Glitchworld

by Damien Hanson

  Finally they passed an ancient transport, its axles rusted to dust, its wheels long gone to powder. Sigourney kicked its rear, then its rusted and rotted cargo space popped open with a shrieking clack.

  “Found a secret loot box,” Sigourney informed them even as their HUDs flashed with red and a Secret Unlocked message splayed across their vision.

  “Oh my god!” Derek enthused. “This is so crazily cool.”

  “You’re welcome,” Sigourney told him, giving him a wink.

  “What?” Meredith asked. “How the hell did you know there would be a secret there?”

  “Welcome to Prestige Gaming. I’ve been around here a few cycles and I learned a few things. And that thing screamed loot box. So are you all going to just stand there? I say we loot it.”

  “Yeah,” Meredith nodded, feeling numb as she watched Derek slobber. That googly eyed stare at the gamer goddess was just the absolute worst.

  She stomped over to the loot box and pulled out three Magna +++ pulse cannons.

  ● Magna +++ pulse cannon

  ○ Rare

  ○ Reroll attack attempt up to 3 times per day

  ○ +1 extra harm

  Meredith gulped. Those were about the best loot one could hope to pull from level 1 access! Her arms swung up, slaves to years of programming and then playtesting her own simulations, and caught one of the rifles with heroic flair. Derek’s eyes turned to her, wide and excited. The other rifle smashed him in the face, knocking him to the ground.

  “You dork,” Meredith laughed. Sigourney, however, bounded over and leaned over him.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him. Derek’s hand flapped up to the bump forming over his skull.

  “Yeah, yeah, I am now,” he smiled.

  Son of a bitch. Meredith frowned. Then a small statue exploded behind her. “Gah!” she screamed.

  Pop, pop, pop pop! Energy bolts pocked the ground and walls around them. Meredith dropped down, putting her body flat to the ground and pushing herself forward with her boots. Lightning blue crackles singed her cheek in passing.

  Derek got up behind her– then yelled and flopped down onto the ground again. Meredith sighed.

  Just a little bit more she thought as she pushed herself forward over the aquamarine. There was a great deal of cover in the dip before an old, crumbling pillar, and she was almost there.

  Pow!

  “Aaaaaaaaah!” she screamed, a level one harm plopping into her vision as another bolt cut diagonal across one plump calf.

  And then Sigourney screamed. But it wasn’t a scream of anger, fear, or even sadness. It was one of war.

  Pew pew pew pew, the blasts stuttered. Enemy screams mixed with the measured and professional cadence of magnetic pulse in a symphony of dramatic origin. Meredith pushed herself up and scrambled the rest of the way to cover, gaining eyes on her comrade. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  Two Necrolites lay just beyond her pillar, holes burned into their backs as they had been stopped on their way to ambush her. Another had the skull face of its helm split in two, one of Sigourney’s short blades sticking through his face and into his skull. A fourth lay on the ground, his head absent.

  But the danger wasn’t over yet. Five more soldiers had encircled her and she was carefully watching their motions, twirling, dodging and jumping to avoid every single shot they gave her. One of them grunted something in guttural words, and all five dropped to a knee, clicking their weapons over to rapid fire.

  Ta ta ta ta ta the now miniaturized energy blasts sounded almost cute in their whining. A thousand sparking projectiles tore through the air– and Sigourney wasn’t there. Screaming in berserker fury she landed behind one of the soldiers and kicked him into the blasts. The other four stopped firing as their comrade died, but they couldn’t get a target on her as she hopped to the next, holding him up as a shield and blasting the other three with precise shots to the head. Then she tightened her arm around the soldier’s neck until it snapped.

  Jesus-hippie-longbeard-tie-dyed-sandal-wearing-lord-and-savior-Christ on a pogo stick. Meredith gaped. This woman was champion level.

  ***

  Derek had to give this lady some serious props. She was a one-woman army. He didn’t even need to worry about overheating his Pulse Cannon (increased effect, indeed), because Sigourney was a master painter and her art was death. She splattered these Necro-losers all over the cave walls. He swiped over to view the current danger level, and blipped briefly over to Risky, then back to Controlled.

