“Could I find her?”
Doc says, “Hey, while you two are Proxima philosophizing, Frances and Arnie are waiting to see if they can go ahead with the extraction.”
Sophia: Imagine taking a model of a DNA strand, shattering it, and tossing it into a room filled with Legos. This is what going back to The Loop would be like. We can discuss more later.
“Please. Doc’s getting itchy.”
“I’m not getting itchy! There are just more important things right now than analyzing the aftermath of a source code bomb. Besides, I’ve already sent you briefings on this – you read them, didn’t you?”
“If I tell you yes, will you believe me?”
“No,” he says.
“Then no, I didn’t read them.” I look back to the screen. “Get a confirmation from Zedic that he hasn’t said anything about our extraction.”
Sophia: Affirmative.
“Hey, Veenure … ” Sophia raises hand and clenches it shut.
Veenure places her hands over her ears, cringes. “Something is happening with my headset. All I hear is feedback. Wait a minute … You cast Deafening Roar!” Her face shifts from surprise to fury. “What the hell is wrong with you!?”
“We can target team members with spells?”
Rocket’s voice comes out of the speaker. “We can’t, but Sophia can. She is a high level Mind Mage, level ninety now. She can pretty much do whatever the hell she wants. Veenure could instigate a battle, but she won’t … ”
“She’d lose,” Doc says. “Now hurry up and get the info we need.”
Sophia floats to over Zedic and Veenure.
“Keep your cool, Sophia,” Doc says.
She stops directly in front of Veenure, locks eyes with her. I swear Veenure’s eyes flame up, but it may just be my imagination. The two broads stare at each other for a moment until Sophia lifts three fingers, holds them inches away from Veenure’s face. She twists her fingers and Veenure cries out, falls to her knees. With that, she leaves the OMIB, logs out for all we know.
“Dammit, Sophia! There was no need for that!”
“It seemed like something you would do.”
“Enough with the measuring of the digital dicks, already!” says Doc. “Sophia, complete your mission!”
Sophia nods. “Sorry, Doc. Zedic, did you tell Veenure about our plans to extract Strata’s son?”
Zedic says, “Are you kidding me? Of course I didn’t! Is this what you’re here to ask me?”
“Why did you tell her we were members of the Dream Team?”
“Can’t you see where I am, Sophia? This place is terrible! I … I hate it here! There’s nothing, nothing at all. It’s like being trapped in some type of abyss, twilight zone. I don’t know! I miss my husband, I miss … I miss real food!”
“We are feeding you,” she says. “Rocket is. That still doesn’t answer my question.”
“You guys don’t know what it’s like,” Zedic sobs. “I can’t go anywhere. I can’t do anything. I’m stuck in here! In this … whatever this is.” He stands, stomps his feet.
“Boo-frickin’-hoo, princess. Cry me a river,” I mumble. Doc nods in agreement.
“You know what this is,” she says. “And you know that we are doing everything we can to get you out.”
“Are you? Because it seems to me like you’re more interested in freeing Strata’s son than your own team member! I told her because … because I just wanted to be honest with Veenure! She’s come here more than you have, more than anyone in the Dream Team.”
“You’re going to need to chill the hell out,” she tells him. “You aren’t the first person to get stuck in a Proxima World. Quantum was stuck for eight years and he wasn’t throwing temper tantrums like a little baby.”
No one contests what she has just said and I leave it at that.
Zedic snorts. “But he had a world! A place! Hell, a girlfriend! I don’t got shit in here. It’s like being stuck in a void or something!”
“It’s not like,” she says, “it is being stuck in a void. You are stuck, but we are working on getting you out. It will only be another day or two. We have people searching for the materials to make the Reality Splitter now.”
“You could have asked King Coromon for the materials,” he says. “Instead of asking to move all our levels up to level ninety. Veenure told me everything. You could have asked for the metal instead of sending some NPCs after the material!”
“We are taking care of it,” Sophia says, stepping closer to him. “Your training prepared you for this and frankly, you’re acting like a whiny little bitch at the moment.”
