Expedition- Summerlands

by Nathaniel Webb

  The Summerlands Series

  Expedition: Summerlands

  Nathaniel Webb

  Copyright © Nathaniel Webb 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No affiliation is implied or intended to any organisation or recognisable body mentioned within.

  Published by Level Up in the United Kingdom in 2019

  Cover by Claire Wood

  ISBN: 978-1-912701-93-3

  www.levelup.pub

  To Jack.

  For teaching me how to walk.

  The Merchandise Machine

  At the exact moment I earned my Summerlands fee I was deep in the guts of a merchandise machine, ringing a bell. I’d worked out the day and hour months ago: at 4pm Hollywood Adjusted Time, my daily paycard incremented just enough that when I swiped it into my bank account that night, it would put me over ten thousand dollars.

  The price of a ticket to the Summerlands.

  I swept the bell through a complex pattern that supposedly, if I performed it in the Summerlands, would produce a small flame capable of lighting a candle or lantern. At the final flourish, I flicked my wrist a little too vigorously, and the bell slipped from my fingers and landed with a clatter on the floor of the narrow maintenance access tube where I sat.

  I picked up the bell, wiped off a little machine oil, and stowed it in a plastic freezer bag with a few quarters and a folding pocket knife. I crammed the bag into a pocket of my uniform as I double-checked the solders I’d been sent in to make, which were solid and shiny. Satisfied, I scooted down my butt until I lay flat on my back.

  I took a breath, reached up, and clicked a glowing orange switch above me into the on position. The machine roared to life around me. I could feel its gears getting up to speed as I wiggled my way down the maintenance tube, the tip of my nose almost scraping the oiled metal above me. By regulations, I had thirty seconds to get out of the tube before the merch machine started running again, but most managers had their techs shorten this startup time, and mine was no different. I’d done the work myself on this one.

  I dropped out of the tube with five seconds to spare and found my manager Mr Fessy waiting for me. He stood with his arms crossed, a phone in one hand, in front of a small mob of impatient customers. He was a round man with a red face and a bushy white mustache that almost distracted from his thinning hair. At my full height—about five feet seven inches, tall for my parents’ income—I looked him right in the eye. We wore identical black shirts stitched with the silver badge of Expedition Games, our mutual employer, but mine ballooned out around me while Mr Fessy’s threatened to pop its buttons.

  The cracked touchscreens on the merch machine flickered and came to life, and the shoppers surrounded me and Mr Fessy as they surged forward. I watched them for a moment as they swiped their paycards into the machine, then tapped through touchscreen menus to find the products they wanted. T-shirts, shot glasses, posters, video cards, plush monster toys, and boxes of hair dye dropped from the machine as quickly as their buyers could snatch them up.

  Mr Fessy cleared his throat and smoothed his mustache with his free hand, a nervous tic that I had learned to associate with big news, usually layoffs.

  “That was very good, Emma,” he said, glancing at his phone. “Target completion time for that procedure is seventeen minutes. Took you only fourteen thirty-five.” I’d actually had the job done in less than eight and spent the rest of the time working with my bell, but I wasn’t about to mention that. The interior of the merch machine was the only spot in the Expedition store not watched by security cameras, which made it perfect for some secret magic practice.

  “Anyway, end of shift,” Mr Fessy continued. “Here’s your pay.” He handed over a paycard, which I pocketed, repeating the mental math I’d performed a hundred times in the last week: ninety-two fifty for a ten-hour shift, less twenty percent in federal taxes, five percent in zone taxes, five percent police insurance, two percent fire insurance. In all there should be sixty-two ninety on the card, just enough to get me to ten k after the bank took its insurance cut.

  “One more thing,” said Mr Fessy, pulling me from my mathematical reverie. “Mr Schneider died yesterday.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said. Mr Schneider had been an uncaring assistant manager, happy to arrive late and leave early. He was quick with a cruel word when he didn’t like my performance, but I most often found him in an opiate haze in the employee bathroom, his acne-cratered face slack, far beyond words for me or anyone else.

  Still, I wouldn’t have wished him dead. We all had our methods of escaping the real world. I spent every day dreaming that I would make it to the Summerlands and I had the gift of three best friends who shared my plan. Jason, Cass, Noah and I could count on each other for encouragement when gray reality pressed in and the Summerlands were too far away. I suspected Mr Schneider had had nobody to fall back on.

  “Anyway,” said Mr Fessy, “I clocked you out. See you tomorrow.”

  I made my way towards the front of the store, weaving around eager Summerlands fans as they picked through the display merchandise. I’d long since learned to tune out the blare of advertising all around me. Rows of flatscreens played up-to-the-second livestreams from all the big-name adventurers: Valkyrie and Rad were sparring, their feeds showing alternate views of the same fight. Pixie was talking directly to her camera, a pink bra strap and soft white skin showing where her tunic had slipped artfully from her shoulder. St George was sleeping.

