Rune Universe: A Virtual Reality novel (The RUNE UNIVERSE trilogy Book 1)

by Hugo Huesca

  Without thinking about it, I took out my phone and texted Darren as fast as I could while searching for a bus to take me to the hospital. I pressed “send” just a second before a bus stopped in front of me. I got in, my mind blank. I gawked as the city blurred behind the window of my seat. It all seemed so surreal… perhaps I’d wake up in my sofa anytime now.

  Anytime. Please.

  The message I sent to The Ferals read:

  Darren. A friend passed away. I just heard about it. I’m heading over to the funeral, sorry. Keep my cash. Send Bliss or Ghoul to cover outside. I’M NOT THERE ANYMORE. Coast has been clear so far. —C.

  The city shifted as the bus crossed it. Holograms and skyscrapers gave way to slums and dirt roads and those gave way to the condemned buildings of the residential districts.

  No matter how hard I hoped to wake up, it never happened.

  An hour later, three hospital’s security guards held me down while I tried to charge against Kipp’s uncle.

  “You did WHAT?!” I shook against the grip of the guards. My vision blurred with rage and tears. I could vaguely see Kipp’s uncle recoil away from me, his expression a mixture of grief and confusion. “How you dare do that to him…”

  I may have threatened to kill the man once or twice before the guards came. I was aware of the dozen or so people who had come to the chapel to mourn my friend. They all looked at me in shocked silence. I did not care.

  “Cole, stop! Please—” a woman’s voice. Perhaps Van or even Mom’s, I wasn’t hearing straight either. That man. That monster. When I put my hands on him, I’d…

  “I only did as he asked!” Uncle Monster tried to defend himself. I was having none of it. I tried to punch my way out of the guards’ grapple, but they were stronger than me and more experienced. They held me down against the cold floor of the chapel.

  “Stop right now, kid. Don’t make me have you arrested,” one of them grunted very close to my ear. I ignored him.

  “What he asked?! Why would he ask you to…” Someone must’ve sat on my back, I had trouble breathing, “… do that to his head?”

  I barely knew his uncle. He was Kipp’s legal guardian, but lived on a different part of the city while the government took care of Kipp’s sickness. I knew he didn’t care much for my friend, but this was nuts…

  And I could do nothing about it. The guards held me down for some long minutes until I exhausted myself from fighting uselessly against them. All the while someone —might have been my mother or my sister— screeched right to my ear —demanding I calm down this very instant or else.

  What I mean to say is, I felt miserable while held down against the floor, barely able to breathe. Eventually, I stopped struggling and the guards allowed me to stand up. I wasn’t even angry any more, just… you know. I was mourning.

  “Now don’t make any more trouble or you are definitely spending the night in jail,” said the same guard. Not without sympathy, actually. They could have had me jailed without trouble if they wanted.

  “Why?” I asked Kipp’s uncle.

  “It’s in his will,” he explained. “I know it’s… tasteless. But he asked for the procedure. That’s why we had to have the funeral so soon. Otherwise, the body is going to be… Christ, kid. Trust me, I wouldn’t have done it if Kipp hadn’t been explicit about it in his will.”

  “Why would he do that?” What I really wanted was for something to stop my pain. I wanted my friend back.

  “The full body procedure is way too expensive,” the uncle explained, “but just the head… that’s cheaper to freeze and to store. His sickness fund agreed to take care of the costs.”

  Of course, they did. They had expected Kipp to last a couple more years. They were saving money.

  There was a coffin in the chapel, but it was partially empty. According to his uncle, Kipp had asked for his head to be frozen with cryogenics. Then to store it in a special container until science advanced enough to restore him, to cure him of his sickness, and to give him a new body.

  Sounded like a tall order to me. Cryogenics had been fading in and out of fashion for a while now, ever since the costs of it went down. And during the decades it had been available to the masses, how many people had ever been brought back?

  Not a single one.

  People who bought into the fad were just paying for an expensive, wasteful way to be buried. Stored.

