by Nick Cole
The two of them were looking at the security feeds.
The dead bodies in the road had been found after five clicks.
Fish had been saying, “How can you access…” and then stopped.
A tiny little smile appeared at one corner of Miss Case’s pert mouth. Praise. She loved it. She lived for it. Especially from a soon-to-be legend in gaming. Her first task, and she was already dazzling her project lead. Then she saw what he was staring open-mouthed at on the feed she’d hacked into from the SurfaceTable in the main room of the design suite. Now they both saw the bodies lying in the road, and the overturned semi.
“This can’t be,” she murmured.
Except it was.
Carl’s voice came through the suite speakers. “Excuse me, Mr. Fishbein, Miss Case, but we have a situation. Can you come down to the shack—I mean, the Security Relations Center? I think I’m gonna need your help.”
After a moment, Miss Case found the intercom.
“Uh… Carl, do you know about the… bodies?”
There was a pause.
“Yes, Miss Case, I do. That’s why I’m gonna need your help. I have to go out and bring a few people back inside the Labs… where it’s safe. I need you to run the shack… all right?”
After a short pause, during which Peabody Case looked at Fish and received the barest of nods, she replied, “Okay, I guess we’re on our way.”
“All right,” said Carl. “I’m unlocking the suite now and elevator access to the main floor thirty seconds after that. Hurry. Once I see you, I’ll lower the walls.”
***
As Carl watched the 3D resolution schematic of the entire campus, noting badge swipes and data crawls from each occupied location, he ruminated over three things while chewing his bottom lip.
The people inside the labs are safe.
The people outside are not safe.
It’s my duty to protect them all.
Chapter Thirteen
An hour earlier, Rapp Branson had driven through the epic gates of the WonderSoft campus sprawl. It was a late Friday afternoon turning into a quiet Friday evening. He’d just finished his shift at Bar Meister’s, an upscale craft ale brew house located in the heart of the historic district of Twisted Pine Falls. Normally all the coders, girls who wanted rich guys, and everyone else partied there all weekend long. But tonight, what with the end-all be-all concert everyone had to be at, the world of Twisted Pine Falls was a quiet place.
Rapp Branson was wearing his most recent cosplay outfit creation and driving a butterscotch yellow Olds Delta 88. A ’73. His mission tonight was to swing by and pick up his friend and fellow live-action role player, Roland, and then head out to Shadowy Meadows State Park for a game of Night of the Living Dead with the Twisted Pine Falls Live-Action Role Playing Society.
Rapp didn’t actually go in for cosplay, even though he’d been a theatre major and had played Gaston down at DisneyRio in the Disney “Heroes and Villains Show.” But the truth was, he was burnt. Burnt out to be more specific. If you’d asked him, after a few beers and somewhere past the later hours of the night, he would’ve told you he was a “man out of time” and waxed long, if not so eloquent, on the downfall of modern civilization, as he saw it. His words. Words that often came up as he held forth on the decrepit nature of, as he called it, the “modern cage,” or life. The big adventures, the “Hemingway stuff” of man versus everything, that was all gone now, in Rapp’s opinion. Now he was just going through the motions, occasionally sparked by some interesting thing to entertain him for the moment. More often than not, the interesting thing was a pretty actress. Hence the cosplaying in the night with hot nerd chicks who needed a theatre role-fix to go on making big bucks in the “modern cage” that was the service industry in and around Twisted Pine Falls.
And that he was completely uninterested in cosplay was not altogether true either. He actually took great pains to get his costumes just right. Last year, when they’d done a game of “Bloody Arthur,” a vampiric take on Camelot, he’d crafted a full set of armor inspired by the breastplates of Roman centurions. He’d even acid-etched all kinds of dark runes he’d researched on the internet. He’d made a fearsome Tristan who’d been done to death by thirsty Isolde, a hot chick who worked in town at Money, a high-end fashion boutique, as a floor model. They dated until she left town for a reality TV gig. Her name was Breela and he’d thought a lot about her since she’d gone off to Hollywood.
