the air, the Founders’ symbols glowing bright on their blades. Immediately the mist began streaming back toward the girl’s bare feet, then disappeared inside the weapons’ microchips.
Kim staggered. She threw her head back and closed her eyes. “Thanks.”
Her fingers slackened. The piece of construction steel she’d been grasping clattered onto the rocks.
* * *
“Why did you need to risk it?” I crouched next to Kimberly. “You knew that Reapers had ambushed us here, didn’t you?”
“They didn’t trust me,” she cast a meaningful glance at Foggs and Arbido.
“You don’t have to prove anything to us!”
“I wanted you to see me as an equal. Right from the start. I needed to show you what I was made of. That’s how I do these things, Zander. I learned it the hard way. On Argus especially. I didn’t last two months there.”
“I don’t understand,” groaning, Arbido walked over to the edge. “What’s with all the cliffs? What happened to the wastelands?”
“The location’s programs are still working,” Jurgen replied. “Now that their data are destroyed, they’re trying to fill in the gaps by using the terrain randomizer.”
“Couldn’t they have made some nice flat plateau instead?” Arbido grumbled. “Much better for hiking.”
“Stop moaning, will ya?” Foggs studied the indicator on one of his swords. “At least here they can’t attack us all at once.”
I had so many things to ask her about. Our chance meeting was too unbelievable. It felt as if someone had extracted her from my dreams and placed her into this distorted space.
“How did you survive?” I asked.
She must have expected the question. “I gradually pieced my neuromatrix together,” she answered eagerly. “I was lucky that my neurograms were stored on a dedicated server. And once I realized where I was, I escaped. The testing grounds are enormous. They’re self-adaptable too. So this is my home now. I really wanted to hack them somehow and get out into the Crystal Sphere. That would be so, so good,” she paused, deep in thought. “So Liori is the same as me now, isn’t she? An identity matrix?”
“She is indeed.”
“Are you worried about her?”
I nodded. “Think you could come with us? Liori will be over the moon.”
“No. Sorry, Zander. I’m not going back. I’d rather stay here with the Reapers. At least I know I can kill them.”
“What’s wrong with deep space?”
“Decompression,” she answered reluctantly. “You’ve no idea what life on Argus was like at first. Nothing but vacuum, subzero temperatures and mobs that you couldn’t even kill. We didn’t remove pressure suits for weeks. We slept in them. The slightest cut or puncture resulted in death by decompression followed by respawn purgatory until you lost all hope and sanity. At least here you can breathe knowing that oxygen won’t run out. Here I can dream of one day going back to the Crystal Sphere. Space scares me, Zander. I just freeze; I lose control. Just not my thing,” she turned away.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Forget it,” once again she was shivering, trying to wrap herself into her rags. I gave her a friendly hug. Kimberly startled and shrank back.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “I’ll be okay in a moment.”
I didn’t remove my hand. It felt so awkward and so difficult, trying to feel another person’s pain, trying to take a small part of it away and replace it with some of my own warmth. All my so-called experience wasn’t worth a damn... and it wasn’t the first time in the last few days that I caught myself thinking this.
“How did it all start?”
“I’ve been waiting fo
r you to ask,” she answered softly. “Is it so important?”
“Sure.”
She paused, then went on,
“One day they uploaded a model of a space station to the testing grounds. The Corporation was going to test an upgrade. I heard the techs talking about a ‘hybrid’ of some sort. But I wasn’t really interested.”
“A hybrid?” Jurgen and I exchanged glances.
“So I decided to escape to the recreation zone before they started the space simulation,” Kim went on. “It’s always good weather there. I started looking for a suitable data exchange channel. I envision them as roads — or tunnels sometimes. I thought, as there were some big-time tests, there’d be no one in the location so I might be able to go for a swim in the lake. So I got to the network node. I needed to get the worker’s login and password but he was offline. All this slowed me up a little.”
“So what happened?” Arbido asked nervously.
I hadn’t even noticed how the others had crowded around us, listening to Kim.
“All of a sudden there was this cold wave. I got so scared. I thought they’d found me. I disconnected from the database, and then I saw the workers running away from the space station model. And I saw that green mist creeping along the ground. It was like a very thick aggressive fog.”
“Aggressive — do you mean toxic?” I tried to clarify.
“No. It was aggressive,” she repeated. “It was as if it was a living thing... a sentient thing. Then it started spewing out jets of discharge, long and strong, a bit like tentacles. Corporate workers were screaming everywhere. They just fell and disappeared in the mist. At first I thought they were logging out. But once the mist thinned out a bit, I saw their avatars lying on the ground! That’s when I knew they were dead. I’d seen enough of it back on Argus. Then the defense programs kicked in and began deleting data. I had to run for my life. Whole buildings were disappearing, the ground was collapsing under me as I ran. Everything around me was leaking, only the Founders’ station kept floating in the mist like a gigantic buoy.”
“Didn’t they try to reload the location from backups?” Jurgen asked.
Black Sun (Phantom Server: Book #3) Page 13
