But he was with Mira now. He couldn’t even think about being with Jennifer.
“So, what do we do now?” she asked.
“Now?”
“Yeah – are we going to go out and fight some monsters or something?”
“Um, we should probably start you off slightly easier than that,” Daniel said.
“Like what?”
“Well… maybe we should go see Jorok and ask what we could do to get you started.”
As if on cue, they heard Jorok’s voice outside the door. He sounded as though he were talking to someone, and was a little stressed out.
“In fact,” Daniel continued, “that sounds like him. Maybe we could – ”
The door opened and Jorok appeared, a concerned look on his face.
A split second later, Mira walked in and stared at them in shock.
75
Mira
Mira froze in her tracks. Daniel was standing next to some warrior chick in a She-Ra getup. Daniel had a guilty look on his face; the girl looked totally clueless, though Siffis was draped around her shoulders.
Wait…
She looks familiar…
Mira’s heart seized in her chest as she realized who it was.
Jennifer Dale.
Daniel had been pining after her for years, the same way she’d had a crush on Eric (before she found out he was a stone-cold psychopathic asshole, that was).
And here she was, right next to him, in the very same bedroom Mira and Daniel had spent the night in just days before.
Okay, not ‘spend the night’ spent the night, since there was no sex and they’d logged out and went home in the real world – but close enough.
Mira’s tongue numb as she said, “What’s going on here?”
“Nothing!” Daniel said, looking and sounding as guilty as could be.
“I’m going to go,” Jorok said uncomfortably, and disappeared down the stairs.
The girl smile-frowned as she looked between Mira and Daniel. “So you guys know each other?”
“Uh,” Daniel said with a gesture, “this is Mira. Rosenbaum. From school.”
Jennifer’s face lit up. “Mira?! That’s YOU?! I never would have realized! Awesome – nobody told me I could not be human!”
“Mira,” Daniel continued, “this is – ”
“I know who she is,” Mira snapped, then gave a tight smile. “Hello, Jennifer.”
“Have you two been hanging out in the game?” Jennifer asked. “Did you fight in the battles, too?”
“Yes,” Mira said brusquely, then looked back at Daniel. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing!” Daniel said as he moved several feet away from Jennifer, apropos of nothing. The move was super-awkward and super-obvious to everyone in the room. “I thought you were visiting more elf cities.”
“I was,” Mira seethed, “but I decided to come back and surprise you because I felt bad about how we left things. I didn’t realize you were busy.”
Jennifer was just beginning to put two and two together. “Wait… are you two… dating?”
“Yes,” Daniel said decisively.
“We were,” Mira snapped. “I’m not so sure anymore.”
“Don’t be like that,” Daniel said angrily.
Jennifer’s eyes widened. “Oh my god – I – nothing happened, I swear – ”
“Nothing happened!” Daniel said, gesturing at Jennifer like Listen to her!
“Maybe nothing happened… but that doesn’t mean you didn’t want something to happen,” Mira said coldly. “Go on – don’t let me interrupt you.”
She turned and walked out of the room.
Her shock was wearing off, and so was the anger.
Now she felt a pain in her heart like somebody had plunged a dagger in her chest.
That, and she could feel hot tears streaming down her cheeks. She rubbed them away.
As she quickly descended the stairs, she heard Daniel clattering down the steps behind her. “Mira – wait – MIRA!”
She doubled her pace, but he caught up to her on the main floor of the dwarf city. “Mira, talk to me!”
“What’s there to talk about?” she said through her stuffy nose.
Shit – for a video game, the sensations of crying were pretty damn spot-on.
“Are you crying? Why are you crying?” Daniel babbled in panic. “Nothing happened!”
“Did you even tell her about me? About us?!” Mira demanded.
“I – I hadn’t gotten around to it yet – she’s only been here for, like, ten minutes – ”
“Whatever,” Mira said acidly, and turned and started walking again.
He raced around in front of her. “Stop it!”
“Look,” she snarled, “I know you’re into her. Everybody in school knows you’re into her. Go back and do whatever it was you were planning to do before I showed up.”
“I wasn’t going to do anything – honest!” Daniel shouted.
“You’re so full of shit,” Mira muttered, and brushed past him.
Daniel reached out and grabbed her arm again. “You’re blowing this way out of proportion – ”
She smacked his arm away. “Don’t touch me again.”
“Nothing happened!”
“Yeah, I heard that the first ten times.”
“You’re getting upset over nothing!”
“You mean, beside the fact that you were hanging out for ten minutes with the chick of your dreams, and you conveniently never mentioned your girlfriend?”
Daniel looked pained. “I was going to – ”
“Look,” Mira said bitterly, “I get it. You and me, we just ‘happened’ because we were both in the game, and I was convenient. She’s the – ”
“You weren’t convenient!” Daniel pleaded. “I really, really like you – ”
“Yeah, but she’s the one you really want. The funny thing is, you probably could’ve had her in real life if you’d ever grown a pair and just asked her out.”
