Countdown
a novel
by Michael Atamanov
Reality Benders
Book#1
Magic Dome Books
Reality Benders
Book #1: Countdown
Copyright © Michael Atamanov 2018
Cover Art © Vladimir Manyukhin 2018
English translation copyright © Andrew Schmitt 2018
Editor: Neil P. Mayhew
Published by Magic Dome Books, 2018
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-80-88231-65-3
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is entirely a work of fiction.
Any correlation with real people or events is coincidental.
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ALSO BY MICHAEL ATAMANOV
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Table of Contents:
Introduction. First Contact
Chapter One. Online Tournament
Chapter Two. Expelled
Chapter Three. Comrades in Misfortune
Chapter Four. Subterranean Dome
Chapter Five. Entering the Game
Chapter Six. Testing by Labyrinth
Chapter Seven. First Night
Chapter Eight. Quick Death
Chapter Nine. Performance Review
Chapter Ten. Initiation
Chapter Eleven. Getting Ready for Patrol
Chapter Twelve. Antique Beach
Chapter Thirteen. First Patrol
Chapter Fourteen. Talking with Centaurs
Chapter Fifteen. Return to Base
Chapter Sixteen. Free Time
Chapter Seventeen. Observation Post
Chapter Eighteen. Lessons Learned
Chapter Nineteen. Morning in the Forest
Chapter Twenty. Around the Bay
Chapter Twenty-One. Harpy Cliffs
Chapter Twenty-Two. Grandfather and Granddaughter
Chapter Twenty-Three. Geckho Base
Chapter Twenty-Four. Journey to the Asteroids
Chapter Twenty-Five. Space Anomaly
Chapter Twenty-Six. Hostile Reception
Chapter Twenty-Seven. Relict Base
Chapter Twenty-Eight. Gnat’s Luck
Chapter Twenty-Nine. Gnat's Triumph
Chapter Thirty. Return to Base
Chapter Thirty-One. Battle for the Boat
Chapter Thirty-Two. Breaking Protocol
Chapter Thirty-Three. Radugin’s Bunker
Chapter Thirty-Four. Tumultuous Reception
Chapter Thirty-Five. Loyalty Test
Chapter Thirty-Six. Virtual SMS Emden
About the Author
AT LONG LAST, an extraterrestrial civilization reac
hed out and the First Contact was made. No one on Earth took it for the genuine article, though. Even fewer appreciated just how little time our new suzerains had promised to keep our planet safe. But the end of their address showed humankind how to access a mysterious game. The purpose of this game is unclear. No one can say where its servers are located, and its inner workings are beyond comprehension. Nevertheless, the game slowly gained momentum, pulling in more and more players. Soon enough, it became impossible to ignore that events in the game had a direct impact on our reality. And not only ours...
But as we learn to play this mysterious game, the countdown timer is ticking away. And no one can say exactly what will happen when Earth’s safety is no longer guaranteed.
Introduction. First Contact
HOW MANY WAYS have writers, astronomers, philosophers and military theorists imagined humanity's first contact with a celestial intelligence? Earth’s observatories receiving intelligible signals from deep space? What about the discovery of interstellar artifacts or even living aliens when excavating ancient burial mounds or pyramids? And the appearance of ominous extraterrestrial starships over our major cities? Heavenly bodies falling to Earth, UFO's crashing? Meeting brothers in intelligence on far-off planets? Invasion? War? The extinction of everything alive...?
But when it really happened, it looked like a stupid joke, hoax or intrusive advertisement, so humanity didn’t believe it was the real First Contact. One day, a popup window appeared on many popular websites, blocking off the whole screen. Despite every computer user’s habitual and instant reaction, it was impossible to close. It played a video showing a furry humanoid that was somehow distantly reminiscent of the abominable snowman, but with thick dark-red fur. The tall bipedal alien had piercing black eyes, a flat dark nose and a wide mouth. Its clothing was somewhere between a suit of armor and a helmetless spacesuit. The first thing it did was raise a clawed hand and give a friendly wave to its captive audience. With a very strong accent, the humanoid gave a speech adapted to the language of the receiving country:
“People of Earth, by right of first discovery, the civilization of Shiharsa declares its authority and jurisdiction over your planet. We will provide one Tong of safety to your world, but the fate of humanity depends exclusively on what you do with that time. You have now made sufficient progress as a species, and may take part in the great game, the game that bends reality. So, come play and earn the right to take your place among the great spacefaring races!”
That was followed by strange diagrams and blueprints, then the fifty-second clip ended, and the popup window closed all on its own. You surely understand that only stupid people would believe such a primitive and artless sham. Even the most gullible viewers thought it was just an actor in a hairy suit delivering a clumsy advertisement for some new computer game.
But some naive individuals had questions. Television studios invited experts to inspect the “blueprints” from the ad, and they all came to the unanimous conclusion that even the most surface-level examination revealed them to be pure gobbledygook. The technology depicted, they assured us, didn’t even have a power hookup, so it could not work even in theory.
Interest in the video of the furry alien didn’t last long. The ad kept coming though. Eventually, when yet another movie, news site, or sports broadcast was interrupted by the obnoxious popup, no one cared what it was for, and just got mad. Unhappy internet users the world over installed pop-up blockers and wrote all kinds of complaints to the tech support services of affected sites.
