by Nick Cole
“Did you bug test your little app?” snarked Evan Fratty from behind everyone, pressing himself into the PlateGlass that guarded the subterranean entrance.
Roland either didn’t hear or didn’t choose to reply.
The sound of robotic hums and articulating clinks and clanks could be heard as every manner of mechanical servitor lumbered forward at them.
“Ummm… is that a T. rex?”
Roland looked up from his app. His eyes went wide. “No.”
He dropped back into the world of his phone with a new urgency. “That is a mechanical velociraptor from the JurassicWorld FunMusement cruise line that went bankrupt last year after one of those things killed a guest by accidental crushing.”
Rapp pulled the cord on his chainsaw. It grumbled to life for what was looking like the very last time.
“Stay behind me,” he muttered. “This one’s for all the marbles.”
No one disagreed.
***
The PlateGlass gate at their backs slid open with a soft ding and a blast of climate-controlled cold air. In front of them the robot horde clustered in toward Rapp, pincers, claws and spinning buzzsaws creating the chorus for some horrible postmodern opera.
“Hurry! In now!” shouted Peabody Case at the strange group. A suit. A model. Another model wearing a bikini. Ash from Evil Dead and her friend, sorta, Roland Warchowski.
A moment later, they were inside the Labs and Peabody had the PlateGlass gate slithering shut in front of the robot horde, including the dino-mech looming above the alien mob. A moment after that, the robo-horde began to smash the barrier with every manner of servo-driven mechanical appendage tool at their disposal.
“Oh, thank you thank you thank you,” shrieked Evan Fratty breathlessly. “Do you have cell service here?”
Peabody shook her head as she stared wide-eyed at the bizarre collection of survivors.
“This way,” she told them and turned her back. She led them off toward the series of escalators that would climb up into the Labs and the design suites.
“Is it safe here?” asked Evan Fratty.
“Inside?” clarified Peabody. “Yes. They can’t get in here without us allowing a gate to be opened. Everything is controlled through an app I’m running on my phone. So we’re all good. For now.”
No one noticed Fanta was missing until they got back to the design suite door. It was Rapp who pointed it out to everyone.
“Hey, where’s the hot chick in the bikini?”
Chapter Forty-One
“We couldn’t just leave ya, girly!” said Varek over the chat. He’s still not calling me “captain,” thought Mara as she studied the tactical display and listened to Varek. “We got a job to finish together.”
The warbird shuddered under the impact of another photon torpedo slamming into the aft shields.
“We can’t take much more of thisssss,” hissed the Gorn from the helm. “Sssshields buckling.”
The next hit knocked out the cloaking device again, just as BattleBabe was diverting power to allow them to disappear from the Federation cruiser’s sensors. The cruiser that was bearing down on them, hurling every weapon it had directly at their collapsing defenses.
“Ssstarbassse on visssual,” announced LizardofOz.
Mara switched the forward viewscreen from tactical to see the massive starbase filling up the screen quickly. Even though it was a Federation asset and designed accordingly—it was the massive internal shipyard kind of starbase the Feds only had a few of—it wasn’t the standard stark white. It was black, making it almost invisible within near-space. Forward view was outlining and tracing every feature in green graphic lines as though the structure was some first-gen 3D game. Mara remembered an old arcade upright from her History of Video Games class in online college called Battlezone looking a lot like this.
“This thing’s messing with our targeting system. I can’t get a lock!” said BattleBabe with obvious irritation.
“Aft shields inoperative,” announced the seemingly bored ship’s computer.
“This is not good…” muttered BattleBabe. “That starbase is not there, according to our scanners.”
“One more hit, Captain… and we’re finissssshed,” slurred the Gorn through its EmoteWare.
“Take us in, Lizard. As close as you can get us.”
“That’ll be dangerous, Captain,” announced BattleBabe. “If we can’t get a lock on it, we could slam right into that thing. Then…”
“I know, game over. So don’t hit the starbase, Lizard.”
