Endgame (Voluntary Eradicators)

by Campbell, Nenia

  “Medication does not work?” the white-coated man asks. “Surgery is irreversible.”

  “She does not swallow the pills and medicine of this kind cannot be injected.”

  “What about hormonal therapy?”

  “And risk another outburst like the previous one?” The creatures in purple shakes his head. “No. She's just in a mood. Like a bitch in heat. It should pass.”

  They stare at her, not seeing the woman she is or the girl she was none too long ago, but a mere puzzle. An intractable puzzle — bemusing and a little frustrating, but capable of being solved nonetheless.

  “If you did manage to remedy this, the price for that solution would be extraordinarily high.”

  The creature in white nods. His qualms, if he had any, have vanished at the mention of money.

  The one in purple smiles at her, not knowing that she can both hear and comprehend his every word, his every thought, and that she is imagining knocking out every single one of those pearly white teeth and ripping out those dirt-colored eyes by the stalks like weeds.

  “I'm so glad we understand each other.”

  They are both breathing hard.

  For a long time, he says nothing and she senses that he is angry, though whether this is aimed at himself or at her, she cannot tell. Then he says, “Fuck.” She blinks, as much at the harshness of the word as at the emotions fueling it. He turns to look at her with an expression she can't read.

  “Why didn't you say something?”

  “About what?” she says, honestly puzzled.

  “That I was your first,” he says.

  “Oh.”

  “I don't want your father coming after me with a gun.”

  “I don't have a father,” she says, hugging the sheet to her chest.

  “That makes me feel so much better,” he says.

  “I can take care of myself,” she says.

  “Yes, I can see that. You're doing a phenomenal job so far.”

  “You're a jerk.”

  He grins. “You've only realized that just know? You won't last long out there, then.”

  He leans over. His lips brush over her pulse and she squirms. “You'd be surprised at what you can live through.”

  “Actually, no.” He pushes her back against the bed and rolls on top of her. “I wouldn't.”

  She loses four hours after that.

  Worse, she has removed her contacts in the fugue state and comes close to leaving the room without them. Only the mirror by the door stops her. Vol inhales sharply and runs back to the bathroom in a panic, nearly jabbing herself in her haste to put the contacts back in.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  She must wear the contacts. Always. She must take the pills. Always. If she does not do these things, something bad will happen.

  Maybe it already has.

  Her room is a mess. The sheets are strewn about, half off the bed, clothes everywhere. It looks like a miniature hurricane passed through her room. Vol knows she must have been looking for something but can't imagine what it could be or why it warrants such wanton destruction.

  No. On second thought, perhaps she can. Because written on the notepad beside her bed, in a frenzied hand she recognizes as her own, are these words:

  “I killed them all.”

  8.

  Rather than eat in the cafeteria, Vol stays in her room and boils some water to use for the tea and the instant noodles. She can't quite bring herself to make her usual attempt to be social. Not today.

  The noodles taste like cardboard and unidentifiable meat. Vol picks up the cup of tea in both hands and takes a long sip. Mm, grass-clippings. Her favorite. After a while, the hotness of the drink numbs her mouth and she ceases to taste anything at all. It's an improvement.

  Her next game starts in two hours.

  Vol considers calling in sick. Her supervisors would want to know why, though, and she doubts they will be sympathetic to a case of bad dreams and déjà vu. Besides, being sick would mean staying in bed, sleeping, and this is precisely what she needs to get away from.

  She considers her room, her meager belongings. The bed, with its standard-issue gray sheets and blue quilt. The bookshelf she uses as a pantry. A small cluster of books huddle together in the lower right corner like refugees. One is a book on programming she bought on impulse in the bazaar one day. The second is an encyclopedia of Karagh, with notations added in her own hand that she cannot remember writing. The third is a compendium of faerie tales. Not glitzy entertainment centers for her. No holladramas. No music. Just a few books and a couple packs of cheap noodles. She didn't realize how boring and pitiful her existence is.

