Glitchworld

by Damien Hanson

  Still, he managed to get the second of the ships in his sights, and with a couple of swears under his breath for good fortune, rolled his Hunt dice.

  And screamed bloody murder.

  Chapter 6 - No One Can Hear Your Pew Pews . . . In Space!!!

  “Mere, Kayle, I’m really sorry, okay! I promise we can have that talk just as soon as we don’t die out here in the vacuum of space. Whadda you say, huh? Truce?”

  Nothing.

  The view screen informed him that outside, the two ships had deployed countermeasures. His awesome torpedoes had just been circumvented by this clearly unfair BS game. The information ended up being pretty unnecessary, as it turned out, because he saw the explosion right before his very eyes.

  Okay, the engines. The engines.

  “Uh… I just have to, uh… speak technobabble. I have to reroute the coolant through, the… uh, the auxiliary life support, and pair the biometric transducer with the Borelon particles to get some extra juice in the engines. It has to work.”

  The HUD rolled Engineering dice for him, resulting in an 8 and a 2. Another success with complication. He was beginning to hate succeeding. Three new pie wedges filled in on the Engines Explode clock.

  “Three! Three! Are you kidding me?”

  He was sweating. This damned game was making him lose his mind.

  A few more switches were flipped, and the ship stopped filling with concerning white clouds of coolant. He also surged ahead, and got into the pilot’s seat just in time to jam the stick to the side and pulled up behind the second of the three ships. He didn’t have eyes on the third, but it hardly mattered, because he blasted the second one with the guns and screamed out in victory.

  Except he’d rolled a 4 and a 7.

  Another XP showed up right in front of his face, in the heads up display. The note below was Every time you make a skill check in a Desperate situation, you gain 1 XP!

  He hated dice, he hated life, he hated this game, and worst of all, Meredith, for being so ridiculous in the face of him using his time to play the frickin game the way he wanted to frickin play it. She had invited him, for pete’s sake.

  Time seemed to slow down as the eighth, ninth, and then final pie wedge of the clock for Ship’s Engines Go Critical to get filled in. The thing flashed from red to green, (which, totally the wrong colors BT dubs), and far behind him, a tiny explosion echoed through the ship’s hull. The whole ship shuddered a second later, along with a slew of brand spanking new warnings here and there and everywhere. They were mainly red and flashing, though a few of them were yellow or orange, and at least one was purple. He was pretty sure it read that the synthesized alcohol for the replicator was running low.

  “Mere?” he asked, but this time it was little more than a whisper. Dimly, he registered that he’d received a second experience point. Big whoop.

  He yanked on the control yolk and snapped at more buttons and switches. The Spacecraft roll result was, finally, a 10 (and a 2, but whatever) though the game informed him that his engine damage had resulted in reduced effect, so the ship turned over more slowly. He angled for the planet now, and–

  ‘Every time you make a skill check in a Desperate situation, you gain 1XP!’

  He roared and shoved the semi-transparent notification aside, and was darkly gratified to see it crack and shatter like glass, then get blown away by his heavy breathing.

  Wait. He was practically a space wizard. What was he doing here? “Enemy ships on screen!”

  When they appeared, grains of sand against the void of space as they were, he reached out a hand to seize each one of them. His HUD flashed the command and then dinged with information.

  This action will cost 5 AP to use on these targets. Proceed Y/N

  He gritted his teeth. Yes, damn you. Yes!

  Again the translucent chains shot out of his hands and this time wrapped around the ships. He could feel them in his hands (whether the chains or the ships, he didn’t know) but the pressure on his hands was real. They were coming toward him, but he was also pressing them together, hard. They veered toward one another, closer and closer, and began blasting at him with plasma bolts again. The ship shook with the impacts, but the shields (thankfully) held for the moment. He just gritted his teeth and shoved his hands until he clapped.

  They exploded in a ball of searing light.

