I waited for cooldown and he charged again in my direction but missed. Still, for the record, the glancing blow to my shoulder was enough to fling me back and steal a few seconds with stun. Damn these game mechanics. Nevertheless, they were the same factor that allowed my fists to bash through his armor like a tin can.
Realizing his goose was cooked, Terry used everything he had. Draining a red flask, fully restoring his health, he grabbed his shield again and swapped out his broken helmet for another. I was back where I started, except my own health was down to half. I was surprised at my own arrogance. I could have at least stocked up on health potions before the tournament.
Terry was cognizant of the time. Eventually the Sudden Death curse would kick in so, hiding behind his five-foot shield, he was making sharp lunges, trying to reach me with his sword without giving me a chance to break through his defenses. His tactic didn’t surprise me, though. His ultimate abil, the one he used to take down the assassin, had a long cooldown and he was waiting for it to come back around. Beyond that, he had an advantage for Sudden Death, because his health, unlike mine, was full.
“The final match, which started so brilliantly, has now become one of our most boring. I do believe this is the dullest battle I’ve ever seen,” came the commentator’s booming voice. “Scyth has the morale advantage, but there’s a catch. Terry’s tactic of running out the clock gives him the upper hand overall...”
I suddenly saw a timer counting down the last thirty seconds before Sudden Death. Terry was no longer coming at me. In fact, he was backing away, drawing out time.
I took out my bow. I pulled back the string, felt an arrow materialize, added a thousand points of plague energy and ran at the warrior. From ten feet away, I loosed an arrow, threw away the now useless bow and leapt forward.
The shot outdid all my expectations: his epic shield, having already lost a great deal of durability to my innumerable Hammers, shuddered and fell to pieces, leaving Terry holding just a handle. Then came his turn to feel what it was like to get hit by a train. Inertia flung him back into the magical barrier. Sparks flew, I smelled roast meat, and a shout of pain filled the arena.
I didn’t let him get back up, breaking his helmet again with a couple of strong blows and Hammers.
“Sudden death!” a demonic voice bellowed.
And the curse timer gave a tick, taking down Terry’s last percent of life.
To the sound of a fanfare over the arena, I saw a banner twirl overhead: “Scyth has defeated Terry! Scyth is champion of the Bubbling Flagon tournament!”
What had I started! Tashot’s words of elation were drowned out by the shrieks of the girls. Some cursed, crying over a gambling loss, some rained insults at Terry the “loser.” Master Sagda shouted in excitement... I helped the warrior up and, unlike Plasmagun the mage, he shook my hand:
“Thank god I didn’t lose the epic,” he said, picking up his restored shield. Wiping the blood off his face, Terry grinned. “I watched the video of you fighting Crag. You’re a real weirdo, Scyth! Levelling unarmed that high... Once you get into the open world, every clan will be trying to tempt you right to their base with a high salary!”
“I wasn’t expecting you to resist so fiercely,” I said. “Plasmagun said it was already decided and you were going to throw the tournament to him. He said there were some important guys...”
“Who? Plasma? Did he offer you money? He’s famous for trying to rig these things, don’t listen to him!” Terry exclaimed. “That was how he, like, won the last semifinal. Obviously, the guy who threw that fight to him didn’t get a dime.”
“I thought you two were working together,” I said, remembering when they spoke before the final.
“Oh, yeah. He told me to throw the battle. He was hoping he could get back what he lost by betting on you.”
“And?”
“I said no, and he ran off to bet on me. What an unlucky idiot, huh?”
“But you placed a bet before the final too, I saw it...”
“Scyth, I’m a good guy, don’t freak out.” He hugged me at the shoulders and we started walking out. “I bet a hundred on myself to lose so I would end up in the green no matter what. Anyway, let’s go inside. They’re about to pay out.”
The crowd was back in the tavern and only Tashot, Sagda, Manny, Trixie and my girls were still near the barrier. Accepting their congratulations, I saw the unarmed combat trainer, his gaze latched into me. He nodded, grabbed me by the head, came right up to my face and said:
“Tomorrow at eight AM outside my school. You have potential, boy.”
Interlude 2. Bellamy
BELLAMY DRAKE had never been a fan of the special projects emergency conference room. It was a real hole in an underground bunker totally disconnected from the outside world. Impenetrable to every wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum, the walls seemed to encapsulate not only space but time as well. And Bellamy was claustrophobic so, if he had his way, he wouldn’t go down there more than once per year and then only for a very large amount of money. And for ten minutes max. And maybe not at all.
But his job required it. Recently, projects like Pilgrim and HCMO[4] Cali Bottom had begun to intersect and such meetings were becoming more and more frequent. The last one was only a month ago, and now here they were again, to discuss issues that couldn’t bear even the most secure virtual environments restricted exclusively for company employees. In the real world. In a bunker ten thousand feet below the earth.
