Glitchworld

by Damien Hanson

  They were just inside the ship when he drew close. “Thank you for saving my life,” he breathed.

  “Thank you for saving my life.” Her words were moderately slurred. Low moderate? Maybe. She started to lean forward, to bridge the few inch gap and kiss him, but then glanced about the ship. “You’re not worried about her watching?”

  “She should have stayed,” he said, and closed the distance.

  Their lips met. Their clothes met the floor soon after.

  Chapter 18 - What, A Plot Twist?!

  They had fallen asleep. Meredith watched them, powerless, listening to Derek snore. Knowing that he did so might have made her feel that much more for him before. But now she could only feel anger.

  She was angry enough to scroll back through the camera feeds and watch their dalliance get started. In reverse they jumped out of bed, put clothes on each other, and kissed back through the ship, where they led their blue alien mark out of a holding cell in the ship to where he was tied back up. They made out some more all the way to the entrance ramp. There. She rewound just a little more, until their faces were inches apart.

  “You’re not worried about her watching?” the Bimbo asked.

  “She should have stayed,” was his response, and then he leaned in and kissed her.

  She rewound it again. Thank you for saving my life, like an exchange of freaking wedding vows. You’re not worried? She should have stayed. She watched it again. You’re not worried? She should have stayed.

  And she watched it again.

  “Well we’re not playing around anymore,” she hissed, and dug down as deep as she could. These settings could be rolled back further. They had Dungeonworld after all; if the system could kill people down there for sport and ratings, it could just as easily hurt somebody up here for the sake of justice.

  “There’s gotta be a way,” she repeated to herself, her voice dull yet her eyes liquid and darting, hitting this menu and that, reading through troubleshooting manuals and commands from the very bowels of the program. She’d need something deep to get in and do what she wanted to do. Something old from the very beginnings of the project, back from before it had been banned from military use by the Moldavia Convention of 2064. There was a time when all of this was the future of ripping apart soldiers, screaming, from every single angle. The nanites were very dangerous without modern civilian governors and safeties built in. And she was going to bring them back.

  I hope you had your fun, lovebirds. I really hope you did. Because things are going to get so much worse. And don’t tell me that you don’t deserve it. You deserve all that I can give you. More than that. I’ve spent a lifetime waiting for this, Sigourney. A goddamn lifetime. And you had to come in out from nowhere and screw it all up. Well, two can play at that game.

  She laughed at her thoughts, though a few tears leaked from her bloodshot eyes. Click click click, her cursor followed the rabbit down the hole, jumping from file to file. Things were getting really old now. Earlier she had been navigating by voice command. But that was impossible with the old classified stuff. This was all click and scroll. Not due to age, but due to the classification. There were a lot of walls and restrictions upon this data and she was overjoyed when she finally found a link they had missed, a back door into the data, and access into the roots of the system. Now she was rolling through, cutting out all of the mandatory failsafes of the server that they had reserved for themselves, allowing nanites to form into real bullets, real blasts of energy, real blades and lasers. And it felt fantastic.

  I wonder if Derek will like you when you’re missing a few fingers, Sigourney. And a nose - ever dream about getting a nose job, siggy dear? I’ll give you one for free.

  It wasn’t enough though. The failsafes were all down now, hours of data search and hacking paying off. All but one. That damn cinematic lull. She looked at the monitor, her eyes bleeding fury as Derek slid one hand up in his sleep and clutched ahold of a breast. There had to be a way to start this all now. When they were naked and sleeping. She could catch Sigourney with her damn bikini briefs down, maybe make a few changes down under too. And then she found it.

  At the very center of it all, the cinematic lull, built in originally to give programmers time to hack into and fix a glitchy system. She laughed. She dug up the proper files from the server. And she deleted them.

  “Checkmate, Siggie,” she said aloud as she opened her ‘mobs’ folder and began to populate a ‘random encounter’.