The authorities tried to combat the viral ad and threatened grave consequences to the mysterious hackers who’d played this stupid practical joke. Sys admins learned to quickly block the bothersome video. Data-security specialists tried to determine its source, but it was skillfully masked. They all assured us, though, that they would soon pick up the trail of these impudent scofflaws. And although they were never tracked down, after just a few weeks, the ads stopped coming and the whole earth breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Thus, the greatest event in human history, settling an age-old dispute about extraterrestrial intelligence, came and went as a chaotic flop. Sure, lots of people noticed it, but practically none of them realized what it was.
There were lone enthusiasts, though, who wanted to find out more about “the game that bends reality.” Despite the expert testimony calling the designs absurd, these stubborn weirdos believed they had seen a miracle and some even built the device depicted in the blueprints...
Chapter One. Online Tournament
YES, WE KNEW it was risky and illegal. We understood perfectly that we’d be booted out of university and fly home with a whistle, if it was discovered that we were hosting these for-profit online gaming tournaments. And especially if they found our gambling software. Nevertheless, we took the risk. Why? Hard to say. At first, it was easy to understand. My roommates and I organized the very first tournaments from our dorm and purely for money. After all, we were borderline-poor university students. But, after we'd earned some cash, we simply couldn’t stop ourselves. By then, money no longer played the biggest role. Adrenaline, the thrill of the game, respect among our classmates and popularity with girls were motivation enough.
We understood perfectly that, as the scale of the tournaments grew, more and more people would find out what we were up to. That would make it harder and harder to hide it from our teachers, the police and university security. All the tricks we used to maintain the anonymity of the players and organizers were primitive. Eventually, serious information-security professionals would investigate, and the jig would be up. We were keenly aware of that. More and more often, my friends and I would say it was time to close up shop or say that the next online tournament would be the last. But that was always followed by another one, then another and another...
This time, our grand PvP tournament had attracted students from every dorm in Moscow. It had begun midday on Saturday and was still underway now, at five o’clock in the morning on Monday. Out of eight hundred players initially, just thirty-two had filtered through the qualifying matches. And I was among them. Yes, unlike my roommates, who handled the servers, encryption software and bookkeeping, I often took part in the online battles. And, a decent chunk of the time, I even won, earning the sizable monetary prizes.
And I never used any “immortality mods,” cheat codes or other unfair methods. All I needed was my powerful computer with a top-of-the-line graphics card and good processors, fast ping, knowledge of game maps and weapons and, most importantly, nimble fingers. I always used different pseudonyms and was sure none of the usual players had guessed that the same person had won many of the recent tournaments.
And now, I was playing. With the virtual reality helmet on my head, and my fingers on the buttons of the ergonomic glove controller, I was totally immersed. To me, the outside world just didn't exist...
* * *
I was running up a steep spiral staircase to the third and highest floor of a luxurious palace. I stopped to catch my breath. Endurance practically at zero, my thick column legs were shaking, and my sides were puffing out like a smith's bellows. I rasped heavily and opened my mouth like a fish out of water. There was just not enough air. How hard it was to be a giant!
I spontaneously chose an Ogre Fighter just a minute before the start of the final match. The randomly selected map was a medieval castle with huge gloomy rooms, narrow passageways and steep staircases. That would be very disadvantageous for the Drow Archer I'd played in the earlier stages so, at the very last moment, I changed it up.
I had never played such a large character before, and the inconvenience of this heavy body came as an unpleasant surprise. My six-hundred-fifty-pound Ogre was unable to run or clamber up drainpipes. Even a steep stairway was a serious obstacle, eating up all my endurance. Also, there was nearly a second of delay between inputting a command and the character reacting, which was particularly hard to get used to.
That inertia nearly cost me m
y life in a recent scuffle with a crafty Human Assassin, who had easily dodged the blows of my huge two-handed pole-ax. I had to take an unusual tact — I wound up to swing my weapon but, instead of striking, I splayed my arms and jumped forward. That knocked the crouching man off his feet and I luckily managed to pin my agile opponent to the floor. The main advantage of the Assassin class was mobility, and I’d deprived him of that. So, I finished him off easily, just twisting his neck with my bare hands. That assassin was my fourth frag in the final, so I had just thirty-seven percent life remaining. Too little to win. A critical situation.
While my endurance dawdled back up, I opened the leaderboard. After nearly an hour of gameplay, just four of thirty-two players remained: my Ogre, a Human Spearman, an Elf Archer and another unknown character. Since no players had managed to spot them yet, their race and class were listed as a question mark. And meanwhile, this unknown person had racked up three kills. Pretty cool. Must have been some kind of invisible stealth character, attacking people from behind while cloaked.
An alarm rang out, informing me that the tournament would be over in five minutes. I needed to hurry. I opened the map. There was a long straight corridor behind the closed door in front of me. If I were playing an elf archer, I would be keeping watch for my opponents there, shooting them down from afar. A very convenient place. I needed to keep that in mind.
Countdown (Reality Benders Book #1) LitRPG Series Page 1