  Derek fell to his shaggy knees. On his HUD, the Desperate situation had been replaced by a yellow Risky. Another explosion shook the ship, but this one was the ship’s engines. Of course it was.

  Without warning, the ship disappeared. One millisecond saw it half there, separating out in rectangles and blobs of bizarre colors, and the next second, it vanished. Everything in his field of view went white, and he realized he could see some of the dividing lines between the magnetized game blocks, where they were stuck together.

  He marveled at it for a few moments. It was starkly beautiful, in its own ultra sci-fi way. Cobwebs of white stretched from the white floor and covered his feet, anchoring him down. White speckles reached most of the way to his knees. More of them crossed his chest in bandolier shapes. The ship’s console was just a great white blocky structure.

  Except… out from where the viewscreen should have been, he noted the far wall of white blocks was corroding away, like a sandcastle recently and barely touched. Through it, the barren New Mexico landscape came into view. The blockalanche revealed that they were at least fifteen meters up in the air, and if… if the blocks could just fall apart so easily…

  “Jeez. Oh jeez. Mare?”

  The skin reappeared in his HUD, then glitched out again, and crept back over the blocks in his vision. Now everything seemed just fine, which in a way was even worse than staring at the problem and watching it unfold. Was the hole in the wall still there? Had other holes opened up that he just couldn’t see?

  This was bad, much worse than Meredith getting upset with him.

  He got an idea. “Mer– Kayle! Hey, listen, sorry about the alcohol.”

  Her head popped up from a circular access hatch above, free of helmet but still pissed from whatever he’d done wrong. She hadn’t seen it? “What? What did you say?”

  Apparently not.

  “The engines exploding must have destroyed most of the um, the on-board alcohol reserves. The replicator won’t be able to make any more.”

  “No! Oh no, no no, no no no no no no!” A second later, she was sliding down the vertical ladder the cool way he could never actually pull off. “What the hell happened?”

  “Coolant leak, fighting ships, doing engineering and piloting and fighting at the same time… you know, after you left? So the engines exploded, and we’re gonna crash into the planet, I hope. Because I doubt there’s anything left to save back there.” He gestured with a thumb back at the engineering section, where an airlock door had sealed shut. Beyond that was little more than a circle of hell.

  And because they were high up in the air, surrounded by bunches of game blocks that might just collapse and bury them alive. Pick a problem.

  She just sort of growled and roared at him at the same time in annoyance, with her hands balled into fists. “Okay, okay… the ship still has small positioning thrusters. Let’s try to land on a relatively safe part of the planet.”

  He nodded. “Look, there was–”

  “Not now!” she bellowed, bounding forward and jumping into the pilot’s chair. She tapped at the console. A maneuvering joystick popped out of the bottom. It looked reminiscent of a 1980’s Atari controller.

  “Look, if the game is that important then let’s play the game. Okay, Kered?” She twitched the stick violently as they crested the upper atmosphere, narrowly cutting through at the necessary forty degree angle to keep from bouncing off and back into space.

  Derek nodded. I have no idea what’s wrong, either with the system or her, but it sounds like she just wants to play the game. Which is what I want. So why is there something wrong? Women are so confusing sometimes. H
onestly it was starting to feel like his ex before last, Aisha. She’d been the sort to stare coldly at him for a good twenty minutes before going critical.

  “Yes, Kayle, I agree. The mission is the number one priority. How close can you get us to the coordinates of the Stellar Necropolis of the Crand?” he asked her. She scowled, and he mentally crossed his fingers they would make it to the safety of the ground before the whole thing collapsed on them.

  “I’m battling heavy winds at the moment. There must be some sort of giant hurricane going on because all I’m getting on the readout is stormy weather. Lightning, rain, wind, and probably some hail besides.”

  He nodded and he gently rolled through his HUD for options. He was down to 4 Action Points. He had a point in Engineer but he couldn’t think of any way that could help him without something to engineer. There had to be an engine to play with or else what could he fix? If only he had some sort of power over the weather.