  ***

  Breakfast was a pretty lavish affair until a squad of goons decided to blow it to smithereens. He’d woken up with Sigourney cuddling up against him, wondering where it was they were in the real world, what was actually beneath him, and what actually covered him. Did the huge warehouses in the middle of the desert come equipped with Egyptian cotton sheets, which were put into place whenever the ship landed? Did the desert have compartments built into it, like dumbwaiters, so the custom meal orders could be cooked in some kitchen beneath their feet and sent up to the ‘kitchens’ in the gameworld? Surely the food couldn’t be faked, and manipulated to taste like juicy medium steak, or this morning’s farmer’s omelette.

  His questions went unanswered even when the ship above him devolved into a series of fuzzy bright colors shot through with other textures from other gameworlds. For a moment a section of the ceiling was dark dressed stone with wood reinforcements, while another portion was white stucco, but it ran through all these changes in mere instants. Just enough for him to stare in wonder and a little fear. Then the ship’s bulkhead rippled like a pond a stone had been thrown into, then settled back to its normal sci-fi self.

  The regret slammed into him next, like a series of glitches in his stomach. Meredith had undoubtedly watched him make love to Sigourney. She’d already been upset, and watching him enjoy himself while she was upset couldn’t have been good for her current state. Damn, what an idiot. He should’ve gone after her, but instead he’d taken the advice of some low to moderately truthful person.

  It struck him in that moment too: Sigourney could just be using him like all his other girlfriends had done. He knew he was pretty easy to manipulate, very ‘go-along to get-along.’ He’d never been able to understand why women might use sex to get what they wanted. What was the point of turning sex into a weapon? He was the type who just tried to make it the best experience possible. No strings needed attaching.

  But he couldn’t simply kick her out of bed or pretend last night hadn’t happened. Ugh, he always did this to himself.

  He got up and dressed in the still quiet of morning, then checked on Teegletwang. Their rescued prisoner was still glaring at him, but with less chafing this morning. He had the replicator make up some breakfast for the little guy, and a cup of coffee for himself, still trying to make sense of things.

  They were essentially trapped out here, unless they could miraculously fix the system and make a beeline for the Alzo and the Hub, and in the meantime he was under assault by Meredith’s reminiscences in alien form. He worried for his crotch, which she’d made the perpetual target.

  Maybe Sigourney would have an idea… there was a statistically low chance it would be a truthful one, but he’d take anything he could get at this point.

  “Time to wake up,” he said, and gave her a calf squeeze. A second later he had to thank his lucky stars the coffee had missed him when he spilled it, because Sigourney was on top of him with a blaster pointed at his face.

  “Hey,” he said weakly.

  “Oh, sorry. I uh–”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  She nodded, her face grim, and dressed in silence.

  They walked back to the restaurant in silence, while clouds of gnats got up in their faces. Derek didn’t want to pry, even though he did. Anything she said might just be a lie, and knowing that put him on edge in a serious way.

  Why did these things have to happen to him?

  She ordered steak and potatoes for breakfast, with eggs over eas
y, green beans and buttered toast and a glass of orange juice, while he went for the farmer’s omelette and a water. While they waited, he tried the first of what he planned were several gambits.

  “So… what do you do outside, I mean, when you’re not spending ridiculous amounts of money to be here?”

  She snorted laughter. “Hell, I live here, big guy.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Oh yeah, heh, I just can’t get enough of good old Prestige Gaming.”

  And since he’d started down this particular road, he figured he might as well keep right on running. He tapped at the command for Study, and once again selected Sigourney. This time his die roll came up a 10, and brought out a heavy, relieved sigh.

  The game informed him that her utterance was somewhat misleading.

  “So you work here?”

  She waved the question away. “Nah.” Truthful. “I just, you know, run through different scenarios.” Mostly truthful. “I guess you could say I’m sort of a level tester, like on a freelance basis.” Outright lie. “What about you? You’re not a coder like Mare, I take it.”

