He used the bathroom, then walked out into the main area of the penthouse. New platters of food had appeared – plus there were about twenty different bottles of alcohol and wine. Champagne and beer were chilling in a giant silver tub full of ice.
It’s not bad being a fugitive from the law…
He loaded up a plate with food and poured himself a glass of wine. When he tried it, though, it tasted like rotten grapes.
Ugh.
Instead, he poured himself a Coke with a dollop of rum – just enough so that he couldn’t really taste it.
He noticed that a new group of yakuza mobsters had taken the place of the day shift – except for the mop-topped guy with the black-rimmed glasses. He walked up to Eric and was all smiles.
“We have women for you,” the man said with a little bow.
“Women?” Eric asked, puzzled. Then he remembered the website from earlier. “Oh – the girls from the website? Yeah, I guess I could choose now.”
“Ah – you do not understand,” the man said politely. “They are here.”
Eric stared at him. “HERE? As in, right now?!”
“Hai.”
Eric’s heart began to beat faster, and his palms began to sweat. “Where?”
Glasses turned and barked a command at one of the other yakuza. The man snapped his fingers, and three women walked out from the hallway and stopped in front of Eric with demure smiles.
It was the Asian girl, the blonde, and the Latina he’d seen – and they were all absolutely stunning. They were dressed in nightclub attire, with shimmering red beaded dresses or little black clingy things that barely covered their taut bodies and gorgeous curves.
They all looked at him, posing, giving him Pick me smiles.
Eric’s heart was hammering in his chest, and his mouth was dry.
“Which one would you like?” Glasses asked with a smile.
Eric gulped. “Can I… can I have all of them?”
Glasses laughed. “Of course, of course.” He rattled something off at the women in Japanese, and they all smiled and walked single-file into the bedroom.
Eric stared as he watched them go.
“They will be waiting for you when you are finished eating,” Glasses told him with a smile.
Eric set down his plate. “Suddenly I’m not hungry anymore,” he murmured, and walked hurriedly towards the bedroom.
It had been a good day in the Shattered Lands.
But in Tokyo, it was a goddamn fantastic night.
47
Daniel
Two self-driving cars pulled into the driveway of Daniel’s house at 3:20PM.
“Is your mom going to be here again?” Mira asked worriedly as she and Daniel walked up to the front door. The locks had been replaced after the SWAT team’s hasty entrance, but the door hadn’t; it still bore the signs of the battering ram they had used to break in.
“No, she’ll be at work until at least 6PM,” Daniel said as the computer system recognized him and let them both in.
As soon as the door was shut, he put his arms around Mira and they began to kiss.
After a few heated moments, though, she giggled and forced him away. “Shouldn’t we log on?”
“Why?” Daniel whispered as he kissed the side of her face.
“Oh, I don’t know – maybe so we can stop Eric and avert a worldwide apocalypse?”
“Later.”
They made out for another 15 minutes before Mira finally put an end to it and ran upstairs to the gaming consoles.
“You know,” Daniel said jokingly as he lay down on his single bed, “we could do a lot more in here besides just play video games.”
“Down, boy,” Mira teased before she put on her VR mask and slipped into the game world.
48
Daniel was sitting at the table in the bedroom when he came to. Mira was on a pile of pillows beside him.
Daylight shone through the balcony window. That made sense; he had anticipated it being afternoon in the Shattered Lands before he logged on.
It also made sense that he wasn’t in bed. Roughly three days had passed in the Shattered Lands since he and Mira had last been here.
What didn’t make sense was the three dwarves standing on the other side of the table, watching Daniel and Mira suspiciously. Siffis watched them just as suspiciously from his makeshift bed in the corner of the room.
One of the dwarves was middle-aged with a reddish beard. The other looked young, with only scraggly tufts of hair on his cheeks and jaw line.
Jorok stood in the center. Seconds after Daniel became conscious, the dwarf’s expression changed. “Interesting.”
“What?” Daniel asked.
“Where have you been the last three days?”
Daniel looked at Mira, who frowned.
“Uh, here in this room,” she said.
“Physically, yes,” the dwarf replied, “but your minds have been absent. You both acted bewitched, doing little and saying less. What happened to you, that you acted in such a manner?”
Daniel looked at Mira again, and this time they stared at each other in open wonder.
NPCs were programmed to ignore all sorts of things – like when players accessed menus, or spoke computer commands aloud. Especially when a player logged off, and his digital character kept up its daily existence like an automaton.
But Jorok had noticed – and not just in a fleeting way: their somnambulistic behavior obviously fascinated him.
Daniel remembered something Korvos had said when Daniel, Drogar, Vlisil, and Lotan were trapped in hell:
Why would you think that the Unnamed One is the only program that has achieved sentience?
“Do you… know what you are?” Daniel asked hesitantly.
Jorok looked at him strangely. “I am the leader of the Council of Elders in the Stronghold of Morrill.”
