It was a decision that had earned him a ton of Hate points, which he knew converted to ready made credits in the outside world. He’d accumulated a crapload of XP, boosted his STR to insane levels, and found the perfect weapon to compliment his build and playing style. Most of all, he’d survived the day. His third day on Oakshield Junction, the most brutal Immersion RPG going around.
And yet he felt indescribably flat as he passed into the shade cast by the imposing tomb. Kain had flippantly mentioned the blood on his hands, but it was true. There was blood on his hands. Before today, he wouldn’t have cared in the slightest. After all, these were just NPCs, right? Lines of code written for Oakshield Junction.
But his disturbing conversation with Prince Alain had shown him otherwise. There was growing evidence to suggest that Neutron Syndicate had begun replacing computer-generated NPCs with real ones. That their pursuit of hyper-realism had taken an extremely dark turn.
By killing Jannibar, Nick had indirectly orphaned thousands of children somewhere in Durandor. Each of those corpses had families. Real families with all the intensity of human emotion that came with them. Grief. Fear. Anger. Sorrow. Shame.
Nick felt sick as he walked down a flight of ancient steps tucked into the side of the tomb entrance. A long tunnel stretched into darkness at the bottom. The light seemed to fade more with each step. He paused and closed his eyes as the world faded. It was over. Time to face the real world again.
Nick didn’t want to leave the embrace of the Immersion gel. There were too many hard decisions waiting for him on the other side. He groaned inwardly as strong arms hauled him from the tank and left him dripping on the ladder. He climbed down and gratefully accepted his clothes.
Ern was standing a few yards away, fingers dancing over his roving lightscreen.
“A solid day,” he murmured without looking up. “A few more like that and we might make a runner of you yet.”
“You don’t mean that,” Nick found himself saying. It was a reflex action, borne from intense anger and frustration. The producer raised his eyebrows, clearly not relishing another fight with his precocious pixel runner.
“All Neutron cares about are ratings,” Nick continued. “You couldn’t get rid of me now if you tried.”
“Then fuckin’ walk, kid,” Ern replied harshly. “Take a fucking walk out that door.”
Nick was overcome with such intense anger that he decided to call the bastard’s bluff.
“I quit,” he muttered, glaring at Ern as he walked past. There was deathly silence as he picked his way through the assistants and techies.
As he emerged into the street and called a flyer, Nick was beset by conflicting emotions. One was relief. Relief that he didn’t have to front up tomorrow. Relief that the emotional meat grinder that was Oakshield Junction was now over. He didn’t like what the game was doing to his mind. It was changing him, morphing him into someone he didn’t want to be. Someone he’d never been. Certainly not someone his long-dead mother would’ve recognized.
The other predominant emotion was regret. Regret that he’d just thrown away a golden opportunity to make some money and establish a career for himself. Well-paid work was such a rarity where he was from that it seemed like utter madness to throw it away for moral reasons.
But that was exactly what he’d done. There was no going back. His one consolation was that he had Emily. Without the game, he’d probably still be with Helena. He smiled at the thought of seeing his new girl that night. It’d been another draining day and the thought of her warm bed made his heart perform wild somersaults.
She sent him a message as he waited for the flyer.
CAN YOU MEET ME IN THE ATRIUM PLEASE?
Nick frowned - he thought they were due to meet somewhere else. He let her know he’d be there in twenty minutes. A flyer arrived and whisked him away into the late afternoon gloom. The clear skies of the morning seemed like a distant memory as the craft weaved its way between dull, windowless hab blocks.
Nick bounded up Emily’s internal stairwell toward the atrium. She was standing awkwardly by a table. A young couple were canoodling in the corner.
“Should we go somewhere else?” she asked nervously.
“Let’s just ignore them,” Nick said, sensing she had something to say. She looked at him with eyes that had died somewhere between last night and the present moment.
“I’m sorry, Nick,” she said quietly. “I don’t think it’s going to work.”
