Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1)

by Vasily Mahanenko

  “What’re ya staring at, sonny? Here you go—you have been resurrected. Thank your lucky Planetary Spirit! Now get on back up there!” the old man grumbled, seeing that I wasn’t about to go anywhere. “Bunch of rabble constantly going in and out of here taking whatever they feel like…”

  “Where am I?” I couldn’t help but ask. Long pipes puffing with steam—darkness—strange inscriptions—dusty monitors: The atmosphere here seemed so post-apocalyptic that I even opened the menu to make sure that I was still in Galactogon.

  “Where-where? Where-where? I’d tell you a dirty joke, but you’re too young to hear it. Oh! More guests are coming,” added the old man, glancing at the lone working monitor. “Soldiers? What do soldiers need underground? Ah! They’re coming for you! I see this order here: ‘Apprehend a certain Surgeon and deliver him to the General.’ You wouldn’t happen to be that Surgeon, now would you, sonny?”

  “I am.” It was pointless to argue.

  “Then get on up there. They’re waiting for you.” The old man pointed at a rusty lift, directing me away from him.

  “I’m going as fast as I can,” I muttered in reply, got out my blaster and aimed it at the elevator’s gears. “Warm greetings to everyone! Make sure to write!”

  “What are you doing?” yelled the Qualian once I’d dumped a powercell’s worth of bolts into the lift.

  “Welcoming our guests,” I said spitefully, as Precian swearing came blaring over the old man’s intercom. I couldn’t understand a word, but you don’t have to be a polyglot to tell the difference between civil conversation and cursing harangue—even in alien. Getting another powercell from my inventory and reloading my blaster, I asked the old man a single question: “Where’s the exit?”

  The Qualian looked at the blaster pointing at him fearfully, looked back at the demolished lift mechanism and started talking…

  The Training Sector’s respawn area was buried deep underground. The reasoning behind this was that if war started, any killed recruits would be able to respawn in a safe place and head up to defend the Sector. An ordinary, narrow lift would take them up to the surface, about half a mile above. The old man had begun working for the Precians only several weeks ago and during that time, no player had had occasion to respawn. To my astonished question of where the old man had worked before, I was told that he had been at one of the Qualian Training Sectors. For many years there had been no incidents there—and then suddenly crowds of enraged players started popping up and fighting for a place on the lift—which could only accommodate two at a time. That was when the old man decided that he would find a better job. He contacted an acquaintance of his, who contacted someone else, who contacted someone else and in the end, the old man was given a cozy position as Recruit Resurrection Facilitator at a Training Sector where nothing had ever happened. Although the new position was in a different empire, at least he could now read his books in peace.

  The old man explained that there were two exits leading to the surface. The first and most popular was the lift. The second, which the old man hadn’t used once during his career—whether with the Qualians or the Precians—was a multi-level labyrinth of pipes, hallways, iron stairwells and chambers. The old man had neither a map nor information about the official exit points to this jumble of steel and rock. Neither was there any information about the monsters that would surely inhabit that part of the Training Sector. Basically, he knew nothing about it at all, aside from how to open the door to it.

  Pushing away the last crate that blocked the passage and entering the access code, the old man hunched his shoulders and closed his eyes. He was expecting me to shoot him.

  “Best of luck with the repairs,” I said, getting a better grip on my blaster and exiting through the door. To be honest, the idea of killing the Qualian had come to me in the first few seconds, but I quickly abandoned it. It was one thing to eradicated packs of soldiers and monsters. It was something else entirely to kill a defenseless old man. I couldn’t care less about the moral aspects—I simply had no idea how the system would react to this kind of act. Considering the way the rest of the game had been designed, such a murder would come back to bite me somewhere and sometime. For example—what if I’d discover later on that I’d need grandpa’s help to get off the planet? I mean, who knew what would happen?

  Welcome to “Trial of the Lost Recruit.”

  You are on Labyrinth Level 1 (of 333).

  Lol! I guess this thing had been designed specially to test recruits! And yet neither the Qualians nor the Precians seemed to make use of it. Strange. I waited until the old man closed the door behind me and piled up the crates on the other side and then, still unable to believe my salvation, called Eunice.

  “What’s up! Finally got a chance to ring you up. Where are you right now?”

  “In jail,” the girl replied. “When I refused to go to training, they simply threw me behind bars. And I took a hit to my Rapport with the Precians. Where are you right now? On the planet’s surface already?”

  “Even better! I’m beneath it!”

  In a few words I related to Eunice the pretty dull story of my meeting with the general.

  “Now I see why they’re running around up here,” mused Eunice. “They’ve seized Yalrock. If you don’t get back to the ship within 24 hours, they’ll be able to confiscate it officially. And that’s IRL hours, not game hours.”

  “I know,” I winced. “That’s why I haven’t signed out. How much longer do you have to stay in jail for?”

  “Two hours. After that it’s either back to school or another two hours of jail.”

  “Go back to school then. I blew up their lift. There’s half a mile worth of pipes and hallways above my head with the-Planetary-Spirit-only-knows how many monsters lurking along the way. I may have to respawn several times. And I don’t have my armor anymore…”

  “Alright. Get out of there as fast as you can. I’ll be playing the good girl up here.”