  “Get ready for some heavy turbulence,” Meredith said, the sexy avatar Kayle Jai scrunching up her face as she leaned forward, winging the controller side to side in response to the hostile buffets of wind beyond. His own hairy wieekoo avatar screeched automatically as he was thrown across the deck into the weapons console.

  “I didn’t do that! That sound I mean,” Kered said sheepishly.

  “Our avatars contain racial quirks and random specialized attributes,” Meredith explained from within Kayle Jai. The avatar winked as she said it, but Derek realized that she was well too angry to have done that by choice either.

  “The more you know,” Derek joked. “Alright, so, hey what’s our situation?”

  “I think I’ve got it and– crap, we’re going Desperate again.”

  The tell-tale circle appeared in Derek’s HUD along with the words Total Structural Collapse. His Kered avatar freaked out again with loud screeching and bellowing. Meredith must have critically failed at some point and now they were ticking away towards doom.

  “Anything that I can do?” Derek asked.

  “Yeah– run to the engines and see if we have an escape capsule. I’m not a ship programmer but I’m going to be firing the people who are if this damn hunk of junk doesn’t have an escape pod. It’s such an obvious thing to have.”

  Derek nodded and ran off toward the back of the ship. It wasn’t that big so it didn’t take long for him to reach the light blue forcefield blocking the hole that had been an engine and a wall. It was a heck of a sight, staring into the electric storm clouds of this world, seeing clearly the massive funnel of a windspout, tornado, or hurricane out on the horizon, possibly all three even.

  He looked desperately over what was left of the rear of their craft and his eyes lit upon it. “Escape Pod” it said in a language he had never learned but intrinsically knew. It was wieekoo. He knew because the HUD gave him the option to pronounce it the way it was spelled and then all at once his avatar was moaning and hooting in its strange and hairy way.

  The escape pod was there, and it was beyond the forcefield, out in a place that was well open to the storm. A place that would almost certainly throw them off into the ground thirty miles below.

  “Um, Kayle?” he called from the back. In his HUD the circle was almost full, with just a single slice left.

  “Did you find the escape pod?” she called back. “I’m not going to be able to get us through this.”

  The ship shuddered on cue, and the piloting controls popped sparks, then powered down. Derek’s stomach dropped into his shaking knees with the certainty that this was the game collapsing on them completely. He did not want to be killed by the building blocks of the future.

  “Yeah, I did. But you aren’t going to like where they are.”

  Meredith– Kayle tore on over to where the wieekoo stood and they both stared at the escape pod. Then she grabbed Derek’s shoulder. “Kered Mingham, I’m going to count to three, shut down the forcefield and then use my Fine Magnetics super power to pull me to the hull over there. If you don’t want to end up a freaking pancake on the surface of this damn world you are going to hang on tight and not fall. Got it?”

  Derek nodded, giving a mournful wonk noise.

  “One . . . Two . . . Three!” she shouted, clicking off the forcefield. Hairy arms grabbed her tight as she felt the metal hull reach out for her and pull her in with a clung. The wind howled and tore at them from every direction, but they held each other.

  Behind them there was a loud ‘Wumph’ as the circle in their HUD filled and turned green. They both looked back to see that the cabin of the ship had collapsed in on itself.

  “Damn, Kayle,” Derek moaned. “We almost lost a life there.”

  “I’m not going to lose a life in the Access Level 1 Zone. I’d be the laughing stock of every production team. We’re going to get out of here. Kered, type in the command code on the escape pod. And don’t tell me you don’t know it. As a crew member who would know it, anything that you type will be fine.”

  He typed. 8675309. The small electronic interface beeped happily, and with the sound of steam, the escape pod door swung open. And then that same door wrenched off with a hearty clang and soared off into the clouds. Meredith’s Kayle avatar watched it sail away with a gaping mouth and wide eyes, her head turning and tracking it in real time.

