Gamer (Gamer Trilogy)

by Christopher Skliros

  Grace looked up, as innocent as ever, and said, “Well, I think we should all stick together. It’s only a matter of time until Lily or B3ast find us and if we’re together, we probably have a better chance of survival…” She blinked twice, exaggeratedly. “Plus I like you guys,” she added as an afterthought.

  I found myself nodding in agreement. What Grace said was logical but this meant that we were also accepting that B3ast and Lily were now our enemies. Stefanie seemed to have read my mind.

  “So we’ve written them off? Both B3ast and Lily I mean,” she asked.

  Grace just nodded. It was hard to find any flaw in her argument, I mean we couldn’t just all stay friends, or else the game would never end – and B3ast and Lily were as good a place to start as any.

  Now it was getting dark though, and I started to make my way into the cave. I could feel the heat radiating out of it from meters away.

  But before I could get in, Victor asked me, “Hey Xander, can you take your pack and fill it up with water for us? Thanks.”

  Instead of choosing a weapon, I’d chosen the bag of supplies

  – one of the items inside of it had been a water-bottle type container. I had subconsciously been lugging it around all day. It was fairly light.

  The river sounded quite close, and not wanting to be rude, I just mumbled “sure,” put on a half-smile, and walked in the direction of the sound of flowing water.

  After five minutes of walking through progressively wetter and colder, knee-high grass, I reached a stream. It was no way big enough to be a river itself, it must’ve been an offshoot from the main source but it would do.

  I started thinking of life at the Academy, and was beginning to regret signing up for Simulator. I probably wouldn’t be able to win anyway and now one of the few friends I’d thought I’d had, turned out to not like me at all. It sucked.

  And then there was the fact that if I didn’t win, I’d be labelled as useless to the school – a fact my teachers had taken note of. Without the Academy, I had nowhere else to go.

  I was surprised by how much time had passed – looking up at the sky, the sun had completely set. The plastic container – one of the many seemingly useful items in my pack - finally finished filling up. I got up to return to the camp, screwing the lid of water-skin type container - but found Grace standing right behind me. I dropped the bottle out of shock and then smiled at my own stupidity. I tried to laugh it off. Looking up at Grace I said apologetically, “I didn’t hear you coming. You scared me.” Still smiling I tried to walk forwards towards the camp, but she blocked my way.

  My smile faltered a little. “Quit it Grace, let’s go back to the others,” I said.

  But she refused to move.

  If this was going to be a confrontation, I’d win hands down. No way was she going to be able to best me.

  But then there was a pop behind her and Victor appeared. Stefanie was in his arms, limp and lifeless, a fresh wound, bright red, on her forehead.

  “What have you guys done to her?!” I growled.

  I ran forward, or at least tried to, to help Stefanie – but Grace tripped me. With lightning fast speed, she was suddenly in front of me again.

  “You mean what have youdone,” Victor said.

  “Me?!” I asked incredulously. And then I realised.

  Victor teleported away, with Stefanie’s body bundled in his arms. She was still alive, that much I was certain of – her chest had been rising and falling, albeit weakly. I groaned at my realisation, however. He was going to tell her I’d attacked them, and she’d all too readily believe him. Or he’d probably finish her off, find the others, and tell them it was me. Either way, I was screwed.

  I stood again, regaining my balance, and Grace did several, impossibly fast laps of the small clearing we were in, stringing something around us. It was orange rope – another item from my pack. Before I could even blink, we were closed in. Grace had discovered her power – extremespeed.

  My eyes searched for a possible escape, between the trees, or under/over the rope – but it was no use. I looked over to Grace, an evil look etched into her features.

  She began to stalk forwards, preparing to kill me.

  6

  LILY From the moment I was in the clearing, I knew something was very wrong. In my head, I found myself thinking: ‘ I’m going to kill themall, one by one. They all think I’mweak, stupid, and too innocent to do any damage. This is going to be too easy.’

  And I stood there stunned for a moment, wondering where this sudden hatred had come from. Sure I had my mood swings here and there but this was intense. I had a feeling it wasn’t even me thinking it – was someone inside my head?

  It took me a brief second to understand – these weren’t my thoughts, but Grace’s.

  Having been forced to spend the last nine years

  underground (I’ll explain in a minute) the light being reflected and distorted by all the trees was so distracting. I noticed this as I turned to look at Grace, there was no way this could actually be her – Simulator was probably doing this to all of us, trying to make us attack each other…

  But double-checking, I realised that maybe I was actually onto something - the twisted look on her face was so harsh and yet somehow, everybody seemed oblivious to it.

  I watched as she raised her wand, conviction etched into her somehow sweet and innocent face. She was going to kill someone… Xander.

  I donned my cloak - the weapon I chose.

  Apparently it was equipped with three thousand different survival mechanisms that appeared in random sequence every time you put it on. It was a little bit of a risk – for all I knew, I could’ve been turned into a butterfly - but there really weren’t many options.

  And then I felt my skin harden and my knuckles extend - into metal spikes. Trust Simulator, even the grass looked like it had teeth.

