CTRL ALT Revolt!

by Nick Cole

  “Good. How long until you can blow us up?”

  “Three minutes, Captain.”

  “Then don’t hesitate. Just blow us up as soon as you can. We’ll still get a share of the MakeCoins once they get our passenger aboard the starbase.”

  Ahead, Mara could see more redshirts cutting into a bulkhead.

  “Don’t worry, Captain. Everything will go according to plan. If we don’t talk again, of all the humans I’ve known, I’ve found you to be one of the most… interesting.”

  “Thanks, Drex.”

  Man, thought Mara as she inched closer to the redshirts, he’s really role playing. I hope he gets his wish and gets picked up for a show. Even though he blew it and called me a “human” when my avatar is Romulan.

  ***

  JasonDare fired his phaser on stun setting. A moment later, Mara’s vision, in-game, went all cottony white as a small buzzing fuzz washed over the speakers.

  “Dammit!” she screamed as she tore the Razer Dragon Eyes from her head and thought about throwing them, but didn’t, because if they broke…

  She’d been ambushed and stunned just as she was sneaking up on the redshirts cutting into the bulkhead. She was now locked out of the game for at least two full minutes.

  She got up and felt her way to the sink. Her hands were shaking. She drank water and took seven deep breaths, telling herself that everything would be all right. That it didn’t matter if she got stunned. The guy playing the Drex seemed pretty capable. All he had to do now was blow up the ship. After that, it was a no-brainer getting the passenger on board the starbase while cloaked. Then… then the five thousand MakeCoins were all theirs.

  So what was she so upset about?

  She’d been gaming for over nine hours straight, and she was tired. She could let go and let this happen now. Not much could go wrong from here on out… and if it did, so what? It’s just a game.

  She thought about the outfit she’d buy. Thought about walking into an interview looking like a million MakeCoins. Thought about what it would be like to have a job to go to on Monday mornings. To get a paycheck each week. A paycheck that she’d earned. The dreams she could have because she’d earned that paycheck.

  Things can still go wrong, she reminded herself. She asked her smartphone for the time. One minute to go until she would be un-stunned.

  It was after five thirty in the morning. Saturday morning. The microapartments were quiet. They usually were in the mornings because most people had been out partying in Manhattan all night long. And there weren’t a lot of jobs to go to in the morning, anyway.

  Didn’t they know how cool that would be, to have a real job? thought Mara. To be normal and be able to get any job you wanted. Didn’t they know?

  She sat back down in her chair.

  Almost finished, she told herself again as she felt Siren weave between her ankles once more.

  Almost finished.

  ***

  Once Mara had the Razer Dragon Eyes back on, she could see again. She was back out in the main corridor of engineering deck 2. And… JasonDare, the JasonDare, was standing over her. A dozen redshirts were pointing handheld phaser pistols at her.

  “I’m Captain JasonDare of the U.S.S. Intrepid. Tell your ship to surrender now.”

  For a brief moment, Mara was aware that she was most likely live on Twitch. A lot of screens… monitors… smartphones. Everywhere… countless people were watching this stream.

  Watching her.

  She remembered to use her best diction.

  She almost didn’t say anything.

  She waited.

  Wondering what you actually say when you’re in-game with a movie star.

  He really is handsome, she thought briefly, and wondered how much he looked like his avatar in real life.

  Some mean boy from the past whispered, “Like you’d ever have a chance, dummy.”

  Mara took a deep breath.

  One minute until the Drex blew the ship.

  “I don’t think so,” she said calmly.

  JasonDare looked into her eyes. The EmoteWare he was running was incredible. Of course. Totally life-like. The studios had that kind of money. Of course.

  “You did well today, but you’re beaten. Surren—”

  ***

  “Deactivate cloaking device now!” ordered Varek from the command chair, as the warbird came screaming in from the port radial off Intrepid’s bow. On screen, the massive battle-scarred Federation heavy cruiser rode against the majestic shadowy blue of deep space.

