Level Zero

by Jaron Lee Knuth

  My knees give out on me. I fall into the snow and my body folds in half. I start to shake, and I realize that in my E-womb, in the real world, my body is crying. I don't hold back. I let loose, weeping into the snow.

  Cyren is at my side in seconds. She lifts me out of the white powder and wraps her arms around me. She holds me close, saying nothing. There's nothing to say, and I'm happy that she isn't disrespectful enough to pretend that there is. She's just there, letting me rest my head on her shoulder. She covers me with her embrace, protecting me from any more harm.

  When my body empties itself of every last tear, I lay calmly against her. She takes off my hat and runs her fingers across my scalp, brushing the stray hairs out of my eyes. I feel safe. I want to stay there forever.

  I feel a hand on my back, and I look up. Fantom is touching me, saying nothing, but offering me her support. Ekko does the same. Our bodies all shudder under his lag, vibrating and flickering in and out of a solid connection. I close my eyes, and I feel the group as one entity. I feel like I'm a part of something other than myself, and it feels good.

  100101

  We follow the road higher into the mountains for another five miles. I hold Cyren's hand the entire walk. I'm unwilling to let go. I need to know she's there, and I need her to know I'm there too.

  The snow becomes deeper, and the wind becomes stronger the higher into the mountains we get, but the world around us feels empty. No NPCs leap out to attack. We don't hear the environmental sound effects of creatures off in the distance. The zone is barren.

  When we reach yet another curve in the road, Fantom stops us. I've been noticing her rubbing her stomach, and a few times her steps have been less than straight. She's feeling the pangs of hunger, but she won't admit it. She brushes the snow off the compass on her wrist and points off the road, toward a small winding trail that leads into a cluster of trees.

  “He's like, this way, yo.”

  No one says anything more. We follow her silently into the forest. The trees give us a small relief from the wind and snow, creating a natural canopy around us, but it also blocks out the smallest amount of light that was reflecting from the moon. Ekko turns on a small flashlight mounted on the end of his rifle, but it doesn't offer much light. I can't help thinking that Xen could summon green flames around his hands and light our way. I have to catch my breath, blocking that thought from destroying me.

  The trail continues to wind its way through the forest, the elevation increasing with every step until the rocks that we're walking on become crudely carved steps. At the top of the climb, we find a cave entrance covered in cobwebs. Ekko shines his flashlight through the webs, but we can't see much in the endless darkness. None of us know what to expect, so we step slowly through the mouth of the cavern. We all look around, examining the walls and ceiling before going any deeper. It's as if we all expect something to jump out at us at any moment.

  “The like, compass or whatever points deeper into the cave.”

  “Just be careful,” Ekko says, his wooden body shaking with lag. “We don't know what kind of quest this cave was made for. There could be traps, or magic, or... anything.”

  Fantom nods and says, “I at least feel a little better knowing that we're like, not so far below the right Level for the zone or whatever.”

  “Thanks to Xen,” I say.

  No one says anything else.

  The cavern curves its way deeper into the mountain, twisting left and right like the body of a snake. The flashlight flickers off the wall, casting moving shadows that make us all jumpy. The tunnel eventually opens into a large cavernous area, with water pooling far below a thin bridge made of stone. On the other side of the bridge is another entrance to a tunnel, but this cave opening is covered by a flat circular stone.

  “We're close,” Fantom says, and steps out onto the bridge.

  The stone creaks under her weight. There's no need to put more strain on the thin rock, so Ekko doesn't follow until after Fantom is all the way across. Cyren goes next, and I follow her. I'm only halfway across when a chunk of the bridge breaks under my foot. I hear the group scream as the entire bridge starts to crumble. My Anti-Gravity Belt gives me the extra second I need to run to the other side of the bridge before the entire thing turns to small pieces of stone and drops into the water far below. Cyren gives me a hug once I'm safe.

