by Isaac Stone
I slid down low to the ground and began to make my way into the encampment. I knew this might take me all night, but at least I had the darkness on my side. If I moved with enough care, I could get down there and find out if they had the box. I didn’t speak German and my character was not blessed with the ability. My first concern was the sentries they’d posted toward the bottom of the platform. One wrong movement and I’d be filled up with bullets. I needed to avoid that scenario.
I spent several hours around the commando camp. In the end I came to the conclusion they didn’t have the box. Several times, I made it into the camp and inside several of the field tents they’d organized for the bivouac. In one case, there was a sleeping commando inside the tent, but I never woke him up once. You can work your way inside any open position if you know how to do it with stealth. This was still a 1942 scenario and all the motion detectors and biosensors in use by the real world had yet to be invented. The Germans were forced to deploy sentries the old-fashioned way. Heck, the men I snuck around didn’t even have radios. If they spotted something, the only thing they could do would be to yell a warning, fire their weapon, or both.
The one thing I did know about camouflage was to break up a pattern. Nature has endowed us with detailed abilities to look for patterns in nature. Cameo is designed to fit in with the background pattern and blend. This is why a leopard has spots. They are supposed to resemble the shaded grass of the African savannah. If you don’t see a pattern where one is supposed to exist, you will notice it. On the other hand, nature doesn’t like sharp angles and lines. If you notice a curve or line where there isn’t supposed to be one, you might shoot at it. This is why some insects have projections to resemble sticks. And, finally, if you do see something shiny and attention seeking in nature, it usually means, “Stay away!” This is why wasps have such bright colors on them. Therefore, my goal was to blend in with any pattern and not call attention to myself.
I accomplished this by moving as slow as possible. I remembered an incident from my childhood where I decided to stand next to a mannequin at a department store and remain as still as I could. I might have found the idea in a kid’s book, few of mine were that original. I stayed still for five minutes, which seemed to be an eternity, while my parents shopped for clothes. Finally, a little girl walked up to me and touched my face. When I moved, she let out a scream, which the entire store heard. I laughed about the incident for years. It taught me that you could fool people by doing very little.
The only place I didn’t visit was the tent where the commandos had the radio transmitter. I could hear them talking in German the entire time I was inside the camp. The frantic transmissions helped to cover any sounds I made while I snuck into their midst. I couldn’t tell what they talked about, but I had the sensation it was over the lack of what they came there to find. My guess it was the courier box I was supposed to locate.
In the end, I made it inside their camp and out safely, but no box. At least I’d eliminated the possible box location from one place.
I left their camp angry with myself for not being able to find the box. The hours I spent creeping around their tents were not spent on trying to locate it at any one of several hundred buildings inside the lost city. Instead, I’d wasted time and risked losing the game to see if the most dangerous opponent I had possessed the courier box.
I didn’t even know if them finding the box was a condition for “game over”. I guessed it was, because how could I ever get the box back if they had it? Would them finding the box undermine the whole point of the game? If the box contained secret treaties, then the secret would be out. However, the commandos might not be in search of another box and have found mine by accident.
All of these “I know that they know that you know” scenarios were possible and none of them made the least bit of sense. Granted, I was inside a VR game with its own internal logic. I wondered what might happen if I decided to make a run into the jungle and see what was on the other side. Probably the game would create the same jungle pattern over and over until I became tired of running. The people behind this game world spent a lot of time and money on the build and thought of everything that might go wrong. The only reason I was here was to see if it could be beaten. So far, I hadn’t managed to do it.
I retreated away from the German encampment and headed back in the direction of our original one. With me were several cans of rations and a pack of matches. I was sure they’d miss them, but I needed to eat soon. The matches would always come in handy.
I pulled out the logbook and looked at the maps inside. Nothing new in regards to plot caches or the location of the courier box. The area I covered was on the map and plenty of details filled themselves in as I watched. Each German commando was given a character sheet with statistics. A few were listed as KIA. I was certain I could beat them on an opposition roll, but combined was a different story.
The rations, which I think was some kind of pickled pork, tasted delicious. I was surprised at my level of hunger. This body they’d given me as a character was ripped and needed to eat right if I wanted to keep it in movie star mode. I’d adjusted to moving around as an athlete. Easy to see how someone would sacrifice food and every craving to look this way.
At least the over-powering cigarette smell was gone. Several times, I’d nearly choked on the fumes from them in the German camp. I came close, but never once sneezed.
I began to think about Chamistra. Who the hell was she and how did that woman fit into this game? There were too many questions about her. She didn’t just appear to resemble Chamita; she was her double in so many ways. For a while, I wondered if both design teams had used the same model for a femme fatale, but it was too much of a coincidence. They’d done something odd with her figure and stuck it into both games.