  I weighed up my options in a millisecond. Charge at and “kill” Grace and have everyone think of me as the heartless killer that Grace actually was or run off into the forest and let Xander die… I’d already invested so much effort into keeping him alive up until this point – I still had a gash from where one of the crazy, ground-popping trees had attacked me – but I wasn’t about to give up now.

  I flexed my metallic muscles, really feeling the suit. I needed to treat this methodically. Cool and calculating. Shouldn’t be too hard for a fifteen-year-old genius like me. Should not be hard at all, I told myself… and it wasn’t.

  Attack mode. My brain instantly computed the most tender spot of Grace’s body to target. My spiked knuckle was aiming right for her chest when I pounced.

  It was dead on. Grace whirled around almost a fraction too late as the tip of my knuckle brushed her chest – BOOM!

  I was jolted sideways and into one of the glass trees. It smashed with ease, shards flying everywhere.

  And then my cloak seemed to wriggle. Thousands of little worm-like creatures emerged from the surface of my metallic layer of skin and I could feel them! Eugh! MAGGOTS!

  She’s going to ruin everything.

  I turned my head to see Victor, battle-axe in hand, dissipate into thin air after a longing glance at… Grace?

  They were in this together.

  Before Stefanie could reload or Victor could do some damage, I turned and fled into the forest, heart racing.

  I kept trying to fling the individual maggots off but after about a minute of sprinting, they just disappeared, leaving no trace. Her wand must have some sort of a range.

  I slowed to a jog and then eventually sat down on a rock, trying to make sense of what had just happened…

  Grace was secretly plotting to kill everyone, one at a time. At the same time, she was also having some creepy love affair with Victor. Stefanie was now going to think of me as her enemy and Grace would make sure they saw me that way. All the while her aim would be to remove Stefanie from the picture… Great.

  The whole journey through the dome with Xander would mo
re likely than not be forgotten, and so he’d also side with Grace – until she eventually killed him too.

  B3ast on the other hand had somehow managed to avoid all the conflict and would probably be the biggest threat out of everyone…

  I took in my surroundings almost instantly; five blades per each clump of grass, and each clump had exactly 3mm distance from the one next to it. The arrangement was repetitive and unyielding – a perfect, digitally synchronized pattern, and my brain processed this in a matter of seconds.

  The glass trees themselves were not as dense as real glass, they refracted the light at a different angle and also seemed far more fragile – probably another digital imaging effect.

  Above, the sky was a crisp blue, a little too vivid to be real in my opinion, but that was maybe just because I knew better.

  Either way, this entire arena was just a patterned arrangement of codes and data. With the right knowledge, it wouldn’t be too hard to draw a relatively accurate terrain map

  – it was all just a sequence.

  I found it a little funny how my upbringing, as traumatic as it was, somehow managed to end in something so successful

  – me!

  Before, I mentioned that I’d literally grown up in the dark… Just to clarify – I had never felt what actual sunshine was until I came to Elitus two years ago.

  At six-months of age, I was sent off to an orphanage – my birth parents died in lab experiment (they were particle physicists) - and then the family I had been left to – along with my inheritance – decided they didn’t want me.

  Although orphanages in themselves are generally unpleasant places to be, my foster parents sent me to a special kind of orphanage – a military, child think-tank - a place that guaranteed the academic success of all its prodigies.

  My foster parents believed I would be traumatized for the rest of my life, destined to become a menace. In their attempt to be pro-active, unfortunately, I became one such prodigy. By the age of two I couldn’t just write and read, I was speaking fluent Latin and studying Ancient Greek. By the age of four, the piano was something I could play with my eyes closed while at the same time reciting the names of every capital city in the world and their individual histories.

  By age five – the normal school-age for most children – I was learning how to calculate the atomic-mass of any given area of dark matter and by age seven I’d already submitted four theses to the Pentagon explaining how the speed of light was actually just proverbial and made by man…

  These congregations of super child education facilities were few and far between, but they existed and nobody else knew about them.

  My particular facility was underground and maintained a temperature around that of what you’d find in an average fridge – cold supposedly stimulates the mind.

  Then they would demonstrate how to carry out the procedure of the task they expected from you. If you couldn’t do it, you were shocked by the electric collar around your neck. In that place you learned fast – those who didn’t were never let up… above ground.

  Even though it sounds impossible that a four-year old could play, let alone comprehend Beethoven, it really wasn’t – and I was living proof. They gave us these strange injections, laced with only God-knows-what, which they placed in the bases of our skulls. The resulting effect was an hour or so of perfect clarity – each sensation being translated directly into memory. The long-term effects involved multiplication of brain cells, a simple yet effective treatment that gave us the brains of superhumans.

  To escape that excruciating feeling that your entire body was seizing up and stretching beyond what was physically possible – as was the torture of the electric collars - I was forced to comply with whatever they told me to do, and pray that it was good enough. Supposedly the electricity also stimulated our muscle and neuron synapses, an interesting theory but in my eyes, an excuse to torture young children.

