by Hugo Huesca
“She succeeded,” Rylena whispered.
“You killed her over this,” added Walpurgis, tightening her grip around his neck.
“I had no choice!” he gasped. “The States asked for it. She thought no single government should make a decision that involved the human race. She—she was going to get us de-funded! Killed, perhaps! I did what I had to do, I didn’t kill them for pleasure!”
Perhaps the Negotiation skill wasn’t real, but I was getting very good at recognizing a liar. Seitaro Ogawa had killed them for the money. “No, you killed them for business, right? To protect your grant.”
“She hid the Keygen. We monitored her son’s account and all his messages and communications and he still managed to slip it past us,” he went on. “That is going to cost me, sooner or later, unless I can get my hands on that Keygen myself and turn it over.”
“You’re not going to sell it, of course,” Rylena said with sarcasm dripping from each word. “You’re a worm, Ogawa.”
“I’ve heard enough,” I told them. “Walpurgis, Darren, step back. You too, Rylena.” I took a deep breath and steadied my hand, training the gun’s sights on Seitaro’s chest.
“I can share the money with you!” he pleaded. Tears were streaming down his face now.
“Not interested.”
“Cole…” Rylena whispered as she tried to reach me. I added pressure to the trigger, but not enough to fire the gun and looked at her with a crystal clear message: don’t try to stop me.
“He’s scum,” I told her, “and if I don’t do this, he’s going to get away with it.”
“Please, I’ll give you anything,” pleaded Seitaro. “I’ve told you everything I know, I fulfilled my part of the deal, please. Don’t you have any honor? You promised…”
“You’ll give me anything?” I exclaimed. My hand trembled and he raised his hands in a sad attempt to shield himself. “How about this? Restore Kipp Patel back to life and I won’t shoot you. That’s what I want. Right now. Go.”
His face was covered in a mixture of tears and snot and he looked so pathetic I wanted to shoot him just so I wouldn’t have to look at him anymore. “Please! Oh, please!”
“Cole, Kipp never thought you were a criminal.” Rylena went on. “Definitely not a murderer. I want Ogawa dead, too… But it won’t bring him back. Do you really think Kipp would want you to kill in his name?”
“He killed Kipp’s parents,” I said through clenched teeth. “He got away with it. He will get away with all of it if we let him live.”
“I’ll tell the police everything!” Seitaro exclaimed. “I’ll confess to anything you want, please…”
“Shut up!” Walpurgis screamed, suddenly. She kicked him in the chin and sent him sprawling to the floor. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast, Cole.”
I’d promised Kipp I would avenge him. This man was guilty of every bit of pain my friend had experienced in his life. I had him right in front of me and the chance would never present itself again…
You didn’t promise him revenge, a timid part of my mind whispered at me. Remember? You did that after his avatar had disappeared. You only promised him to finish what his parents started.
What his parents started was currently hidden from public access. Only one man could help me get there.
And I had been so close to killing him…
I screamed in frustration and lowered the gun. I had two choices. Either get revenge and kill a person who very much deserved to die, or finish the promise I had made my dead friend.
“Oh God, thank you, thank you…”
“Shut up! You’re a sad, pathetic excuse of a man. You don’t deserve to live, but you’re not even worth killing,” I yelled at him. “Validore. The planet you made unreachable. Make it public right the fuck now, no excuses. Not one word, Ogawa. Not a single one. If you say you can’t, I swear I’ll kill you right now.” This time I meant it and he knew it.
He stood up trembling. “There’s a console here… I have the password. Please, don’t…”
“Not a word, Ogawa,” I reminded him. After the rage and frustration had passed through me, all that was left was a cold determination. “Validore. Public. Now.”
“C’mon, asshole, move,” Walpurgis told him as she pushed him around. “Don’t try anything or you’ll regret it.”
We followed him towards the end of the room where the console waited for us, a small glass screen and a keyboard under it, both protruding from a server rack slightly bigger than the rest.
“I only need a moment…” Seitaro mumbled.