  Pfff, she definitely had these chumps under control.

  He had to force himself to stop watching Sigourney’s bikini-clad behind and get his head in the game. The correct head. A few measured breaths later, he strafed out into the hallway and picked off one of the stragglers trying to get away and inform the lord of the necropolis… or just keep itself alive a little longer. The thing went down on its face, and the AR blipped at the side of his view. He brought it up, and discovered they’d completed another scene. One more XP in the bank. He needed to go ahead and get wounded, because he was only three XP from next level.

  They advanced down the hall, until they came to a fork in the cave.

  “BOOBS check,” Sigourney said, and of course Kered Mingham couldn’t help himself. It took him a good moment to tear his eyes away from the real boobs and bring up the wrist gadget.

  “Well, I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly,” Kered said groggily, tapping the device and twisting the 3D model this way and that. He twisted a circle with his fingers, highlighting a small room deep in the innards of a massive and fortresslike citadel in the exact center of the necropolis. “But I bet if I did, this would be it.”

  Meredith came on over and risked a look at the screen past one hairy, eye-level armpit.

  “Yeah that looks like the stuff. We’ve got a boss base, a dungeon level, and probably a standard boss fight right outside the cell. Something tough but weak enough that we can take him.” Meredith winced. Derek saw that she had been hurt. A Level One Harm according to his HUD readout. Same as him.

  “Alright can we do some medic stuff first and, I don’t know, heal up then blast through the front door guns a-blazing?” Derek asked.

  Meredith started to nod but Sigourney grunted in the negative. Meredith turned and stared daggers.

  “No, listen, look at your display. The cell that you have chosen is connected to an air filtration system that takes in air from here and runs it through the filtering device there before nice and gently puffing it out into these rooms– including the cell. What we should do is find the entrance to this system, hack the lock without detection, make our way through these vents, disable the air filtration system for just long enough to get through it, reenable it to avoid suspicion and finally slip into the cell, grab up the child, and come back the way we came. Simple and easy. No boss battle. No worries. Just kid, out, and quest complete.”

  Derek stared in awe and looked over to Meredith. Her face registered stubborn outrage.

  “No. That’s way too many skill checks and I guarantee one of us will fall and die. That vent right there is a hundred foot climb top to bottom with nary the handhold to speak of. I can magnet myself through but what are you two going to do? Fall past, raise the alarm, and get me dead in a level one adventure? Make me the laughing stock of the whole company? I don’t think so.”

  Sigourney leaned back, her eyes hawklike as they pored over Meredith. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would your loss in this quest make you the laughing stock of your company? What is your company?”

  “Sigourney, she’s one of the bigwigs for Prestige Gaming!” Derek gushed. “She made a lot of the stuff that we’ve been fighting and I don’t doubt that she has some custom Masked Midnight and Bluejay stuff waiting for the next one. This place is awesome!”

  Meredith smiled triumphantly.

  “Interesting. Color me surprised, because I had no idea. Well, Kayle,” Sigourney bowed, waving out a
hand in supplication, “I suppose that makes you royalty around these parts. Or at least the best one qualified to lead. Through the open doors it is.”

  The trio marched forward, moving in tactical sprints, those crouched dashes, then scanning the area for cover, over and over again. Merdith’s avatar Kayle smiled wickedly as she joined in the squad tactics, finally getting herself back into the game. Derek gave her a thumbs up. He didn’t know what had been eating her butt before but now things seemed to be going good again. He saw Sigourney finish her sprint, disappearing behind a cracked slab of dusty aquamarine brick, and he stood up, running forward. Meredith slid into his former spot, scanning the rear for enemies.

  Braaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh - some electronic sound screamed.

  What the hell is that? Derek wondered, dropping and then rolled to the nearest cover he could find.

  Raaaaaaaaaah - the sound repeated. This time it was more bestial and full of life.

  Derek opened up his HUD and tabbed through his options. A thought struck him and he opened up his history tab tabbing to and selected the latest entry. ATHLETICS interrupted - moving to PROWL. 3 , 4, HIDE ATTEMPT UNSUCCESSFUL.