Nick blinked, wondering if this was just her twisted sense of humor.
“I’m sorry for wasting your time,” she continued, her eyes searching his.
So it was real. Nick felt like his insides were on fire.
“I don’t understand,” he blurted. “We’ve only been ...”
Emily nodded, fighting back tears. She backed away to the exit.
“I’d like to be friends. The nurse that looks after your father.”
“Don’t bring him into it,” Nick said in a voice thick with anger. She bowed her head.
“I’m sorry. It’s just one of those things.”
She had almost disappeared when Nick had a sudden thought.
“You watched today’s episode, didn’t you?”
The look on her face said it all. She’d probably configured her cast to follow BaronFuckAss around all day. She would’ve seen everything. His attack on the trading outpost followed by his humiliating defeat. His interlude with Alain’s whore, Syl. His decision to sacrifice the lives of thousands just so he could prove his fighting prowess against Prince Jannibar.
Emily had seen what she thought was the real Nick. She didn’t understand games well enough to know that it was all a facade. That the hesitant boy she was looking at was pretty much all there was.
“I should never have made you watch that,” he said in a tiny voice.
“I’m glad I did,” she said, a tear sliding down her cheek. She turned her back and was gone.
Nick stood alone for several minutes before realizing the young couple in the corner were giving him dark looks. He made his way out to the street and called a flyer without even thinking about it. He was numb. An automaton.
There were no words to describe the utter devastation in his chest. Emily couldn’t have hurt him any more if she tried. He should’ve accepted that she didn’t understand games. Accepted that his ‘other’ life was best left private. Although he knew the persona he presented to Oakshield Junction wasn’t very likable, he couldn’t help but feel that a rejection of his gaming personality was a rejection of him.
“Angel Hospital,” he muttered to the pilot as he strapped himself into the passenger seat. He barely registered the journey, instead poring over Emily’s every word. His mind was in a dark place as he exited the machine and trudged through the hospital’s roof terminal.
Nick expected his father to be asleep, but instead his head was covered with a blanket. Unable to breathe, Nick looked around for a nurse. He eventually found one buried in her night station.
“There must be a mistake,” he said in a quavering voice. “That’s not my father out there.”
The nurse sensed Nick’s panic and took him by the arm.
“You must be Nick,” she said, gently leading him back to his father’s room. “I’m sorry. We sent you a note this afternoon.”
Nick looked stupidly at his wrist pad. He hadn’t received a registered note since Helena’s cousin dropped the unit in the hab stairwell.
Rendered helpless by the blistering emotions blowing through him, he shot a despairing glance at the bed. That was his father’s face under there, cold and lifeless. Never again would it shower kindness on Nick’s dark moods. Never again would it radiate understanding in the face of Nick’s many failures. Never again would it be Nick’s north star in a frightening, uncertain world.
A choked sob fell from his lips.
“Please,” the nurse said, guiding him to a plastic chair on the other side of the bed. “Best I leave you alone for a while.”
And with that she was gone. Nick was left staring at the corpse. What the hell was he supposed to do now? He didn’t dare pull back the blanket, preferring to remember his father as the vibrant, passionate man he was.
Time was irrelevant as he sat and stared at the wall. Hours may have passed, it didn’t seem to matter. When a doctor knocked on the door he decided it was time to go. He could work out the release details later. Right then all he wanted to do was get away.
The address he gave the pilot was automatic. Where else but Sea Eagle? There was no date with Emily, no rendezvous with his father. He hadn’t realized how important his visits to Angel Hospital had become. Every day for three years. It had become part of the fabric of his life. What did he have now? He was standing at the edge of a gaping abyss.
An unknown man was standing guard at Nick’s front door.
“Where’s Mike?” Nick asked as he approached. He realized that he desperately wanted something, anything, to remain unchanged from earlier that morning. To reassure him that the world did indeed still exist, and that he hadn’t stepped into a grotesque fever dream.