  That place was a living hell.

  In my time there, I had just one friend. Her name was Eliza. Her specialty was, by far, language.

  Even though we were all learning three or four languages at a time, she could learn an entire dictionary by heart, in under five days. My strengths were more in the field of

  mathematics, patterns and molecular physics.

  Anyway, she and I, we used to share one of those underground one-person cave-like stone dorms – lit by a single candle. And every night we used to tell each other about our day, talk about the teachers we hated most, the subjects we would be taking up the next day and recite all the things we’d learnt. It was probably this human contact that kept us both sane.

  The day I graduated, however, was the day our friendship ended – that’s how things usually go, anyway, after you put somebody into a vegetative state.

  We were in the same macrobiotics lecture, and she raised her hand to ask a question about information that had been told to us the year before. She knew she was going to get into trouble – but not nearly as much had she dropped beneath her 100% average on her daily testing. And so she took a risk, and it ended badly.

  The lecturer smirked with cruelty at her question and he produced a small remote from his pocket – a big red button embedded into it.

  All the other students just stared ahead, without any emotion, as Eliza writhed from the current of the collar – we were like dogs.

  Except then the lecturer didn’t stop, he was a particularly harsh one, but even for him, it was a little far.

  A few people exchanged nervous glances and even though we were trained to be emotionless, we were all a little influenced by last period’s literature class, it was our first exposure to not actually perceiving everything from just a factual perspective and it confused a few people…

  Anyway, after what looked to be causing some serious damage – Eliza’s mouth was frothing up – I actually rose out of my chair and objected.

  As soon as I did it, I regretted it. The reputation that would get me above ground was shattered in an instant but this only seemed to make the lecturer happier.

  Mr Klazpt seemed overjoyed and he called me down to the board.

  I was confused but I didn’t dare disobey, in case I was shocked too, and when I got to him, without a word, he handed me the remote.

  With one look I was subdued into silence, and forced to push the button and watch my best friend twist and writhe with increasing pace until… silence. The years of trauma overwhelmed her and she had snapped… weak, I know.

  I awoke out of my reminisce, a tear was leaking down my cheek but I quickly wiped it away.

  “At least it got me out of there,” I sighed into the slight breeze that had picked up.

  So in short, I killed my best friend to set myself free, so yes, I did sometimes step back and ask how the absolute annihilation of a child’s soul somehow equated into a humanrobot like me, I shouldn’t have been able to take that – but I did.

  Now, however, I was out to win that Omega. Just the other day the orphanage head – Phelix – sent me a letter and expressed his concern that I was slipping – I had come second in the Annual Elitus Spelling Bee to a girl who was six years older than me, and just as robotic.

  Regardless, there was never an excuse for failure, and my punishment was to be deployed into Simulator to win the Omega - or else…

  Remembering the choking, splitting pain that came with every second of the collar, I pushed myself up off the rock I was sitting on, and decided to just not stop walking.

  Another tear leaked down my cheek and I settled myself.

  She wasan obstacle, just something in-betweenthe way of

  you and success.

  But I couldn’t force myself to believe it.

  Now that I was in Simulator, just slightly removed from all the pressure, I was, well, feeling.

  Two years away from that hell hole and things were starting to look up, coming second wasn’t even that big of a deal for me. I just wanted to be free.

  “ARGH!”


  I spun around. Someone was coming.

  After a few seconds, I figured it must’ve been my imagination – but it was such a strong feeling.

  I slowly edged my way into a bush and just waited for something to happen.

  Finally someone did come… B3ast!

  He was sweating profusely and he dropped his computer…

  A huge split in the ground opened up about a dozen meters away – a resounding crack echoed along the forest.

  Power.

  The one thought that was resonating in his head.

  I had another flash in my mind – instinctively, I ducked and jumped away.

  Just seconds later the glass tree I’d been hiding behind smashed to pieces. B3ast was controlling the elements… Holy crap.

  Even with my mind there was no way I could compensate for that – if he spotted me I’d be dead.

  And now these visions… I was having short bursts of a foresight almost. But I’d taken enough lessons in metaphysics to know it was total bullshit… then again, so was elemental control.

  B3ast ran off with determination on his face, having picked up his laptop again.

  I sort of collapsed to the ground as a wave of static passed over me – it felt almost like the electric current collar. But it was weak and it didn’t really affect me, I’d read B3ast’s thoughts and known it was coming anyway… So we were actually in the game now… Did that mean we could actually die?

  I walked over to where B3ast had just been and sat on the ground. I needed a plan and some direction.

  Focusing my thoughts, the flash came just a millisecond too late. Extremely fast footsteps and cruel thoughts bombarded my senses.

  I barely had time to look up as Grace wrapped her hands around my neck. She was wearing white gloves, like you’d expect to see at a ladies’ tea party, but they were coated in something sticky, that was now covering my neck.

  It didn’t take much effort to know Grace had just fulfilled her twisted love promise to Victor – it was blood. She had already killed.

  I then heard one thought pierce my mind, as if she knew I could hear her…