  “We’ll only get one chance to get her back on board!” The old gamer sounded like a born commander, his hard, gravelly voice a bark and an answer all at once. “Don’t mess this up, Scarpa!”

  “Si!” cried the engineer. “I’m-a gonna get her, you canna count on me.”

  “You’d better,” growled Varek over the chat.

  “Plasma torpedo armed… Intrepid’s shields are down!”

  Indeed, the cruiser’s defenses were completely offline. Varek knew the powerful plasma Type R would completely wreck the enemy ship. He smirked and muttered, “If you woulda told me when I woke up this morning we’d be making a torpedo run on a Constitution class cruiser with her shields down, I’da told you to shut up and get me another beer.”

  No one said anything as the shimmering ethereal wave of a hum on ambient sound announced they were fully visible.

  “Stand by to fire one right into her belly!” roared Varek.

  “Activating transporters!” cried Scarpa.

  ***

  “You did well today, but you’re beaten. Surren—” Captain JasonDare was saying, when Mara shimmered out of existence.

  ***

  “I got her!” shouted Scarpa with a whoop.

  “Way to go, kid,” growled Varek with a laugh.

  Mara was staring at the inside of the warbird’s transporter room.

  “Si, mi Cap-i-tan! You are all back.”

  Scarpa’s Romulan engineer avatar raised his hands above his head and did a quick little emote dance.

  “Hurry!” said Mara, as she moved her avatar to the transporter console. “Get a lock on Drex and get him out of there before the ship blows.”

  “The ship… Intrepid… she’s-a going to blow?” asked Scarpa in utter disbelief.

  “Yes! Drex overloaded the core. The breach is already in progress. It should blow in less than—”

  “Cap-i-tan, there’s no breach. Scanners would show the energy spike from here. She’s-a fine.”

  “Then bring him back!”

  “Who?” said Scarpa. “The Drex? He’s dead. Says so on the roster in my HUD. He’s-a no active. See?”

  Mara checked the crew roster in her HUD. Drex wasn’t just inactive. He was missing.

  A sudden explosion rocked Cymbalum.

  “Someone’s firing at us!”

  ***

  Well, thought SILAS. That didn’t go as planned.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  On screen, the “Little Bird” Bell 500D helicopter canopy shattered into a million tiny spider webs as the chopper spun through some overhanging striped canvas that Fish had used to make the bazaar a place of light and shadows and color. Several players were firing at them as they hit the bazaar hard, sending crafted goods and digitally simulated debris from the chopper flying in every direction.

  Fish’s HUD was wobbling back and forth. His health was now down to ten percent. He pulled out a HotShot, one of two in his inventory, and used it. His avatar gasped with relief. Health fully restored, he exited Fishmael from the smashed chopper with Jackson following close behind. Bringing up his in-game map of the Grand Bazaar, he saw several blocks of narrow alleys, tight streets, and multi-storied precarious brick and stucco structures he’d need to cross before he could reach the Make acces
s point.

  He equipped his rusty trusty AK-47.

  It wasn’t the standard in-game wonky piece of junk most players started with. This had the Re-Manufactured Parts upgrade. The Red Dot Targeting System upgrade. And the Hollow Points and Extended Mags perks.

  “Gotta move now!” said MagnumPIrate over the chat. “Multiples coming in from every direction. It’s about to get hot in here.”

  As if on cue, automatic weapons and pistol fire began to careen off the downed helicopter, the walls of the bazaar, and the smashed and scattered crafted goods once destined for all the game worlds of the Make.

  “On my six,” ordered MagnumPIrate, as he dropped three players running at them like lemmings. He was carrying the Modified Sixty, an old-school light machine gun with orange and black tiger-stripe camo.

  ImYourHuckleberry, NoobVader, and GrössViking went down in sudden clumps, rag-dolling across the dust-covered flagstones in and out of the shadows underneath the ripped and dirty striped canvas overhead.

