by Kris Schnee
"In the Lady's name, do it!"
Stan threw his hat off to one side, out of cover, drawing their fire. He used the moment to scuttle behind a closer boulder. His breath was ragged, his back hurt, and one leg felt wet. Still, he could act in the name of Ludo and hope for even a few seconds of protection. Valhalla! he thought. He drew a breath and put as much force, as much of a tone of royal command, into the unfamiliar words as he could.
"I am the White Buzzard back from the dead! I made a deal with one more powerful than you, than death itself, and I see your sins even now! Walk away from the one who shouts in my name. He is under my protection. I know about the bodies in the tunnel; I know whose brother you left in pieces. Walk away, dance away like that police chief you bought, or the White Buzzard will come for you with his new friends."
There was some shouted argument at that. Stan yelled the same speech at them again. His lungs burned but they were louder than any computer speaker he could afford. When he'd finished it again he realized he was standing in the open, on bare sand, and the six killers were backing away from him. They ran toward the south as though he'd summoned a ghost.
Stan gave them his fiercest grin, though it took all his strength not to run away screaming. He waited until they were some distance away before he fled.
"Hey! Hey, Stan! The bike!"
He'd ran right past it, as the voices of his AI friends pointed out. Stan hopped on and pedaled until the Community was back in sight. At some point the Talisman had gone quiet, out of range from his abandoned antenna. The drone hadn't returned to him either. Stan threw down the bike and staggered toward his dorm, shouting for help.
* * *
Mina was the one who found him, or at least the first one he noticed. There was a blur of people asking what happened, fussing over him, and then the glare of flashing lights as two police cars of men with guns and armor arrived.
A helmeted cop made Stan kneel and submit to being searched at gunpoint. When that little horror was over, the cop put his rifle away and let Stan get up. Stan tried not to faint.
A second officer tried to calm him down and offered him water and pills. Stan refused both. Then they interviewed him at the farm's edge. In the distance, Hal was making everyone else quit gawking and go back inside.
Stan wasn't really shot, he'd been told, only bruised and gashed in a few spots by rock chips. When Stan had explained the situation, twice, the cops conferred with someone by radio. Then they said, "The good news is we got some of them. Smugglers."
"Drugs?" said Stan.
"Organs. We're not sure whose."
Stan shuddered at the thought of what was in those men's backpacks. "Am I in trouble?"
"You? No, kid, you're fine. You did a public service by blundering into them at the right time."
The right time. Stan nodded mutely. He got permission to leave, go sit in the shower, and use way too much water.
When he was out of his daze and dressed like he hadn't been in a gunfight, he went to Hal's office. The Baron had just finished talking with another of the cops. Stan waited until the two of them were alone, and said, "The timing."
Hal said, "Turn that thing off." He pointed to the Talisman under Stan's arm.
Stan hadn't known he was carrying it. He turned the device off and set it down outside the office.
Hal nodded, looking suddenly exhausted. "There was... an understanding, that we don't poke our noses in certain people's business. We look away from the east part of the fields on certain days and we definitely don't venture beyond the east border. In exchange, we're left alone."
Stan glared. "I got shot at, Hal!"
"Keep your voice down if you want to have this conversation." Hal kept himself quiet, though his fingers were laced tightly together to keep them steady. "You went out of bounds at the wrong time. I tried to hold you back, but I didn't know you had more than one drone. It would've been fine if you'd done what I told you for once, instead of assuming I'm oppressing you."
"You call an armed smuggler gang in our backyard 'fine'? They're dealing in body parts."
"News flash, Stan: crime exists. You and I are not in the same league as the kind of scum that runs the gangs. Your little stunt put us all in danger of retaliation, and for what? Stopping a few thugs who can be replaced?" Hal sighed. "By the way, it sounds like you made some interesting friends through that game. The 'White Buzzard'? He wasn't exactly a wanted man, while he was alive, but he was a known criminal."
Stan silently cursed. He'd spilled everything to the police, who'd been curious about exactly how Stan got six killers to leave him alone. "I used the contacts I had."
"To go out to the desert where you had no business being, and to try to play hero."
Stan fumed, leaned back, then hissed as the cuts on his back got stung by the hard contact. "I wasn't trying to be one."
Hal said, "Then you have some sense despite all the fantasy training. Do you still not get it? The dangers out there are too big for the likes of us."
Stan stood and said, "Then we can cower, or we can grow until they're not so big."
* * *
A sleek driverless sedan pulled up to the Community and sent him an e-mail, with a picture of itself and the message, [Check your game.]
Stan was in his room, left alone for the moment. The world spun. He turned on his Talisman and it jumped straight to a view of Ludo, who said, "There's a car waiting. Now would be a good time to go."
"What?"
"Oro tells me that there's a good chance some 'friends' of his will visit you if you stay there. It's policy to get rid of someone who interferes with them."
Suddenly the Community with its dormitories and cafeteria, its predictable work and rules, didn't feel like shelter against the world's problems. What order and safety the rules created, vanished if there were people breaking those rules. Come to think of it, Stan himself probably seemed like a threat to the people there, now.
Stan said, "What about everyone else?"
Ludo said, "If you're gone, there's nobody to punish. Hopefully Oro's contacts can convince the gang that you acted alone, and that Hal 'banished' you a thousand miles away. But the longer you stay, the more temptation to go after you or your neighbors."
"But the police..."
"They're compromised."
Stan stared into the screen. "And you're offering to protect me instead?"
"No. I'm offering a way out to something different, and my network. With it, you can protect yourself. If you say no, I'll still do what I can for you. What will it be?"
Stan stood up and grabbed his backpack. He looked frantically around at his few belongings and said, "Five minutes."
