by Shiloh Hunt
Lucy rolled over, pinning Jessica’s avatar beneath him, and dragged his hands through her hair. He gripped a fistful of it to keep her head still.
“Where’s OMG?” Lucy asked, his voice ragged.
Jessica relaxed her grip, eyes widening. For a moment, the ferocious intensity left her face and a brief flash of unease touched her features.
“What’s happened out there? In the other rifts?” she asked. Her voice was less husky now, more of what he remembered. “It’s been hours since I last got hold of someone.”
“Crazy shit. Everyone’s been in for too long. They’re all…” Lucy’s fingers tightened around her curls. “They’re unravelling. Those that are left.”
“The glitches—” Jessica began.
“It’s us.” Lucy looked back at her, again catching a fleeting glimpse of fear. “And they’re getting worse.”
“All the more reason to get a move on.” She lifted her hand, palm up, and flicked her fingers. “Give it to me, baby.”
“You’ll wait.” It wasn’t a question, but Jessica pouted as she considered.
“Whatever gets you hard, Lucy. Now give it.”
Lucy opened his inventory and removed one of the many small pills nestling inside. It had a smiley face etched on it. It disappeared into Jessica’s inventory and the girl gave him a wide smile.
“When this baby’s been deployed—” Jessica murmured, her eyes sparkling “—all it’ll take is one good shove with your battering ram to slam that fucking door all the way open.” Jessica reached up, her fingernails scoring his avatar’s flesh through the thin shirt he wore. “You ready?”
Lucy didn’t reply. His eyes fixed on the bedding beside Jessica’s head.
“Are you ready, Jason?”
Lucy shook his head, blinking to focus his gaze. His eyes found Jessica’s again, and his fingers slid over her cheek, tracing the shape of her mouth.
“You didn’t answer me,” he said. “About OMG.”
She shrugged, and her clothes snapped out of existence with the movement. Jessica writhed under him until his knees tightened enough to still her.
“Where is he, Jessica?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. He was just backup, anyway.” The girl arched beneath him, biting her bottom lip. “Does it matter anymore?”
Lucy stared down at her and gave his head a slow shake.
“No. It doesn’t.” His clothes disintegrated as he bent over her. “But I still want to know.”
Jessica closed her eyes, her head whipping to the side as she shuddered underneath him. He leaned closer. His lips brushed her ear.
“Tell me.”
Jessica’s eyes flared with sudden intensity. Her fingernails dug into his shoulders, dragging him closer, until their bodies melded.
“OMG’s gone native,” she whispered.
Lucy narrowed his eyes at her.
“Doesn’t know who I am,” Jessica said. “Doesn’t remember why he’s here. Except for you…” She tapped him on the forehead with a fingernail. “He remembers you, for sure. Said he’s waiting for you. Said he’ll get you to stay here with him.”
Jessica shuddered again. Lucy nestled his face against her neck as thoughts scurried around in his mind, trying to latch onto something concrete. The feel of Jessica’s avatar moving under him made thought difficult, sluggish.
“Where is he?” Lucy said, pushing the words through his teeth.
“Right here, baby.”
Lucy jerked, staring down at the girl. She gave him a tiny shrug and bit down on her fingernail, fluttering her eyelashes at him.
“What did you say?”
“You heard me.” Jessica sat up, her hands sliding over the top of his shoulders. She drew herself up against him. “He’s right here. Just… folded. A two-dimension shape flipped on its ass. It’s what happened when the game got hold of him, Jason. It got inside him, somehow. Changed him. It almost got to me too, but I—” her gaze became unfocused “—I was too big a mouthful for it to swallow.”
Lucy scrambled up. “Give me back the loader, Jessica.” His clothes flashed onto him, feeling two sizes too small.
“Think again. I’m getting the fuck out of here.” Jessica curled her legs under her. The smiley-faced pill appeared in her upraised palm. “And I’m not waiting a second longer.”
“No!” Lucy made a grab for her.
