Glitchworld

by Damien Hanson

  The sound was tremendous: a muffled boom amplified by the rending shriek of metal trying to blast apart metal, and probably a bit of the game at work. She would’ve liked to have seen Gary get lifted off his feet, but no dice. She slid over to where he now lay, glaring balefully up at her with one muddied cybernetic eye, but there was no water bottle sized building block thing in his exposed chest. She ripped the bayonet from its place on her belt and slammed it down into center mass.

  Only it never even touched him. The blade stopped inches from his chest, and that cybernetic eye focused on her. Her wrist was trapped in Gary’s metallic pincer arm, which was now studded with shrapnel, and painfully hot.

  “Everything you thought y-you knew about me… was in error,” he said.

  “You’re nothing. You barely even qualify as real,” she hissed, and shoved downward with all her might. Damn CLIT better be there when she finally dug this bayonet into it.

  Nothing, not a half millimeter of give.

  “I w-will shortly give the Russians the secret and the capabilities to manufacture nuclear weapons,” Gary said, out of his artificial face half. “Like Prometheus g-g-giving fire to the humans. This entire oasis of artificial in the midst of a desert of reality will go up in a flash, and you will only have a moment to realize you will be ended.”

  “You’ll… kill… yourself.”

  That hideous fake chuckle emerged. “I am in the system, f-friend of the Maker. I fight in no less than four d-d-different scenarios at this very moment. You and your friends have already l-lost.”

  “Not if… I have… any–”

  She didn’t get to finish off her cliche before a synthesized chuckle escaped Gary, and he crushed her wrist.

  Sigourney had known pain in her lifetime. She’d endured torture. This wasn’t very different, except in the sudden ferocity of it. Where she’d been trained to count the hours, resist the incessant questioning and the pain to go along with them, this was just a bit out of left field. She screamed and sprayed a few more shots into his face.

  She didn’t expect him to let go, but he released her and she stumbled back, almost onto the useless wrist in question, and instead rolled over her shoulder with only a teensy bit of absolute agony lighting up her arm.

  “Siggie! Hey! We gotta do something!”

  Ugh, Derek. Didn’t he know she had an artificial building block construct covered with a glitchy ass digital overlay to kill? Or, wait. Gary burst up off the ground on his rocket feet and disappeared up the hill. More than before, it seemed like he was shedding bits of himself. Pixels came off him in spurts and clods.

  Sigourney watched him for just a minute, then rushed back to Meredith.

  “Hey, meal ticket, how’re you doing?” she asked the woman. She scanned the entry wound - it wasn’t too large, but then she turned Meredith a little and examined the exit wound. That was going to be a problem. A hole the size of a bottle cap gleamed pink and liquid, strung full of off-white tendons and snarled bits of bone. She’d definitely seen worse in Dungeonworld, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t nasty.

  Meredith moaned. “It hurts so much,” she muttered. Sigourney nodded and got up. She ran to the truck and hopped in the back, digging one-handed through the medical supplies within. It was all period appropriate stuff: gauze, bandages, pain killers, the works, and it would work. She’d done more with worse in this hellhole. She put together a solid first aid kit, hesitated, dug back around for a water can and hopped back out of the truck.

  “Hey Meredith, I’ve got something here that’ll stop the bleeding. It’ll make you feel real good too. Also water– how long has it been since any of us drank?”

  Derek pushed himself up off of the ground and limped on over.

  “Every step I take feels like a fork in the cheek. Goddamn did that hurt.”

  “Could have been worse,” Sigourney said, and showed him her wrist. “Good move with the God stuff.”

  He let out an explosive breath, eyes on her mangled wrist. “I… that was Meredith. Damn is she quick on the uptake. I didn’t know what was going on. Figures. Big dumb Derek misses the cues again.”

  Sigourney busily washed out Meredith’s wound, then handed the can to Derek. He grabbed it up and stumbled a bit with its awkward shape and immense weight. But a few circles around his mouth got him on target and soon cool liquid was coursing down his throat, into the wrong pipe. He coughed and spluttered. Sigourney shook her head and muttered.

