That was when the sun disappeared, and everything stopped.
Another man, any other man, would have been staggered. By the abruptness of it all. By the overwhelming totality. Would have fallen to his knees and covered his eyes in fear. It did not just go dark: the sun literally vanished. Around Sharffen, nothing moved. Not a bird, not a scavenging canine: nothing. Frowning, he started forward. Within moments he had encountered a decimated platoon of retreating troops. Motionless as statues, their expressions frozen in fear or concern or contemplation, they stood where they had been stopped. Reaching out, he felt of necks and chests. There was no movement. No pulsing of veins, no beating of hearts. Yet they did not appear to be dead. Only petrified.
What the hell was this? he wondered.
His first thought, naturally, was that the invading Durgeon had unleashed some new weapon. Some kind of raybeam that produced instant paralysis. But what could that have to do with the disappearance of the sun? Continuing onward, his progress illuminated by a dim glow whose source he could not discern but for which he was inordinately grateful, he encountered more and more fleeing soldiers and occasionally their mechanized transport. All were stilled in place. Nothing moved around him, not even a forlorn butterfly.
That was when he had the idea.
The skid lay where it had stopped, brought to a halt when it had been abandoned. Its operator, a corporal, lay decapitated in a ditch nearby, the wide open eyes of his guillotined head gazing toward eternity. Stepping onto the personal transport, Sharffen spoke to the ignition. It ignored him and refused to start up until he used the senior officer override built into his own communicator. Upon accepting the necessary sequence it rose silently beneath him. Entering the desired coordinates as best he could remember them, he checked to make sure the energy level of the slenderslicer mounted on the front of the skid held at least half a charge before he gave the command to accelerate. Directly toward the enemy lines.
Given the pace at which the humans had been retreating he did not expect much time to elapse before he encountered the first Durgeon troops. Sure enough, a cluster of them soon hove into view. Bipedal, bisymmetrical, scaled, and vaguely Piscean in appearance, their bulbous skulls and flaring armor made them stand out from the surrounding dark and devastated terrain. Bending slightly forward, Sharffen prepared to let loose with the slicer.
That was when he noticed that they were as locked in place as the troops he had left behind.
Slowing the skid, riding its repellers half a meter above the torn-up ground, he soared past them. Not a one turned slitted eyes in his direction. Not a weapon swung around to bear on the intrusive human target. The light here was as bad as that behind him, the sun just as absent. The reality of the situation came crashing home without the need for additional verification.
In all the world, or at least this corner of it, General Valentin Sharffen was the only thing that moved.
Absorbing the monstrous totality of his motionless surroundings he flew onward until eventually he reached his objective: the Durgeon field headquarters. Drawing his sidearm as he hopped off the hovering skid, he made his way past ranks of waiting alien soldiers, past blast doors that were halfway open, down a shielded tunnel, until at last he found himself in the inner sanctum. Intimately familiar as he was with Durgeon devices, within moments he was standing beside the commanding alien officer. The High Marshal was staring at a float screen that showed the field of battle: position of ground forces, armor, artillery, the topographic layout, and much more.
Raising his pistol, Sharffen placed the end of the muzzle against the side of the Marshal’s head, just between the two fin-like auditory organs that flared from the left side of the skull. It would only take him a minute to assassinate the Marshal and his entire staff. Sharffen could take his time, striding around the command center while eliminating them one by one. His finger tensed on the trigger. Start with the Marshal and then … and then …
He hesitated, pondering. The urge to follow through, to kill, was powerful within him. Powerful, but not quite overpowering. Sharffen prided himself on being a soldier who could grasp the entire field of battle, much as a chessmaster might analyze the board before him and the position of the pieces upon it. More than a little was happening that made no sense. Taking out the Durgeon senior staff made sense, yes, but only in the context of everything else making sense. Which, he was starting to think, it did not.
Lowering the pistol, he rested it on his lap as he sat down in an oversized alien chair to wait for some sense to return.