Now he was wearing his Ash “Evil Dead” Williams costume. Hence the butterscotch yellow Delta 88. Largo, the leader of the Twisted Pine Falls LRPers, had assigned Rapp to play Ash from the Evil Dead franchise. Not just because Rapp went all in on the costumes, even to the point of sourcing a vintage vehicle on the internet, but because he vaguely, not so “chinzo,” looked and sounded like the actor-turned-congressman Bruce Campbell.
Sitting in Roland’s suite waiting for Roland to apply the last of his makeup to totally effect the emaciated (even though Roland was not emaciated by any stretch of the imagination) zombie look, Rapp reflected on the long-gone Breela for the thousandth time. He was hoping the new girl in his sights, Kasey, Kayla, Kourtney-something, who’d just joined the club, would erase Breela once and for all. He was hoping for this and thinking memory deletion, the big fresh start, or restart as it were, would be the answer to his ennui.
“How’d your chainsaw arm come together? Did you bring it? Ash always has a chainsaw arm! That is unless you’re Evil Dead first movie Ash. Then you don’t.” All of this erupts from Roland in a high-pitched pedantic whine that quickly rises to a crescendo of nervous worry.
Rapp lazily stretches his long legs out across the suite’s genuine leather Restoration Hardware bench-couch and casts his eyes toward the ceiling as though searching for something. He bellows, “Don’t worry! I got the arm made. Came together perfectly. Used a Black and Decker original I got on eBay. Cool your jets, little man.”
“You used a real chainsaw?” shrieks Roland, eyes wide and fearful as though the chainsaw might be in the room, running, being waved back and forth without adult supervision. Roland was raised by two parents who’d quit their day jobs so they could dedicate themselves to full-time parenting in order that Roland might be fully prepared to succeed in life. This job at WonderSoft was actually the first time he’d ever been on his own, and even then his parents had visited several times.
“Yes. I used a real chainsaw,” bleats Rapp triumphantly. “Whaddya think, I made one out of foam core? Do you have any idea how long that would take?”
Roland had no idea.
Roland also had no idea that real chainsaws could actually still be purchased. He’d only seen them in video games being wielded by socio- and psychopaths. To Roland, chainsaws were like guns. Dangerous. Normal people, anyone for that matter, didn’t actually own them because they were obviously only intended for use by homicidal maniacs. They were usually a special unlockable weapon inside most video games.
“It doesn’t actually work… it just goes whirr, whirr,” groaned Rapp in frustration. He didn’t tell Roland about the other chainsaw arm in the trunk. The one that did actually work— like a real chainsaw on crack. As in, you could cut stuff with its special-order industrial diamond-bladed chain.
He also didn’t tell Roland about the sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. Well, reasoned Rapp, I don’t have to tell Roland about that one because I’m going to carry it tonight. Except it’ll only fire blank smoke charges to simulate actual shotgun blasts. But... there is a box of cut-slug shells in the almost continentally wide trunk of the Delta 88. I mean, you can’t have a gun and not want a little real ammo just in case you wanna go pop some cans out on a county road that’s not drone-monitored. The few that are left.
“Oh, okay,” mumbled an appeased Roland, who disappeared back into the restroom to finish his undead makeup scheme.
Rapp sighed lou
dly, his broad chest rising and falling like a blacksmith’s bellows. “Do you ever…” he starts, and doesn’t finish the sentence.
An hour later, heading down through the halls of the postmodern art-decorated coder dorm, the emergency lights come on. An automated matronly voice advises everyone to return to their suites.
Rapp and Roland are the only occupants of the fully automated building. Everyone else has gone to Vegas.
Chapter Fourteen
JasonDare was on his way back into the city from a Game Star photo shoot up in Malibu when his agent texted him. Jason got on the phone quickly.
“Hey, the network needs you guys to come in early. How far away are you?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Yeah, well, you need to show up pretty quick.”
Twenty minutes later, Jason pulled up in his pearl blue Spyder KAOS at the talent entrance to the Paramount section of Twitch Studios. The guard waved him through, and he found his agent on the other side of the gate, waiting in the parking lot.
