Life: Online: A gamelit novel

by Shiloh Hunt

  Panting — not from exertion but from fear — Kitty waited.

  No one emerged.

  There was a flash of light, its source hidden in the depths of the black water. Kitty started, straining forward, her hands clutching at the barrier. For long minutes nothing happened. Had the light been the two doing something to escape the deathtrap of the sinking car? Maybe they’d respawned in town like Will—

  A purple door appeared, suspended five yards above the toiling surface of the water. It glowed faintly, as if its paint held flecks of luminescence. It was beautiful, entrancing, and to date the weirdest fucking thing Kitty had ever seen; and she’d had tea with Cecil.

  The door swung open to reveal the silhouette of a tall, thin, cone-shaped being. It stepped out from the doorway, sliding out over nothing and coming to a halt directly over the patch of water where Ilyena’s car had drowned. The white light streaming from the doorway was so bright, and angled so directly into Kitty’s eyes that making out any features on the being was impossible.

  The tip of a pointy head bent down, studying the waters beneath. A limb slowly protruded from the being’s lithe body, clutching a large, chunky shape that looked like an exaggerated key. It turned, sliding the key into the air beside the glowing door. A panel opened, thrumming with a faint green light, and the creature busied itself in front of it for a few seconds. She thought she could hear — the sound faint with distance — a tiny, jangling bell.

  Kitty’s teeth clicked together. Her eyes swung away with difficulty, glancing down. She’d been backing up from the overwhelming weirdness in front of her and had stepped into the road, the difference in height jarring her.

  Her eyes snapped up, but the creature was sliding back into the doorway, the rays spearing from the rectangular frame diminishing as the door swung closed.

  A large air bubble broke the surface of the now calming sea, the ripple induced by its presence swiftly spreading. The game shuddered. That same ripple grew stronger, humping up the water as it sped toward Kitty.

  She stumbled back, eyes widening, but the ripple didn’t slow. It struck the supporting pole of a nearby pier, and that too rippled as if it had suddenly acquired the same physics that controlled the water. Kitty spun around, knowing she would never be able to move fast enough to outrun the ripple. She glanced behind her, body growing rigid as the distant pier wobbled and bounced like jelly, the glitch moving faster now.

  Tyres squealed.

  Kitty faced forward, her hands lifting to shield her as a snub-nosed Mustang broke through the curtain of rain ahead of her. The driver slammed on brakes. The car fishtailed on the wet road, coming to a halt an inch from her quivering body.

  The driver-side window descended.

  “Kitty?” William stuck his head out of the window, blue eyes wide. A slow smile parted his lips. He gestured wildly at her. “Fuck, I’m glad I found you. Get in!”

  She lurched to the other side of the car, gripped the handle, and clambered inside. William’s arms slid around her, crushing her to him. Her suit pulsed in warning, but she couldn’t have spoken if she’d tried. The urgency of escaping the glitch was struggling to compete with a sudden, overwhelming certainty at seeing the two headlights cut through the rain moments before.

  “Sweet Jesus, it’s good to see ya.” William drew back, eyes crinkling at the corners. Still holding her shoulders, he gave her a small shake. “You’s okay? Surprised to see me?”

  “You killed them,” Kitty said when she'd found her voice somewhere in the depths of a frozen stomach. “You killed Ilyena and Borris.”

  “Who?” William twisted around, eyes hunting. “I drive over someone?”

  “In…” Kitty swallowed, wetting her lips. “In the car. They…”

  “What?” William drew back, top lip twitching up. “What car? I jus’ got here.”

  “You… you didn’t drive into a car?” She lifted a trembling finger, pointing upward to where the road doubled in on itself, where the barrier had been torn open by Ilyena’s car. “Up there… A car—”

  “What the hell is that?” The straining panic in William’s voice pushed further thoughts of his possible involvement in Ilyena’s death from Kitty’s mind.

  She spun in her seat, facing a slack jawed and wide eyed William.

  The ripple had evolved into a violent, jerking tremor.