Jessica slapped her hand against her mouth. Lucy fell backward in his haste to get away from her. She swallowed, her brief, triumphant expression flashing into confusion. Her hand wrapped around her throat. She coughed, eyes flashing open, fixing with wild panic on his face. Long fingernails reached for him, the girl stumbling as she surged off the bed after him.
Lucy shot to his feet. He slammed into the wall beside the door as he fumbled with the handle. His shoulder slipped, and he stared in blank stupefaction at the wall as the horrible blue wallpaper began sliding down its surface.
He flung his head around, watching as Jessica took two wavering steps closer. Her body stretched, turning into liquid goop that held semblance of her form for another step before pooling on the carpet with a wet thwack.
A purple doorway appeared, hovering less than a foot above the carpet.
Lucy ripped at the door handle behind him. It came away with a sucking sound, the gaping hole it left distorting as it melted like candle wax.
The door swung open, glaring light casting the figure in deep shadow. The person moved, a merry jangle accompanying them.
Lucy dug at what remained of the barrier behind him, the room’s door coming away in his hands in clay-like lumps. He forced himself through the gap he’d dug out and staggered into the hallway before the figure could step from the purple door frame.
Ahead, the corridor began slanting to the right, the ceiling drooping. A chandelier splashed to the carpet. In its death throes, it sprayed diamonds over the melting, psychedelic wallpaper.
“Fuck me,” Lucy whispered.
The corridor resisted his every step, clutching at his feet with sticky carpet fibres. He tried to drag himself along using the wall, but his fingers only left smooth runnels, the structure providing nothing in the way of solidity. Lucy waded to the stairs, lost his balance when the stair’s railing disintegrated under his hand, and slithered down the gentle mounding of steps until he slammed into the aquarium.
Which had transformed into a gigantic cube of jelly.
The shark, however, looked as solid as anything.
The screams of trapped players trying to free themselves from the quicksand of game architecture they were now stuck in came from everywhere, but urgent thoughts herded him past the swimming shark, through a transparent film of gelatin-like glass that tore around him when he clawed his way through.
This glitch was moving much slower than the one in Torque, but its effects were devastating.
The gravel path leading to a tree house in the back yard glittered like newly-laid tar. Lucy instead battled his way across the grass, legs moving slower and slower the more the grass surrendered to its now complete lack of structure and physics.
Lucy flung open the game’s code console and thought out the command to position his avatar on the surface of the grass instead of knee deep inside it. His avatar flickered, moving up a foot before being sucked down into the green again.
Ahead, he heard a familiar scream.
Lucy looked up, watching as Kitty fell through the bottom of the tree house and splashed into a patch of ground beneath it. Another command meant to move him closer to her made his avatar vibrate for two seconds before flickering him four yards to the right.
“Stop fighting me!” Lucy yelled. He thought out another line of code, and flickered closer to Kitty.
She was sitting up, trying valiantly to free herself from the embrace of the gloopy flora. Her efforts increased visibly when she spotted him.
“Stand up,” Lucy called.
“Can’t.” Kitty wriggled furiously, tugging at her arms. �
��It’s too sticky.”
Lucy gritted his teeth. There was a muffled yell, and William plopped into the grass beside Kitty. He scrambled up before it could engulf him and grabbed Kitty’s arm, trying to leverage her free. Surprisingly, he did: she staggered into William and clutched him.
“Lucy!” Kitty’s eyes were pinned to something behind him.
Lucy considered whether he should look around. Surely, whatever was behind him couldn’t make him move any faster? There was literally nothing that—
He glanced over his shoulder. And froze.
The mansion collapsed in on itself. A wave of liquid rock, tile, glass, furniture and shark sped toward him. Beneath him, the grass gave way, his legs sinking knee-deep into the foliage.
“The kids! They’re still in there! We have to—”
The desperation in Kitty’s voice brought a sudden wave of calm into Lucy. He stared at the approaching wave of pixelated death with resolution he could feel thrumming in his body back on terra firma… wherever the hell that was.