The personality of Chamistra is what made her so different from Chamita. She was a leader; Chamita was a lone woman who’d been raised isolated from the rest of humanity. Her only friend was the wolf who died during the assault on us by the bootleggers. She seemed to have a familiarity with the cave dwellers, but I wasn’t on the mountain long enough to find out what was their relation to her. It was the clan leader of the cave dwellers who married us, something I still couldn’t believe I’d agreed to do. Well, at the time it seemed like the best course of action and got my team returned to the surface. We still had to shoot it out with the gat men from the bootleggers.
I realized, once again, I asked the wrong questions when it came to my relationship with Chamita and Chamistra. The real solution lay in the minds of the game designers. Especially the man whom I’d befriended just prior to his death, Hans Konkin. So much of the Sandstone system was his concept that it became a reflection of his own personality. He’d died and left me a photograph of a woman who appeared to resemble Chamita. I’d seen her in the park in the real world, but she ran off before I had a chance to confront her.
At least my head no longer hurt. After my adventure on the mountain, it started to do that when I returned to the real world. The pain was one of the reasons I sought out Ruby Realizations. They wanted to build a VR game system of their own, so I went to them when the head pains wouldn’t stop. Even the expensive therapy, which Sandstone paid to have done, didn’t stop my shift from reality back into the world of Wolf Mountain. What would happen when I returned to the real world? Now that Sandstone knew I’d worked for Ruby, the treatment would cease. Not that it did any good in the first place.
I stopped and looked at the wall carvings on the buildings that made up the city. As an archaeologist, I could tell this was all faked. The same motifs were repeated once you saw the first few buildings. There were no separate areas for high court officials, priests, warriors or the common people. Hell, I couldn’t even find a thing that resembled a shop. Any other professional would’ve saw through his façade right away. At least any who had a basic education in the field?
I decided it had gone far enough. I needed some help and resolved to demand i
t from the VR team. I pulled out my gun and snapped back the handle cover over the communicator screen. One tap brought up Rhonda’s irritated face.
“What’s up, buckaroo?” she asked me. “Ready to come home? Say the world to me and I’ll have you out of the Lost City of Virkya in a minute.” She didn’t even try to act as if her mood was good.
“I want some help, dammit,” I told her. “I’ve got Nazi commandos camped near me, the buildings all look the same, and no clue as to where this courier box is to be found. My gaming experience is not something I'd rate as satisfactory in a product review.”
She yawned. “I told you the team wants to bring you back to the land of the living. They’ll let you stay in as long as you’re alive because that is in keeping with the contract. Honestly, how much longer do you think you’ll live under these conditions? Do you have any food left after that attack?”
“I snuck into the commando camp and lifted some rations; they’ll get me through for another month.” Okay, that was a lie, but I was desperate.
“Look, I’ll ask the team and see what they say. But, as you may have noted, they don’t seem to want you to stay, so expect a ‘no’.” She turned away from me and spoke to someone off camera.
“Well?” I asked her a few minutes later when she turned back to the screen.
“Like I thought,” she responded. “They want to bring you back out. No, they won’t give you any more help. If you read the contract, they don’t have to give you extra assistance. The whole idea of you play-testing this scenario was to see if it would fly on its own resources. To add anything to it creates more problems.” Her face seemed firm.
“Had to try,” I sighed to her and shut down the communicator. I closed the cover over the handle and returned it to my holster.
I checked the logbook, just in case. Nothing had changed. At the very least, they could have slapped an entry in there that would give me some clues as to the location of the cache, but it wasn’t going to take place.
The logbook was almost closed when I spotted a light that shone from within. I opened it back up after I’d first made certain that the Nazi’s hadn’t made reappearance. It seemed safe and I turned to the page that glowed in the moonlight.
This was a new phenomenon. I hadn’t seen the pages glow before, not even in the caves under the mountain. However, back there I was provided with torches that didn’t go out, so they provided the light. Now I didn’t have any torches, so pages that glowed helped me a lot.
“What is the problem?” appeared on the glowing page. “Why don’t you want to leave?” The page was signed “Heath”.
This page was previously blank. I realized Heath Mint; the person who brought me to work at Ruby Realizations, wanted to talk to me without the intercession of Rhonda and would do it with the use of this logbook. I was glad I hadn’t shut it too soon before I noted the glow.
It then hit me I didn’t have a way to communicate back with him. This was 1942 and the best writing utensils were fountain pens. I had few pencils back at the camp, but nothing else to write with today. I didn’t even have a stylus. So how did he expect I was supposed to talk back?
The answer came in the form of a glowing pen, which materialize in front of me. The VR crew had bent the rules just enough to talk with me and avoid the front desk. Nice. I walked over and picked up the pen that glowed. At least it appeared to be a fountain pen from 1942. I appreciated the little detail they’d gone to keep this the way it was supposed to be. For that, I was grateful.
“Thanks for the pen,” I wrote just below the entry on the glowing page. “You didn’t tell me I could communicate with you this way.”
“I didn’t know it was something we could do at the time,” he wrote back. “The VR lab dreamed it up last year, but we opted to not use it in your game scenario.”