  It ate through Life: Online’s architecture as it surged toward them, leaving misshapen objects and distended textures in its wake. It was less than twenty yards away now, and closing.

  Kitty was flung back in her seat as William shoved his foot down on the accelerator. His Mustang struggled for purchase, tyres shrieking at them for rebate before finally gripping the tar and hurling the car forward.

  “I’m open for ideas ya might be havin’, good or bad,” William yelled, jerking the steering wheel to avoid hitting an abandoned car parked on the side of the road.

  “Whatcha want me to say?” Kitty fumbled beside her for a seat belt, realized there was none, and clung to the chicken bar with both hands instead.

  “How close?” William’s knuckles whitened. “How close is it, K?”

  Kitty risked a glance over her shoulder and stiffened.

  “Go faster,” she said.

  “Fuck.” William flung the car around a corner, the Mustang shuddering as it struggled to retain its grip. They shot up the side of the hill, the road twining lazily from side to side with complete disregard for their sudden and intense need for speed.

  “We need to get out,” William said. “How do we get out?”

  “Getting to the exit. It’s on the other side of the map.” She gestured wildly. “Keep going.” Kitty’s shoulder blades crawled, but she refused to look back. They couldn’t have gained on the approaching glitch; what was the point of confirming how close they were to death?

  “You sure that’ll work? What if the glitch—”

  “No, I’m not sure,” Kitty cut in. “I’m taking a wild fucking guess. But as guesses go, I think it’s pretty fucking spectacular.”

  26

  Lucy glanced behind him, shoulder crashing off the corner of an anonymous building as he ran past. He swore, stumbling in an attempt to regain his balance, forcing his eyes forward again.

  The ripple had nearly caught up to him. There wasn’t an operational vehicle in sight: all the cars scattered alongside the road were wrecked, rusted through, or still smouldering. Facing forward, Lucy tried to ignore the itch eating up his spine.

  Billy the Kid had looked alternately surprised and devastated when the glitch had taken him. If the player had still been alive… well he wasn’t any more.

  Lucy huffed to himself, shaking his head.

  Had the direction of the glitch’s travel been a few degrees different, then it would have struck Lucy seconds after annihilating Billy. But it hadn’t. The whys and hows of which he would have to contemplate when he wasn’t busy running for his life. He’d briefly considered shifting the hell out of the rift before the glitch could claim him, but the thought of it reaching him before he’d fully shifted — corrupting his player profile in the process — made every hair on Lucy’s real-world body stand up in silent protest.

  Ahead, a vehicle stood abandoned in the centre of the road. Both headlamps were still shining; a pair of auguring eyes beckoning him. Lucy tried to run faster but his avatar was already moving at top speed and no encouragement from his real-world mind could make it move any faster.

  He skidded when he reached the banged up Toyota Supra, feet slipping in a puddle of rain. His fingers scrabbled against the handle, both to keep him from falling and to try and rip open the door. It finally swung open, a gust of wind nearly folding it against the bonnet of the car, and Lucy leapt inside.

  The glitch poured toward him, a wave of digital uncertainty that left confused textures and malformed architecture in its wake. What had it done to Billy? There one minute—

  Lucy shoved the thought from his mind, much as he shov
ed the gear shaft into reverse. No time to do a three-point turn in the narrow street. He would have to hope a side-alley came up soon.

  He had several seconds of face time with the glitch, the pressure on his jaw tightening as it ate up the distance between them. A glance in the rear-view mirror gave him hope: up ahead a set of traffic lights blinked at him through the water-scattered air. His fingers tightened on the gear lever, his mind straining for calm as he took a deep, insubstantial breath and flung the steering wheel to the right.

  Before the Supra had even straightened from the turn, he’d slammed the car into first and dropped the clutch. The car squealed, fighting against the backward momentum it had gained in order to obey the new direction its master wanted from it.