He opened the game’s code console, but his thoughts brought no script to the console’s blank interface. Lucy tried again, frowning with the effort. His avatar began to shudder.
“Kitty, open your console.” His voice was quiet, firm despite the quiver inside him. Was his real body shaking, back at home? Was it trembling in fits and starts as surges of panic sluiced through him?
“My what?”
“Console. Bottom right, next to the chat icon.”
“What… it’s just blank.”
“Think out this code.”
“Okay…” Kitty sounded too wary.
He wanted to look around, wanted to make sure that she had an expression of studious confusion on her face and not irritation. But he faced the oncoming glitch instead, trying to force his words to emerge smoothly and without error.
“Set.newpos 1.57{anchor_grid:bad_kitty_69} players(). Add the kids’s handles to the end, between the brackets.”
“But I don’t know their handles! I never added them as friends!”
“P4ND4_GUY,” William called out. His eyes were focused on something only he could see. He was doubtless reading players’s handles off his contact list. Go figure: Will was the kind of player that would add anyone he encountered in-game, just so that he could boast about how many friends he had. “RAD_BRAD_05. TWINKLES_4. And TREV—”
“There’s no time to take all of them!” Lucy said. “Add those three and submit the code.”
“Okay, I—”
Three avatars flickered into existence around them. Lucy did look around then, catching the expected look of shock on Kitty’s face. William had a glazed look in his eyes, but whether it was from the sight of three players materializing out of thin air or the approaching glitch, Lucy couldn’t tell.
“Now—” Lucy was interrupted by a keening wail.
His head spun to the side, staring at one of the kids. At what remained of one of the kids. The girl lay a few yards from him, but from the waist down she’d merged with the lawn. She had two handfuls of grass in either hand, and was trying to draw herself free, but where her body and the grass met, bits of avatar strung out like melted plastic, eternally stretching.
Somewhere in front of him, Kitty made a strangled noise in her throat. Lucy tore his eyes away from the struggling kid, now careful not to jar his legs.
“Kitty!”
She turned wide eyes to him and wrapped her arms around her avatar.
“I’m going to give you another code. Are you ready? You can’t make any mistakes with this one.”
“It was just one number…” Kitty whispered. “Just one number—”
“William,” Lucy cut in. “Slap her. She’s hysterical.”
William stiffened, turning surprised eyes to Lucy. Kitty bristled and gave her head a violent shake before turning a glower to Lucy.
That was more like it.
He gave her a nod and lifted his eyebrows. She dropped her eyes, took a visible breath, and nodded once.
Lucy gave her the code, spelling it out slowly. Her eyes flickered as she entered it on her console, lifted up to him for a second, and then fled to the glitch.
He kept his eyes on her. “Enter it.”
“What does it do?”
“It gets us the fuck out of here. Do it.”
William grabbed her shoulder. “Do it.”
Kitty reached up, gripped William’s hand, and closed her eyes.
The world went white, an electronic scream of discordant noise snapping around Lucy, deafening him as his avatar was shredded by invisible teeth.
Level 11
Don't Hate the Player, Hate The Game
“War is when the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other.”
Nico Bellic - GTA IV
44
Sound returned in a screaming thunderclap.
Kitty staggered as her feet sank into soft sand. Was she back in Helical? It was hot enough, but… Her avatar blinked slowly, revealing this new world in irritatingly vague shapes and shadows. She fell forward, unable to stop herself, and then she was crawling, her avatar controlled by something otherworldly.
After a few more pathetic attempts at opening her eyes, she finally began to make sense of where she was. Or, at least, where she wasn’t.
This wasn’t Helical.
The earth dipped beneath her, thumping into her an instant later. Kitty wheezed as her fingers dug into the soft beach sand she lay sprawled on. She jerked, moaning at the sight of her fingers: bloodied, the skin torn.
A man’s hands.
