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

by Hugo Huesca

  The air inside was cooled by an industrial-sized air-circulation unit, independent from the rest of the office. Each server still radiated waves of burning heat, almost unbearable if you got too close —which in the cramped space between rows was what ended up happening. The final effect was currents of shivering cold passing through my body like the whispers of a ghost while my arms and legs roasted slowly with every step I took.

  “Look for a computer,” I heard Rylena say behind me as we delved into the indistinct maze of metal slabs, “anything with a screen that could be used to introduce changes to the system.”

  “We could spend days here, Irene,” muttered Walpurgis, “and we don’t have days.”

  I could feel the gazes of my friends (and Darren) drilling my back. I clenched my jaw shut and balled my fists as frustration and anger burned in my chest. They were right and I knew it.

  If I lead them into a dead end to be caught with me, doing nothing…

  The face of Stefania Caputi appeared in my mind. She hadn’t even hesitated before discarding me into the Police Department. The message had been crystal clear: you’re not a player in this game, Cole Dorsett, you’re just another pawn. Now step aside and let the adults handle things.

  When the police came for us, I decided then, I’d tell them I’d forced Rylena and Walpurgis to come with me. I’d tell them I had lost it when I realized I was out of Strikes, and tried to find something in the building to blackmail them into using corporate lawyers to help me. I worked here, after all, I knew what to look for.

  Perhaps the police would believe me. As far as I knew, my friends had no record on their files. Nothing I could do for Darren, though.

  I was so focused on my own despair that I didn’t hear the steps until they were almost in front of me.

  “Well well, I was hoping we would meet sometime,” said the shadowed figure as he stepped out of the server’s row where he was hiding. “I didn’t know it would be so soon.”

  I had never seen that man before in my life. He was in his mid-thirties or so he appeared to be. His frame was thin like a stick in a very expensive suit. He was Japanese, but his accent was from the States.

  It could only be one man. Seitaro Ogawa.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in prison?” he asked with the gall of a man hosting a party and greeting his guests at the door. “Doesn’t matter. I called the police as soon as I heard intruders were in my building. They will be here to meet with you all soon. In the meanwhile…”

  He was holding a pistol in his left hand, pointed straight at my chest.

  I stepped back instinctively, trying to get as much distance from the man as I could. I knew he was a murderer, even if there was no evidence left to prove it. I almost tripped when I smashed against Rylena and Walpurgis, but I held onto the burning surface of a server.

  “Uh, uh, careful with those things. They are a couple million a piece, you don’t want to ruin your credit score with the payments,” Seitaro Ogawa said.

  “Hey man, we aren’t looking for any trouble,” Darren told him. He raised his hands and tried to take a step forward.

  Ogawa instantly waved his gun at him and fired one single shot. The deafening bang drowned our surprised screams. In the cramped room, the sound smacked against my ears with the efficiency of a flashbang and every sound disappeared, but a constant flat screeching. The bullet had hit just a foot in front of Darren and so close to Walpurgis’ feet that she dove for cover out of view, quick as a leopard.

  The others and me froze, including Darren. A bullet will kill you just as dead as anyone no matter how much muscle you’re packing. And in the little hallways created by the server rows, Darren was a target impossible to miss.

  “Next step you take, the bullet goes straight into your brain,” said Seitaro. His voice came far away and muted, but I could see every syllable form in his lips. Words fell out of his mouth like slime out of San Mabrada’s water treatment plant.

  “Fine, man, calm down,” Darren said. He raised his hands again and stepped back, glancing nervously across the room.

  “You plan on killing us?” I spat at Seitaro. “Like you did to Kipp and his parents?”

  He shrugged. “Kipp? Never heard of him. If you mean the Patel’s kid, he wasn’t in my sights. A mere casualty of war. Wrong place, wrong time.”

  “You call his mother’s womb ‘the wrong place?’” Rylena whispered behind me. I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was trembling with rage.