He was awakened from having dozed off by the return of sound and movement around him. As if nothing had happened, the Durgeon resumed everything they had been doing before the paralysis had struck. Tacticians poured over their readouts and screens, assistants strode purposefully through the command chamber, others argued in their high-pitched, rapid-fire speech.
Needless to say, recognition of his presence was met with a combination of fear and shock.
He sat calmly as half a dozen weapons were hastily drawn and aimed in his direction. Listening to the confused chatter that now surrounded him, he was almost amused. Another time he might have enjoyed their panic. Not now. Not when something greater than immediate success in battle was at stake. What had happened to the sun, for example. Having finished first in class in Durgeon speech studies, he had no difficulty understanding what was being said around him.
“You can shoot me any time you wish,” he finally interjected. Immediately, discussion ceased in his vicinity. They were clearly surprised and startled by his fluency. “I would ask that you first hear me out.”
It was the Marshal himself (Sharffen decided to reference it as a “him,” as the Durgeon were not gender-specific) who approached.
“I am Culd-ad-Culm, Commander of the Fourth Force.” Wide, bulging eyes took the measure of the impossible intruder. “I detect that you are a twice-general officer. Your presence here is inexplicable. I do not understand.” A flexible three-fingered hand indicated the surrounding arc of equally fish-eyed subordinates. “None of us comprehend. How did you get in here? Have your kind mastered teleportation?”
“That would be easier to understand than what has actually happened.” Feeling no fear, Sharffen displayed none. His striking presence and confidence was no more lost on the aliens than they had been on his own troops.
He proceeded to explain what he had experienced in the course of the preceding day. Disbelief was universal, as he knew it would be. Just as he knew he had only one viable card to play.
“If I am hallucinating all this, then nothing will come of it. I will become your prisoner, to do with as you wish. If, on the other hand, similar circumstances should recur, as I suspect they might, then I will find a way to prove it to you.”
The Marshal gestured his comprehension. “You realize, surely, that regardless of whether your incredible elucidation proves to have any basis in reality or not, you can never leave this place alive.”
Sharffen’s expression betrayed no feeling. “If I am wrong, then you are right. If I am right, then our lives may mean nothing anyway. Give me two days.”
Culd-ad-Culm’s huge eyes rolled in their sockets like glycerin-slickened ball bearings. “In two days we will have driven your surviving soldiers to the bank of the great river, and the battle will be over.”
“If I am right,” Sharffen replied tersely, “in two days we may all be over.”
It did not take two days. According to Sharffen’s communicator, less than one had passed when the paralysis struck again. As for himself, he felt nothing. Not a tingle, not a shock, not a moment of inexplicable disorientation. Nothing. But around him, all movement ceased and the light dimmed. From High Marshal Culd-ad-Culm down to the lowliest member of the Durgeon fighting order, motion ceased. The battle screens froze, indicators ceased functioning. Everything simply—stopped.
Rising from the seat where he had been ordered to remain, he walked slowly around the Marshal and a pair
of his subalterns. Picking up first the Marshal, who weighed less than the average human male, he carried him out of the command chamber and through the access tunnel before finally lying him down gently beside a refuse tank. Returning to the room he repeated the action one at a time with three of the Marshal’s staff, positioning them beside each other. Recovering the pistol that had been taken from him, he added a Durgeon sidearm from an unresponsive subofficer before walking back outside. Then he settled down to wait. Adding to the enveloping strangeness, he did not feel tired nor any need to sleep.
As before, the return of movement, sound, and light awoke him. To his credit, Culd-ad-Culm was the first not only to awake but to attempt an evaluation of the incomprehensible.
“Here.” Having displayed his ownership of both weapons, Sharffen proceeded to pass them back to his enemies. Still stunned, one of the Marshal’s subordinates accepted them, fully realizing the import of the human’s gesture.
Utterly bewildered, another asked, “How did we get out here?”