As his hands flew over the keyboard, Darren turned to me. “So, this is what you’ve been doing? I suspected you’re in some deep shit, man, but this is insane… A videogame made by aliens? You realize that’s what the asshole is talking about, right?”
I nodded, calmly. Darren looked about to go into a nervous breakdown and I knew my frie— my acquaintance—, was tough. He had broken his hand punching a metal dog and was barely complaining. And yet, after hearing Seitaro’s confession, he was pale and sweaty.
Perhaps I should be freaking out, too. All this time I’d been prancing around the simulated wet dream of some alien civilization I couldn’t even imagine.
There were no aliens in Rune Universe. The empty vastness of the game now seemed creepy and dangerous, like the lurking creatures hidden under the acid sea of Prima’s Death World.
The news still didn’t shake me much. Walpurgis was as calm as I was, and Rylena was quiet and thoughtful, but not scared.
We were too calm. Darren’s reaction was appropriate if you discovered not only that aliens were real, but that they had filled the universe with a simulation of secret layers with no known purpose. And that you were about to run head-first into said secret layers.
This wasn’t a movie nor a game. But Rune was really close to my brain. It didn’t have access to my neurons or anything like that… But it knew me, on a psychological level. It knew who I was.
In the tutorial, when I was trying to find reasons not to like the game and was trying to compare it to old MMOs, it had given me exactly what I wanted: things to kill and discharge my frustration on.
After that, it had given me different quests when my interests changed. Hell, a teleporting dog? That was a character in Sirens of Titan, the first book in Kipp’s collection I’d read.
Had my tastes changed and the game kept tabs on me, or had it changed me to accommodate its own interests?
I mean, it was awfully convenient it was so focused on helping out the player with the Keygen needed to release its last security layers…
Still, I wasn’t scared one bit, even if I suspected it wasn’t entirely my own emotional state.
“It’s done,” said Seitaro. His voice yanked me out of my own mind and I realized he was staring at me. “Validore is public again. The police is well under way, so if you want to negotiate a deal, this is your last chance.”
“You gave the Patel’s chance for a deal before you poisoned them?” I asked him.
His eyebrows rose ever so slightly and his mouth curled in a snarl of hate.
Walpurgis took a look at the expression on my face right then and grabbed Rylena by the shoulder and pushed her away from the line of fire.
I raised Seitaro’s own gun and pointed it at an empty spot a couple feet away from his head and then pulled the trigger just as he realized I was about to fire.
Recoil was stronger than I’d come to expect from Rune. The shot rang like an explosion right by my ear and deafened it while shaking my entire skull. The gun made my hand jump and it smacked against my shoulder hard, but I barely noticed the pain. Even before I’d heard the sound of the shot, Ogawa’s right knee had exploded in a shower of red gore.
The man crumpled to the floor, his expensive trousers covered in blood, fragments of bone, and torn muscle. His mouth contorted in a mask of pure agony and I knew he was screaming, even if I couldn’t hear him.
“Fuck,” I
mouthed. I was as stunned as everyone else. I glanced at the smoking gun in my hand like the thing had possessed me to do so.
My hearing came back slowly in my other ear and I could distinguish the voice of Darren, faint as a whisper, telling me:
“Jeez, man, you straight up shot him. That’s stone cold, even for me.”
I turned to him, shaking my head frantically. “It was an accident,” I mouthed, “I wanted to scare him, not really shoot him… I wasn’t even pointing at him…”
Ogawa’s screams were also coming clearer now and I realized I’d be having nightmares about those even if we made it through the day.
“Okay, Cole, give me that right now…” I heard Walpurgis whisper to me. She slowly walked to me. She made sure to use careful movements, like I was a crazed animal, and extended her arm towards the gun. “C’mon, buddy, let me have a look at that.”
I let her grab it and she stashed it in her back pocket. “Okay. It’s fine. It’s all going to be fine.”
“I’m not in shock,” I told her, loud enough for even me to hear. “It was an accident, okay?”