Kitty recoiled and pushed herself up. A few yards away, sand had been carved into a deep crater, its surrounds littered with body parts, shrapnel, and smoking beach. Another scream started somewhere high above, and Kitty threw herself to the side, rolling away just in time to avoid death by asteroid — or whatever it was raining down from the sky.
She stared up at the blueness above, trying to bring a semblance of thought back into her mind. It was crowded at the moment; making space wasn’t working as well as it should.
They’d been in Play. That ugly-ass mansion had melted like chocolate on a hot tin roof. She’d put in those codes. Now they were here, in what she assumed was Bang-Bang.
Kitty propped herself up on her elbows and scanned the beach. In the distance, weapons of various shapes and sizes formed a layered noise that screened out the pounding of the waves behind her. It looked like she’d been dropped off by one of many random ships, the closest of which bobbed haphazardly in the sea, a gigantic hole visible in its hull. The waves — rust coloured from blood — were polluted with hordes of bodies which tossed and turned in their surf.
A distant throb made her stiffen. It came from so far away that it took an aeon before it departed again, like an echo in a cave. She gripped her rifle tighter, blinking a few times. It came again, not as intense, but just as terrifying.
Her medication was wearing off. If she didn’t take her methadone soon, she could expect wave upon wave of incapacitating agony to be unleashed on her nether regions. Unfairly, since she’d only retained partial stumps of her legs after the accident.
The falling bombs or missiles or whatever the hell they were, had kicked up so much dust and smoke and sand that a haze hung over everything. Further up the beach, it was impossible to see anything except the closest batch of strewn-around body parts and bloodied sand. If the guys were here, if they’d been thrown into this rift like she had, then how the hell—
“Come in, Kilo India Tango.” The voice, barked straight into her ear, made her jerk.
She stared around her, lifted a trembling hand to her ear, and touched the earpiece fitted neatly inside.
“Come in, Kilo India Tango,” the voice repeated.
“Hello?”
“That you, Kilo India Tango, over?”
“Well… I… I guess. Who’s this?” She didn’t recognise the voice.
“You sas
sing your Commanding Officer over the squawker, over?”
“What? No! I just… I don’t know—”
“We’ve located your position via GPS, soldier. You remain prone and don’t move a cunt hair in any direction until we get there. Understood, private?”
Kitty did a hurried scan of the beach. “I—”
“I said, understood, private?”
“Yes, for fuck’s sake.”
“Did you just cuss at your Commanding Officer, private?”
How the hell did you end a call? Kitty stared in horror at her HUD, which consisted of strips of metal slammed into place with a bloody sledgehammer. A name flickered in the top right corner: Cmd. Killjoy.
“Uh… no,” she muttered, and then added a disgusted and much belated: “Sir.”
“Glad to hear it, private. Over and out.”
The line went dead.
Kitty sank back on the sand in relief. She shot up to her elbows again. That hadn’t been Lucy or William, she was sure of it.
Who the hell was Killjoy?
And why was he coming to get her?
Footsteps crunched closer, audible only because of a brief lapse in the violent coughing of a distant machine gun. Kitty spun around, scrambling up in time for the advancing stranger to grab her helmet and jerk it off her head — tearing free her earpiece in the process.
“Hey—”
“Shut it,” the man barked.
Kitty froze, her immobility caused from part shock, part fear. The player’s avatar looked like it had engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a combine harvester. A deep scar traced the curve of his jaw, his dark hair close-cropped, dusted with beach sand and patches of blood. Pale blue eyes squinted at her, crow’s feet etched deep into the corners. His camouflage uniform was a mottled mixture of sandy browns and jungle greens, torn in several places, bloodied in even more.
The man tossed her head gear aside and grabbed hold of the front of her fatigues, dragging her avatar closer. Kitty looked down in shock, mouth opening to cuss at him for laying hands on her person… but instead of the ample bosom she’d expected and half-hoped to see, the rest of her was as manly as the hands she’d spotted earlier.