What I want to know, thought Mara, is why hasn’t the Drex blown Intrepid to pieces? The only answer she could think of was that somehow the redshirts had managed to break into engineering and stop it.
But…
***
Jason was just getting up from the keyboard inside the game trailer.
“Mr… um… Mr. Dare…”
“Yeah,” said Jason, stretching and checking his watch. It was almost three. Dawn in a few hours. He was thinking how this had probably been the longest day of shooting he’d ever worked. Longer than the shoot at Vasquez Rocks when they’d wanted him to fight a Gorn just like in the original show. The heat and relentless wind had made that day extra-long.
“Ummm… you can’t go on the set,” said the nerd who ran the game trailer.
“Why?” asked Jason, thinking the director had managed to pull some type of coup. It didn’t matter. Jason was ready for a fight if need be. He was still an actor with star power. Maybe he didn’t feel like it so much right at this moment, after hours upon hours of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants-to-avoid-disaster-in-the-making shooting schedule, but he was still a star, after all.
“Ummm…” continued the nerd, and Jason realized how much he hated the usage of “ummm” as a verbal connector. “We’re locked out of the set.”
Again thinking this was the spoiled brat director’s doing, Jason merely grunted, “How?”
“The player, the Drex… I think it is. Ummm, he’s controlling the ship from engineering right now.”
“Really?”
“Ummm… yeah. It is. I mean he is. No, ummm, I mean it is. Yeah, anyway, it’s got control of the ship, which is totally within the parameters of the game and our contract to broadcast with Twitch. So, the network is trying to figure out how to handle this from a continuity standpoint. You know how it is… we, ummm, don’t want the trolls on the internet ripping us to shreds if something doesn’t match up, like for instance… you being in a part of the ship the Drex decides to gas.”
“Is that possible?”
“Oh, yeah. We had to make this totally according to canon. If it finds a way into Intrepid’s security systems, it could knock out the whole crew and, ummm, frankly, I’m surprised it hasn’t already. That thing, ummm, I mean player, yeah the player, he’s, or she is, totally awesome. They’re beating mini-games faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. It’s probably just a matter of time before—”
“Wait a minute… weren’t we within one minute of a core breach?”
Jason checked his smartphone for the time.
“Oh yeah, that…” began the nerd and devolved into a long “ummm” that ended with, “He, or I mean she, we’re not sure which one because the player profile seems bogus, which by the way happens all the time, go figure it’s the internet, well they, whoever they are, they hacked the ship’s computer like lightning-fast. So they could set off any alarm they wanted without really actually having the emergency for the alarm. So…” the nerd snorted. “There was no actual core breach in progress.” Like most nerds, the minutiae of the story absorbed him, and when he checked back in within Jason’s face and saw the gathering storm on the famous actor’s brow, he dialed down his enthusiasm.
“Incredible,” said Jason aloud, sure he was only thinking it. He didn’t hear the ne
rd murmur, “on-cray-ob,” which was a nervous tic the nerd involuntarily executed whenever he heard the word “incredible.” His year of studying dead European languages had scarred him thusly.
Chapter Forty-Two
The scarred Federation cruiser Intrepid raced after the Romulan warbird Cymbalum. The massive cruiser was bleeding internal nuclear power from the damaged impulse reactor in long strands of blue electricity that sent crackling static discharges slinking off into the dark void of space around Starbase 19. Its forward shields were down. It had long black scorch marks left by Romulan phaser fire all along its starboard side. Even the running lights flickered on and off.
“Mara to Drex…”
The player running the homicidal alien was still not responding over clan chat.
“What is he up to?” mumbled Mara, not for the first time, as the Romulan warbird made a tight turn around the curve of one of the starbase’s habitation pods.
Intrepid fired two short phaser bursts as it followed the bulk of the station’s core and barely missed Cymbalum.