  I did not understand why someone like Kipp would fall for a scam like that. Other New Century fads never interested him, he never lied to himself about his chances.

  And yet he had agreed to have his head… Stored… For God knows how long, until the company ran out of business or a cataclysm destroyed the installation entirely.

  What was he thinking?

  When people realized the show was over, they turned back towards their own cliques and their own mourning. Once I calmed down, I even felt a bit guilty for disrupting them like that. They were here to say their last goodbyes to my friend. A couple of them were adults, people he had met while on his trips to the hospital. Others were kids about my age. Kipp didn’t go out much, he mostly stayed home, reading and playing videogames. Who were these people?

  Out of shame, I retreated to the back of the chapel and sat on a bench by myself. Van and Mom stayed with Kipp’s uncle, helping him deal with the responsibilities of the funeral.

  The doctors had said it was a complication.

  No one could’ve predicted it. It happened out of nowhere.

  Kipp had enough of a rough life for this shit, I thought.

  It was not fair.

  “You really think it’s so weird Kipp was into cryogenics?” A girl’s voice took me out of my own thoughts. I raised my head and realized she had sat next to me while I wasn’t paying attention. She must’ve moved like a cat. She was slightly shorter than me and thin in a way that didn’t leave much space for curves. Bordering in malnutrition. But she had a cute round face, auburn hair, and green eyes. Her clothing was too expensive for Lower Cañitas, but she wasn’t rich. She wasn’t wearing any black, though.

  “It’s weird,” I said, watching her with worry. Was she here to lecture me? “I can’t picture him agreeing to have his own head cut.”

  “I guess he lacks a better use for it right now,” she said with a condescending smile.

  I hated her immediately.

  “Who do you think—”

  “Don’t start. He would’ve found it funny,” she cut me off. She looked at me like I was some sort of experiment and she wasn’t happy with the direction it was going.

  “Yeah, but he’s dead,” I said. “He’s not here to argue with me.”

  “He thought that condition was very much temporary, right? Otherwise, he wouldn’t have bothered,” she said.

  “I don’t know what he was thinking,” I said, bitterly, “he never told me about it.”

  Cryogenics were folly, anyway. Something better than freezing parts of you with hopes of coming back to life was never dying in the first place. And how was that going? Some withered billionaires had hit a hundred and fifty years or so. Took them about ten heart transplants, among other things.

  I looked away, hoping the conversation died out. She sighed deeply and stared at the coffin in front of the chapel.

  “Who are you, anyways?” I asked her when curiosity got the best of me.

  “A friend of Kipp Patel, just like you,” she told me, her gaze never leaving the coffin. Over there, Van helped Uncle Patel put a floral arrangement at its feet. “We shared a hobby.”

  I had never seen her around Kipp. He was very much the solitary kid, the one who got picked last at school. I told her so and she nodded.

  “We never met in real life before,” she explained. “We knew each other from the game we played.”

  “You mean Rune Universe.”

  “Yup. Same with the others.” She made a gesture towards the other guys our age. “He made very good friends there.”

  I doubted anyone could ma
ke any real friends in a fake world. Yet here they were, people who had never met Kipp in real life, grieving just as much as I did. In the middle of the night, after only an hour’s notice…

  Perhaps it was the bitterness which made me behave this way.

  “Anyways,” the girl stood up, “I just wanted to meet you. Kipp talked about you a lot, you know? For what’s worth, I doubt this is the last time we meet Kipp Patel.”

  Kipp mentioned me? Before this morning, Kipp and I hadn’t talked in a couple months. We were best friends, or at least I thought so. But, lately, we just didn’t have much in common. What was left to talk about?

  The girl was already leaving, heading towards the front of the chapel.

  “Wait. What’s your name?” I asked her.

  She turned back, “The name’s Rylena. Diamond-ranked Battlemind. See you around, Cole.”

  I didn’t ask you your Rune username, I thought, frowning, as she left. It didn’t matter. She sounded like the gaming equivalent of a religious nut. Some friendships Kipp kept.