  I never much liked first person shooters. As a rule their designers place you in some grim, dim place with narrow hallways, a low ceiling and plenty of steam. It’s like they can’t imagine that anything bad could lurk in a normal open area with plenty of light. Given the narrow hallways here, as well as the strange sounds, screams and moans—even if there was nothing dangerous in the labyrinth’s beginning, I would bet my life that after a few more steps I’d be shooting anything that moved. Or rather, shooting anything that moves twice, just to make sure.

  As I understood it, the first level had been designed to introduce the player to the labyrinth ahead—a hallway about 200 feet long with walls made of pipes that interwove with one another like mating snakes. At the far end, I could see an iron ladder that would allow me to go up nine feet. That was where the next level was, so I would now have to do this 330 times…Something told me that I wouldn’t be making it to Yalrock in 24 hours—and I had no way of getting in touch with Braniac without my armor. I would be proper pissed if those Precian jerks confiscated my ship.

  When I got to the ladder, I stopped and stared at the wall, perplexed. The pipes had ended about sixty feet back and given way to an ordinary plastered wall. Right before the ladder, however, a piece of the wall stood out from its surroundings. It was like someone had hurriedly covered a small passageway and painted it over with whatever paint was at hand. If I saw this in the real world, I wouldn’t think twice, assuming that some careless workers had simply cut corners. But I was in Galactogon and things like this didn’t just happen without good reason. Based on my experience in other games, as well as the fact that I was currently working through a labyrinth, I could safely conclude that this patch of wall concealed either something useful or something dangerous. The former was more likely than the latter, since respawned recruits (there was no other way to get here) would have no weapons or means of self-defense. I’d need to check.

  Understanding that I was losing valuable time, I hoped back off the ladder and approached the obviously mismatc
hed part of the wall. I didn’t want to ruin my last blaster, so I drew back as far as I could and slammed my fist into the wall. Better I lose some health than ruin my only means of convincing the Precians what was good for them. The pacifiers would be my last resort.

  Found Secret: 1 of 1 on this level.

  You have passed Level 1 of the Labyrinth.

  You have received the following items: Precian Assault Boots. Item class: E-1.

  I didn’t lose any health at all—the wall gave way like papier-mâché. A green light illuminated the hallway and a pair of steel-toed boots fell to the floor.

  Oh come on! Any middling player would notice this part of the wall. It followed that the Labyrinth’s designers had decided to show right there on the first level that their creation was stuffed full of various secrets. On one hand, these boots would be useful for an impoverished recruit—on the other hand, I had absolutely no need for them. As soon as I’d make it to the outside world, I’d buy myself an A-class marine armor and forget all about the other clothes. So, it didn’t make sense wasting time to explore each level of the dungeon only to…

  WAIT!

  The idea that suddenly came to me forced me to instantly pull up the main menu and sign out of the game. Those Precian Assault Boots should be the first part of a set of marine armor. This set would include gloves, a suit, a blaster, pants and who knows what else—but the main thing that excited me was that this set would have to also include some kind of communications device. If I could get that, then I could get in touch with Braniac and order him to self-destruct! I still had the access codes to Yalrock in my PDA, so Braniac would have to follow my orders. I didn’t mind losing one hundred levels, an entire class, if I could retain possession of my ship! But I had to first make sure that the marine set would include a comm to begin with…Did it make sense to waste time looking for it at all?

  Secrets found: 3 of 4 on this level.

  You have acquired the following items: Precian Assault Boots. Item class: E-1

  I swore and tossed aside the loot I’d discovered behind a pipe belching steam. Out of the 32 items in the Precian marine set, I was missing the one thing I actually needed—the communicator. Over the last four hours I had only managed to ascend eighteen levels of the Labyrinth, at which point—as luck would have it—the items in the set started to repeat. It was like they’d decided to outfit another recruit. I walked through the five hallways and six rooms of the current level but didn’t manage to find the fourth and last secret spot. It was like it didn’t exist! Realizing that I was beginning to lose time, I signed out IRL again. I still had the level recorded in my PDA and so I decided to ask Stan to parse it in search of the final hidden item. There was no point in reinventing the wheel—I had access to a computer, so why not use it?

  “Show me the map,” asked Eunice, sitting down beside me. Stan was huffing and puffing like a steam engine, trying to solve the problem—yet I hadn’t heard anything from him for ten minutes already.

  “Let’s go through this one more time—you walked down all the hallways and rooms. You didn’t notice anything suspicious anywhere. Right?”

  “Right,” I said, feeling like Captain Obvious.

  “You’re missing the comm,” Eunice stated the obvious yet again.

  “That’s right.”

  “Stan, throw up a map of the eighteenth level on the screen,” the girl commanded my smart home for some reason. I had no idea what she was trying to do. What did the map of the level have to do with the remaining secret spot?

  “Master?” Stan asked me for confirmation. Just because Eunice lived with us didn’t give her the right to issue commands.

  “Do it.”