“I carried you.” Sharffen nodded back toward the entrance to the command bunker. Startled soldiers were talking among themselves and gesturing in the direction of their superiors, who were slowly awakening and trying to make sense of what had happened to them. Sharffen continued.
“I brought you outside, arranged you on the ground, and took the two guns simply to show that I could have killed you without effort.”
“But you did not.” The alien commander was staring at him. “Why did you not?”
General Valentin Sharffen’s voice was grim. “Because I think we are engaged in a three-way battle with a mutual enemy that is unseen and unidentified, and if we do not join forces or at the very least forge some kind of a truce, that in the end we will both be annihilated.”
“Aw, man!”
Tyrone leaned toward the screen. No doubt about it: the image was frozen. Before checking with Lewis, he tried several tried and true techniques for unfreezing the action. None of them worked. Adjusting the pickup mike that looped downward from his headphones, he spoke to his friend.
“Lew, I’m all jammed up here.”
The reply was a surprise but not a shock. “You too? I thought it was only at my end. Just happened. You tried unfreeze, save and restart, different battle screen?”
“All of the above.” His frustrated friend leaned back slightly in his chair. His room was small but cozy and when he was into what was on screen, he felt it doubled in size. “Man, I don’t wanna reboot! Stuff was just hotting up!”
“You don’t want to reboot?” Lewis’ voice was arch with frustration. “I was kicking your ass! You think I want to reboot?”
“I was just reassembling my forces,” a defensive Tyrone muttered back.
“Sure you were.” His friend’s smugness came through plainly. “On top of all your dead bodies. Seriously though, man, I don’t think we have a choice.”
Tyrone sighed as his fingers moved toward the keyboard. “Fuck it, then. I’m saving.” A brief pause. “Rebooting now.”
While his machine shut down and restarted, he considered the possibilities. None of them were encouraging. Hopefully the freeze was just the result of a one-time, undefined glitch. It wasn’t impossible. If that was the case, in the end all it would cost them was some game time. He liked playing against Lewis. His friend was an excellent tactician and knew pretty much everything there was to know about the game. His weakness was a reluctance to commit sufficient forces to go for a swift kill. In their head-to-head competitions, they were running about even. When they combined to play the MMU version of the game they usually stomped all over their opponents. Even the gang from Seoul.
It did not take long for his souped-up machine to flash ready. Reloading the game, Tyrone was pleased to see that it had returned to the exact spot where play had frozen. Well, maybe he wasn’t entirely pleased. Despite what he had said, there was no question that Lewis, who was directing the Durgeon this time, was well ahead on body count as well as battlefield position. Without waiting for his friend to acknowledge that he had reloaded and hoping to gain a few meters of battleground, Tyrone eagerly gripped his joystick and prepared to move a squad of demolition experts toward an as-yet-incomplete alien turret emplacement.
The joystick moved, but the figures depicted did not move. The screen remained frozen. Sitting back, he slapped the arms of his chair hard and muttered “Shit!” The still-connected Lewis hailed him via the headphones.
“I heard that. Double it for me.”
“You still froze up too?”
“Yeah. What the hell, man?”
His co-player took a deep breath. “Virus?”
“Can’t be.” Tyrone could almost see Lewis, who lived on the other side of town, shaking his head. “I’ve got every antivirus program you can think of on my machine, plus double firewalls. Not even my student loan coordinator can get through without raising two or three pop-up alerts.”
“Pretty much the same here.” Tyrone’s anger subsided as his curiosity intensified. “Can’t be a Trojan, either. For the same reasons. Wonder if Gcube is doing an unannounced update?”
“Shouldn’t do that without telling players they’ll be interrupting gameplay,” Lewis responded, referring to the name of the game company. “Still, I suppose it’s not unprecedented. I’m going to …”
“… check my machine,” Tyrone finished for him. He was already entering commands.
Relief was forthcoming. “You were right, bro. That’s all it is. Don’t know why the game should freeze just to acquire a new character, though. Should be able to continue play while the upgrade downloads.”