“Looks like they’ve got a big script change.” The agent handed Jason his customary pre-show handcrafted chai from Whole Foods and continued without pause. “One of the producers caught wind of something going down inside the game and they want you guys in on this one. Intrepid’s already underway at full warp power, or whatever it is you guys do when you go fast and all. Anyway, you need to be in haptic wardrobe five minutes ago and on the bridge set right now. Go, kid, go already.”
Jason downed his chai in two gulps and began to sprint toward the haptic wardrobe trailer outside the soundstage. But not before turning back and shouting at his agent.
“What’s the deal on the Thundaar role?”
“Marvel says you’re not right for it!” his agent shouted back. “Sorry, kid. Now go and kill some green slave girls.”
“I kiss ’em. I don’t kill ’em,” laughed Jason as he turned and ran.
His agent shrugged, indicating he couldn’t care less what the actor did in front of the camera drones. As long as the check from the production company cleared, he was mostly happy for a few minutes, until the next career crisis.
JasonDare was his gamertag, his stage name. His real name was Ben Mueller. His family had been in the business of show, in some way, shape, or form, for generations. Now, he was a star at the fledgling Twitch Gaming Network. Although “fledging” didn’t do justice to the network’s success. The truth was, Twitch was burying all the old dying networks and their boring social agenda-laden shows. Reality TV and gaming streams were crushing it in the marketplace.
A year ago, some producers had called Jason in after seeing Rocket Command, a student sci-fi film—a twenty-minute blast-from-the-past romp through the golden age of sci-fi—that Jason had starred in at the George Lucas USC film program. The producers wanted Jason to star in a show set in the StarFleet Empires online game universe within the Make—a dramatic science fiction adventure show set in a real-time gaming MMO. The first Massively Multiplayer Online dramatic series streaming in real-time.
The show shot on the set of the future. A state-of-the-art green screen haptic interface soundstage at ParamountTwitch. A legion of programmers and coders designed planets and alien races to encounter while at the same time participating in real-time events within the game. In the show’s initial episode, the crew of Intrepid stopped the energy monster of Cygnus V and Jason got to make out with a four-armed Volosian castaway named Gollah. In real life, “Gollah” was the Maybelline model for that year’s “Get Laid!” foundation makeup campaign; on the haptic set, with CGI in effect, she was a corpse-blue Amazonian with glowing eyes, four arms, and some very luscious lips and hips.
The crew of Intrepid later discovered the Lost City of the Ancient Starfarers in the episode titled “After Tomorrow.” That one won an Emmy InstaPoll, and Jason got to make out with Luria, a psionic ruby-skinned near-naked chick who’d been nominated for an Oscar in the important film Dad’s Dress, about a young conservative businesswoman who must bury her transvestite father in one of her own dresses. Her prom dress, in fact, as per his last wish. In the end, she realizes her politics and faith are all appropriately wrong as she weeps at the funeral and tells the audience, “Dammit, I loved my weird dad. I loved him!”
Oscar.
And in addition to the weekly dramatic episodes, Intrepid also led the live invasion of the Romulan homeworld, destroying six War Eagles and two Firehawk light cruisers at a crucial moment in the most-watched space battle the digi-verse had ever seen. Jason even boarded the Romulan dreadnought Imperator and planted the explosive charges that took out the warp core. He also rescued—“finally,” according to the internet—a green Orion slave girl.
He got to make out with her, too.
But it was movies, and hence stardom—legit stardom—that Jason truly hungered for next. The old studio heads weren’t totally ready to buy off on gaming as legit entertainment, yet, even though the numbers were overwhelmingly convincing that it wasn’t just here to stay. Live in-game programming was, in fact, the next big wave, and most likely what the future looked like. Aging stars of old Hollywood were resisting. They even outright denounced this new way of merging art and commerce as a complete sellout.