  Party on, she thinks, raising the tea skywards. No wonder she doesn't have any close friends. Why, they'd all be bored right to dea —

  (I killed them all.)

  A shattering sound jolts her back into full-on consciousness. She has dropped the teacup on the floor.

  Vol goes to the bathroom and grabs a dirty shirt from the floor that she still hasn't gotten around to washing yet. She frowns. She cannot recall putting it on, although it has clearly been worn. The pile of dirty clothes is larger than it was the last time she —

  When was the last time she did laundry? She can't even remember.

  Slashes of memory, as hot and white as supernovae, tear through her mind in a disconnected stream, each as distinct and as separate as the shuttering images of a phantasmagoria, and just as occluded. And they are memories, not nightmares. She is certain.

  She has done something horrible. Irrevocable.

  Monstrous.

  Vol stares down at the shirt. The fabric is stretched taut between her straining hands. She can't help but think that the lukewarm tea stains look awfully similar to dried, spattered blood. She swallows hard, and tosses the ruined shirt aside, no longer willing to even touch it. She needs to find out what she might have done …

  Before she does it again.

  Today Vol is scheduled to compete in GP1. She rides the elevator down to the first floor. Her breakfast sloshes against her stomach unpleasantly. This is going to be a long day, she can tell. The lobby is packed with Marks. She feels like an island marooned in the center of an oblivious and insensitive ocean.

  Seeing Catan in the front room does nothing to allay her misery. He's leaning on the back of Suryan's chair, watching her program the computer. Seeing him draped all over the female God Mod like that instills a sense of disgust so strong that Vol nearly feels drunk in it. Taking supervision as literally as possible. He would, the power-hungry son of a bitch.

  His eyes lift. “Good morning, Volera.”

  “Hello, Vol,” Suryan says without looking up. “You can go ahead. We'll just be a moment.”

  We?

  “Run along, Vol,” Catan says. “Your friends are waiting.”

  Friends?

  She pushes open the back door, both curious and wary in equal measure, and is just in time to hear Kira say, “This is absolutely unacceptable.” Since Suryan and Catan are busy setting up the cubicles for the back-to-back shifts, her captive audience is considerably larger than it would be under other circumstances. “Somebody is making pirated games.”

  Several Players roll their eyes, used to the temperamental Spinner's outbursts. Some whisper. Most of them, Marks included, simply ignore her.

  “Kira — ” Jade puts a hand on her shoulder. She shrugs him off.

  “This is ridiculous. Good, honest people are suffering while this cheat goes unpunished.”

  “A good, honest person?” someone pipes up. “In Karagh?”

  Laughter ripples throughout the room.

  Kira's cheeks darken. “I'm being serious.”

  “I think he is, too,” one of the other Marks says. The two of them must be friends because the first boy who spoke nudges the other and the two of them double over from the weight of their ensuing giggles.

  Kira eyes the two of them with disgust, though since the two of them are Marks she curbs he
r tongue. Vol can only imagine how much effort this must cost her. “Why isn't anybody doing anything about it, then? They could be viruses. They could be — ”

  “Competition,” someone whispers.

  “I'm not worried about that,” Kira snaps, suggesting otherwise. “But it isn't fair. What if everyone decided to make a game without training? Do you have any idea how chaotic that would be?”

  Vol stares at the carpet, trying to tune out the argument. Kira's whining annoys her. The whole thing is stupid, anyway. Why shouldn't anyone who feels like it be able to create a game? Everyone needs to escape sometimes, and retreating into somebody else's fantasy isn't nearly as satisfying as slipping into your own.

  Why deny them that?

  Drove snorts. “If the Dying Moon was the work of an amateur, then maybe they should. Did you play that game?”

  Kira's eyes narrow. “They're not safe,” she grits out. “They haven't been tested and approved for the public.”

  “That wasn't the consensus opinion from what I heard. It was very, very popular.”