  A knot of kids, too poor to afford to watch at home, stood staring at the feeds as flickering colors played across their rapt faces. I couldn’t blame them. If they missed something especially thrilling or momentous on the feeds, they’d be completely left out at school tomorrow. One of them, a girl in oversized clothes, turned and gave me a little wave that said thanks for not kicking us out. I smiled and waved back.

  I was almost to the front doors when a boy cut me off, stepping from behind a T-shirt display to put himself between me and the exit. I recognized him instantly: Jamie Bullard. He lived in my apartment block, and had been a couple years behind me in high school. His crisp haircut, round red cheeks, and little gut hiding under a brand-name Valkyrie T-shirt all illustrated the most important fact about Jamie: his father was the chief of police, which made him the richest kid on the block.

  “Hey Burke,” he said, “you pull anything out of the prize machine for me?”

  “It’s not a prize machine, it’s a merch machine.” I tried to stand up as tall as I could. “If you want something, you can buy it.”

  “Come on, I know techs get full access.” He had a sort of whiny voice for such a big guy. “My allowance ran out. Just hook me up, I won’t tell.”

  “You know I can’t do that, Jamie.”

  “Ah, fine.” He deflated a little, letting air out of his tough-guy posture. “How’s training going? You’re looking fit.”

  I blinked at the sudden change in tone. “Oh, thanks. Cass works us hard.”

  “You must be close to having enough, yeah? You guys really gonna do it?”

  That’s the ten-thousand-dollar question, I thought. We’d spent five years saving, and now the Summerlands were within reach. With my own fee banked, I could start putting money towards the others’. Cass was almost as close as
I was. Jason made decent money working swing shift at a factory, but he was still in school, so he couldn’t work full-time. Noah… Noah was lagging behind, but now I could help him.

  “We’re not there yet,” I said.

  “Yeah, I have a hard time seeing you killing rats.” Jamie shrugged. “Be cool if you were famous, though.”

  “I guess.” I looked at my sneakers, which really needed replacing.

  Jamie crossed his arms. “You better give me free Hearthammer merch.”

  ***

  It took me the better part of an hour to get home, walking my usual route along a broken and abandoned highway. The anticipation of telling my friends was a buzz of fear and elation in my stomach and I couldn’t keep my right hand from diving into my pocket to touch my paycard every few seconds. It sat there like a stone and yet I was constantly certain it had disappeared.

  I walked past a clutch of big white houses that sat in a wide bowl of dead grass just off the street. Their windows were mostly cracked or missing and a dozen black power lines made a drooping spiderweb between the houses and a half-fallen electrical pole. Jason and Cass’s dad—Mr Keats, though I had always just called him Keats—had told me once that the houses were all owned as investments by rich folks waiting for the prices to rebound. They’d been waiting longer than I’d been alive.

  A policeman stood on the weedy shoulder of the road between me and the abandoned homes, tapping his fingers on the butt of an Armalite slung across his chest, his head swiveling to follow me as I passed. I gave him a wave—I’d passed him at this same spot nearly every day for years—but his expression, hidden behind black shades, didn’t change.

  Between the brown grass, the black asphalt of the neglected highway, and the orange-gray clouded sky, it was a dismal landscape I walked through. Even I could see that and I’d never known anything else. But today, the money in my pocket made me feel daring enough to call unnecessary police attention to myself. Not because it made me rich, but because it made me a promise: a better world.

  ***

  Between the strip mall and my apartment block, one crisp rectangle of bright color showed against all the washed-out gray. A billboard for the Summerlands stood about half a mile from my block and it looked quite literally like a window into another reality.

  On the billboard, a skinny, handsome, light-skinned man with salt-and-pepper hair and a neat beard stood holding a sword in one hand and a bell in the other. Behind him were the perfect blue sky and rolling green hills of the Summerlands. He wore lush red wizard's robes and a necklace of sea-green jewels. His name was Dr Agony and if anybody was the face of the Summerlands, it was him.

  Because the Summerlands wasn’t just a place, it was a game, and he was the man who’d built it.

  Back in 2055, Expedition Games was the leading developer of VR and sensurround games. Dr Agony—also known by his real name, Dr James Agostino—was their chief designer and coder. So it fell to Dr Agony to make the announcement that changed everything: Expedition Games had found a portal to another world.

  The portal was in the European Union, on a craggy island in the North Sea, at the northernmost extremity of a country my History text called Scotland. In a patch of reclaimed wilderness that was part of Expedition’s real estate holdings was a small crofter’s homestead that had collapsed long ago. Beside the low stone rectangle that had once been a peat-roofed house, there was a well. At the bottom of the well was a ring of luminescent moss. And on the other side of the ring was a world they called the Summerlands.

  At first, people were just confused. Most of us took it for a marketing tactic: Expedition had probably come up with some slick new VR technology and the whole “different world” thing was metaphorical. Then, once we all understood what they were claiming, nobody bought it. But soon the feeds started. A team of Expedition employees called the First Ranger Group, led by Dr Agony, sent back live HD video streams of a world with green grass, blue skies, clear rivers, and gleaming white ruins.