  “Oh, so he knew more than he let on. Wonder how that happened.”

  I had to think fast. That man was the last person I wanted to find at the wrong end of a firearm. But he had us down his sights in a straight line. Impossible to miss.

  I hadn’t been in a firefight ever, yet I knew these things instinctively. My whole body screamed at me “move a muscle and die” and still…

  “Cole,” Rylena whispered behind me, “he wants to kill us.”

  Without moving my head very much, I nodded. I knew this. You don’t call the police and then go at an intruder waving a gun and firing “warning shots”. You just shoot them, miss around a bit to make it look less like an execution and more like self-defense, then claim exactly that.

  The shot at Darren’s feet was an intentional misfire, not a warning.

  Seitaro Ogawa looked at his sides, trying to keep a clear line of sight in case Walpurgis jumped at him out of the shadows.

  “Your friend better come out right now or I’ll start shooting,” he said.

  “She’s allergic to bullets,” I spat back. I stood in the middle of the way, trying to cover Rylena with my body (yeah, sorry Darren, no way I can do that for you). I wasn’t being heroic at all, it was cold, hard logic. The kind she used all the time in-game every time we went into combat, actually.

  I was in the front, so I was taking a bullet if Seitaro shot, no matter what I did. I may as well help the other guys have a better chance at running for cover.

  “I planned on visiting you in jail as soon as I heard the news,” Seitaro told me. His gun pointed toward me and at this distance, I could see the darkness in the barrel even with only the faint light of my phone pointed at my feet. “I set an alert with your name on every search engine, heard about it instantly. I knew I had to make sure whatever your friend told you stayed buried, like him. When he sent you that message he condemned you, you know? That you took the time to come all the way here without speaking with anybody just makes it easier.”

  “Then why not kill him in his home, far away from here, when people wouldn’t have the chance of suspecting foul play?” asked Rylena.

  I turned around briefly, with a “seriously?” look on my face. With friends like these… Still, she was right. Seitaro Ogawa had the resources and the will to take me out without dirtying his suit. He had chosen to wait until the last possible second. Why?

  Seitaro smiled. “It was a favor that an acquaintance paid a lot to get. See, by sending Stefania Caputi to you, he was hoping he wouldn’t have to kill you later. Some people are sentimental like that. Most are, actually. That’s why I outwit them all.

  “She was supposed to take you out of the game and leave him and myself to handle her… Of course, I planned on having you killed in jail as soon as that was taken care of —you see how much trouble loose ends can give. Nothing personal.”

  Even at gunpoint, I felt a cold rush of hate wash down my fear. I could see how Seitaro Ogawa thought. How he saw people. He must’ve said something very similar to himself while he poisoned Kipp’s parents.

  “You’re scum,” I told him.

  “Whatever makes you feel better, kid. Sorry, this chat is over. I’ve seen what happens when the guy with the gun starts explaining his plan. I’m not giving you that chance,” he said. He barely bothered to look in my direction, instead glancing at his sides to make sure no one was about to flank him while he wasn’t looking.

  I raised my hands as I fought down panic. “Wait just one second. You are for
getting one thing and it’s very important.”

  “I think not,” said Seitaro Ogawa and he started to pull the trigger.

  What he was forgetting was this: even if it was “safe” territory when he moved through it, it didn’t mean it would stay that way during a confrontation. I had learned about it firsthand when the Posse of Iron ambushed Rylena and me in the Prima sector. That mistake had cost us the Apollo Wing.

  To Seitaro Ogawa, the cost was one hell of a misfire when Walpurgis rushed at him from the servers behind him. The girl hit him square in the middle of his back, sent his gun flying wildly through the air and catapulted him to the floor with a heavy thud.

  Ogawa was a businessman whose only forays into exercise were probably golf and tea time. He may have given Walpurgis alone a fair fight since he was bigger and heavier. Key word being may. It was clear, judging from the very painful headlock she instantly caught him in, that Walpurgis was trained in something more than videogame PvP.