  Why are you baiting her, Drove? Can't you see she's about to explode?

  “Why do you think the Tower is looking the other way? Profit. Our many supervisors are perfectly willing to ignore infractions if they think there's an extra token or two in it for them. You can cut all the bureaucratic red tape you want, but it isn't going to do you any good if your games don't continue to top the charts.”

  Kira opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. A few people chuckle. Vol almost feels sorry for her. An angry blush rises up her throat; she turns on her heel and runs from the room. Now that she's gone, the laughter flows more freely. Jade starts to go after her, but Drove pulls him back by the arm. “Let her go. She should be alone.”

  “Get the fuck off me.” Jade shoves Drove away from him, sending him stumbling backwards into a chair. Both Drove and the chair topple over. Jade is breathing hard, looking as angry as Vol ever remembers seeing him. “If you care,” he says, “Why did you provoke her in the first place? You don't know anything about her. Don't pretend for a second that you understand what kind of pressure it is, trying to entertain everyone, to please everyone. Because you don't. You just play.” He spits the word.

  A few Marks stare down at their shoes with renewed interest. The ones who laughed earlier are now staring the hardest.

  Drove doesn't answer.

  Jade snorts, mutters, “That's what I thought.” He turns and goes after Kira unimpeded this time. The door closes behind him with a slam.

  A long silence presides for several seconds, making the pressure in the room rise. And when it explodes, as high pressure things inevitably do when they reach critical mass, whispers choke the small space. The Players, Tower residents, and Marks alike came to participate in a VR game and found themselves with the unexpected treat of a real-life holladrama. Unscripted.

  Program: Space_Crusaders_3.exe

  Class:

  Aliens have invaded the planet. Through the destruction of various national landmarks on a global scale, the aliens have declared their intentions hostile. After a failed intervention by the government, civilians are forced to seize control of various spacecrafts and fight against the invasion themselves.

  Mission objectives: Prevent the invasion — and stay alive.

  The simulacrum of space explodes outward, encapsulating Vol in the game. She finds herself behind the wheel of a futuristic conveyance that, with its dome-shaped interior and cold, hard accents, gives her the unpleasant sensation of being in the belly of a mechanical behemoth.

  Besides the control yoke, the control panel has two buttons that, according to the archives, are supposed to fire bombs and artillery, respectively. Personally, she doesn't see the distinction between the two, but she supposes it's the size of the bang that defines them. Flying this thing is going to be more complicated than the simple shuttle craft in the Dying Moon scenario. This thought cheers her a little. Maybe a shoot-em-up is just what the doctor ordered to take her mind off things.

  The spacecraft shoots forward, slamming her against the seat. Vol discovers that tumbling through space with nothing but a few inches of high-pressure glass to keep her from being sucked into the void is not all that comforting. Pay attention, she scolds herself.

  A speaker on the control panel crackles to life. “Anyone see anything yet?” It sounds like Drove.

  “No,” says Vol, and several others echo her negative response.

  Space Crusaders differs from most of the other games Vol plays in the sense that it's a team effort with groups of players working together to perform a set of common goals. She supposes that Bounty Strike could be considered collaborative, in the loosest sense, as could The Dying Moon, but neither of them were intended to be.

  I wouldn't mind playing more of these types of games.

  Her ship pitches abruptly. Only the straps of her seat belt keep her from being thrown to the floor. A red light begins to flash, accompanied by a high-pitched warning siren. Vol manages to grab the yoke just as the ship begins to rock, and she curses.

  Where is the systems read-out? There is no room on the panel for anything else. Vol looks up and sees a flashing blue light that has activated almost as soon as she thinks up her question. Her palm slams against it with unnecessary violence.

  “Left wing is damaged,” a sexless voice intones from the speaker. “left hull is damaged. Engine temperature is fifty-percent below automatic cooling threshold.”