The head of project Pilgrim, the eternally youthful Kiran Jackson, a man with Indian roots and a private island in the Pacific Ocean, had worked for Snowstorm so long he made everyone else there look like a rookie. Even Peter Gowatsky, lead on the Cali Bottom project, who’d been at Snowstorm a quarter century, had less experience. Curiously for a man with a Polish surname, Peter came from South America and had a British father and Brazilian mother.
Both leaders were now exchanging morose glances as they listened to a report from someone on the project Pilgrim team.
“As you can see, continuing to develop the HCMO project is not in our best interest,” he concluded.
“What is the maximum duration of a game session for a controlled object?” Jackson asked.
“Twenty-one hours, Kiran,” he answered. Jackson, you see, required employees call him by his first name. “All the testers had noncitizen pods with curtailed functionality and no life support systems.”
“Take the ten most successful testers.” Kiran began. He hadn’t yet said anything, but the presenter and Gowatsky had started taking notes. “Give them pods with life support. Gently suggest they gradually increase the length of their game sessions, starting with twenty-four hours, and going up to twenty-six. Record all deviations in standard and game behavior, track even the most miniscule changes in brain structure.”
“What about the others?” Gowatsky asked.
“Get rid of them,” Kiran waved it off, dismayed that he had to explain such elementary matters. “Heart attacks, strokes, give them something. Tragic incidents happen every day in noncitizen pods.”
“Yes sir,” Peter nodded.
“Alright, let’s wrap up the HCMO topic for now. Or are there any questions about the Cali project?”
“No, Kiran, everything is clear,” Peter called back.
Bellamy had always thought the idea of giving people control over nonplayer characters was a stupid idea. But it was closely tied to his project Pilgrim, which he was just as motivated to see succeed as Gowatsky himself. As he waited for the previous speaker to clear the podium, he worked up some nerve then got up where everyone could see him.
“Go ahead, Bell,” Kiran nodded.
“Colleagues, let me get straight to business,” Bellamy started, clearing his throat. “As you know, beyond my main work for project Pilgrim, I am also leader of the threat department. As a matter of fact, I was on the team that pioneered the very concept, and have stayed on to keep watch. As far as we know, the entity known
as Patrick is the only relatively successful instance of transferring a human mind into Disgardium. Patrick O’Grady, a disabled veteran of World War Three, was convicted of mass murder. For those who aren’t aware, he shot his own wife and friends one day before his wedding. For that, he was sentenced to death. He was subsequently transferred to one of our prisons, where his sentence was to be carried out. Three years ago, we managed to completely transfer his mind into a nonplayer character named Patrick O’Grady, which we created a year prior to the experiment. His real body was subjected to IDE, or instant death effect, which by the way did not damage its viability. The very instant he died, his mind was transported into the virtual world, and his body died. Brain activity then trailed off and his heart stopped. That became a separate research topic...”
“Bell,” Kiran interrupted him. “You’re getting off topic.”
“Okay,” Drake agreed. “We all remember celebrating our first success. As far as we knew then, it was merely a matter of duplicating those exact conditions and presto! We thought we had a pipeline for mind transfers, which would both solve the resettlement issue, and stage one of project Pilgrim. But our celebration was premature. All subsequent tests ended in failure. What was more, the digitized Patrick’s behavior defied all rational expectations. The carefully prepared legend, the story of his character. It all broke down because he retained fragmentary memories from his past life. His mind rejected the intrusive memories but, to this day, he has flashbacks to real events from his life on earth, confusing them with false ones from his invented history. And we were about to write it off as a failure and isolate him, but then something changed.”
“What exactly?” someone from Gowatsky’s team asked.
Acting on habit, Bellamy forgot he was in meat space and tried to read the man’s profile, but then turned his gaze to a badge that read “Max Kolesnikov.”
“Have I already mentioned that I am in charge of the threats department, Max?” He turned to Kolesnikov but, while talking, slowly led his gaze around the whole conference room. “The threat system is self-regulating and kills a few birds with one stone. First, it gets rid of imbalanced players. And those will always exist, because we cannot predict everything. Second, it’s a marketing gimmick that adds thrill and the element of surprise for normal players. And third is something we never talk about. The very concept of labeling things ‘threats to the world’ go back into the twentieth century. Communism, nuclear war, Islamist terrorism, drug cartels, global warming, the machine revolt, the lunar insurgency, resettlement. All those things taught humanity to unite in the face of a common threat. After globalization, people needed new threats to remain a united, controllable herd. In Disgardium, contrived, minor threats are labeled that way non-stop, as if they really posed a problem. But not too long ago, Dis saw a totally new kind of threat. A completely authentic, significant danger. And not one we created intentionally.”
“Bell, thanks for the tangent, but let’s stay on topic,” Kiran said.
“Just a sec,” Bellamy nodded. “Has everyone heard that there is now a threat with a potential class of A? And strange as it may be, it was Patrick that initiated the chain of very unlikely events. One day, in a mental fog, he left the city where he’s bound and wandered into a zone that’s off limits to normal players. NPC’s not only give it a wide berth; they simply cannot see the area. On the edge of the location, which is called the Mire, there is an NPC camp that gives quests for local monsters. But then, miles deeper, it becomes a ‘blind zone.’ Players have no way of getting there. The muck sucks them in and, if they use a Waterwalking Potion, endless groups of mobs will come from the whole Mire with a respawn rate of five seconds. It’s just impossible to get through. It was a location we cordoned off because of the ‘Awakening of the Sleeping Gods’ scenario, which is embedded in the core.”