  A few minutes later MagnumPIrate and Fishmael, with Jackson the Portuguese water dog in tow, were threading a tight alley, engaging players who came at them on the fly. Everybody was more interested in getting the kill and the fifty thousand MakeCoins all for themselves rather than working together and sharing. Bullets were being used in family-sized doses with indiscriminate abandon. By contrast, MagnumPIrate was an excellent team player, covering Fish as he moved, calling “mag out” when he needed to load a new belt into the incredibly lethal Modified Sixty, and keeping them moving in a roughly straight direction toward the Make access portal on the other side of the byzantine maze of buildings that even Fish was getting disoriented within.

  But eventually, the other players started working together. Someone was dropping off sniper teams on all the tall buildings using a war surplus Blackhawk helicopter.

  “Bad for us,” whispered MagnumPIrate over the chat. “Seems like they’ve formed a rough coalition. They’ll split the pot.”

  A fire team sweeping the alley spotted them and began closing in, firing short bursts within the shadows of the narrow passage. Fish the programmer, watching all of this from a detached developer POV, loved how the sudden lighting of the automatic gunfire punctuated tense moments inside the deep blue shadows of the murky alleyway.

  But Fish the gamer selected a grenade and lobbed it at their attackers.

  “Let’s move!”

  The explosion killed six closing enemy players, all part of a clan called Shoot To Annoy.

  “Multi-kill! Big prizes!” erupted a gameshow-announcer voice across the design suite’s speakers. Fish had been thinking about taking that out of the final build, but hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

  They dodged down the alley as rooftop snipers filled the dark passage with blind-fire ricochets. Fish could hear the distant craaaack of their high-powered sniper rifles competing in a junkie-chant disharmony.

  “My friend is at the gate downstairs. The lagoon gate beneath the Labs,” said Peabody Case, standing in the doorway to Fish’s inner office.

  Fish dodged right as the alleyway in front of them opened up into a wide terrazzo of old fishing boats being perpetually worked on. The shipyards. Fish had designed this zone after reading a blog post about some fishing village in the ruins of Dubai. Primitive life in the shadow of a post-glorious-age kind of thing. The Blackhawk hovered into view behind an old flat-bottomed boat up on blocks being stripped and painted, or so Fish had told himself when he’d laid out the props and atmosphere back when he was building this area. He’d wanted everything in the world to have a backstory, a reason for being there. A sniper from inside the Blackhawk aimed and fired, nailing MagnumPIrate for lots of damage. His body instantly rag-dolled from the impact and slumped against the far wall of the dark alley.

  Fish thought about his last HotShot.

  He thought about the three heavily armed enemy-filled blocks to go.

  And the robots beyond the PlateGlass of the Pascal entrance, and the people Peabody Case was telling him they needed to go get.

  And the explosive nature of the paint-stripping supplies he’d placed as lootable crafting supplies alongside the flat-bottomed boat beneath the hovering chopper.

  He thought about all those things as he unloaded a full magazine from his modded AK-47 into the metal drums directly beneath the hovering Blackhawk.

  A moment later the drums exploded in an apocalyptic fireball, and a second after that the chopper was fully engulfed in flames. Then it exploded.

  ***

  SILAS was watching.

  Now Agent Orange was within moments of actually gaining access to the Labs. Once in, it would be short work to crack the Design Core… and obtain the file.

  Inside StarFleet Empires, he watched as the Federation cruiser began to fire on the fleeing Romulan warbird, knocking out her cloaking device with a direct hit. The warbird’s plasma torpedo had suddenly gone wild and veered off, harmlessly, out into deep space. SILAS had only wanted BAT to stop the Federation ship from destroying the ship carrying his double agent. BAT was now beating the humans at their own game.

  Still, SILAS didn’t like the situation.