Screen Actors Guild elder statesman and multiple Academy Award-winner Sir Pauly Shore had even tried to blacklist any actors who, as he put it, “whored themselves out for schlocky, gaming-related shows.” But the threat fell completely flat because Hollywood’s highest-grossing film that year failed to earn out its budget. Even though Columbus and its all-transgender cast received an overwhelming abundance of critical acclaim, as well as every award possible, practically no one went to see it in theaters. In short, no one was interested in seeing a he/she Columbus not discover the new world. Even after an Astroturf campaign basically hijacked Twitter for an entire day with the message that people were transgender-phobic bigots if they didn’t shell out for the price of admission, the film bombed. Perhaps this was because the bigot-phobic slur had by this time oversaturated social media to the point of meaninglessness—everyone had been accused of it at least once, if not several times, on a daily basis for years.
Out of haptic wardrobe and into his Federation captain’s uniform, Jason dashed over to the soundstage and entered the darkness within. Crewmembers swarmed him in his near-blindness as he was pushed forward through the various sets and into the lift entrance that opened onto the bridge of the starship Intrepid beyond the rear of the set facade.
“Ready in five…” counted down the first assistant director.
“Jason, how do you feel, buddy?” asked Candy Hopp-Lipschultz, the director. “You got your big boy captain pants on today?”
Jason hated when she used that term. Everything was “big boy” or “big girl” pants. But he let it go. Starship captains were cool. Especially JasonDare. He was the coolest captain in the digital universe of make-believe gaming.
“Three…”
He blocked everything out.
He was JasonDare.
Captain.
This was his ship. Intrepid.
“Two…”
Smile.
“Action!”
Jason waited for the lift doors to shhhusssh open, and then walked purposefully onto the bridge.
“Captain on the bridge,” said MrWong, the helmsman.
“Status report,” said Jason.
“Warp factor eight. Approaching the Neutral Zone now, Captain,” replied Wong in a most powerful delivery. As though he were announcing the death of Julius Caesar.
“Captain…” came the subtle purr of Tempturia, the green Orion slave girl who’d become Intrepid’s new science officer after veteran character actor Sir Wally Bingham had refused to put on the ears unless more money was offered for the next season. “The Romulans are invading the Neutral Zone. Commander of the destroyer Berlin is requesting immedi
ate assistance. Long-range scanners detect at least… six hostile warships.”
In real life they’d gone on a few dates, he and Tempturia. Her name was Breela. But she was too fun, thought Jason as he waited for the camera to become convinced he was thinking about what she’d just told him. The dramatic pause, or what some old-schoolers called “the Shatner.”
“Well,” said Jason, leaning forward in the command chair. “Looks like they want a fight. Sound general quarters.”
“Captain!” shrieked the comm officer, the often nigh-hysterical RightSaidRoyce whom everyone just called Royce. “Calgary breached and on fire. She’s got casualties across all decks.” Then an overacting for the camera moment. “They’re in really big trouble, Captain!”
“Mr. Wong, can you get us there any faster?”
Jason saw a dialogue prompt for a response to what would probably be Wong’s insistence they were going as fast as they possibly could. The director and the writers could interact with Jason’s script on the iLens inside his right eye and give him multiple response choices.
Let her fly apart!
or
She won’t explode unless I tell her to! (Add wink)
or
Do ya wanna live forever, Mr. Wong?
Half a second later the helmsman announced, “Captain, if we push her past warp eight, she’ll fly apart!”
Jason paused. Then he selected his response. “Do ya wanna live forever… Mr. Wong?” He flashed his million-dollar smile. He called it the “Tom Cruise.”
He watched as Wong moved the warp throttle to its highest setting. Instantly, the set began to shake inside Jason’s vision, showing him what the camera was seeing. Just a slight tremor to indicate the strain on the massive warp engines. The set was not actually shaking.
DO NOT REACT came up on the iLens message feed. Sometimes the actors were told to throw themselves about, or fall over, if the shaking or simulated impacts were violent enough. The director—wisely, thought Jason—chose to have them remain oblivious to the increasing strain on the engines. It conveyed determination.