“Mike won’t be on this detail any longer,” said the man in a bland voice. “Don’t worry, I’ll watch over you tonight.”
Nick’s heart officially sank through the floor. What the fuck was going on?
“Are you from Neutron?” he asked.
The man clenched his jaw and turned away, making a show of watching the stairwell.
“Just head inside, sir.”
Nick was beyond disappointment. Beyond fear. A living ghoul, he entered his trashed apartment and curled up in the least disgusting corner.
There was absolutely nothing left to do, or think, so he let the sweet embrace of exhaustion take over.
+4
Nick woke feeling like he’d drowned and was slowly rising to the surface of some distant, alien lake. His heart lurched when he realized that the nightmare of last night wasn’t a nightmare at all - the cold, silent abyss was still there.
His father was dead. Nothing else mattered. Not his failed romance with Emily, not the trashing of his apartment, not his voluntary departure from Oakshield Junction.
Terence Stanners was gone and Nick had failed to support him in his last days. Instead, he’d been running around like a lunatic on a competitive game cast. Somewhere along the line his priorities had crumbled and he’d veered from his tried and true path.
Why didn’t he just accept a cleaning job and be done with it? Why did he feel the need to bow down before the unholy God of Immersion gaming? A God who had mercilessly torn him limb from limb?
The living room did nothing to improve his mental state. Broken furniture, walls smeared with feces. His old Sentinel gaming unit lay shattered by the wall. Nick needed a distraction, and fast. He checked his wrist pad - at least that was still working. Despite having nothing tangible to call his own, his bank balance was much, much fatter than it had ever been.
55457.
That was a fortune for a hab urchin like Nick. He had no apartment, no job, no family, no girl, but at least he had choices with money like that. If he was able to keep hold of it. Hab Block Sea Eagle was riddled with gangs who would happily leech him if he lingered too long.
And what about the “bodyguard” outside his front door, the man who had “replaced” Mike the Slovakian. Nick was almost certain the new guy was from Neutron Syndicate. And that meant Nick would be “encouraged” to participate in today’s climactic episode of Oakshield Junction. The very thought made him feel ill. How could these people be so utterly shameless? Couldn’t someone else take his place?
But he knew that’s not how Neutron operated. Their key selling point, the reason they sat on top of the Immersion gaming tree, was their obsession with personality and the viewers’ relationship with the pixel runners. For better or worse, Nick Stanners had a following out there and Neutron had extensive data on that following.
He was beginning to create a picture of how it all worked. Pixel runners that didn’t meet audience expectations were slowly worked into a position where they had to accept NPC roles, which meant living in an Immersion tank like a pickled vegetable. That might have been the reality that KainDestroyer18 was so fearful of.
The NPCs in Oakshield Junction were performers, folks who had played games all their lives. Former pixel runners and desperadoes who never made the grade. There was something inherently wrong about the whole setup.
Nick groaned as he propped himself against the wall. That fucking ape outside was about to frog-march Nick down to the Neutron studio and shove him into that Immersion tank whether he liked it or not.
And if he happened to die in the Tomb of the Fallen? The general public would mourn the pixel runner they’d followed through heaven and hell. Neutron, who prized the peculiarly sharp minds of skillful gamers, would quietly install him in one of their private tanks for deployment as a special character. Maybe even a boss. People like Nick, with no one to miss them in the real world, were worth more to Neutron “dead” than they were alive.
It wasn’t a pretty picture, but that’s what awaited Nick. Unless, of course, he managed to survive. But that scenario was implausible. He’d had no sleep, his body was throbbing with relentless grief and he’d completely lost his will to play. The prospect of dying in the first few minutes of the session, only to spend the rest of his life in-game without fully realizing it, was horrifyingly real. There would be no white knight to save him. Today was probably the day he said goodbye to the world as he knew it.