  It finally surged forward, giving Lucy a last, lingering glimpse of the glitch transforming the street he’d just reversed down into a gently undulating river of tar and automobile scrap. Then the car was fishtailing as it straightened, the symmetrical walls of buildings flashing past in streaks of gray and brown and neon as Lucy stomped down the accelerator and shifted into second gear.

  Ahead, the road began to slope. Lucy glanced down a side street. But it also curved up with the intention of climbing one of the many hills littering Torque. He shoved the Supra into third gear and stomped the accelerator against the floor. The car’s revs spiked, and then slowly began to drop as the incline steepened.

  Lucy hazarded a look in the rear-view mirror.

  It became obvious that the hill was going to end him: if the glitch had been an animal, it would have been breathing down the back of his neck. Lucy shifted down into second gear, the revs again rocketing up before slowly sinking. What the fuck had the developers been thinking, putting ninety-degree fucking hills all over the fucking map?

  Lucy growled under his breath, feeling a tingle in his real-world body as anxious anticipation spiked through him. The Supra’s engine whined at him like a dog begging for scraps.

  Yup: he wasn’t going to make it.

  The car protested with an outraged shriek as he forced it into first gear. Revs flew into the red and smoke billowed from the hood.

  There came a thunk from the engine compartment. The car lost power, his repeated frantic stompings on the accelerator doing nothing about the situation.

  “No!” Lucy took the car out of gear, put it back into first… but it was over.

  The engine had seized, or whatever it was that happened to motor engines under the kind of strain he’d just put it under. The Toyota slowed, coming to a violent halt as Lucy jerked up the handbrake and sprang from the car.

  He spun around, lifting his hands — fingers spread — as the glitch washed toward him.

  Would he die, like Billy? Or would the game turn him into an NPC? Send him to another rift?

  He couldn’t afford to find out.

  Lucy opened the game’s code console and thought out a hurried line of code, executing it as soon as the last character had appeared.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried again, knowing he hadn’t made a mistake but fervently wishing he had.

  The game didn’t accept the code.

  Torque was in lock-down.

  Now his only hope lay in reaching the mod’s exit. But then he’d end up in Bang-Bang Island. Not, as he’d told Kitty, the next rift. He’d lied to that player so many times he still found it hard to believe she hadn’t called him out on it yet. Except... she had to an extent. No, he needed to be in Fantasia.

  Nothing would stop him getting to Fantasia.

  The first two glitches had left Chimera and Helical intact, but what had happened to Polaris? The third glitch had been violent; much more violent than its forebears. If it had completely corrupted the rift’s code… then what would happen if this glitch sent him back there?

  Any further questions were snapped from his mind as the glitch reached him. The tar went soft under his feet. His avatar sank knee-deep into the road. Lucy squeezed shut his eyes; his real-world body spasmed as a sharp pain rived open his chest.

  A stutter went through him. Like the violent shiver that sometimes came just before a sneeze.

  Lucy fell.

  27

  Having reached the top of the hill, the road finally straightened out. William threw the Mustang down a gear, engine snarling as its revs tripled.

  Beside him, Kitty was scowling at a tablet computer she’d retrieved from the floor by her feet. William frowned at her. Despite the obvious dampening effect of the glitch they were still trying to outrun, his reunion with Kitty hadn’t been what he’d expected. High-fives and a quick snog in the back seat of the car: that’s what he’d been expecting. Not this.

  He’d been fucking ecstatic when he’d seen her on the side of the road — Life: Online was an awesome place to be, but not when players were busy setting you alight after having kept you trapped in a hole for like two hours. She was a familiar face, but being near her hadn’t smothered him in layers of downy comfort like he’d hoped.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  “Looks like it’s right at the edge of the map,” Kitty said, sounding more as if she was speaking to herself than to him. “Pretty sure it’ll still be there. I mean, it was in Polaris, even after—”

  “Pretty sure?” William asked, louder than he’d intended.

  Kitty snapped her arm straight, shifting her glare from the tablet to him.