  “I don’t mean to be a ditz, you know. I just make it look easy.” Derek rubbed at his back as well as he could - he felt like he’d been stepped on by an elephant. “How’s Mare?”

  Sigourney had stuffed in gauze and wrapped the wound as best as she could, tying it off with a stout stick in order to be able to cinch it tight as necessary. “In a minute she is going to be awesome,” the woman said. She pulled out a few white pain pills and shoved them into Meredith’s mouth, then chased them down with water from her hands. “Listen, he got me good. You’re going to have to get him this time. He’s going to use Meredith’s tablet and give the Russians nukes. We’ve got to get over there and stomp that CLIT.”

  Derek was halfway through a yawn and snapped his mouth closed. “Nuke. What… do you think that means…”

  “Yeah, this place will flash fry us. I’ve seen it a hundred times in Dungeonworld.” She peered around. “The grenade put him on his ass. We’ve got a couple more of those, but I wouldn’t trust any of the weapons here. They’re lethal for us, but he’s got armor, and Mare’s tablet. Nothing from the game is going to really do any damage, and he’s not going to just magically come apart. We need something else.”

  ***

  Derek rubbed his eyes and yawned, then walked to the truck and dug out some cans of stew. Gary was looking pretty messed up when he took off– he needed calories to help him think. Sigourney’s face lit up when she saw the grub, and she pulled a knife from her belt to clink and crank the can open. She handed the knife over, and soon enough they had sludgy beef, carrots, potatoes and gravy schlorping out. She dug two fingers through it and ladeled the food into her mouth.

  “Just like Mom used to make,” she smiled. It was an old army joke they’d say when they ate their soggy eggs or canned meats. But, to be honest, this tasted pretty damn good.

  “Looks like cat food,” Derek complained. Sigourney shrugged. He sat down and stabbed at his can a couple of times before letting Sigourney do it for him.

  “So… is it even possible?” Derek asked, then yawned again. Sigourney glanced over to Meredith, who was sleeping.

  “I’ll be honest. I have no idea. We blew off half of his face and tore apart his chest. Yet how much do you want to bet that he’ll be whole when he comes back?” Monsters, damn monsters, she couldn’t even imagine what the battlefields would have been like if these nanites hadn’t been prohibited from combat. “I could wake her up and ask her, but she didn’t seem to know either. All we really know is that we need to get to the CLIT and hit it hard.”

  “Maybe a machine gun?” Derek asked.

  “No, too weak. That submachine gun didn’t make a scratch until I messed up his face. Then his body seemed to get confused.”

  “Work with that,” called Meredith sleepily from the ground. “You and Derek go up there, and you blast him in the face, and then Derek just ratatats all over the place until the CLIT… is overstimulated.” She gave a weak laugh.

  “Will that work?” Sigourney asked, her voice laced with doubt.

  “I doubt it,” Meredith said back. Her voice was getting more awake. She pulled herself into a sitting position.

  Derek slid the canteen into his belt and tried not to sigh. It would have to work. There was nothing else, except one last tired joke. “Mare, you’ve made the CLIT too powerful.”

  They spent the next few minutes using Sigourney’s actual medical knowledge because his virtual skill no longer functioned. He fashioned a pretty terrible splint, based mostly on how much Sigourney his
sed or gritted her teeth to keep from crying out. It wasn’t enough: she could only tuck the sub machine gum into the crook of her elbow, and prop that elbow on one knee to simulate firing.

  She nodded gravely. “It’ll have to do.”

  By the time they stormed up to the bunker where Gary was busy trying to murder all the people in Prestige by nuclear meltdown, Derek had had a moment to think about it. There might be a way, but he didn’t want to jinx it by blurting it out.

  The bunker itself was nothing more than a reinforced concrete shell with an artillery piece sticking out of one end, and arrow-slit style machine gun windows on the corners and sides. From within came the rusty laugh of a boss whose actual body might be falling apart, but if the girls were to be believed, his programming had infiltrated the admin levels and was running amok.

  “Go hard in the paint,” he told Sigourney, even though he wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.