  He couldn’t just twist the conversation back to her so eas–

  Everyone in the restaurant stood at the same time, all of them turned in his direction simultaneously, and what appeared to be a harpoon gun appeared in their hands. Every fifth or sixth one got some manner of pulse rifle though. Derek could only stare around as all of them, glassy-eyed and slack-jawed, leveled their weapons in his direction.

  His omelette exploded, and sent a shower of plate everywhere. One of them sliced across the side of his neck with a level of pain he hadn’t come across yet. His hand went there and came away wet with his blood. He would have stared dumbly at whoever had done this, except Sigourney was already across the table and tackling him backwards.

  More blaster fire erupted overhead, smashing into the other tables and the walls. A fury of breaking glass and ceramic, coupled with the choo choo of blaster fire made anything but screaming impossible.

  She touched the side of his face, and he hissed in pain. “You’re bleeding,” she shouted.

  “I’m bleeding!” He screamed. Better the neck than the dick though, if he was being honest with himself.

  The option to resist the Harm hadn’t popped up. He also hadn’t taken Harm anyhow, according to his HUD. The Downtime Phase clock had disappeared. The Gary catches up to you clock had likewise vanished. The situation monitor, which had been sitting at Controlled, was gone. Come to think of it, a lot was now missing from the heads up display, but there wasn’t much time to do anything about it.

  Sigourney flipped their table up and dumped his breakfast, but luckily for them the blaster fire didn’t pierce through. Yet. Bright flashes could be seen through the table, which glowed at first, before the light shrank. Still, the number of shots was concerning.

  “Come on,” she said, and popped out to the side to squeeze off a few shots. He noted the dice rolls above her head, and heard several of their attackers take hits.

  He also popped up, but his luck was running thin after that 10, because he rolled a 1 and a 4. On the upside, he nabbed a Plot Point. So those were still a known and usable quantity, like his junk. Good to know.

  “Covering fire!” she screamed, and he stuck his arm out above the table to spray blaster fire mostly into the ceiling.

  ***

  Sigourney blasted two more of their attackers, then grabbed up Derek by the scruff of his neck and shoved him back into the kitchen area. Harpoons bowled over people’s meals and slammed into chairs, while blasts of concentrated neutrinos disintegrated flower arrangements and seared great molten orange spots in the walls. She had the good sense to pelt the kitchen staff with blaster bolts while Derek gawked and generally played citizen to her savior.

  The rolls came and went in her HUD, but for a lot of the game features, the HUD had stopped relaying information. All around her the walls and props were going in and out of reality, between switching up the type of object they were, visual digital glitching, or showing the white magnetized blocks composing the game world. A sleek stainless steel container shifted into a handmade ceramic container in ruddy reddish browns, a pixelated mess, then a plastic container of Parmesan cheese, before finally settling on the stainless steel once again. Pots and pans, the stoves, containers of ingredients, the ventilation ducts, and the steel shelving units all jerked in and out of phase, shifting between skins sporadically.

  “What the heck is going on?” he shouted.

  “Hell hath no fury,” she muttered.

  “What does that mean? Why am I bleeding?”

  “She’s out for blood, and now she’s going to get it.”

  They alternated popping out of the doorway and blasting at the restaurant goers. Mostly it was to keep them from creeping up on her position. The centipedes would try to slither across the floor, but she took them out one after another. The frogs would leap up and get in real close, requiring her to shift back and forth between her side of the doorway and Derek’s. He was just a bit too distracted by the idea that his childhood friend had gone for the jugular, literally.

  It fell into a kind of pattern, as games often did.

  “This is because you lied, isn’t it?” he hissed.

  “What?” Now it was her turn to be sideswiped by the sudden left-field approach of the situation.

  “You’ve been lying. You don’t work here.”

  Oh for fuck’s sake. “Took you that long to figure it out? Yeah I don’t work here. I have no idea how I got here.” She added several shots out the kitchen doorway, and a pair of shots at the creatures trying to get in through the back door. “I bet it was your girl’s sloppy coding.”

  “So what, then?” He demanded.