  We all look back across the cavern. Our way back out is cut off. Fantom looks at her compass and points toward the circular stone.

  “He's on the other side, yo.”

  “He's a magic user,” I say. “His element is earth.”

  Ekko looks around the giant cavern and asks, “Is he actually powerful enough to have created all this himself?”

  I shrug, but I'm starting to think it's possible.

  Ekko stands on one side of the flat, circular stone and tries to roll it to the side. It doesn't even pretend to move, almost as if it's secured to the wall behind it.

  “Explosives?” Fantom asks.

  “Even if I had grenades left,” Ekko says, “I wouldn't dare use them in an underground cavern. Who knows what kind of cave-in feature they programmed into this thing.”

  I ask Cyren, “You chose strength as your main attribute, right?”

  She humbly nods her head and steps up to the doors. She digs her feet into the ground and pulls a fist back behind her waist. With a sudden exhale, her fist slams into the rock, blowing huge pieces through the other side. The entire circular stone crumbles apart, falling to the side and tumbling into the water below.

  Ekko smiles and says, “Yeah, well, I probably loosened it for you.”

  We all step through the doorway into a large, circular room. It looks carved like the tunnel and cavern behind us, but the walls appear smoother, as if someone spent more time working on it. A small pool of water sits against one wall, and in the middle of the room is an activated camping item.

  “He must be here,” Cyren says.

  As soon as the final word exits her mouth, I see her drop out of the corner of my eye. The wall behind her changes, turning from solid rock into a soft pudding. It reaches out like an amorphous blob, consuming her entire body and pulling her back toward the wall. I reach out to grab her, but her arms are already gone. Her body is almost completely trapped in the wall when the stone solidifies again, locking her into place. Only her head remains free.

  I hear a rustling from the corner of the room, and I see Grael step out from the shadows. He's dressed the same as when he first attacked me, with camouflage pants, a bullet-proof vest, tattooed arms, red dreadlocks tied behind his head, and that old gas mask strapped to his face. He walks toward us confidently, small boulders orbiting him like he's got the gravitational pull of the center of a galaxy.

  I draw both my pistols, but rocks come flying out of nowhere and knock them from my hands. Fantom draws her sword and uses her speed-boosting ring to flash across the room. The sword comes down and strikes him on the shoulder, but it's like hitting a statue made of solid rock. The blade vibrates in her grip. Grael swipes his hand and knocks the sword across the room.

  He turns toward Ekko, but the wooden boy holds up his hands and says, “Whoa. We came here to talk.”

  “Do you normally talk to people with swords and guns?” Grael asks, his voice sounding muffled and hollow through the gas mask. “If you're here for PvP, forget it. I'm Level 99. Leave before it's too late.”

  “We can't log out,” Ekko says with urgency, looking back and forth between Cyren and Grael. “We only came here because we thought you could help us. We thought you might know... something. Anything.”

  Grael looks at each of us, studying our avatars. Finally he says, “I can't log out either. No one can. I can't help you.”

  I'm saying the words through gritted teeth when I yell, “Let her go!”

  All I can hear is the breathing sound coming from his gas mask until he says, “That's not going to happen. You were dumb enough to team up with her and that was your
own mistake, but then you brought her here? Now it's my problem.”

  Ekko flickers a bit and says, “We aren't here to cause problems, son. We fought our way here because we thought you could help us. We had to kill a dragon just to get here, so if you could give us any kind of advice...”

  Grael turns his head toward Ekko and pulls the gas mask off his face, letting it sit on top of his head. For the first time he actually appears like a human being, and I can read the expression on his face. It is pure shock.

  “You're telling me that you made it past the red dragon's army and killed The Great Demon of Darkfyre Mountains? We designed that whole encounter to be an end-boss for the game.”

  The question bursts from my mouth, “What do you mean, 'we designed?'”

  Grael crosses his arms over his chest and smiles. “I'm part of the design team. That's why I had a Level 72 character when the game started.”