  When sunrise came, I left the chapel and the hospital. I told Mom and Van to catch up later. They seemed worried for me, but I was in no mood for anyone to feel sorry for me. I wanted to put as much ground between me and that coffin as I could. My friend wasn’t there. He was in some container in a giant refrigerator for dead people.

  Jeez, Kipp, I thought we shared the same humor.

  I don’t remember when I came home, nor when the girls arrived, nor when I finally fell asleep on my sofa. I woke up in the middle of the day and realized my pillow was wet with tears.

  Breakfast was on the kitchen table and I was alone. Van had classes on Sundays to get her ready for her college applications. Mom had her AA meetings.

  I vaguely recalled one of them asking me if I wanted them to stay, but I much preferred to be alone. Like a wounded dog hiding under a bed so no-one sees how vulnerable he is.

  I ate in silence, trying not to think of anything. The videos on my phone failed to make me laugh, in fact, I couldn’t even stomach them. It felt as if my soul wanted to puke.

  There was a knock on the door.

  A visitor? I thought it could be the police, but that was the instinctive paranoia of someone who has spent way too much time in the Department. Still, I considered just letting them knock away until they left.

  I was in no mood for visitors.

  The knocking continued, rhythmically, demanding, without a trace of politeness. The beating on the wood did a number on my ears. I got up and opened the door with an angry pull. My jaw was so clenched my whole face felt stiff.

  “What?” I demanded. It was a man in a baggy brown suit. He smelled strongly of sweat and moss, like that was his only suit and he hadn’t washed it in a week.

  “Mister Dorsett?” he asked. He had a professional tone, emotionless, trained to imply nothing but exactly what he said. So, he was a lawyer. “Cole Dorsett?”

  I nodded, but made no move to let him in. He didn’t seem to expect me to. “I’m Mister Kapila Patel’s court-appointed executor. Horace Johnson.”

  He had an official-looking document that placed in writing what he said out loud. It was startling to think Kipp had left me something in his will. Even hearing he had a will…

  “Alright,” I said. Even my voice felt numb. “You can come in, I suppose.”

  “Thank you very much,” he said as I moved aside. I guided him into the kitchen, where he made himself comfortable. He sat by the table and placed his cheap briefcase on the tablecloth while I stared at him with mild curiosity. “Please, grab a seat.”

  Too distracted to even realize I had just been ordered around in my own house, I did as he said.

  “Right. First of all, I’m sorry for your loss, Mister Dorsett,” said Johnson. He opened his briefcase and took out a thick stack of papers. I hadn’t seen that much paper together in my life, but I wasn’t about to ask and end up looking like a fool. “Second of all, you are the beneficiary named in two different points of Mister Patel’s will. Both of the assets bequeathed to you have already been taxed according to the law. You only need to sign your consent right here so you can claim them immediately. Great. Also, sign here… and here… Excellent.”

  “What’s this about?” I said as I signed over and over again, “As far as I know, Kipp wasn’t rich enough to bother with a will.”

  He pointed another bunch of places where my signature had to go, then said:

  “To be honest, his will was not very big. Most of it consists of the items you are claiming.” If he had any opinion on the matter, he didn’t show it. “All done. Very well, Mister Dorsett, here’s the part of the will concerning you.”

  He took out a sheet of paper with a red seal on its top and read mechanically from it.

  “I, Kapila Patel, give, devise, and bequeath to Cole James Dorsett, my personal mindjack.”

  Horace Johnson took out a sleek, black, plastic diadem with a glass visor. I had seen videos about it on the internet, it was the device used to connect to a Virtual Reality System. A new model, like this one, must’ve gone on the market for the same as a second-hand car. I stared at it incredulously.

  “I, Kapila Patel, give, devise, and bequeath to Cole James Dorsett my permanent subscription to the Virtual Reality System ‘Rune Universe.’” Johnson looked up from the document. “Very interesting, by the way. Usually, subscriptions like this are not transferable. But the company that owns the game agreed to his terms. I wonder what he did to convince them. It could set a complex precedent.”