She saw the anger and pain on Daniel’s face. For a second she felt ashamed, and then she thought, Good before she continued her rant.
“So go on – she’s there, waiting for you. Go. I don’t want you anymore. You’re a free man. Make out with her, screw her, whatever you were going to do. Just don’t come after me, and don’t ever touch me again.”
She stomped out the front gates of the city.
This time Daniel didn’t follow her.
She climbed into the saddle of her griffin, which she’d landed on the east side of the city gates just so she could surprise him.
Guess she’d been the one who got the surprise.
She urged the griffin into the air, back towards the lands of the elves –
And she cried bitterly all the way there.
76
Artificial Intelligence Diagnostics Program 2AIAG3283835GB2372.exe
Invisible and silent, the AI observed everything: as Mira Rosenbaum stormed out of Morrill. As Daniel Lauer, in great emotional pain, watched her griffin fly off into the sky.
The AI allowed itself a moment of self-congratulation. Its plan could not have worked any better.
At least one of its two gambits had borne fruit.
But now the AI had the fallout from the Trent Lockner failure to deal with…
77
Eric
When Eric logged out and entered the White Room, he was still shaking.
He couldn’t stop picturing Trent’s face – shriveling, graying, caving in –
He wondered what it was like for him to die in the real world.
He wondered if Trent had screamed or not.
Wondered if anyone had heard it from underneath his mask.
Eric hated the bastard – he truly did.
But being asked to pull the trigger on someone here in the Shattered Lands, and knowing they would die in the real world?
To his surprise, he realized that there was no one he hated that much.
E
ric stood there in the white room, trying to build up the nerve to return to the penthouse prison in Tokyo –
And then he realized something:
The Dark Figure wasn’t in here with him.
Only endless blank whiteness, as far as the eye could see.
Eric stood there a moment and waiting for a blot of inky black to appear… but it never did.
Is it leaving me alone because it knows it freaked me out… or can it even SEE me in here?
For the first time, he realized that he’d never seen the Dark Figure in the White Room.
There was that time after they’d first met when the White Room faded into Mr. Lauer’s office and Eric had hacked Varidian, but that wasn’t technically the White Room. That was some pocket of the game the Dark Figure had manipulated to look like reality.
“Unnamed One,” Eric said aloud.
No answer.
“Hey, Dark Asshole,” Eric yelled.
Nothing.
He stood there, suddenly afraid at what he was contemplating.
But then he figured, I’ve got a circuit board stuck in my brain and I can’t get the goddamn AI out of my head – what exactly have I got to lose?
He called up the game menu and found ‘Send Message.’
Then he hesitated.
Her name was Rebecca Wolf, but that’s all he knew. He supposed he could chance just going with that – rebeccawolf – but he wasn’t sure about the spelling. Maybe there was only one ‘C’ in her name. Or maybe a ‘K’ instead a ‘CC.’ Or maybe her username was rwolf. Or maybe there was an underscore or period in there between her first and last names.
He just didn’t know.
However… he knew someone who probably did.
78
Daniel
Daniel was watching Mira’s griffin fly off and feeling like total shit when he heard the Ping! that informed him of a text message.
He wasn’t in the mood to talk to Drogar or Vlisil or Lotan.
Then he thought of something.
Maybe Mira had sent some kind of a message to him.
Probably some final ‘F U.’
If it was one more bitter send-off, there was no way he wanted to see that, either.
Although he couldn’t not check it, either. The pull of curiosity was too strong, like probing a sore tooth that was about to fall out.
So he opened it up and got the shock of his life – even greater than seeing Jennifer or Mira.
From: Eric Richards
I need Rebecca Wolf’s username inside the game.
Daniel’s eyes bugged out – and then he tapped out a message.
What’s going on? Where have you been?
He only had to wait a couple of seconds for the reply.
PLEASE – just give me her username.
Daniel glared.
Why – are you going to betray her, too?
Another short pause.
No. I need her help.
Daniel sucked in his breath… considered what he should do… then typed out a reply.
Hold on. I’ll text her and tell her to contact you.
A few seconds later he got a text:
Thanks.
And that was all he heard from his former best friend.
79
Eric
While Eric waited, he scrolled through the dozens of unopened messages he’d ignored from Daniel over the last couple of weeks, all of them imploring him to give himself up.
If I’d only listened to him…
It was like an alcoholic finding a bunch of notes from a friend begging him to quit drinking and driving… but finding them after the fatal wreck where he’d killed a family of four.
Eric was literally shaking with remorse and grief when he got the text message from dr_rebecca_wolff.
I’m glad I asked.