  She nodded, and expertly hucked one of the grenades into the bunker. Derek covered his ears to protect against the blast, and as soon as it came, she had another grenade handy.

  “Back door!” She shouted, through the ringing in his ears. He nodded, thinking what a Meredith joke and ran around, beneath the slits. Another explosion followed, and when he reached the doorway, a third explosion blew bits of concrete and other less savory nuggets out past him. He braced himself for the worst facepalm or setback in his life.

  The scene was chaos in capsule form. Explodified wood and metal parts lay everywhere, and the place was saturated in receding smoke. Blast marks littered the walls, and amazingly Gary was still alive. One of his legs below the knee was gone, and several types of fluid were leaking out from within. Curiously though, Derek could make out a number of white game blocks here and there, the small ones and the tiny white grains of sand. A large portion of his side had disintegrated as well.

  “Y-you’re out-t-t-t of explosives,” the robotic voice taunted. “You fleshb-b-bags are pathetic-c-c-c.”

  “Says the guy who’s literally falling apart.”

  Gary produced the tablet from the floor, like reverse quicksand. One moment it wasn’t there, and the next it had melted up into his hand. A tap later and he pushed himself up to his feet, because the concrete had melted into his foot and given him a second, workable leg again. It appeared to be just white gameworld blocks for a moment, before glitching into his bluish robot skin.

  The tablet was their ticket out of this mess. Derek pressed in and began firing with the tiger, blowing huge chunks of blocks and metal out of Gary, while the boss laughed and laughed at his attempts to do any real damage.

  “J-j-j-j-just human,” Gary said, and reared up to mash Derek up against the concrete wall.

  If there was any sliver of luck to be had at this point, it was that he was slowing down. Derek jumped aside and kept up the assault. A gnawing certainty in his guts told him this was all pointless. Gary had the tablet, and there was no way to get within reach of him without suffering the same fate as Sigourney. The tablet gave him immunity from anything this game could dish out. If only he had a real weapon. If only he wasn’t surrounded by a hundred percent game nonsense.

  Or was that hunger? For once, Derek desperately wished he was in the real world. In the real world, he could grab a real Chicko Chicken and a big bucket of soda. And throw that soda in Gary’s big idiot robot face.

  Bits of Gary spattered, spanged, and splashed off, yet Derek could hear the roar of synthetic laughter even over the ratatatata of the machine gun.

  Wait.

  Derek pressed in close, gritted his teeth, and prayed for the first time since seventh grade, when Danielle had started the whole facepalm, setback, disappointment trend by laughing at his attempt to be her boyfriend. She’d laughed straight in his face at church, tossed a cup of water on his pants, then ran off and told everybody he’d peed himself. Back then, he’d sworn off church, God, girls, and water. Now he popped the snaps on the canteen and drew nearer to Gary. The machine gun still blasted chunks away from him. He unscrewed the cap with it still in the holster, praying to God for the first time in about twenty years.

  There, a hint of light peeked out in the center of Gary’s formerly huge chest. Now it was made of white blocks and scraps of ragged, chewed through metal where the game wasn’t glitching.

  The CLIT. He hoped anyway. From the way women talked about it, it might actually be a myth, little more than a joke to confuse poor guys like him into believing there truly was a way to please them, and that they’d never learn it.

  Gary was laughing, Derek was screaming, the machine gun was filling the bunker with the stench of cordite, and he reached forward and dumped the canteen directly on the space he’d opened up.

  Nothing.

  He released the trigger; the machine gun wasn’t hitting him by now anyway. This was pointless. Gary’s demented, unreal cackle just went on and on.

  And on.

  It was really getting annoying. Seriously, just give the NPCs the free ticket to kill everybody already. All he had to do was tap the freaking tablet and just get it over with.

  The laughter continued, and Derek realized Gary hadn’t moved a robot muscle. Derek inched forward, this time close enough for Gary to lash out and grab hold of him, and crush his skull like a ripe melon. Nothing. He felt his gut clench, whether from the awful tin of army ration stew he’d got into, or hunger, or just blind terror that Gary was going to move faster than he could track and he’d be dead in half a second. Dead in real life.