  “Can we do this another time?”

  He blasted a salamander creature in the face and watched too long as it crumpled to the ground. “No! No we can not. I want to know what’s going on.”

  “What’s going on is we’re going to get killed if we don’t get out of here.”

  She pulled him, resisting, to his feet, and the two made their blasting way out the back door of the kitchen, with him complaining and making cockamamie demands the whole way. She was sorely tempted, for just a few seconds, to do Meredith’s work for her.

  No. She’d committed to the Derek way, since Meredith was nowhere to be found. She had to stick with this idiot, and use him to get out.

  “Who are you, then?” he spat.

  ***

  Bing - Meredith’s pad came to life, light flashing out from the screen. ANAL PROBE COMPLETED She looked down at it and her eyes widened.

  Oh, no! Derek!

  ***

  “I’m a freaking dungeonworlder, all right? Is that what you wanted to hear?” She lobbed a grenade into the kitchen and pulled him against the wall. A second later, screams followed the explosion, and she jerked him away from the wall. “Does that improve our situation one single freaking iota? Does it get us closer to the exit? Does it stop your girlfriend’s murder squad from coming after us? Yeah I didn’t think so.”

  “But, what did you do? Did you kill a person? Did you kill lots of people?”

  Sound came to a standstill. No more shots or explosions - Sigourney sank down, looking warily from corner to corner. Derek dropped down next to her and she smiled. Mostly truthful his HUD flashed.

  “What I did was piss off the wrong people alright?” She crept forward, heel to toe, knees bent and rifle clutched tight to her sweaty chest. She looked so goddamn hot doing it.

  Derek shook his head and looked at the floor. “No. That’s not enough. But we’ll have to get to it later.” He probed at the bloody graze on his neck. The blood felt thicker, already scabbing over. It was just a scratch.

  “I’m glad we’re on the same page, champ. Now, Derek, listen, we’re going to head out of here. I don’t know where all of these people went but I have a really bad feeling about it all.” Sigourney turned her head and De
rek followed her gaze, Table tops shimmered in the glare of the morning sun, cast down from windows shaped like reptilian eyes. Derek’s eyes widened. Everything, all of the food, the dishes, the enemies, they were all gone! He searched wildly in all directions, straining his eyes to the point that they felt like they might burst - but nothing. He caught Sigourney’s gaze and she put a finger to her lips, then nodded. Stay quiet. Meredith is up to something.

  It was strange to see Sigourney hunched over. She was a tall woman and seeing her as such gave her a special bit of intimidation. But here, hunched over, she still radiated power and deadliness. Being found out seemed to add to that, giving her a sense of cold metallic justice, the kind delivered at the edge of a sharp blade. Derek shivered. None of this was good.

  Her strong golden legs flashed as she led them to the doorway out. She put out a hand and he stopped, trying desperately to soothe and calm his beating heart, afraid that the hard lurches and bumps might give him away.

  “Okay,” Sigourney said, her voice rising to a normal level. “I don’t know what is happening but it looks like we are safe.” She waved him to join her at the door. “Here’s the plan, we rush on the count of three, run as fast as we can to the ship, and try to smash our way into Level 0 Access. There has to be a way.” Her face fell and for a moment her eyes glistened, emerald green pleading hedged by the haughty face of a trained killer. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be a dungeonworlder. Watching them on the tube, all he’d ever really seen was what he wanted to see. Thin, strong, handsome and beautiful veritable superhumans battling real monsters, getting shot with real bullets and cut with real blades. But in those eyes he could see what they really were - flies stuck in the spider’s web, pulling themselves along forever and struggling to break free.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Derek said, and Sigourney’s face became puzzled. “What you did, I mean. Sigourney, it doesn’t matter. I’ll help you get out of here.”

  Her emerald greens seemed to perform their own Study check as they probed his baby blues. “Thanks,” she said. “I really do appreciate it Derek. Now let’s get the hell out of here. One . . . Two . . . Three!”