  Oh crap oh crap - whatever this is can see me.

  Derek got up to his knees and peeked around. He saw Sigourney running back in a low crouch from the direction of the citadel, and behind him he saw Meredith looking confused, tapping out something on her Prestige Gaming console, but he couldn’t see what was making the sound.

  The ground beneath him cracked and began to buckle.

  “Earthquake?” Derek yelled, very confused.

  Sigourney leapt up over a large crack and landed next to him. She swung her arms around him and coughed, then put her mouth very close to his ear. Her breath tickled.

  “Dinosaur. Under you. We’ve got to charge the citadel.”

  The head of the monstrous beast tore out of the ground, Sigourney and Derek clinging to its crown. His Kered avatar shrieked and moaned, but neither of them slipped as they were hoisted into the air. More body came out. Derek took in as much of it as he could. He had a headache, but a good one.

  Holy Bejeesus! This thing has the carnivorous fangs and angular head of an Allosaurus, but the body of a buff brontosaurus, and somehow it’s been nested here all this time? Super cool!

  Then he heard a surprised shriek. Looking to the source, he saw that Meredith had gone frantic. All of the land they had trekked over to the point of their new encounter with this dinosaur was pixelating out, fading away to nothingness, and Meredith’s avatar Kayle kept glitching in and out of the AR overlay.

  “Something is very wrong!” Meredith yelled to them, and then she and her avatar were gone. Everything in a perfectly concentric circle where Meredith had stood in the citadel was a black and colorless void.

  “Cool,” Sigourney said, her eyes shining with a happiness he didn’t know that she personally was capable of possessing.

  “Jeebus– the system is down? Now what do we do, Sigourney?” Derek asked, flitting through his HUD to make sure all of the systems there were okay.

  He could feel her smile when she breathed on his ear. “We finish the mission the way God intended it to be finished. Riding on the head of a meat-eating Brontosaurus.”

  Chapter 10 - Meredith Tries ANAL

  Goddamn system. What the hell is going on around here? Meredith fumed as she marched through the real world, leaving those two who knew where. The system seems to have scooped them up when they were riding that dinosaur head, and deposited them elsewhere. But where was that? And how did a bot from Stone, Bronze, and Iron get over here? And why the hell did it cut me out and not her? It is like the system wants them to bone.

  Meredith ran her nimble fingers over her tablet. Locate Prestige Players she selected, blasting through her password.

  Welcome to ANAL: Access Network Administrative Lookup - Type in name, Customer ID, or Government ID and Country of Citizenship here.

  She couldn’t just use ANAL without alerting the administrators to the intrusion. She’d have to use the backdoor access to ANAL she’d built in her first couple of weeks on the job. Nothing like having a smooth and effortless way to do dirty deeds. Derek Hammings she typed into the system. The screen went sideways and pixelated. For a moment it appeared to be a screen again, but the next bright bars of multi-colored nonsense raced across.

  Somewhere on her HUD, a computers roll was being done by the game, for some stupid reason. She brought up the skill check, and saw a critical failure: 1 and 5. The game awarded her a Plot Point.

  “What in the bloody hell–”

  Dirka Hamad is not present or booked into this facility.

  Gah!

  A couple of commands later, and the screen stopped slipping off into oblivion. It settled down. She’d scored a partial success on another Computers roll, which wasn’t supposed to happen when using the Prestige tablets.

  Based on her perfectly black surroundings, she wasn’t even in the gameworld any longer. It didn’t matter; nothing mattered right now except getting back to Derek and peeling Sigourney off him. Better yet, she’d get the game to peel her off him.

  She clicked the grinning mouth icon in the lower right hand corner.

  “Derek Hammings,” she pronounced, the Speech-to-text AI now enabled. She watched the name scroll across and enter the screen.

  Derek Hammings– Age of the Powered crossed Galaxies Unknown (breed title Space Opera) Access Level One, Adventure of the Crand Necropolis. Location Unknown. An error has occurred– please contact Troubleshooting for identification and correction. Error code 420.