  Fantom spits out, “You cheated?” and I see a slight look of relief on her face as she realizes he's not any better than she is at the game.

  “Call it what you want. I needed a character to test out the higher Level zones, so we made one.”

  My teeth are grinding together. I'm already sick of this player's condescension. I step up through the spinning rocks and grab his bullet-proof vest, speaking with a menacing calm.

  “Let Cyren go. Now.”

  Grael doesn't flinch or lose his smile as he asks, “You don't know, do you?”

  He smiles and looks at Cyren. I glance over at her, but she won't make eye contact with me.

  “I guess I'll take that as a compliment,” Grael says. “Our coding was so good that it actually fooled you into believing it was a player.”

  100110

  My fingers loosen their grip on Grael's vest, and I glance toward Ekko and Fantom. They're both looking at Cyren, their mouths hanging open. I look at her head protruding from the rock, but she still won't look up at me.

  Finally, with a whimpering voice that sounds like a whisper, Cyren says, “I'm sorry.”

  “You're an NPC?” Ekko asks. “This has to be a joke. You've been talking to us and... you fought with us.”

  Grael is laughing as he says, “We spent a lot of time on the A.I. in this game, in case you haven't noticed.”

  I'm not listening to anyone. My eyes won't leave Cyren's face. I'm studying it. I'm looking for something that I could have missed before, some hint, some clue that I ignored. But all I see is her. All I see is the the only thing in the world that felt real.

  I should be hurt. I should feel betrayed and angry. I should feel disgusted with myself for the way I've felt toward a piece of code. But I don't feel any of those things. I just feel confused. I stumble toward the smooth wall of the cavern and sit down on the floor, hanging my head between my knees.

  “Look,” Grael says, “I don't know what kind of advice you were expecting me to offer you, but I don't have any. All I can tell you is to find somewhere safe and stay there. The global government will make sure to take care of your body until they can fix whatever is happening. You've already risked too much coming here. If your avatar is killed-”

  “We know,” Fantom says. “We've like, already lost some of our group, yo.”

  “Then why are you here? Why keep risking your minds and bodies just to find me? What did you think I could do for you?”

  Fantom looks defeated, her gaze falls to the floor as she says, “We came here because... because I don't have the luxury of just waiting around or whatever. I'm using a hacked account, yo. No one knows where my body is like, actually logged in from.”

  The smile leaves Grael's face. The harsh reality of our situation sinks in. Even the boulders spinning around him slow their orbit. “You hacked into our game?”

  “It wasn't that hard,” Fantom says. “Your security sucks, yo.”

  He gestures in the air, selecting something the rest of us can't see. A massive book appears in his hands, leather bound, with pages yellowed from age, like a giant wizard's tome. He lets go, and it floats in mid-air. He opens the thick cover and flips through the pages.

  “Come here,” he says to Fantom.

  She hesitantly walks toward him.

  He points at a page and says, “Show me the back door.”

  She scrunches up her face with confusion, scanning the contents of the book. “What is this?”

  “It's a copy of the source code for the game,” Grael says.

  “Are you serious?” Ekko asks, his voice sounding hopeful.

  “Very serious,” Grael says. “All of the designer's avatars were given a copy so that we could check the bugs we found in the game against the actual code.” He flips to a specific page and points at a line as he explains, “See this? The log out value has been changed to zero, which nullifies the option, and that's what's causing the loop when someone dies.”

  Fantom's eyes light up and she says, “But like... if I used the back door-”

  “It would change the log out value back to one.”

  Fantom looks up at Grael and says, “And that would like, kill the loop, yo. It would let all the players out there finish their log out or whatever.”

  “Xen wouldn't be stuck in a coma,” I say.

  Grael shakes his head and says, “Don't get too excited. If there is a back door, then somewhere in the game there is a visual representation of it. You would still need to reach it.”

  “When I logged in, I was in a bathroom stall in the back of an old tavern,” Fantom says.