  “There! Look!” the girl laughed happily, pointing at the map. “I knew it!”

  “Erm…” I said emphatically, looking on the same image as she and still not comprehending. “Why don’t you break it down for us slower ones.”

  “I came across a similar puzzle in my last game,” Eunice began explaining. “The gist was simple—I had to enter a certain combination. But there was no place to input them into. The level had nothing but rooms connected by hallways.”

  “Are you trying to say that the rooms and hallways—that is, the level itself—are like a huge communicator?” I asked baffled.

  “Bingo! Look—Galactogon uses decimal notation. The level has eleven different areas. That is—ten rooms for ten digits and one more to freely pass from one room or hallway to another. Look here—this hallway alone,” Eunice traced her finger along the screen, circling the largest and longest hallway, “connects all the other rooms and hallways together. All the rest have three exits or entrances. One with the common hallway and two with the neighboring rooms.”

  “Alright, let’s assume you’re right. How am I supposed to use this information? Where is room number one? Two? Three? How do I ‘press’ the number I need?”

  “I have no idea,” the girl admitted sincerely. “You wandered through the level so chaotically that you must’ve entered some kind of combination strictly by chance. But nothing happened. It follows that you have to do something in the rooms. But what exactly—is already a question for you to answer.”

  “What do you say, Stan?” I asked my second brain.

  “Eunice’s hypothesis is plausible. Considering the layout of this level, the common hallway that connects all of rooms, and the small circles that may be found on the floor of the rooms, the conclusion that there is a gigantic communicator here makes sense. However, there is one detail you and Eunice have overlooked—there is a circle in the common hallway as well.”

  “What circle?” Eunice and I said almost simultaneously.

  “I will show it on the screen. As we know, each room and hallway has a small circle, about twenty inches wide. The circles’ locations correspond to the intersections of virtual diagonals. In the common hallway, the circle is located at the far wall without any regard to the overarching geometry formed by the placement of the circles in the rest of the level. The circle in the common hallway stands out from the floor by virtue of a darker shade of paint, which makes it basically invisible in the Labyrinth’s low lighting. If we follow Eunice’s hypothesis, we may conclude that the circles are all buttons corresponding to different number values. And the call button itself is located in the common hallway. I can calculate no other possible solutions at the moment.”

  “So all we have to figure out now is where the beginning of this convoluted keypad is located,” mused Eunice.

  “That’s actually the easiest thing to solve,” I realized. “All the rooms are linked together sequentially. Consequently, we assign ‘1’ to a room, and use it to calculate the other digits. Then we make the call. If it doesn’t go through, we’ll assign ‘1’ to the next room and repeat the operation. Yalrock’s number only has thirty digits. The level has ten rooms—in a few hours I’ll be able to go through all the combinations. Then I’ll keep my klamir!”

  I was a little off in my estimate. It took me an entire hour to walk through thirty rooms in the correct sequence and finally press the “call” button. That was just for one call! After waiting a couple minutes to make sure that there really was no result, I switched to the next room-sequence in my PDA and began entering the next call. If Eunice’s theory was correct, it would take me no more than ten hours to try every possible combination. If, on the other hand, she was wrong…Well, I didn’t even want to entertain that possibility.

  Secrets found: 4 of 4 on this level.

  You have gained access to the stationary communicator.

  I almost jumped, seeing the notification that popped up after my fourth run through. It was that unexpected. I was already beginning to doubt Eunice, since I’d gotten no response to the first three “dials.” And here suddenly I was granted access to the stationary communicator! Please, please let it be Braniac!

  “Delranos keltake ugranda de!” said a man’s voice from the wall beside me as soon as the notification had fad
ed. It looked like the speaker and mic had been built right into the wall. I was not familiar with the language being spoken by whatever creature was on the other end. He could’ve been a Delvian or an Anorxian or even some Zatrathi—cleaning toilets on the very station I’d recently escaped from. Surely the devs had furnished them with the same means of communication as the rest of Galactogon.

  “This is Surgeon, captain of Yalrock!” I said, checking to see if I could be heard. It’d be a heck of a thing if I’d finally reach Braniac only to discover myself unable to actually tell him anything.

  “Qualian?” the man on the other end asked in a language my character understood. “How did you get this number? Who gave it to you?”

  “I repeat, my name is Surgeon. I am the captain of the ship Yalrock. I dialed your number entirely by accident. Whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”

  “My name is Grandar. I am the junior advisor to the deputy weeding assistant to the gardener of the Third Palace of his Imperial Highness, the Emperor of the Precian Empire (hallowed be his persona). Please do not call this number again, as I have not the time to speak with various…”

  “Wait!” I yelled, before Grandar could hang up. “I have information about the kidnapped prince! I know where Rrgord is being held! I know why the Qualian prince died!”

  “WHAT?!” curiosity reared in the voice of the twelfth advisor. “Speak! I need to know this information urgently!”

  Uh-huh. Allow me to fall all over myself to tell you. I’m being persecuted by a Precian general who’s taken my Yalrock and stranded me inside “my own personal hell,” and I’m going to give this random gardener’s assistant this info for nothing? Thanks but no thanks.