“Bring it, Sophia,” I say.
“She’s right,” Doc says under his breath.
“I know it sucks, but bear with us, we will get you out and you will apologize to me for your behavior right now.”
“I miss my husband,” he says. “We had a gig tonight!”
“We can try to bring him here to see you,” she says.
Doc says, “That’s not protocol. We don’t normally involve family members in DT affairs.”
“Yeah, but this might do him some good though,” I say. “He can just partially dive so he can see Zedic. Tell him we’ll work it out, Sophia, but he needs to keep his cool for a little bit longer.”
“This is really becoming a family affair … ” Doc drums his fingers on the desk for a moment. “Alrighty, I guess now is as good of a time as any. We need to get Luther and we need to get the hell out of Colorado. Metal Man, Bovidae, you are go, say again, go, over.”
“Bovidae, Metal Man, affirmative.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“That was a bit harsh,” I tell Sophia as soon as she’s logged out, “but you did good.”
Rocket chimes in, “I thought Veenure was going to step on you!”
“Her actual level is in the thirties and mine is sixty-one, regardless of the fact we are both ninety now. I would have made her cast Flesh Stripper on herself until she was forced to log out.”
“Flesh stripper? I don’t know if that’s something I’d like to see or not,” I say as I watch Arnie enter Strata’s estate through a gated fence. He parks the van in the driveway, an almost blatant move. Frances’ iNet feed appears on the screen furthest to the right. She gets out of the vehicle, heads to the back, where she starts unloading a hover stretcher. Arnie joins her, hooks the skip box to the side of the stretcher.
“What about exterior cameras,” I ask Doc. “Surely he has surveillance drones.”
“He does.” Like clockwork, a drone drops out of the air and hovers above Arnie and Frances. “But we’re overriding the feed, deleting it as it records. If anyone checks right now, this is what they’ll see.” He clicks a button on his mouse and a video image of an empty driveway appears. “We have a little visual treat for them as well once they do decide to review the video.”
“A visual treat?” I ask.
“A fully restored and digitally remastered video of GG Allin crapping on stage. Doc chose it!” Rocket says from the speaker. “Also, I have no idea who that is, but boy is it punk rock!”
“Gross.” Sophia scrunches up her face.
Doc answers my next question before I can ask it: “The van is decked out in some milspec holo-camo. It’s a nanofiber covering that reflects a 3-D image, taken from a 3-D picture Arnie captured earlier. It even adjusts to the time of day, can show weather conditions and has shadow-skirting tech. There are limitations, especially if someone walks into it or it rains extra hard, but that’s a risk we have to take. Also, these things show up on a thermal imaging scan, but of course, we’re controlling all that at the moment.”
“Where’d you get that?” I ask. “And do you think you could have them make me a zoot suit?”
“Even I know that’s out of style.”
“It’s not like anyone would see it!” I turn to Sophia to gauge her reaction – nada lotta.
“We do work for the feds, you know,” she says. “Some things are
available to us that aren’t available to civilians.”
“Getting this kind of stuff can be a pain, but I know a few people who know a few people.”
“What about their physical bodies?” I ask Doc.
“That’s another flaw in our plan,” he admits. “Hiding big stationary objects is easy. Objects on the move ain’t so easy.”
Arnie and Frances quickly approach the front of the house, an enormous door fit for a home in Kensington. Frances lifts her hand into the air and punches in a code on an invisible keypad.
“Let me guess,” I say, “she sees it on her personal iNet feed?”
Doc nods. “While we are capturing her overall feed, there are still some things we don’t get, like what she’s witnessing on her personal iNet screen.”
Sally bleats and startles awake. Doc coos over his shoulder, “It’s all right, my good, good goatlet. Just relax sweetie, we’re almost done.”
A laser scanner does its thing on Frances, jumps to Arnie and repeats the process. It must like what it sees, as I hear three soft beeps through their feeds; the door opens and the two Dream Teamers walk in like they own the place.