  And then we had to believe, because nowhere like that existed on Earth anymore.

  For months, the world was enthralled just watching the First Ranger Group explore this new Eden. Expedition Games claimed all the territory the rangers covered in the Summerlands. They certainly owned the well and the portal and their lawyers argued convincingly that the laws of Earth’s nations ended where other worlds began. Then, just as the secondhand thrill of the rangers’ exploration feeds was wearing off, tragedy struck.

  A ranger group led by Dr Agony himself made camp at the outskirts of a huge forest. They shut their cameras off for the night. The next time their feed came online, some twenty hours later, every ranger was dead except for Agony himself. Expedition weathered a tsunami of demand from the public to explain what had happened, even stared down a congressional investigation, but they refused to disclose the fate of what became known as the Lost Expedition. Instead, they marked off a wide circle of land, built a huge wall along the border, and revealed Dr Agony’s master plan: he was making a game.

  First, they built a city. Called Wellpoint, it was a full-scale model of a fantasy medieval town, all plaster and stone and exposed beams. Some of the materials were brought over from Earth, but most were harvested from the seemingly endless resources of the Summerlands. In the center of Wellpoint, surrounded by a cobblestone town square, stood a green-glowing moss circle that matched the portal in our world.

  Next, Expedition started hiring. Noah, Cass, Jason and I were too young to apply, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway: they received something like half a million applications for maybe two hundred jobs. They quickly filled out seven more ranger groups, whom they sent off to map the new world, with a particular eye for caves, ruins, and dungeons where treasure might hide. The rangers were the first to find the monsters that seemed to lurk anywhere there were riches to be found. They named them: gold dogs, trash snakes, giant hell rats.

  The town of Wellpoint grew and Expedition took on applicants to act as the everyday people of the world. You could be a town guard, a ditch digger, a blacksmith, a shopkeep, anything Expedition needed to keep their new fantasy world running. If you had the skills, all they asked was a lifetime contract.

  It was during this period that Dr Agony discovered magic. A cache of books in what appeared to be an ancient temple suggested a codified system of spells, but the texts resisted translation for weeks, until one day Dr Agony announced that he could speak and read the language of the people who had once occupied the Summerlands.

  The Book of Elvish Magic was published a month later and rode the bestseller lists for a year. I read my copy over and over until it fell apart, learning that magic came in two types and relied on the help of ritual implements. Dr Agony was what he called a red magician, casting flashy spells with coins, swords, bells, and jewels. I also practiced red magic, not that I could afford jewels. Noah was our white magician; he amassed a small trove of wands, bracelets, cups and gloves as he practiced from his own copy of the Book.

  Finally, after three years of frenzied anticipation and round-the-clock media coverage, Expedition opened their new game to beta testers. A spot on the beta list cost a quarter-million dollars; it filled up in four hours. One by one, the new players passed through the portal to the Summerlands. They were stripped of all their possessions and sent through with nothing but some pseudo-medieval clothing, a handful of copper coins, and a camera drone.

  The drones were the only concession to modern technology in the game and Expedition Games was notoriously strict about enforcing the rules of their new wonderland. (A would-be player once tried to smuggle in a handgun and he’d been caught and banned for life. No refund on the ticket fee, which was a hundred-fifty thousand at that point.) Before you passed through, you were implanted with a subdermal RFID chip and on the other side you were given a drone keyed to your particular signal. Twenty-five hours a day—time worked a little differently in the Summerlands—your drone sent back a live feed of whateve
r you were up to.

  With the beta open, Dr Agony quit his job with Expedition to become a full-time adventurer, handing over the reigns to his protégé, a woman named Blomhaugen. Some fans complained that he had an unfair advantage, but as the earliest players learned how to navigate their new world, Agony swiftly established himself as having the most interesting and exciting feed to watch.

  The beta players quickly formed adventuring parties and the most talented ones started guilds to share their knowledge (for a fee, of course). The less talented chickened out and opened shops and restaurants rather than risk their lives. Others returned home via the portal and hit the talk-show circuit. But the adventurers who stuck with it soon found that there were really only two good ways to get rich in the Summerlands.

  The most obvious was to go out adventuring and make it back to Wellpoint laden with treasure. The ranger groups did their job well and there seemed to be no shortage of abandoned buildings crammed full of coins, jewelry, and other treasure. The other way was to have a popular feed. Advertisers were happy to pour cash into the accounts of big-name streamers like Dr Agony and, in return, plaster their likenesses across any and all merchandise. The more viewers you had, the more you could make in sponsorships, but if you turned off your stream, your fans would change channel.

  Still, some players lived mostly off the airwaves, streaming only in the midst of something exciting. Most killed their streams when they were doing something really mundane, like sleeping or using the bathroom. (Some didn’t. There was a market for that.) Some people streamed their lives in confessional form, showing everything twenty-four/seven and talking nonstop about their emotions through every gold coin found and every friend lost to a monster. A few had even made the leap to porn, teasing, stripping, even sleeping with other players and beaming every detail back to a thirsty public. They always had the nicest clothes.