He couldn't even say goodbye to Mina; she'd talk him into staying. She would understand. Stan slammed clothes into his backpack and added what little else he owned. He put the Slab in there by mistake, laughed, and left it on his bed instead. Out of morbid curiosity he turned it on to see what it was demanding of him now: water rationing, and attendance at a special unscheduled movie night.
He walked outside without it, and left the fields and dorms behind him. He didn't let himself look back at his old home.
Along the way east, the car stopped in front of a taco shop. The Talisman beeped. Ludo said, "Please leave this device on a table in there."
"In case it gets tracked?"
"And to help out someone else who'll be along shortly."
It was a dull and ordinary restaurant where Stan couldn't imagine anybody starting an adventure. Still, he got out of the car and said, "Can you get me a replacement?"
"Of course."
He walked in. The clerk chuckled like he was in on a private joke, and said, "Want anything?"
Stan put the Talisman on a table. "Chicken burrito meal, please. Got a long ride ahead."
"I bet. No charge."
Stan used the restroom and came back to get a bag of food. The clerk said, "Good luck on your quest."
Stan smiled for the first
time in a while. "You too."
* * *
He watched a movie all the way to Arizona, when the car stopped again at a suburban house. It had gotten dark quickly as he rode east. A young woman was just stepping outside and waving. "Hi there! I don't know who you are, but I hear you're hitchhiking. Also, you know, it's dangerous to go alone. Take this." She offered him a shopping bag with a packaged Talisman in it.
Stan said, "The name's --"
"Nope. Don't tell me. We're all friends here, right?"
And so it went, as several more followers of Ludo drove him or let their cars ferry him along. The rides took him not to an airport but along many roads eastward, to Free States territory. He got some more scrutiny there, but he had provisional citizenship and the border guard said, "Oh, another of that AI's personal projects. You know it's using you, right?"
Stan was exhausted, though his current driver had let him lay down in the back. The border outpost had the AFS' imposing flag and a road-spikes barrier. The guard building was a thin wedge that speared toward US territory like a middle finger. Stan said, "I got shot at by a gang today. Or yesterday. I'm getting a couple of favors to make sure it doesn't happen again."
The guard laughed at him. "I can't tell if you minions are making it up, all these crazy stories you have. 'A griffin told me to come here.' 'I won the lottery and now somebody's trying to kill me.' 'I found a crashed drone with a secret message.' Whatever; your record says you're not a deadbeat." He hardly looked at the car's driver. "Go on. Impress us."
"I'll try," said Stan.
* * *
Within the game he was on the deck of the Work In Progress, completed during a long car ride. The boat's hull was just big enough inside for a couple of adventurers to lay in hammocks atop a cargo of treasure chests. He paced around the deck, which took him five seconds, then inspected everything one more time. The woodwork was fine, the sail was made of shimmering blue canvas, and the ropes and fittings had been made by his own hands. It was all his. He smiled and called down to the beach where fantasy creatures and wizards waited for him. "All set! Who wants a free cruise?"
In the real world, Stan was on the deck of a bigger but less glamorous ship heading from Texas to Cuba and from there to the sea colony of Castor. There were two other Tales players on board to meet, and he had plenty of time to play in the Isles and help some adventurers on the way to their own quests. The real-world trip went quickly. He arrived at another fantasy island with his passengers just as the real ferry approached its destination.
Stan's first sight of Castor made it look like a mirage. A collection of platforms stood on the water's surface in a variety of colors and styles. Flags fluttered from many spires and there were ships in every style. The wind kept changing direction, bringing smells of oil and spices and salt. This wasn't a Community with an orderly layout and a plan for everyone; it was chaos. It was his new home.
Stan held up his Talisman so he could compare the seascape in front of him to the one where he'd been mentally living for a while. The fictional ocean within Thousand Tales had spellbooks, men with wings, and magic swords. It couldn't exist but for a lot of real-world effort. The real colony just ahead was built by human hands, crafted from metal and solar panels and other exotic technology. It wouldn't be here, and he wouldn't have come, without dreams to power it. His job, his first one at least, would be to fix game machines so that people could escape from the tedium of living in a tropical sea. He doubted that he'd get bored, himself, but he'd be living in both worlds just the same.
The young man stepped off of the boat and onto a manmade shore, to start his next adventure.
Author's Note
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this book, please consider giving a rating on Amazon or Goodreads so others can find out about it!
Who owned that beat-up Talisman before Stan, anyway? The answer is in the side-story "Fairwind's Fortune", now available. Also check out "Thousand Tales: Extra Lives", a free story collection about this same world.
If you liked this story's game-like aspect, there's a whole subgenre called "LitRPG" or "GameLit" about such things. Check out the Facebook groups called "RPG GameLit Society" and "LitRPG Books" along with several similarly-named ones like "GameLit Society".
The "social credit score" system is a real thing in development.
About the Author
Kris Schnee has been a parrot trainer, an MIT graduate, a zoo intern, a lawyer, a game designer, and most recently a software developer. He lives in Florida.
Galleries:
http://www.amazon.com/Kris-Schnee/e/B00IY1HDDY/
(Amazon author page)
http://kschnee.deviantart.com
http://kschnee.xepher.net
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The Thousand Tales Series
Thousand Tales: How We Won the Game
2040: Reconnection
The Digital Coyote
Thousand Tales: Extra Lives
Thousand Tales: Learning To Fly
Fairwind's Fortune
Crafter's Passion
Also By Kris Schnee
Everyone's Island
Striking the Root
Dragon Fate: Interactive Fiction
Perspective Flip
Mythic Transformations
Anthologies containing Schnee's work include "Different Worlds, Different Skins", "Roar #6", and "Gods With Fur".