  “Ja, I’m pretty sure. It implies that I don’t know, because I’ve never done this myself before. Okay? Happy?” Then she was scrutinising the tablet computer again.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, I’s jus’ asking.” William forced himself to look in the rear-view mirror. He couldn’t see anything weird happening. Maybe the glitch had played itself out, style of thing. It couldn’t just go on indefinitely, could it?

  He opened his inventory and retrieved a banged up packet of cigarettes. He lit one, rolling down his window just far enough to let the smoke escape without letting in too much rain. Ahead, a traffic light switched to orange. He ignored it, subjecting his cigarette to a long drag. It didn’t help of course. His body was craving nicotine like a mother-fucker, and smoking fake dream-cigarettes did nothing for that.

  “Hey, maybe I can help. What’s it look like?” He blew out smoke and studied Kitty. “Come on, K. Least give me a clue. I mean, mineral, vegetable, or animal?”

  Kitty let the tablet sink into her lap. She scanned ahead of them, as if determined to find the thing they were looking for before she had to go through the effort of describing it. After a few seconds, she pursed her lips and half-turned to him, her shoulders stiff.

  “The one exit was like this—” Kitty gestured vaguely “—oily filmy thing. You couldn’t see through it. But it was like a mirror. Except, not really. Then there was like a swirling vortex thing. Does that make sense?”

  “No. But at least if I see it, I’ll fucking know it.” William stared ahead. “Any specific reason we can’t ask your friend Lucy?” He gave the back seat of the Mustang a quick glance. “Who, I happened to have fucking noticed, you don’t seem to be keeping company with no more?”

  Kitty stiffened.

  “You two have a tiff or something? I mean, she’s helped you before and now all of a sudden—”

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “I said no.”

  “That’s fucking awesome, but—”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “Listen, jus’ because—”

  “End of fucking discussion.”

  “But why—”

  Kitty swung to face him, her finger stabbing toward William. “That fucker left me with a bunch of strangers. Going on about how ‘we’ll find your William’, then at the first opportunity—” Kitty broke off with a strangled scream, glancing through the windscreen. “We don’t need Lucy. We never did. I never did. And I was an idiot for thinking so, even for a second.”

  William took another deep pull of th
e unsatisfying cigarette, giving his head a tiny shake. It was full steam ahead now. Next stop: nuclear meltdown. It was a good time to leave, or find something to subdue Kitty with. Like cupcakes. But he couldn’t leave, on account of being stuck in a car going a hundred twenty kays an hour with a death-inducing glitch possibly still wailing after them. And he didn’t have any fucking cupcakes.

  So he drove in silence, lighting another cigarette when the first one was flicked out the window, ignoring traffic lights, and steering around bits of debris and the carcasses of muscle cars that littered the road.

  “I mean, who does that?” Kitty demanded a few minutes later. “Who says they’ll help you out, and then abandons you?”

  He’d thought it was a rhetorical question.

  Kitty twisted to glare at him. “Who?”

  “For fuck’s sake,” William groaned. “Lucy, I s’pose?”

  Kitty rolled her eyes and stared forward again. “Yeah, that mother-fucking piece of—”

  A few yards ahead of them, a guy materialised in the middle of the road.

  “Holy shit!” William yelled, yanking the steering wheel to the side.

  Time slowed as the game detected a suitable moment to impose some dramatic cinematography on their environment. The Mustang yowled at William, tyres refusing to grip the wet road. The car began a slow spin, its rear plunging toward the man — back still facing them and completely unaware of his date with death — lifting a hand to his head as if he’d developed a headache.

  He was in for more than a headache if he didn’t get out of the way. William slammed his fist on the hooter, the Mustang letting out a bellow that found it difficult to compete with the squeal of tyres.

  Kitty had her hands on the dashboard, rebelling against the g-force of the Mustang’s spin, her mouth hanging open, face aghast. The guy finally turned, his movements languid. His eyes flashed wide when he spotted the car, widening further when they found Kitty.

  William fought the steering wheel, trying to command the Mustang out of its spin and failing. The guy’s shoulder’s dropped, his arms drawing close to his side as he prepared to leap out of the way.