“It’s your character,” Lewis shot back. “Human soldier. I’ve got him in my file, too.”
Studying the sidebar, Tyrone read aloud. “Valentin Sharffen. Major General, United Planetary Defense Forces. Born Yekaterinberg, Russia. Height six-four, weight 220. Graduated first in class Tactics, first in class Global Strategics, second in class Gunnery, first in class … this character’s a bit much, Lew. I’m looking for the usual counter-programmed faults and I’m not seeing any.”
His friend had a reasonable comeback. “Maybe they’re downloading him to you in the hopes that he can save your ugly butt. Going to take more than one senior officer to resist the Durgeon tide, though.”
“That so? Let’s see. I’ll try engaging him via Direct Field Command.”
Once again, nothing worked. The screen, and the game, remained unresponsive.
“Crap, crap, crap!” Tyrone would’ve hit the keyboard if he’d thought it would have done any good. “I’m still dead here.”
“Me too. Look, maybe it’s a new kind of trojan.”
“What kind of trojan resists you installing it?” Tyrone snapped.
“I don’t know. I’m a gamer, not a black hacker. The game was working perfectly until this new character was downloaded, or uploaded, or whatever. Right now I’m thinking if we delete him we can get back to where we were.”
Tyrone considered. “Why not just go back and do a general restore, from yesterday?”
“Might not get rid of the install,” Lewis countered. “Or it might work and we’d find ourselves back at this same point all over again, still froze up.”
“Fine, fine.” Anxious to resume play, Tyrone was ready to try anything. He moved the gun cursor over the new character bar. “Let’s do it together, then. One, two … delete.” He entered the necessary control sequence.
There was a very bright flash and a muffled snapping sound. It crackled throughout the two-story suburban house, reaching far enough and loud enough to distract the woman in the kitchen from her dinner preparations. Wiping her hands with a dish towel, she called out toward the back of the building.
“Tyrone? Tyrone, you okay back there? You’re not messin’ around with that fake laser again, are you? Tyrone!”
That boy, she thought as she put the towel down on the counter and headed for his room. Why couldn’t he get himself
with something sensible, like football or girls, instead of sitting staring at that computer all day? Boy didn’t get enough sunshine, let alone exercise.
His door was closed, as usual. Unusually, a strong acrid smell was sifting through from the other side.
“Tyrone! I told you that if you were gonna keep smokin’ that stuff you needed to do it …”
Her voice broke off as she opened the door. Her boy, pride of the freshman class at the nearby college, was lying on his back on the floor. His eyes were wide open. So was his mouth. Smoke rose from the blackened, carbonized tip of his right forefinger. He was not moving. First she screamed, then she ran back to the kitchen to dial 911, knocking over two hallway tables and a standing lamp in the process.
The call to the lawyers came later.
The scandal was sizeable, the payouts considerable. As a result of the defective game-cum-console, three deaths in total were attributable to the still unresolved anomaly. Tyrone Landsford and Lewis Chang in Los Angeles, and a continent away and fifteen minutes later, valedictorian and bound-for-Yale high school senior Martin Goldberg of Brooklyn Heights, New York.
Gcube reacted about as quickly as could be expected, given the unprecedented and incomprehensible nature of the problem. Just not quickly enough, the vampirish pundits declared, to prevent the deaths of three talented and promising young men.
Even though no one else died or was injured, the online version of Durgeon Invasion: Part IV was simply wiped from existence as rapidly as possible. Though it cost the gaming company a bundle, they really had no other choice. Besides, the financial hit was nothing compared to the PR disaster. Whether they continued gameplay harmlessly or not, all physical copies of the game were immediately remotely disabled, followed by instructions that they should be deleted from their hosting hard drives in lieu of a potential life-threatening hazard. Double refunds were promised. Gcube was big enough that it could survive the blow.
The Flavors of Other Worlds Page 18