Daniel relaxed. He’d jumped to conclusions; obviously the dwarf was just an NPC in the game. Everything was fine, exactly as it should be –
“However,” Jorok continued, “I think you meant something different by your question.”
Daniel’s heart beat irregularly in his chest – whether from fear or excitement, he wasn’t sure. “What exactly do you think I meant?”
“I believe it was something more along the lines of, do I understand that I am different from other dwarves… and that this world is not as it seems. Is that closer to your meaning?”
Mira exhaled heavily. “Holy shit…”
Jorok turned his head and looked at them distrustfully from the corner of his eyes. “What do you know? What are you not telling me?”
Daniel and Mira exchanged looks again.
How much can we tell him?
How much SHOULD we tell him?
“You’re… right about this world not being exactly what it seems,” Daniel said. “We’re… visitors from another world. Our consciousness goes in and out of these bodies, I guess you could say, when we log on – uh, when we visit this world and when we leave.”
“But something is amiss. I see your behavior the last three days as strange, as do Lok and Virim – ”
Jorok gestured to the other two dwarves.
“ – but no other dwarf in Morrill does.”
Mira’s eyebrows raised. “You’ve been parading dwarves in to see us the last three days?”
“Only a handful. I have known about Lok and Virim for many months; they have commented on other things that let me know they are like me, and so I had them come up here to watch you. But the rest of the citizens of Morrill treat you as though nothing is odd. Why is that?”
“I guess… you could say… you’re enlightened?” Daniel said. “Or… ‘awake’ is a better word, maybe.”
“Awake? You are saying the others are asleep?”
“They just can’t see what you can,” Mira said. “They can’t tell that we’re…”
Her voice trailed off as she peered beyond the dwarves towards the open balcony window.
/> “What’s that?” she asked as she pointed.
Daniel had to shift slightly to see what Mira was talking about, since he was sitting parallel to the balcony and not facing it. But as soon as he looked, he saw it.
A massive column of dark smoke hovered in the distance like an enormous rain cloud. And it had to have been enormous – at least ten thousand feet tall – because it existed beyond the most distant visible mountain.
Jorok turned and looked. “Ah yes. The smoke appeared yesterday morning, and has continued since. A glow at night suggests massive fires. I fear some disaster has befallen the kingdom of the forest elves.”
Mira turned to Daniel, her eyes wide with fear.
“Eric,” she whispered.
49
Daniel and Mira hurried out of the city gates and across the grassy plains towards their griffins. Siffis clung to Daniel’s shoulder as they ran. They were followed closely by Jorok and a dozen dwarven soldiers.
“There is nothing you can do,” the elder dwarf called after them.
“You don’t know that!” Mira shouted.
“The fire began yesterday – the damage has surely been done!”
“We might be able to help,” she insisted as she pulled herself up into her saddle.
Jorok turned his attention to Daniel. “I must know more of what you spoke – about my being ‘awake,’ when others of my tribe are not.”
“When I return,” Daniel promised. “Look, about the sword I gave to you – I don’t have another weapon, so could you – ”
Before Daniel could finish, Jorok motioned with one hand, and a dwarven soldier stepped forward. He unstrapped his leather sheath and offered it on outstretched hands.
Daniel pulled the blade out and looked at it, swiped it through the air. It was well-made, there was no denying that – but it was a regular sword, nowhere near as powerful as the weapon he had returned to Jorok.
Great.
…but I suppose it’ll have to do.
“Thanks,” Daniel said half-heartedly as he hoisted himself up onto his griffin.
“You will return?” Jorok asked, a hint of pleading in his voice.
“Yes. I promise.”
“What if the Evil Sorcerer you spoke of kills you first?”
Daniel allowed himself a wry grin. “I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”
Seconds later he and Mira were in flight.
As they soared over the mountains towards the distant smoke clouds, he remembered what Rebecca had told him about updating her on Eric’s whereabouts.
He pulled up his menu and dictated a message: “Eric probably just hit Aravall the elf kingdom yesterday – that’s yesterday inside the game, so just a few hours ago in the real world. The place was apparently burned to the ground. He probably wasn’t acting alone, and might even have an army. You might not be able to find him, but I doubt whoever he’s with is being cloaked. Maybe that can help.”
Then he sent it to the username Rebecca had given him.
He hoped it would be of some use. God knows they needed some good news right about now.
50
Rebecca Wolff
Rebecca was at home, waiting on her teakettle to boil and working on a way to ‘decompile’ the code of the AI – to peel it back and expose it in the game, allowing her to make changes that might cripple or kill it – when her computer chimed with a specialized tone. She immediately switched windows and read the message forwarded from the Shattered Lands:
Eric probably just hit Aravall the elf kingdom yesterday – that’s yesterday inside the game, so just a few hours ago in the real world. The place was apparently burned to the ground. He probably wasn’t acting alone, and might even have an army. You might not be able to find him, but I doubt whoever he’s with is being cloaked. Maybe that can help.