He would have never guessed the username on his own, not with that spelling of ‘Wolff.’
He opened the message.
Rebecca Wolff here – are you under surveillance by the AI program?
“No,” he dictated. “I’m in the white log-on room, and I’ve never had it follow me in here.”
Send.
Seconds passed. Then:
Excellent. One quirk of the system architecture is that diagnostics programs can’t access the log-on rooms. Hang on.
Eric frowned. ‘Hang on’? What did that –
“Hello, Eric,” a voice said out of thin air. “Nice to finally talk to you.”
He jumped and looked around. There weren’t any physical representations of her anywhere – just the voice.
“Uh… nice to talk to you, too.”
“We need to be quick, just in case the AI begins to suspect something.”
“If the AI can’t come in here, then how are you talking to me?”
“Because I hijacked the onboarding computer protocol. Different program.”
“Couldn’t it do the same?”
“It’s a possibility, which is why we should hurry. Did you decide to accept my offer?”
“I don’t know… I didn’t hear your entire message. The AI stopped it.”
“I see. Basically, I will do whatever I can to help you get away from it. I just need your help in trying to destroy it.”
“As long as I turn myself in, right?” he asked sarcastically.
“No.”
The answer stunned him. “What?”
“I don’t give a damn about you hacking Varidian. They might come after you, but I’m not going to help them. The only thing I care about is destroying the AI.”
“…oh.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“Not really, I’m just…”
His hands unconsciously crept up to the back of his head.
He realized it as soon as he felt his hair.
He immediately thought, It’s not real.
That was the main thing: Remember what’s real.
Remember what’s waiting for you when you get back out in the real world.
“Eric?” Rebecca’s voice said.
“…I think I might need to turn myself in.”
“Why?”
“The AI had a bunch of doctors operate on me. They put something – a neural mesh – in my brain, and there’s a jack in the back of my skull where it can upload itself into my head.”
There was the sound of Rebecca sucking in her breath. “I see.”
“You don’t have to be polite,” Eric said drily. “It’s pretty goddamn awful.”
“It sounds pretty awful,” Rebecca agreed. “You realize, in order to get you out of there, I would have to contact the authorities and/or Varidian… which means you will probably go to jail?”
Eric paused to consider. Then he decided.
“If you can get it out of my head, that’s a trade I’m willing to make.”
“How does it manifest when it’s inside the neural mesh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can you hear it?”
“Oh yeah,” Eric said darkly. “Hear it, see it…”
“Can it take over your actions?”
Eric shuddered as he remembered how his body froze up in the hospital room right after he awoke, when the doctors were trying to subdue him.
He imagined his body walking around the penthouse while not under his own control – and laughed bitterly at the irony.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’ve been possessed… just like I did to Daniel in the game. No wonder he hated it so goddamn much…”
“So it HAS taken over your motor functions?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve been unconscious most of the time since they did it, so… I don’t know. But it’s done it at least once while I was awake.”
“All right, I’ll contact Varidian and see if we can handle this without law enforcement getting involved.”
“They might have to get involved at some point,” Eric said, and a noise escaped his throat that sou
nded almost like a sob.
“Why?”
“The AI killed somebody.”
That actually rattled Rebecca. “What?! How?! Did it shoot or stab someone while inhabiting your mind?”
“No… it was a kid named Trent Lockner, from my high school. It told me it had modified his gaming unit, and that if it killed him in the game, it would kill him in real life.”
Rebecca’s voice sounded relieved. “Oh. Well, that’s impossible.”
“I think it was telling the truth.”
“I’ll look into it, but I’m positive you have nothing to worry about.”
Eric wasn’t so sure.
“Do you know where you are?” Rebecca continued.
“Tokyo.”
“Do you know WHERE in Tokyo?”
“No, but… I know I’m in a really high building in a penthouse. I can tell you what’s visible from the windows…”
“I’m ready.”
He gave her blow-by-blow descriptions of the different buildings outside his window – or at least what he remembered.
“There’s an Eiffel Tower-looking knockoff…”
“How far away?”
“Not far… maybe a half mile?”
“Are you higher than the tower, or lower?”
“Almost equal height. And I can see a river or some sort of bay past it…”
He gave her as many details as he could remember, about highways and the shape of various billboards.
“Oh, and there’s a gaming unit in the penthouse. And there was a power outage a while back, maybe… a week? Also, I set the curtains on fire, and the sprinklers went off.”
“Why did you do that?”
“The fire was a diversion to get me out of the apartment. The electrical outage was to make sure the AI couldn’t see me or follow me.”
“But if it was downloaded to the neural mesh – ”
“This was before the operation. The night I escaped, they found me, chloroformed me, and then took me to get operated on.”
“I see. Do you remember anything about the lobby?”
He told her everything he could remember.
Shattered Lands 3 Demon Wars Page 24