“So why does the magick pen work now?” I jotted down on the page.
“Desperation. We want you to come out and feel a direct plea might work.”
“Why? You don’t want to pay the bonus. Funds get cut?”
“Not so simple. We have a problem with the system which could get worse.”
“Then why get me involved. Can’t you do it if you detect a threat to the player?”
“Wish it was that easy. Half the VR team believes the problem warrants intervention, the other half wants to watch and see what you do about it.”
“Why don’t I find that comforting?”
“Look, just hit the panic button, I’ll find a way to get your extra cash. You don’t want this thing to get out of control, trust me.”
“Maybe if you told me more.”
There was a pause and the words did not form on the page. I had the sensation Heath was scared he’d said too much. We weren’t the only two people in on this conversation.
“The NPC’s,” he wrote back. “We are losing control of them. You can’t stay there. If you do, I may not be able to get you out.”
“Threat?”
“Just listen to me!”
“Thanks for the pen, Heath,” I wrote. “I’ll take what you wrote to me under consideration.”
I slammed the book shut. The glow from the lone page ceased. So did the glow from the ink pen, which I placed in my uniform’s shirt pocket.
I shouldn’t have done that. Heath risked something to get in touch with me and I’d shut him down. I had a thought and opened the logbook up. I thumbed to where the paged that glowed was located and found it in a few seconds. I held the page up to the moonlight and looked at it. Blank. He’d erased our conversation, which was a smart move on his part. I knew a record had to exist of it somewhere, but it was gone for the time being. Part of me speculated that someone had it under review at this very moment.
What did he mean by “losing control of the NPC’s?” The Non Player Characters were independent programs, which ran the various virtual characters, such as Howard, Sargent Grom, Private Tommy, the commandos and Chamistra. Did he mean they’d begun to develop agency? A computer program with free will was scary.
Once again, I thought about the relationship between Chamita, Chamistra and the mysterious woman she was supposed to be based upon. All I had in the real world was a photograph, the sighting and a note left under my door. I had a vision of her as a lab technician just prior to my journey to the land of make-believe, but it could be a hallucination. For all I knew, this entire trip in the VR world was one big hallucination. Perhaps I was a program that ran loose inside a vast cosmic database which felt it had free will and didn’t.
Didn’t every NPC I ran into while inside this VR world, both the Sandstone and Ruby versions, feel it too had free will? What a better way to run a universe. Create a bunch of self-maintaining systems and allow them to run amok until their energy level dropped to the point where they could no longer be used. Who guides the blind watchmaker?
At least my head didn’t bother me. Although right now I could do with a phase-shift to the mountain. Then Howard and I could have another one of our fireside chats.
I ran a hand through my hair and wondered how it could feel so real and yet I knew it was all a simulation. There were ways to tell when things were faked inside this VR world; the repeated patterns on the temples were one sign. Perhaps there were other repeated patterns.
Or repeated characters, such as Chamita and Chamistra.
Bingo.
Both women were the product of the same mind. Hans wanted a woman to meet his idea of perfection, but was smart enough to realize it doesn’t exist in the real world. So he created her somewhere else, in a computer-simulated environment.
I looked again at the erotic sculptures carved into the walls. His heart was broken and this was an overflow into a fantasy world.
Just one more look at the logbook. I had to look at the thing one more time before I could move onto the next objective, although I had no idea what that objective might be at the moment. Therefore, I opened the logbook and went right to the section where the map was locat
ed.
And there was another plot cache. Dammit, this wasn’t fair. The people who ran the game weren’t supposed to be tossing these things in at random. Or were they? Perhaps that was the whole key to the game. Just as life smacks you with curveballs every day, so would the game sabotages your plans by randomness.
The cache container was located in the same temple where I’d found the statue of Chamita. I knew where it was and didn’t need the map to find my way back to it. The logbook went back into my uniform and I made for the temple as I passed all the conjoined wall carvings as I returned.
I stopped at the temple and looked at the figurines on the doorway. I hadn’t bothered to examine them the first time, once you’ve seen the possible positions portrayed; it becomes a bit monotonous, as any adult movie fan will tell you. These, on the other hand, looked different from the repeated patterns I found all over the city. I shouldn’t be surprise; after all, a temple build to honor a special woman would be expected to have special statuary about it.
All of the female figures in these wall carvings had the face of Chamita. I was certain of it. Jesus H. Christ, the game designer, Hans Konkin, had it for her in a major way. I expected to see the male ones with his face, but was not so rewarded. Now why would he show her face everywhere but not his? I could only surmise he didn’t find himself worthy to be here. The poor, sad fool. He’d died creating this city and for what?
The box was right under the statue of Chamita. It wasn’t very large, which made it easy enough to conceal. I lifted it out and opened it, expecting the entire roof to collapse or some other disaster to take place. Instead, the lid popped loose and I stared down inside it. These plot caches could advance or retard the plot of the game, put they always had some effect on it.