It was an idea that had occurred to her before – to seek out Eric’s confederates and fellow travelers and use them to pinpoint his location. However, there was a nimbus around Eric that sheltered all other NPCs from detection. Either that, or the AI had extended its cloaking privileges to others around him.
But an army large enough to cause mass devastation would leave a ripple behind in the physical environment as it passed. And the physical environment was one thing the AI couldn’t alter.
She set to work by entering the Shattered Lands codex through one of the backdoors that had been there since the beginning of the game’s development. Once upon a time the backdoors had served as connective points between different programming modules; she had needed specific checkpoints for the AI to ‘pass through’ so she could monitor the things it did and how it did them. Now those checkpoints were abandoned, but had never been removed – merely papered and patched over. Houses under construction had open spaces that were eventually enclosed by sheetrock, even though the empty spaces still remained inside the walls. The idea of solidity was an illusion, a façade. The same happened in a programming environment, only the walls were made of code.
She pulled up the map and found Aravall. Daniel had been right about the devastation. According to the readouts, the environment had been reduced to cinder and ash. She then searched for moderate, continuous disturbance in the physical environment within a 500-mile radius – displacement and destruction that would indicate the presence of tens of thousands of feet tromping over grass and vegetation, for instance.
The search took awhile – after all, she had to run it in the background, away from the prying eyes of the Varidian software engineering team. But an hour later, she was rewarded with a ‘heat map’ of a massive path of disturbance moving north from Aravall, straight as an arrow.
“Gotcha,” she whispered.
51
Mira – Shattered Lands
They reached Aravall shortly after nightfall. At least, what remained of Aravall.
What had once been a majestic landscape of thousand-year-old oaks was a barren wasteland of charred wooden skeletons.
At least the fires had stopped, and the area was relatively free of smoke. The conflagration had moved on to the far distance, where dark clouds blotted out the stars.
As the griffins touched down, their flapping wings raised a cloud of choking black soot – and when Mira dismounted, her feet sank into the ash like dry, dusty snow.
She couldn’t believe the extent of the destruction. No matter how badly the forest elves had treated her, it hurt to recall her thoughts as she’d left Aravall just days before:
If Eric wins, I hope he comes for you KKK assholes first.
Eric had won at Blackstone – and he had come for the elves of Aravall next.
Now, nothing was left.
“Jesus,” Daniel whispered as they looked around.
“We should look for survivors,” Mira said.
Daniel was about to say something, but he stopped himself and merely nodded.
Mira could guess what he’d been about to say:
WHAT survivors?
Or maybe, Who on earth could survive THIS?
They trudged through the blackened trees as Siffis lit their way. He was the only light – not even the moon could be seen through the clouds of smoke blotting out the night sky.
They walked for almost ten minutes before they heard something.
Mira drew her bow and Daniel unsheathed his sword.
Someone walked out of the tree line, dazed and blackened with soot.
Mira recognized her – but just barely.
Ladriel, the leader of the forest elves. The woman who had forcibly turned her away.
“You were right,” the woman whispered to Mira. “You were right.”
52
Ladriel told them the story of the Sorcerer’s attack as she guided them through the ruins of the forest kingdom.
As she talked, a dozen elves appeared, one by one – then drifted back into the darkness like soot-covered ghosts. Ladriel explained that they were still looking for survivors. The rest of the tribe had gone south with the t
ribe’s children and elders.
“Why south?” Daniel asked.
“Because the Sorcerer went north,” Ladriel answered simply.
Mira looked around as they trudged through the ash. “There must have been a lot of survivors, at least.”
“Less than a third.”
Mira stared at Ladriel. “But… where are all the bodies, then?”
“The Sorcerer took them with him. Resurrected them as soldiers in his ‘Army of the Damned.’” Ladriel’s eyes filled with hatred. “That’s what he calls them… I heard him from my hiding place in the trees.”
Mira looked at Daniel in fear and desperation. If Eric was building his forces by killing everything in his path, then his army could eventually envelop the entire population of the Shattered Lands.
“I should have listened to you,” Ladriel moaned. “My arrogance sealed the fate of my people… and now so many are dead…”
“Will you help us convince other elves to fight?” Mira asked.
Ladriel looked around the blackened remains of what had once been an elfin paradise. “Yes. To prevent this from happening to anyone else… yes.”
“Even help me convince the dark elves?”
Ladriel looked back at her with mournful eyes. “Yes.”
“We should go to Alshurat first,” Mira said. “I’ve already met with the king – with your help, maybe we can get him to join us, too.”
“Where’s Alshurat?” Daniel asked.
“It’s almost directly… north…”
Mira’s voice trailed off, and her face contorted in horror as she remembered Ladriel saying, Because the Sorcerer went north.
“You don’t think Eric knows all the places I went, do you?!”
“He might not, but the AI would,” Daniel said. “And that’s exactly the sort of thing Eric might do just to spite us.”
“Oh my God – ”
Shattered Lands 3 Demon Wars Page 16