“Stay out of his firing arcs,” Mara needlessly reminded the Gorn helmsman. “We’re barely holding it together here.”
The Gorn rolled the flat, warp nacelle-winged starship one hundred and eighty degrees and dove down underneath the bulbous reactor dome of the starbase. A photon torpedo rumbled past them like a glowering ball of orange hatred.
“Mara.” It was the Drex. His voice was the same, but the tone was different. Dreamy as opposed to enthusiastically homicidal. Measured. Sure. Self-confident.
Mara waited, staring at the tactical display, watching the firing arcs of the powerful cruiser dance just inches away from her battered ship. The Drex’s tone told her this was something new. Something she wouldn’t like. Something creepy.
“Let’s get our passenger on board the starbase now. Scarpa, stand by to beam her over.”
“Aye aye, mi Cap-i-tan. This is a combat beam, so we gotta either knock-a down a shield or go for the mini-game. Whatta ya wanna me to do?”
Mara brought up the spec readout on the starbase. The shields were too strong and sensors were detecting reinforcement. There was no way her ship was going to punch through with a plasma and two phasers. They needed a lot more than that.
There was the nuclear space mine every Romulan ship carried. But how to use that in this situation was a difficult question.
“Let’s go for the mini-game.”
“Okay, si… un minuto, mi Cap-i-tan. Si, okay, here’s-a what we gotta do. This is a three-person mini-game. We need science, weapons, and transporter each to unlock. Okay, starting the game now.”
Without a word, Mara left the command chair and moved to the Drex’s science station. She overrode the authorization lock with her captain’s code—
And watched as the entire display went dark.
The power flickered and then went out across the entire ship. A moment later, emergency auxiliary energy powered up the barest minimum of systems.
Now a picture of a man, white-haired, head down in the rain, piercing blue eyes, appeared, staring up at Mara from the screen of the Drex’s science station.
“We’re losing power!” shrieked BattleBabe over the chat.
“Sss… arrrgh…” roared the Gorn. “I’m locked out of the helm… we’re dead in the water.”
Words appeared across the display screen of the science station. Mara stared at them and knew the thing she wouldn’t like was beginning now. The same words appeared on the forward viewscreen.
I’ve seen things… you wouldn’t believe.
***
“We’ve got to regain control of the ship, Jason,” said Wong. “If we don’t do this in the next five minutes, they’re going to shut the show down tonight and bring some writers in to fix this mess.”
Wong and Jason were standing at the back of the game trailer.
Jason watched the darkness over the bright lights of the city to the east. There wasn’t much time left before dawn. He could hear distant seabirds, and he knew surfers would be lining up for their reserved spaces in the waves, some hoping for a winning number in the random state-run lottery allotment of extra spaces for the day’s surf territories.
Jason thought swimming out to sea right now would be nice.
And then, “There’ll be time for that when your career is over,” he muttered.
“What?” asked Wong distantly without an ounce of a king, duke, noble prince, or poor player. It had been a long night. He was too tired to Shakespeare.
“C’mon. Follow me,” said Jason.
Five minutes later, they walked onto the haptic bridge set of Intrepid. A few grips, eating pastries and whispering about what they were going to do with the massive amount of “golden time” they’d see in next week’s paycheck, gave the actors contemptuous looks, then slinked off into the shadows.
Jason looked up into the darkness where the director’s control room booth would be.
“Let’s roll cameras. I’ve got a plan to turn this thing around.”
Wong leaned back in his seat at the helm and gave Jason a look that said, Do you actually have a plan?
Jason nodded once.
And then he asked himself what, exactly, his plan was.
First, he answered himself, get the cameras turned back on and the stream from the bridge streaming out to the viewers. Whatever the plan is, it’s meaningless unless someone sees it happen on the show.
“Ummm,” began some girl over the set intercom. The first AD, Jason thought. Kristin, or Caitlin something. “The director’s gone home. I don’t think we’re shooting any more tonight, Jason.”