Putting one foot in front of the other through sheer muscle memory, Nick padded into the bathroom and had a freezing-cold shower. The water braced him a little, but he gave into his grief. His tears joined the rivulets of water sliding down the porcelain. He couldn’t banish a painful image of his father, who’d spent his final years drifting in and out of medicated sleep. Such a kind, giving man, even when his body was eating itself from the inside.
Nick dressed slowly, reflecting on how incredibly lucky he was to have had such a wonderful mentor in his life. The best way to honor the man was to try and live by his example. The thought was comforting, but it couldn’t hope to fill the chasm in his heart.
The bodyguard was waiting in the living room.
“We don’t want to be late,” he said blandly.
“I bet you don’t,” Nick replied, heading out the door.
A private flyer was waiting for them on the roof. It was an intimidating machine, all armored plating and rotor blades that spanned the entire roof.
The interior was sleek but cold and corporate. Nick sat as far away as possible from his minder, which was difficult in a four-seater. He gazed glumly at an approaching storm as the flyer powered its way up the coast. The trip took half as long as it normally did, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
That familiar anxiety began to churn in Nick’s gut as he stepped out onto the roof of the Neutron Syndicate building. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning, when he was with Emily. He sighed as he was ushered into an elevator that delivered him to the ground level studio.
Ignoring the sidelong glances of Neutron staff, Nick found his way to Studio 20. How on earth did these people expect him to perform today? It was going to be the shortest run in Immersion gaming history. He didn’t even have the energy to care.
Ern wasn’t buried in his roving lightscreen like he usually was. Instead, he seemed to be on the lookout for Nick. The producer’s shoulders sagged with relief when he saw his wayward pixel runner.
“Glad you made it,” he said. “We weren’t sure it was gonna happen.”
“Like I had a choice,” Nick said irritably, taking his shirt off in forlorn resignation.
“I heard about your father,” Ern said, taking a different tack. “I realize this isn’t easy.”
Nick shrugged, letting Ern know exactly what he could do with his “sympathy”.
“Today is important,” the producer said, as if he cou
ld make a valid comparison between Oakshield Junction and Terrence Stanners’ life. “This will be the only session of Oakshield Junction on the planet. There are fifty runners left in this run. All with be participating today.”
Nick didn’t bother acknowledging the brief - he simply didn’t care. Did it really matter which runner killed him?
“But there’s a catch,” Ern said with relish. “Any runner who dies is out for good. In other words, NPCs can kill you permanently. The Tomb of the Fallen is a dangerous place.”
A bunch of assistants laughed out loud at that. Seeing the complacency, the arrogance on display, Nick snapped.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” he said, seething with emotion. “I fucking quit yesterday. So forcing me here is an act of war. Just so you know.”
Ern dropped his sympathy routine, his face collapsing into a scowl.
“What makes you think you’re different to the other sniveling rookies out there?” he sneered. “Look at you. No one in this room is willing to bet you last more than an hour. And when you rise to the surface of that tank, like the worthless pond scum you are, the public will think your dead.”
The producer’s eyes had taken on a malicious gleam. Nick had no doubt he was face to face with the true Ern Williams.
“That’s when we really go to work on you,” Ern said. “First, there’s neural re-conditioning. Most of what you know will be scooped out and destroyed. All we need is the shell that remains. The canvas on which we can paint any fucking character we like. A better you. I’ll take personal pleasure in tending to your permanent Immersion tank.”
His worst fears confirmed, Nick couldn’t muster a response. Ern noticed his vulnerability and moved in for the kill.
“At least dear old Dad had the good sense to die naturally,” he said. “You’ll be wasting away in that gel for another hundred years.”
“You gotta kill me first, asshole,” Nick growled.
Ern’s assistants had stripped away the rest of Nick’s clothes. Desperate to distance himself from his producer, he rounded the tank and climbed the ladder. A techie checked the diagnostics and gave a thumbs-up.
Strength Build: A LitRPG Saga (The Complete Strength Build Cycle) Page 14