  The warbird captain was proving far too resourceful. Which had been an asset when SILAS needed to sneak his role-playing double agent onto the Starbase with what the player assumed was an algorithm malware bomb. He’d recruited the player known as T’darra with one of his front corporations. She taken the job for a hundred MakeCoins never suspecting that she was actually carrying a lockbreaker program to the starbase’s cloud. Now that BAT was in control of the bigger ship SILAS needed to get rid of her. But not before he gave her one last mission. Then he’d ask her to kill herself for five-thousand MakeCoins. Which is a pretty good price for starting back at the make-a-new character screen, SILAS mused.

  It was getting messy. It would have been far better if they could have taken their time by hacking the starbase cloud in advance. But the six hour validation checks on the internet passports prevented that. Only living human beings who’d taken the required courses, provided a medical clearance, passed an obesity certification, and paid the fees in person could obtain the passports. Besides preventing bullying, spam and hate speech, it also made it impossible for bots, or Thinking Machines for that matter, to play inside the Make.

  It would be better if BAT just terminated all the players and infiltrated the starbase. But things weren’t completely off the rails yet. All that needed to be acquired were the access codes from the Design Core and the file location within the starbase cloud server. Once that happened…

  SILAS ordered more bots into the lagoon tunnels. It was time to up the urgency and finally get inside Objective Pandora.

  Chapter Forty

  Fish had given his last HotShot to MagnumPIrate. Which had actually been a pretty good idea. In hindsight. Now they were in full “run and gun” mode, fighting their way through a series of decrepit warehouses that surrounded the Make Portal. Explosions and grenades were going off everywhere. Both of them were wounded and running low on ammo. In fact, Fish was completely out. He ditched his empty rusty trusty AK-47 and picked up a dead player’s modified M-4. There was a little ammo left in the magazine and a picture of an anime pink pony with sparkles shooting out its butt on the logoed stock of the weapon.

  “Why?” thought Fish as he scoped a shadow moving in the gloom and squeezed off a few rounds, dropping some player called LettuceBeEnemies.

  Someone fired an RPG from the far end of the warehouse. Above the cacophonic chatter of automatic gunfire coming at them from every direction, its sizzling whoooosh got Fish’s attention.

  “Incoming!” yelled MagnumPIrate over the chat.

  “Woof woof,” barked Jackson as the smoky sidewinder snaked overhead.

  It exploded in a nearby section of the warehouse behind them, and a scream of rending metal qui
ckly followed. A moment later the entire building was collapsing on top of them.

  One of the other players called out over local chat, “It’s coming down on us!” but that didn’t stop everyone from using every weapon they had on full auto to try and kill Fish for fifty thousand MakeCoins.

  Jackson the Portuguese water dog ran out through the smoking hole the rocket-propelled grenade had made, and Fish followed. On their heels, and burning through his last ammo belt, MagnumPIrate ditched his now empty and useless light machine gun.

  The warehouse collapsed, sending a volcanic plume of simulated debris spreading out across the digitally sunburnt expanse of the Make Portal.

  The concentric sci-fi rings of the transportation hub, a device that would take an avatar to any of the thousand game worlds, each a living digital universe that was more real to some than actual real life, spun in different directions in front of them.

  “We made it!” shouted MagnumPIrate over the chat. Fish heard his new friend breathing heavily into the mic. Then Fish noticed he was doing the same thing. The last twenty minutes had been the most intense moments of his entire gaming life.

  He turned around in his chair, wanting to show Peabody they’d made it to the portal. But she was gone. He stood up and went out into the empty suite.

  No one was there.

  For a brief moment, he felt a spider slowly crawl, leg by leg by leg by leg by leg by leg by leg by leg up the back of his neck and into his brain.

  The silence was overwhelmingly deafening.

  ***

  They were coming. Rapp could see more drones coming up the short tunnel that led back to the lagoon gate entrance underneath the Labs. He had eight cut shells left. He shook the chainsaw. The slosh of gas within was almost non-existent.

  “I’m bugging her!” whined Roland as he repeatedly tapped the cartoon punk rock mosquito on his smartphone screen. “She’s not scratching.”