  A large, teal spacecraft looms outside her window, as sleek and streamlined as a shark gliding through the Ingo Sea. The metal glitters in the absence of any light, throwing off prismatic rainbows of luminescence that suggest the metal, like the spacecraft, is alien made. Because Vol has no doubt that this ship is a member of the enemy.

  “Incoming bogey from the rear,” the audio crackles. Where, exactly, are those other spacecrafts positioned? As far as she can tell, the enemy is dead ahead. With extra emphasis on the dead.

  “Engine temperature is forty-percent below automatic cooling threshold.”

  “All right,” she snaps at the computer. “I get it. I'm slowing down! Gods!”

  “Activating Generic Ocular Display Sequence. G.O.D.S.”

  The front of her shuttle goes transparent and Vol experiences a nauseating wave of vertigo.

  “No, that's not what I meant! It's an expression! What the hell?”

  “Error. Request must be made in the form of a command.”

  “Oh, fuck you.”

  “Error. Command not recognized.”

  “I'm not surprised,” Vol mutters. She activates the thrusters, careful not to drain the craft's full reserve of power. The game has a rebound window, she sees, and if the window is maxed out, the craft stops moving for several seconds, giving the spacecraft time to recharge. Several seconds is not that long, but it's enough for the enemy to get in a couple good shots if they're quick. It's a safety precaution for the speedsters who slow down the system and take advantage of the other Players' inexperience.

  Like me.

  Vol slams on the brakes as the reserves bar shifts from yellow to orange to neon red.

  The alien ship fires green beams that light up the cockpit of the spacecraft with a radioactive glow. Vol turns hard-left, activating the thrusters just briefly enough to roll the ship without turning the reserve bar red. Space whirls around her in a carousel of starburst, and it takes Vol a moment to reorient herself. She's facing a different direction. Keeping one eye on the energy reserves, she steers the ship in a zigzag formation, trying to avoid the beams and to orient herself towards the aliens at the same time.

  “All right then,” Vol says, reaching for the 'bombs' button. “Close encounter of the worst kind it is.”

  The heat-seeking missiles careen into the alien ship's side with explosions that disappear as quickly as they occur with no oxygen to fuel the flames. The iridescent surface remains unaffected, impermeable to damage. Vol stares incredulously.
What is this? The ship must have some weak point.

  Right?

  The alien ship fires several more shots. These aren't ordinary missiles. Unlike the weapons of her own craft, they appear to have been refined from pure energy. Vol turns the yoke, hard, throwing her craft into a barrel roll — and then keeps spinning in lazy circles. The reserves are empty.

  “Right hull hit,” the computer informs her. The emotionless voice is starting to sound a little snide.

  “Thank you, Co-Pilot Obvious,” she snaps at it. “Do you actually have anything useful to say?”

  “Error. Request must be made in the form of a command.”

  “Go fuck yourself!” she shouts to the computer. “There. That's my command. Fuck. Yourself.”

  “Error. Command not recognized.”

  Vol feels another impact — “weapons defense shields at twenty-five-percent below critical overload” — and for a few heart-stopping seconds, she is completely upside-down. Since space is unidirectional, though, her mind and body eventually adjust to the change, albeit a much speedier adjustment than the real world.

  Vol clenches her teeth. Not good. “Where is everyone?” she says, directing her questions to the speaker. “I can't see anyone else.”

  “Firing at the aliens,” says a voice that sounds like Bastien. “Where are you, sweet cheeks?”

  It is Bastien. He called her that on the Dying Moon, too. Belatedly, she remembers Drove's warning and sighs with impatience.

  “Lost in space,” somebody jokes, earning laughter at her expense. That sounds like Cori. The two of them were in this game? Together? On today of all days? One of the gods up there hates her.

  “I'm hit and need backup,” she says shortly. “I'm going to deploy one of the flares.”

  “You're hit? Well, stop the presses.”

  “I'm getting out of here,” she says defensively. “There's something wrong with my craft. The missiles are having no effect.”