It is safe to say that Strata is living the high life – twenty-foot ceilings, a grand piano near the entrance, a waterfall cutting through the middle of a cascading stairwell, marble everything, and hanging on various walls is what is probably listed as ‘art’ on the insurance inventory.
Talk about deconstructionism. At some point in the twentieth century, artists decided that painting rudimentary objects was somehow difficult and one-percenters decided that they would pay millions of dollars for paintings a dyslexic, drunken twelve-year-old in a remedial fingerpaint by numbers class could make given the right materials. Damn you Gen-Xers and Millennials, for letting these lame-ass, no-talent pretend-artists get away with this execrable waste of paint and canvas; damn you more for shoveling wheelbarrows full of cash at them for producing it, and proudly displaying it so that all may see just how much mazuma and how little taste you all have.
The opulence of Strata’s lifestyle doesn’t bother me as much as does the knowledge of how he obtained all this wealth. His Revenue Corporation, under the guise of public service, exploits the legal loopholes his lawyers and lobbyists created to harvest the insurance payouts of the trapped players who die in the Proxima Galaxy. The brainwashed orphans he uses as his storm troopers are little better off than those they enslave and murder. When did he change, or has he always been like this and I just never saw it?
Would he really do all this just because his son was trapped?
Doc swallows hard. On the center screen, a tactical map of Strata’s house enlarges on the center screen and centers on the thermal image of a large humanoid figure just finishing up in a small bathroom. “Metal Man, Bovidae, Zulu in the restroom marked on your reticle. iNet respond, over.”
Arnie: Got him.
~*~
Arnie taps a button on the hover stretcher; it rotates ninety degrees and goes flush again the wall.
The bathroom door opens and Arnie zaps the guy with a neuromuscular inhibitor while Frances provides cover. The man’s face muscles contort as he falls, Arnie catches him just before he hits the ground. His stats appear on the screen next to a picture: Goodman, Saul M. 19 JUNE 2031, 5’10”, Brown/Brown.
Arnie: Bovidae, Metal Man, target neutralized.
“Oh-Ho-Ho-ho-ho!” Doc chortles and nods slowly at the screen. “Sucks to be that guy. He’ll shit and piss himself and about thirty minutes later, he’ll wake up in a soiled stupor not knowing what the hell happened. This particular inhibitor is no longer available to the public because high schoolers kept videoing themselves shooting each other and uploading the videos to iNet, in a viral competition called Shoot and Poo.” He chuckles. “What a bunch of morons. Sometimes I am glad to know that robots are going to eventually replace humanity.”
Sophia frowns. “That’s horrible!”
“Would you rather option two?” Doc asks. “Would you rather Arnie just off him? I know you’re Ms. Big Badass in the Proxima Galaxy – seems like all you under thirties digital children are – but you need to remember that war, real war, and real battle, has consequences. So what if Strata’s in-game monitor wakes up with dirty britches and a pounding hangover? It’s better than dead, isn’t it?”
She looks down at her hands.
“You do what you do,” he says without even the slightest hint of anger in his voice, “and I do what I do. Both components are necessary for the good of the team, and the successful completion of this mission. We clear here?”
“Got it,” she says. “My bad.”
Arnie drags the in-game monitor’s body into the bathroom, places him in the tub and closes the shower curtain.
~*~
Arnie and Frances stop in front of a door at the end of the hallway. Frances steps up, presses her hand onto a fingerprint scanner. An eye level flash scans her retina, and the door clicks open.
“THE DREAM TEAM DON’T PLAY!” Rocket’s voice booms out of the overhead speaker. It startles me, startles Sally too, who stands and bleats.
“Not so close to the mic, kid,” Doc says.
Arnie and Frances walk down a small flight of stairs into a large underground bunker. Sophia is the first to gasp at what they discover. The room seems to go on forever, far enough that I can’t see the wall on the furthest end. The lights at the front are on, definitely sensor-activated. Then there are the dive vats – I count ten from Frances and Arnie’s feed. They are front to back, the next row partially hidden in the darkness.