  No no no no no! This can’t be. This isn’t good at all! He’s with bikini slut Sigourney and she’s going to take him and he doesn’t know he’s meant for me– all of those time in the past we should’ve been together and we weren’t and now here is our chance and–

  “Rah!” she screamed, jabbing a happy smiling pod icon, and getting ready to smash some heads in at the programming department.

  ***

  They emerged out of the tunnels beneath the necropolis proper and out into a massive, open space beneath the main pyramid, which was mostly dusty columns reaching up into the darkness, and statues commemorating long dead gods. The place was poorly lit, but the necrolite helmets clearly gave them low light vision somehow. Either that or the aliens themselves were suited to darker conditions than he.

  Not that any of this mattered: it was all just fodder for their new dino buddy. Braziers full of burning coals, statues, columns, altars, and what had to be a necrolite cafeteria all fell before the mighty power of the killosaur.

  “Lame name,” he muttered.

  Vengeansaurus. No, that wasn’t right either. The… dinosaur… rampaged all around the citadel, its every step tromping and crashing little objects of necrolite veneration. Derek and Sigourney sat and laughed at the necrolite efforts to subdue the massive creature, and waited for the right moment to hop over or somehow get in there.

  “This adventure is like nothing I ever expected,” Derek enthused, his avatar hooting in agreement. “Like, the whole world ender trap– that seems well too powerful a thing to throw at a noob like me but it was so fricking amazing. And the dinosaur rescue here - I don’t even know what to say. It’s like Masked Midnight and Bluejay when they got taken over by the crackhead Marvin Mayer and he did those loopy crossover comics where every page was something different and nonlinear.”

  Sigourney nodded. “The rainbow editions– unnumbered but each with their own unique symbol instead.”

  “Yeah– god those stunk. Worst comics ever. But I would kill my own mother to have them in my collection,” he laughed. “Here, though, it works. The loopiness of what all just happened works– I wish Kayle didn’t get killed though. I guess Meredith really is going to be the laughing stock of her department.”

  Sigourney nodded again. “There are worse fates, trust me.” For a moment, a shadow of anger passed over her features, and her gaze grew distant,
but she snapped out of it after a few seconds.

  Derek looked puzzled for a moment. “Ah– Aha! I get it. You are lapsing back into character! The mysterious, desperate past type, eh? Alright, hold on. Let me get into character.”

  Derek hooted a bit, his avatar enthusiastically accentuating it and making the sounds into something that would make any wieekoo proud.

  “Shush,” Sigourney laughed. The dinosaur stopped, its last savage stomp echoing through the ancient necropolis.

  She stood up and walked to the edge of the Allosaurus head, checking the gap between there and an alcove ten feet below them. The necrolites had covered it in bizarre stained glass and sprayed candlelight through it, causing bizarre shapes to dance on the walls around them. Derek stood and joined her.

  “BOOBS says this is it. That’s not too bad an angle. I bet we could Athletics down without too much trouble,” he said.

  She looked at him, her stunning face sparkling in his vision as she sucked on her lip, her face confused and full of indecision. Her emerald eyes bore into his baby blues and he gasped. Then she grabbed his hand. His arms pimpled over with goose bumps.

  Oh my god! he thought, his heart racing in agreement.

  “If we jump like this, hands together, we’ll have a teamwork roll,” she said. Derek gulped and nodded. “One,” she started, tensing her calves. Derek tried not to stare so much at her rippling muscles, and get his head in the game.

  She is so into me. Oh man, this adventure is amazing.

  “Two.”

  Meredith is such a great friend. I can’t believe it had been so long since we talked and then boom there she was with this adventure and everything– I’ve gotta do something fantastic for that woman.

  “Three.”

  The duo jumped. 6, 7, 4 flashed into Derek’s HUD and then clack, they landed on the ledge, a few bricks clattering out of its bottom to crack into the aquamarine below. They now faced the glowing window, dancing with the twisted alien stories of another alien civilization’s dead beliefs.