“I think we could do with some more detail here,” Kiran nodded. “Not everyone here knows about this problem, Bellamy.”
“Of course,” Drake called back eagerly. “Before the whole threat concept was first launched, one of the initial lead developers added a global apocalypse scenario to the core of Disgardium. At that time, triggering it made the end of the world a virtual certainty. Now...”
“Just a minute,” Gowatsky interrupted. “Bellamy, if this is such a nuclear bomb, why wasn’t the scenario simply deleted?”
“It’s impossible, Peter,” Kiran answered in Drake’s stead. “The core of the game is immutable. It contains the world’s physics, its nature, the very rules it lives by. It’s basically the same as rebooting our world. All current civilizations would be destroyed, wiped off the map. We’d have to start over again from bacteria, and that would take a very long time...”
“We’re talking about restarting evolution and letting it run until consciousness is reborn. And this time it might not be people who get it. That much is clear, Kiran...” Gowatsky yawned and, digging in his pocket, popped a ‘booster,’ a legalized drug that enhanced mental activity and reduced exhaustion. The drug also had an anesthetic effect, so the next phrase he said was somewhat garbled: “But Dis isn’t the real world. Locations, mobs, NPC’s. All of those things were written and designed for one...”
“No. They would be different NPC’s, Peter. Don’t you get it? AI’s live in this world without ever guessing that they are nothing more than an intelligent crystal. They recognize themselves as people, orcs or whatever they’re registered as and, when they die, they are reborn in different characters, starting all over again from zero. You need to slow down on the boosters, you’re killing yourself. And you can’t even remember basic facts.”
“Oh my god, Kiran!” Peter rolled his eyes. “I can take another two doses before I hit the proven safe limit, then I’m going to bed. Everything is fine, don’t worry. Bellamy? Sorry for the interruption, keep going, please.”
Drake smiled, reaching for his own boosters, but changed his mind. It wasn’t worth compromising himself before his colleagues. Perhaps technically he had equal standing with Gowatsky but, as a favorite son of the founders, Peter could get away with things no mere mortal was allowed.
“So then, colleagues. We’re talking about a simply fantastic coincidence of nearly unbelievable events!” Bellamy brought up some slides for all to see.
Intrigued, people stood from their chairs and surrounded the panoramic image. Each of the three-dimensional spinning holoslides showed a different scene. Drake started explaining each of them:
“Event one. The entity known as Patrick is overcome by a flashback from his previous life and goes insane, slaughtering his entire patrol squadron. The only survivor is a nonplayer character named Jane, a mage who created an illusion of her own corpse and fled. Confused, weak and devoid of mana, she is captured by a band of orcs near Tuatha. They sell her as a slave to a local ruler, who adds her to his harem, but she escapes and makes it to Darant. There she discovers that her father killed himself, thinking his daughter was dead, so Jane decides to stay in the capital of the Commonwealth, enrolling in the University of Magic.”
They were listening to Bellamy with bated breath. Everyone already knew about the class-A threat, but this was the first they would be hearing of the potential consequences and how it was intertwined with projects Pilgrim and HCMO Cali Bottom. Only Kiran stuck his nose into his comm, but there was nothing new for him there.
“Event two. Patrick wanders the Gloomwood then into the Mire. There he falsely triggers the Sleeping Gods scenario. Patrick returns to town, comes to his senses and the scenario is aborted.”
Bellamy flicked to the next set of slides, showing a picture of a gaunt barefoot young man in a pair of canvas pants and a shirt.
“Event three. Scyth, a level-one player, who started a year and a half prior and had not yet levelled his character at all, suddenly angers AI Peter Whiteacre and is given a quest to clear zone X 4, one of...”
“The ones we control,” Gowatsky spoke up, looming over the slide. “The crypt of the
temple of Nergal the Radiant in Tristad. I remember that incident. The zone was under control of HCMO Andrei Clayton, a disabled noncitizen. Clayton surrendered to Scyth.”
“You’re skipping a few things, Peter.” Bellamy pushed him gently and said: “Event four. Patrick is begging on the street. Scyth refuses to give him money for a drink, which makes him mad and – this is important! – curses him!”
“What do you mean?” a few voices came in chorus.
“Literally. The aborted scenario, and Patrick’s unusual nature created a permanent connection between his mind and one of the Sleeping Gods, Behemoth. Patrick’s anger was strong enough for the Sleeping God to feel, so it was able to make his curse a real game element, the permanent curse Restless Soul. But as a novel effect, absent from all our databases, there was no way for anyone to read that Scyth had the debuff. It appeared only in his profile and only the player himself could read it. That was event four.”
Apostle of the Sleeping Gods Page 23