  “Um, Kayle?” Derek asked as his avatar whined.

  “What the hell? I swear to god this better not be me dying and months of work harassment buddy,” she said, then she launched them both into the pod.

  Derek let go of her and stood up, bashing his head on the roof of the emergency vehicle.

  Ow!

  Then he stooped over and looked around for something to block the hole that used to be a door. There were thin and solid seat cushions, but those would rip apart in a second. And other than manuals everything else was bolted down or inherently part of the structure. He stood up to tell Meredith, bashing his head again on the roof of the emergency vehicle.

  You have taken level 1 harm. Absorb it with your armor Y/N.

  Derek sighed and clicked yes. What a waste. Especially since his head still throbbed even after letting his armor absorb it. But better to keep his in-game health strong since things were not looking at all promising.

  “Hey dumb dumb,” Kayle called. He looked over and their eyes met. She still looked pissed, but it looked like maybe she was having some fun again as well.

  “Yeah?” Kered asked back.

  “I can get us detached and rocketing through the sky but we won’t be heading anywhere but down. Especially in this weather. Still I think I can get us close to the Stellar Necropolis–”

  “Won’t do us any good,” he interrupted. “You think you can magnet us to a wall and we’ll just, I don’t know, be able to hang on against all of that wind pressure and velocity and whatever other physics thing is in play?”

  Her eyes flashed. “No. I’m not stupid. Look, can you grab off a hunk of our ship and use that to block up the hole?”

  Derek checked his HUD. “Yeah, for this size it says it’ll cost me 3 Action Points. But then I just have one more Action Point for the mission!”

  “Yeah, but then we survive. Alright you do that and I’m going to launch us as soon as I hear it clank into place. You got it?”

  Derek nodded Kered’s shaggy head and reached a hand out toward the gaping former door.

  This action will cost 3 AP to use on this object. Proceed Y/N

  “Every single time,” he muttered. “Yes, yes, yes!”

  From the ship came a squeal like a cat’s squall, torturous and head-splitting. Then a thick square plate flew into view. It was a double-wafered armor skirt, perfect for the task ahead of it, though much larger than the hole it was going to repair. Derek grinned and gave Kayle a thumbs up even as he swung the scrap into position. Then it clanked, hard, and Kayle grabbed a hold of a long-armed lever, pulling it down from the ceiling. The pod jolted, dinged, then flew off and away from the wreck of their former ship. The pod
kicked as she engaged its atmospheric jet engines, packing a wallop almost hard enough to throw Derek out of his seat.

  “Where are the seatbelts on this thing? Is this like issue 532 of the Midnight–”

  “Seat fields engage!” Meredith shouted. A light-blue lattice work laced out and across their bodies, warmly hugging them into place.

  The tremendous comfort of the field shimmered and failed though, as the pod jolted and shook. Derek could see from the viewscreen that Meredith was trying to follow a path through the storm, but angle as she might, it was a hellish aisle of turbulence, energy, and funneled air.

  Then they were through the worst of it. For a moment, calm stole over the craft. A tiny warning boop informed them that in three minutes, they would have to engage the landing thrusters and help the computer determine the best place and position to set down. Then, it started a countdown.

  “I saw something,” he said.

  “I don’t know, and I don’t wanna know,” she said.

  “I mean, it was a glitch. That’s important, right?”

  That got her attention. “What are you talking about?”

  “The AR thing, the view of all this,” he waved his hairy arms, “it all disappeared. And it was just white game blocks, right? All just–”

  “That’s impossible. This place has been through so many tests, you can’t even imagine.”

  “But didn’t you guys say this new multi-genre cross thing was a new feature? Maybe it’s just some simple bug, and maybe there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But I saw a hole open up in the wall, all right?”

  She appeared to think this one over. Either that or she was just stewing in her own anger over whatever he’d done wrong. Press the button she’d told him not to press, probably.