“Sure buddy,” said Darren, “of course it was.” He winked at me.
“It’s not like he didn’t deserve it,” said Rylena. She was looking at Ogawa’s whimpering silhouette with a mixture of disgust and pity. “He’s going to live by the looks of it, but he’s going to need a tourniquet.”
“Aren’t tourniquets dangerous?” I asked her. It was something I had learned in Rune. I felt guilty over shooting him, even if he deserved it. “He could lose the leg.”
Rylena shrugged. “He’ll have to buy a new one, then.”
Walpurgis tore another strip of cloth from Darren’s shirt. The Feral now looked like a Zombie from a B-list movie. “I got it. You guys go ahead. I’ll tie him up for you.”
“Ahead where?” asked Darren.
I smiled. “Well, it may be our last shot at finishing a Quest we have, you see. And there is a badass room full with mindjacks waiting for us, so we may as well…”
I was carrying my own mindjack in the backpack Van had given me, but I was a member of a team. We had started this together and we were going to finish it together.
Darren was staring at me like I’d gone crazy. “You’re going to log into that alien game in the middle of a police stand-off?”
“Police stand-off?” I asked, confused. “What are you talking about?”
I realized that, as my hearing slowly came back to my mauled ears, I could hear the faint roar of police sirens in the distance. And something else, too, the screaming of an engine… A spaceship? Of course not.
Oh, it’s helicopters. I deduced. Lots of helicopters.
“We need to get out of here before the SWAT drones start pouring in,” said Darren as Rylena, he, and I sprinted towards the beta testing room.
“It’s too late,” Rylena told him, “when you can hear them, it means the building is already surrounded.”
“They haven’t stormed in yet,” I pointed out. I could still hear Ogawa’s screams, even with my messed-up hearing.
The screams stopped after we reached the beta testing room and closed the door behind us. Rylena went straight to the two nearest mindjacks and started configuring them with practiced hands.
I took out my own mindjack from Van’s sack and plugged an Ethernet cable to it while trying not to think of what would happen to us when the police swarmed the building.
“Cole, check this out,” Darren told me as he handed me his phone.
It was a live stream of the outside of the skyscraper. Police were surrounding it even now with more and more drones and officers. The media was here and a reporter occupied half the screen while she frantically narrated:
“—We’re outside the Ogawa Conglomerate’s headquarters in the financial district, where a violent event is currently unfolding. Sources claim that fugitive of the law, Cole Dorsett, is currently holed up atop the building and may have taken hostage none other than billionaire Seitaro Ogawa, the founder of Ogawa Conglomerate and the famous game company, Nordic.
“Less than an hour ago the police detected an advanced digital intrusion on their servers and traced it back to their holding cells, where Dorsett was being held. They found said cells empty and declared a city-wide pursuit. The next development came when they received a frantic report by Dorsett’s sister, who claimed he had captured her minutes after his escapade. The girl managed to escape and is currently under interrogation by the Investigations Bureau. The police have tracked Dorsett’s location to his former employer, Xanz Corporation, and is currently determining the possibility of an immediate breach and capture. We have with us Capitan Del Rio of San Mabrada’s finest, ready to give a statement—”
I put down the phone and turned to Rylena. “They’re going to breach the building, but they think we have a hostage…”
The door opened with a bang and Walpurgis came in. “There are helicopters outside. We don’t have enough time to connect to Rune.” If SWAT was involved it meant those helicopters were stealth ones, analyzing the interior of the building with scanners and looking for any trap or ambush. I had seen the videos over the Internet. Soon after the helicopter’s scan came the squads of SWAT drones. Cold, efficient, deadly.
Rylena took out her own phone and dialed a short string of numbers. “Let’s make some time, then.”