  Then Darren joined the fray while Ogawa flailed around like a tuna out of the water.

  Walpurgis pressed Ogawa’s head against the burning surface of a nearby server. It wasn’t hot enough to burn him but, judging by the way he screamed, Ogawa didn’t know this about his own property.

  “He should have just shot you instead of gloating,” Rylena told me to my ear while we calmly observed our two friends go to town. “I mean, he even said so himself.”

  “Yeah. He almost got me, though,” I said.

  I pointed my phone’s light around for a bit. A few feet from me I found the gun that Seitaro had dropped seconds ago and I grabbed it. My heart-rate was steady. The heavy weight of the thing surprised me. Blasters in Rune were more light even if they were bulkier. It gave the pistol a real-like quality.

  “I better stop them before he’s too mauled to talk,” I told Rylena.

  “You sure that’s all you want?” she asked me as she examined my face. Her eyes were real human eyes out of Rune, but they had an eerie shine that reminded me she always saw more than she let on.

  “I have more skill points in Negotiation,” I reminded her. I was calm, but my mouth felt sandy and dry.

  I expected her to laugh, but instead she shook her head. “This isn’t a game, Cole.”

  “Yeah. I know that.” I studied the gun in my hand.

  Then I turned to Walpurgis and Darren, who were in the process of turning Ogawa into ground meat. The man whimpered softly in the ground, one side of his head red and blistered.

  “Stop,” I said as I walked towards them, “we need him to answer some questions.”

  I towered over the man who had murdered my friend and shoved the gun under his chin. He whimpered and tried to crawl away, but Walpurgis held him by the shoulders. “After that,” I continued, “we’ll see what we do with you, Mister Ogawa.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Siege

  The murderer complained like a sad puppy, but I could see his eyes still held on to a sliver of scorpion-like rationality. I decided to watch his hands at all times and at the same time, I took a step back.

  “Search him, Darren,” I told The Feral’s leader.

  He did so and the expression in Ogawa’s face told me all I needed to know. It was the crazed look of a man who has finally been defeated.

  “The hell is this?” muttered Darren when he searched Ogawa’s jacket. He took out a small vial of a green liquid mounted on an automatic syringe.

  “Just medicine,” whispered Seitaro.

  “Then you won’t mind if we stick you with it, right?” I spat at him. He winced.

  “Kipp’s parents died by poison, didn’t they?” said Walpurgis. She grabbed the injector from Darren’s hands and stared at it in disgust.

  “I—” started Seitaro Ogawa, but the sight of the barrel of his own gun staring at his right eye shut him up instantly.

  “I’m not interested in hearing excuses. If you want to survive the next few minutes, you’re going to answer all our questions, you understand?” I told him, anger seeping into my voice. I took my finger off of the trigger: there was no way I wouldn’t shoot him if I left it there.

  Just to make sure he understood, Walpurgis kicked him again in the ribs.

  “Rune,” I spat at him with my voice trembling with raw hatred, “you killed three good people over it. Why?”

  Seitaro tried to look defiant but the cold barrel of the gun being shoved in front of his nose changed his mind really quick. “The Patel’s were going to get us all killed anyway,” he said hoarsely, “they refused to cooperate after Antarctica.”

  “What happened at Antarctica?”

  “We were a team,” he said. “Contractors for the States. They called us over a signal their satellites had discovered, it was transmitting directly to the Southern Magnetic Pole, we had to reach it on a boat.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “At first, we thought it was random noise,” Seitaro’s eyes were unfocused, like he was reliving the events that had led him to where we were today. “Eleanore Patel decoded it. It wasn’t random noise, but raw data. Complex. Layer after layer of mathematical systems interacting with each other, changing, modifying themselves in real time. Some of those systems were physical laws, we could identify those. Others, we couldn’t reach, they were codified.”

  “You mean something transmitted this signal straight to Earth?” Rylena asked him. “From where?”