“How many?” Sophia asks.
Doc clicks something and a 3-D schematic appears. It starts at the front door, enters through the lobby, passes the kitchen and goes down the hallway. Once it enters the door in question, dozens upon dozens of dive vats populate. “The schematic claims that there are just under fifty. There are fifty in the west wing too.”
“How do you know Luther is in here?” I ask.
A light at the front of the holoscreen flashes, beaming a 3-D image in front of Doc. “Notice the center dive vat,” he says as he presses his hand into the 3-D image. It readjusts the viewing angle, giving us a tilted, aerial view. “That’s a Proxima Three, the top of the line dive vat. It costs six times as much as the other vats. It provides full medical overwatch, nutritional support, physical therapy and personal hygiene. It does everything except feed the cat and walk the doggy. There are fewer than a hundred of these worldwide, due to the cost of production versus demand. The waiting list to get one is over a year. Strata owns two of them, one for himself and one for his son.”
“Are you sure he’s in there?” I ask.
“Likely, but there’s only one way to find out. Metal Man, Bovidae, check the big tank, front and center, over.”
“Bovidae, Metal Man, roger.” Arnie approaches with Frances backing him up. He moves to the back of the oversized vat, crouches in front of the power supply.
“What’s he doing?” I ask. “Why didn’t he check the front panel?”
Doc says, “We deduced the location of the vat – or as you can see, vats – from the power usage and later from the schematic. Even with the spiders we put in Strata’s system, we aren’t able to see who is in the vat without a manual override. We assume Luther is in the biggest vat, but we may be wrong.”
Sophia explains. “Vats are always plugged into two outlets, which requires custom installation like we have back in Baltimore. One outlet is to the regular power source; one is to the back-up power source. That’s the only way these things work. Otherwise, there’d be a lot more digital comas. A little known fact: as the vats boot back up, they flash the person’s details before the system can officially go online, which is another way to flash user information on the vat information display, the VID.”
“Any alarms?” I ask.
“If you unplug the main power source, it will sound the alarm,” Doc says. “If you unplug the back-up power source and plug
it back in within twenty seconds, it won’t sound any alarm systems, but it will flash the user info on the VID. This is done in case there is a disaster and someone is stuck in their vat. There are other applications, as well, like what we’re seeing now.”
Arnie moves around the vat, drops to one knee in front of the power source. Two thick cables snake into a square outlet flush with the floor.
“You’d think there would be more defense,” I say.
“Oh, there is a defense system,” Doc says, “above the vats.”
Arnie glances up; laser turrets spaced at six foot intervals line the ceiling. He looks back down, places his hand on the two power cables and keeps it there for a moment. He pulls the cable on the right and we all look to Frances’ feed. The name LUTHER S. GODSICK lights up on the small holoscreen panel at the front of the vat.
Doc says, “Metal Man, Bovidae, target confirmed, extract, over.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Me: Goose it, Frances! Just get Strata’s ankle biter and get out of there!
Of all the times to collect data, now, when Arnie and Frances are deep in the belly of the beast, is possibly the worst time imaginable. Yet there they are, walking through the underground führer bunker like a bunch of census droids collecting data on every player that’s stuck in a digital coma.
“It’s important to be thorough,” Doc reminds me. He doesn’t need to see the look on my face to know that I don’t agree. Sure, thoroughness is good, but not when you’re inside the enemy’s citadel. For her part, Sophia is quiet, which gives me the itching feeling that she’s doing research over iNet.
Rocket’s voice this time. “We need this for the database I’ve been working on. It includes the Reapers that have been blasted with Doc’s hack, a few bleach people who we’ve been able to identify previously and now, whoever these people are. Any ideas on how we can speed this up?”
The Feedback Loop (Books 4-6): Sci-fi LitRPG Series (The Feedback Loop Box Set Book 2) Page 23