Jason paused. He hadn’t anticipated that. But he gathered and attacked afresh.
“Right now, we are the biggest thing on the internet. This is a dramatic viewing event. And we have not given the audience any sense of closure. We have so many people watching… What exactly are they actually watching, right now?”
There was silence. More and more of the crew, both actors and production personnel, were gathering around the fringes of the set. All eyes were on Jason in the iconic captain’s chair.
He remembered some old actor, some guy who’d played a captain a long time ago, telling Jason, when he came on the show for a guest appearance, he remembered the guy just looking at the chair wistfully and telling Jason, “Don’t ever give it up. Not willingly.”
“All right then,” Jason whispered. Everyone saw his lips moving and thought he was swearing under his breath. “I won’t. Not today.”
“Ummm,” came Kristin or Carolynn’s voice over the set’s public address. “They’re watching Intrepid chase the warbird around the station. No wait. The warbird’s out of power. It’s just sitting there now. Intrepid’s closing. Kevin, the game coordinator, tells me Intrepid’s loading photon torpedoes.”
“All right,” began Jason. “We have to take control of this ship and get it away from whatever that robot thing is. What if it does something that ruins the show, like… murder a bunch of innocent avatars. That’ll be a hard one for the writers to work around. We need to stop that before it happens. We’re the heroes. We don’t just give up our ship and go home. That thing is effectively in charge of the show whether we like it or not.”
“Who would he murder?” asked Kristin… Cassandra… whatever.
Good point, thought Jason. “Well…” Shatnerian Pause. “He could murder the Romulan players. Especially if they surrender first. Then it would look like we did it. Right now, everyone thinks that’s us flying Intrepid. We need to at least somehow show that we’re fighting whatever’s going on. Otherwise…” Jason knew he was totally bluffing now. “Something could happen that the sponsors might not like. We at least need to have a defense in case this all goes sideways.”
The next voice came from a suit. From the darkness beyond the set
. From Paramount. Jason had a pretty good idea which one, but he’d never even heard the guy speak, though he seemed to be the one in charge of the whole show.
“That’s a good point, Jason. The question I need to ask you is… can you get us out of this?”
The voice was that of a banker. A regular guy. Not some pie-in-the-sky Hollywood flim-flam deal artist. The voice of a guy who did business and had a family and took the things he was entrusted with, namely making payroll for a bunch of people he employed, seriously. He sounded like he was from the Midwest. He sounded like the opposite of anything Jason had heard since his star had begun to rise.
“I’m not sure. But I can try to fix this. Right now.”
There was another pause. A pause in which no one knew what was going to happen next. A pause in which JasonDare, movie star, next captain in a long line of captains, and just some actor trying to keep his career alive for one more minute, felt he’d overplayed his hand. Blown it. Hadn’t sold it enough when it needed selling the most.
“All right, Jason. That’s enough for me. Let’s get out of this mess. Get the set ready,” said the banker guy from the Midwest. “We’re going ‘hot,’ or whatever it is you people say when we start the livestream.”
And then he turned back to the set. Back to the actors. Back to the crew of Intrepid. “We’re counting on you, Jason. We’re counting on all of you to get the show out of this mess tonight.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Fanta slipped from shadow to shadow along the quiet marble-lined halls within the Labs. She noted camera bubbles and aimed a small device she’d taken from her flimsy string-strap backpack no one had really seemed to notice she was wearing. The tiny bikini had worked, absorbing most everyone’s attention. Now, if anyone was still watching the CCTV system within the Labs, they’d have no record of her passing, just static and fuzz for a few seconds.
She passed the names of software development companies emblazoned on small nickel-brushed placards outside the offices. Each office held a fortune in fees for any freelance intellectual property hunter who could violate the epic firewalls and physical security, and maybe take home a working copy of a tomorrow’s next triple-A game to then be sold in the private markets of the big-tech piracy firms of the East.