  Uh, I thought. My brain refused to cooperate and left me to fend for myself.

  “Doesn’t matter, in the end. The transfer process is finished, there is no actual physical document for this one. Just launch the game application and confirm your identity.”

  The lawyer gathered all the loose documents and put them back on his briefcase. I continued to stare at the mindjack, astonished.

  “Very well, that’s all,” said Johnson. He stood up. “Our business here is concluded. Are you satisfied with this meeting?”

  I nodded without really listening. Johnson smiled. “In that case, a satisfaction poll will be emailed to you in a couple of minutes. Have a good day, Mister Dorsett.”

  I was alone again before I realized it. The mindjack almost stared at me from its place on the table, waiting.

  Kipp had finally found one hell of a way to get me to play his game, I realized. I grabbed the mindjack. It was cold to the touch and sturdier than it looked. It was also heavy. Reflected in the black visor, I could see myself. My razor-shaved head, the scar on my jaw, brown eyes over olive skin. Whatever it was I found on that expression, I didn’t like it. I looked away and sighed.

  Mom and Van wouldn’t be home for a couple more hours. Hell, why not, I thought. I brought the mindjack to my unkempt sofa and closed the curtain.

  It’s funny how little gestures can have huge effects on our lives. At that moment, while I plugged the mindjack to the wall, I didn’t realize my life was never going to be the same. I wonder what I’d have thought, had I known what waited for me in Rune Universe.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Patel Situation

  In the middle of the night, two men were about to meet for the first time in several years. Both had hoped they never had to see the other again.

  Circumstances had changed, though.

  The first man’s name was John. Few people called him that, though, since he had divorced his wife years ago.

  Almost everyone called him the Director, although some did so sarcastically. He was technically retired. But he had built his entire life around earning that title. It was the only name he had left.

  The second man was a scientist and a very rich businessman. He was also a murderer and a betrayer. His name was Ogawa Seitaro. He was thin and bald. His face was severe, almost bitter.

  These men were to meet in a mediocre fast-food restaurant ran by a manager software as legally close to a true AI as
possible. The waiters were the year 2041 equivalent of an automated vacuum cleaner.

  John was dressed as a bulky tourist. His ex-marine frame, nowadays more round around the belly, was covered by a loose shirt with a colorful purple, teal, black, and bronze motif. He also wore brown shorts and running shoes with white socks.

  When he came into the restaurant, only three living human beings were inside. Two hobos looked at him for a single second and then forgot all about him. The third person was a young lady from a ghetto much worse than Lower Cañitas District. She briefly made a pass over John’s shirt, rolled her eyes, and went back to eating her synthetic hamburger.

  A vacuum-waiter dropped by John’s table seconds after he sat. It displayed on the table a hologram of the restaurant’s menu. The food in the pictures looked much better than it did in real life. John selected an item at random and set the waiter on its way.

  Minutes later, Ogawa Seitaro arrived. His disguise: an anime t-shirt with a holographic girl floating in a skimpy pose millimeters over the white shirt. A slogan at chest level announced, “Mai waifu is better than yours.” This slogan stopped being funny before Cole Dorsett was born. It recently made a comeback, but it just wasn’t the same.

  Ogawa Seitaro was in his late forties. He had a net-worth bigger than some smaller countries. The chance of a reporter recognizing him, even paparazzi-surveillance software, was near to zero. Not only thanks to the shirt but to the illegal camera-scrambler beneath the smart-mesh fabric which projected the hologram.

  “John,” Seitaro said as he arrived at the Director’s table. He looked at the chair with an expression only someone who owned trousers more expensive than the entire restaurant could make. “I hoped I never had to see you again in my life.”

  “Call me that again and you won’t like what happens next,” John said.

  Seitaro raised his finely groomed eyebrow. He wasn’t intimidated by the Director. His fellow businessmen were more dangerous nowadays. Mostly because they didn’t give you any warning before shooting.