  He finally got up the gumption to reach for the tablet, and wouldn’t you know it, Gary picked that exact second to move after all. Derek screamed like a preteen pop idol fan and nearly wet himself. Instead of Gary lashing out and crushing his everything, the robot fell apart into a loose pile of white game blocks. In the center of this was a block the size of a water bottle with a fading glow of red. It went dark within seconds. The tablet fell with them, resting atop like the Holy Grail about to roll away and into a crevasse, forever lost.

  Derek shakily reached out for it, sure there was another shoe set to drop. Turned out there was: he nearly tapped on a command that said CODE PACKAGE COMPILED: TAP ‘IMBUE’ TO CONTINUE, and beneath that: all NPCs in this game environment receive the following:

  The list was too horrendous to read past ‘Knowledge of the manufacture and deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), all known nuclear and bio weapons, and the will to use them.’

  He carried the thing back out of the bunker like it was a wedding ring and he was four years old again. The bunker itself let out a buzzing noise, glitched out, then fell apart. Some of the white game blocks were the size of his head.

  Derek took a deep breath, then yelled to the sky, “Quit it already! I’m freaked out enough, okay!”

  All about him, the gameworld was bugging out. It went through various stages of skins before it calved white game blocks like Antarctic glaciers, either from a tree, part of the hillside, or the truck near where Meredith was lying.

  Sigourney was suddenly beside him. “Did you do it? You did! Damn!”

  “Don’t sneak up on a guy who just nearly died, okay!”

  She chuckled, then saw part of the Russian landscape peel away from the white game blocks a hundred or so yards off. Half of the mostly-destroyed building fell away. “Meredith needs that, right now.”

  They rushed over toward here, lightly slapped her awake, and shoved the tablet into her hands.

  “Huh? Wha–”

  “The whole place is going to fall apart on us,” he said. “You’ve got to do something.”

  She groaned in pain.

  “I know,” Derek said. “I’m sorry.”

  She seemed to stare at it uncomprehending for several moments, before lifting a shaky hand and swiping the IMBUE button away to the trash. She then began a tap dance on the surface that caused commands and blocks and alerts to come and go. It went too fast for him to track, but the buzzing, glitching and
rumbling immediately subsided.

  Epilogue

  What Meredith eventually settled on was a lush, gorgeous private island with a glittering sandy beach of pure white, great big palm trees providing copious shade, and huge puffy clouds. Not a robot in sight, although there was one large cylindrical object, that appeared to be a cross between a missile and a car: gleaming, silver, and hovering a few inches off the ground. It was in stark contrast to the shantytown made from old shipwrecks leaning out into the water, just beyond the shining bullet thing. Weirdest of all, it had melted out of the Russian hillside, like it had crash landed there hundreds of years ago and only now appeared to show the puny humans they weren’t alone in the universe after all.

  “Hey, Mare? You forgot a thing.”

  “That’s my PENIS,” she said, but didn’t look up from the tablet. She’d been at it for a good ten minutes or so, sliding, tapping, swirling, expanding and typing. And she hadn’t yet stopped.

  He and Sigourney shared a look, before he cocked a smile. “Of course it is. You rode in here on it, eh?”

  “It gets me off… the admin levels,” she replied, still creating and destroying like a vengeful god.

  Sigourney snorted. “I guess size matters after all.”

  “So I’ve re-designated you both as park guests,” Meredith said, and a floppy straw sunhat appeared on her head before she looked up at the two of them. “Game system is back online. I’m worried about hacking the system anymore, so we’re stuck where we were in terms of Credits and level ups and such. If you guys want to go swimming or make a sandcastle or bone down or whatever, go ahead. This… it’s gonna take time.”

  Derek shot both of the ladies different looks, and both of them rolled their eyes at him.

  “We are not boning down again,” Sigourney said.

  Derek smiled sadly. So it seemed she’d only pretended interest to get on his good side. That made sense, given that she was an escaped convict looking for any way possible to exit, stage right. He’d hoped she had a thing for him. Ah, well.