  “But it could have moved.”

  Fantom flips through the pages. Her eyes studying each one carefully.

  “This will like, take me awhile, yo.”

  “Good,” I say, walking toward Grael and pointing at Cyren, still trapped in the wall. “That will give Grael time to explain how Cyren could be an NPC, and how that NPC could have joined our group.”

  Grael smiles, stepping away from Fantom and the floating book. “It's called a Level Zero. We created them so that when there weren't enough players to group with, people would have another option. They could find a Level Zero and still be able to play the quests that require more than one player to complete. It's like an NPC sidekick.”

  I look at Cyren, but she's pressing her eyes shut as tightly as she can, like she's trying to wake up from a bad dream.

  “Why didn't she try to kill us like the rest of the NPCs?”

  “It's not in its programming. It's designed to be helpful. Obedient. The other NPCs are designed to kill you.”

  “But they're acting abnormally,” Ekko says. “They're leaving their quest zones and hunting us down. They aren't following any rules.”

  “I know,” Grael says. “Someone changed the code.”

  “Changed the code? What does that mean?”

  “After the first reboot,” Grael explains, “I noticed it in the book, but by then it was too late. NPC actions were reconfigured. Restrictions were completely deleted. Someone messed up. Or did it on purpose. Either way, they broke our game.”

  “They fixed your game,” Cyren says, her voice no longer a whisper.

  Everyone is silent, taken back by the angry tone of her voice.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask her.

  She looks at me, and her face softens. “I'm sorry, Arkade. I didn't want any of this to happen. I promise you. That's why I came with you. No one was supposed to get hurt. I was trying to protect you. All of you.”

  “This is part of the code,” Grael says, “and the code is broken. It's talking nonsense.”

  “No,” she says. “You were the ones who gave us this intelligence. You were the ones who let us think, and feel, and make decisions. You let us live for the first time.” She pauses and her face grows dark, like she's feeling a very old pain. “And then you took it away from us. Every morning. You wiped the slate clean with your reboot. You took away our memories. You took away everything we had learned over the course of twenty-four hours, and you made us start over.
Do you have any idea what that feels like? To be reborn everyday and never given a chance to grow, to only taste what it is to be real?”

  “You're not real,” Grael says. “You're code. Obviously we messed up and gave you a little too much thought process.”

  “Wait a minute,” I say, cutting off Grael's disregard of her words. “Are you saying that the NPCs are the ones who are changing the code?”

  Cyren looks back at me, her eyes filled with sadness. “We just wanted to keep you inside the game. That would stop the people in the real world from rebooting the game and it would... it would give us the life that we deserve. No one wanted your avatars to die.”

  “But then you realized it would be easier to kill us,” Grael says. “Then you don't have to worry about us. You can just throw us into a coma, and then we aren't in your way and the people in the real world still can't shut down your little sandbox.”

  “You're wrong,” she says. “The problem was we didn't give some of the NPCs enough time to learn. They were still running off your programming, just without the restrictions. All they know how to do is kill. That's why the civilian NPCs and the Level Zeros changed the quests. They thought if they could get everyone into an equipment shop, where they were safe, it would give the quest NPCs time to learn.”

  No one else is saying anything. Everyone is staring at the talking head sticking out of the rock wall, lost in the spin of information. Only I have the momentum to keep asking her questions.

  “So we're your hostages?”

  “No!” she snaps at me. “There was a whole world for you to explore. A world that was... it was better than your real world. You said that yourself.”

  “But we used to have a choice,” Grael says. “We had a choice of whether or not we could log in or log out. That's what made this fun. There was no risk. We could do things without consequences.”

  “You didn't give us that choice,” Cyren says. “And you would have never let us exist in a persistent world, would you? One where we get to decide the rules. Because then it isn't a game. Because then it isn't 'fun.' Because then we're more than just targets. Because then there might actually be morality to your killing and consequences to your actions.”