“Hello, 911? I’m Irene Monferrer. I’m inside the Ogawa Conglomerate, next to Cole Dorsett. Tell your scanners to confirm it, I’m the one waving right now. You got it? Good. Listen carefully. We’ve captured Seitaro Ogawa and have him hidden along with half of his staff in a secure location. We’ll kill them all if you try to enter. We’re carrying deadman switches with us. We have a list of demands and want to talk to someone capable of taking decisions. You’ve five minutes to call me back or we’ll start killing hostages.”
She ended the call. “What?” she muttered, noticing our stunned stares. “That’s at least half an hour we just gained.”
“And two thousand years in jail for each of us,” I guessed.
“Then, let’s make it worth our time,” said Walpurgis. She held the mindjack Rylena handed to her and put it on her head. “You guys ready?”
“I hope whatever is inside Validore is a real secret and not something like ‘the secret was inside you all along,’” I whispered, putting on my own mindjack. The device’s weight had become comfortably familiar.
“I’m voting for ‘the real secret is the power of frienship’” said Walpurgis without turning towards me. Instead, she reclined in her seat and searched for a comfortable position. I did the same after a moment.
Darren looked nervously around the room, like trying to guess where the SWAT drones swarm us first. “So, what do I do? Just wait around until someone shoots me?”
Rylena handed him the phone. “When they call back, you’re going to tell them we’re demanding the release of the following Syrian rebels from Egypt’s political prison. Here are their names, try and pronounce them right—” she told him the names of about eight men and woman that I had never heard of before in my life.
While Darren looked at us like a deer in the middle of the road that’s seconds away from being run over by a fire-covered train, Rylena sat in a chair next to us and donned the last mindjack.
“Alright, let’s go,” I said. I tried to give my voice a resolute strength, but couldn’t stop it from trembling a bit. “One last rodeo, gals.”
Begin Deep Dive Immersion?
Oh yes.
I ran through my virtual desktop to Rune’s green icon.
Welcome to Rune Universe. Connecting to the game servers…
After hundreds of jumps like this one, my brain handled the transition from the white landscape of my mindjack to the ultra-realistic graphics of Rune Universe like a pro. It was like stepping out of your comfortable pajamas and straight into a badass suit.
My body appeared, all geared up and ready for action, inside Beard’
s merchant freighter, just where we had logged off the last time we were here. I wasn’t Cole Dorsett anymore, but Cole Picard. This universe was my playground and all its secrets belonged to me.
My spacesuit’s readings readily informed me that my playground was currently without an artificial atmosphere around me and that I was using my suit’s oxygen reserves. A look-around the ship was enough to conclude the reason why.
Beard’s ship was a broken derelict of plasma fire and burned metal. A hole in the hull had torn apart the cargo bay and I could see through the cracked screens of the cabin how Beard merchant’s supplies floated out of the ship and into space. They resembled a string of guts flowing out of the belly of a dead animal.
And it was, in a way, a dead animal. I knew even without Rylena’s system analysis: Beard’s ship was dead.
“What the hell happened here?” Walpurgis muttered when she appeared just a few steps away from me. Her rifle appeared in her hands as she took it out of her inventory and she looked around, searching for any attackers.
Rylena appeared next. Her confusion was short-lived. She turned to me. “They boarded the ship?”
“I don’t think so,” I told her. “The cargo is out there, they took nothing.”
“Let’s assume the worst, alright? They were looking for the Keygen and ambushed Beard while he was doing a routine supply run. We’re in a secure system, so it couldn’t have been pirates. It had to be a big Alliance to go against the Terran Federation…”
“Posse of Iron did this?” I asked her. I gripped my blaster with trembling rage. “They couldn’t have taken the Keygen, right? It’s safeguarded.”
“Guys?” said Walpurgis, “I don’t think it was Posse of Iron.”
“Why?” Rylena and I turned to her and saw she was pointing outside to the flowing debris. I followed the direction of her finger and realized some of the boxes were bouncing against each other just when they neared a part of space that the string of debris and junk seemed to avoid, even if it was partially in its way. Space didn’t work that way…
“Cloaked!” exclaimed Rylena, beating me for a second. “Quick, log out!”