  “No, you’re not getting it,” Seitaro said, still looking far away, “the signal is everywhere. Its presence in Antarctica has more to do with Earth’s magnetic field than anything intentional. You can find the same signal in Jupiter. Or in Alpha Centauri. It comes from a place farther away than the Milky Way, farther than we can see with our modern telescopes. As far as we know, it permeates the entire known universe.”

  “You’re telling the truth?” Rylena went on. “How hasn’t anyone else realized this?”

  “It’s very well hidden. Beneath the radiation noise… It isn’t—it isn’t like a radio signal, you can’t just tune in to it accidentally. Look, if you let me go now, I’ll tell the police to go easy on you—”

  “Trial will go easier if we just kill you,” I told him. “So make it worth our while and change our minds. You found this signal. Then what?”

  “We thought it had to be some sort of message. We spent years trying to decipher it and then Eleanore Patel came up with her own theory. The signal wasn’t a message, it was a simulation. All the raw data it included was enough to simulate a complex system. A huge one. In a galactic scale.”

  I almost lowered my gun. I’d heard all the discussions about our own universe being a simulation, I’d never expected Seitaro Ogawa to tell me, all this time, we had a simulation hidden in our own universe. Then the next realization came like a sack of bricks.

  He’s talking about Rune. He’s saying Rune is the simulation. And also, that Rune wasn’t from this Earth.

  “We could find out what the simulation did if we built a compiling language around it,” Seitaro went on, “and the States paid us to do so. We subcontracted the staff of a game’s company that had recently went out of business. We pretended to create a new Virtual Reality System, the most complex ever made. In reality, we just wanted to see what the darn thing would do. We connected all this,” he made a gesture that included the entire room, “to the Antarctic signal. We transformed it into our ‘game’s’ engine. Over it we added classes, items, a fighting system, skills. Even quests… We didn’t need to track those, the software generates them automatically. It’s like it hand-crafts the buggers. We built Rune —the game— around the signal, but it is layered over it, we can’t mess with the Core build.”

  Rylena was so distracted by the tale that she reclined against a server’s and didn’t notice until her jeans started to smoke. “And what did you find?—After Rune went online…”

  The man had the gall to shrug. “We found dick. It was mostly empty space. A representation of our gala
xy, Earth included —barren, at first, just a rock no different than Mars— and not a very good one at that. Planets were wrong, the scale was all wrong. Physics worked, but not always. It makes for a great game, not so much a good anything else.”

  “The hidden layers,” said Rylena after Seitaro shut up for a second. “You said there were hidden layers you couldn’t reach.”

  He nodded. “We believed the true purpose of the signal was hidden there. But we couldn’t access them. Just by studying the encryption it uses, we advanced Earth’s computer science by a decade. Modern hacking and security come from there and you can thank our studies for the mindjack technology, too.”

  “How nice of you,” Walpurgis whispered.

  “Doesn’t matter. We were never able to decode it. We have been running the simulation under the guise of a game ever since, hoping one of the players runs into a clue. Or for the system to do something interesting. Anything, really.”

  I raised the gun again and pressed it against his temple. “I told you not to lie. You killed the Patel’s over this. We’re not forgetting that, Ogawa.”

  What he was going to say next, I knew before he said it aloud.

  “Please, be careful with that thing —agh!— fine! Fine! Eleanore kept working at the encryption long after I had given up on it. She believed we were missing an important detail and she was right. For all our efforts to break the code, she believed the signal would decode itself with the right string of instructions. Those instructions had to change each time the signal changed, though. She wanted to build a piece of software that was ‘in tune’ with the changes.”

  Like the PIN sequencer that some old-guard banks still relied on for every transaction. A Keygen.

  A Key disguised as an in-game item that Kipp’s mother, Eleanore, had left him as his legacy. A legacy that he had gifted me and now was hidden in a bank inside a videogame that wasn’t really a game after all.