by Aaron Jay
After some time, I saw a hare eating some scrub just off the road. My father’s influence once again. He was insistent that beginner areas have something from the lagomorph (aka rabbit) family as one of the first mobs that a new player would encounter. People from before the nanowars have all sorts of odd ideas about things. The hare was gray and brown and much larger than the rabbits from children’s stories. Still, it didn’t look too dangerous. Famous last words.
While I was barely armed, I had the stats of someone well advanced of me. I had a year and a day. Better start grinding when I can. It may take me slightly longer to drop the hare than if I was fully equipped but with my stats the difference should be negligible. Plus, despite the lifetime of slavery lurking in the background of my every choice in the game, I was bored from an hour of running down an empty dirt road. It turns out that anxiety doesn’t make monotony interesting. The scenery was gorgeous, but still.
I readied my stones. The hare ignored me. I looked around to make sure there were no linked mobs. I was clear. It was just the hare and me. I threw my rock, and it hurtled off into the distance not even disturbing the hare from its meal. I was already snapping my next rock forward when it struck me that something was seriously wrong. Attacking a mob should automatically engage us into combat. Even if I muffed my attack, the creature should feel the aggro and respond. As the next rock whipped through the air, I wished that I had the power to take my throw back. I left my hand stretched out in front of me from the release as if that would draw the rock back. No dice on suddenly being able to turn back time or use telekinesis. But more dangerously, no combat mechanics took over that would let me auto-throw again and again until I changed my combat choice or ran out of ammunition. What the hell was going on?
Maybe my luck with throwing would hold, and I’d miss by a mile again. No, my luck was holding constant at crappy. The rock struck the rabbit a solid hit in its flank. Now the rabbit was subtly limned in red and was starting for me.
You have successfully
struck DESERT HARE
with
SMALL STONE for 1pt
of damage!
9/10 health remaining
I swept the message out of my view and threw more stones. I threw the stones. Not the game system. I missed my next shot. I managed to get one more shot into the hare bringing its hp down to 8. Now it was the rabbit's turn.
Part of my mind had been mulling over the fact that none of the automatic combat mechanics were engaging. So it wasn't much of a surprise when I failed to block or dodge when the rabbit attacked and bit my thigh. What was a surprise was when incredible pain shot up into and through my leg as the hare’s teeth pierced my virtual flesh. It felt like someone had hammered two nails into the meat of my leg. A strangled cry left my lips as I crumpled over.
DESERT HARE bites
you for 2hp of damage!
Immediately, I tried to log out as the pain hit. Something was seriously wrong. I knew that I shouldn’t be able to log out during combat, but I also shouldn’t be experiencing pain like this either. I hit the grayed out log out button. Nothing doing.
“You are in combat. You cannot log out until combat is resolved,” said the neutered voice of the game system. I didn’t need the motherfucking AI to let me know I was in combat as the rabbit whipsawed its head back and forth tearing a wider hole into my leg.
A combat log message informed me I had lost another 2 hp.
The pain was excruciating. So was the jolt of fear from having a monster rodent, pardon me, lagomorph, tearing up my inner thigh. I think even with the pain I might have been struck immobile from shock if the hare had been gnawing on my foot or arm. But somewhere in the deepest most primitive and survival-oriented part of my brain the horrifying idea that the rabbit would take a bite just a little farther up from my thigh drove me past the pain and into motion.
I grabbed the rabbit’s head with my left hand and started striking it with my right. I couldn’t get any leverage, strength or weight behind it from this angle. I got another notice that I had lost hp. I started trying to gouge its eyes out with more success. With a high pitched squeal, the rabbit jerked and pulled away as my thumb forced its way into its eye.
You have GOUGED the
DESERT HARE for 3 hp.
The DESERT HARE has
status effect HALF- BLIND
for: 45 seconds.
HALF-BLIND: Blindness on one side of a player, NPC or monster who uses binocular vision. Attack and defense from this side is lowered by 75%. Ranged attacks lose accuracy.
DESERT HARE bites
you for 2hp of damage
The rabbit backed away and I lost my grip. I scrambled up as best I could with one leg torn. The rabbit and I were both down about half of our health bars. We were about even on this front. The rabbit had the advantage in that it knew what it was doing. It had survived until now fighting for its life with tooth and claw. Without the combat mechanics working I was just a regular guy fighting a vicious animal with my bare hands and a torn up leg. Yet I had one tiny thing going for me, at least compared to most people I knew. I had dealt with pain, unlike almost everyone else I had ever met. In a world with instant nano-healing, where people spent most of their time in virtual worlds where life’s rough edges, at least the physical ones, could be sanded down by technology, I was unique in that I had the experience of fighting past pain. For the first time in my life, I was grateful for having broken my arm and spent months aching as I healed up.
The rabbit had its head cocked to one side at me due to the half-blind debuff. It was weaker now than it would be in just a few more seconds. This was only going to get harder if I waited.
“Fucking rabbit. Fucking AI. Fucking wager. Fucking Maya. Fucking Eastmans. Fucking Party. Fucking Game. Fucking world.”
With a scream, I launched myself at the hare.
The next few minutes were a blur of biting, clawing and high pitched squeals. Then there was everything the rabbit did. I can joke looking back at it, but in truth, it was a vicious fight. For a first encounter designed for beginner players to dip an easy toe into the waters, it was insanity. Afterwards, I lay on my back looking at my hp bar blinking in the red next to the corpse of the desert hare. I actually did bite it in the end.
I didn’t like my odds. If I was feeling pain in the Game, what would happen if I died in it? I remembered the old wives’ tale about how if you die in a dream you will truly die. Rea Silvia’s admonition about suffering came back to me. I needed to get a handle on what my zero luck stat meant for me and the wager.
I looked through the combat logs. There were notices of damage dealt and received. The hare’s damage varied. Looking at my hp log, I felt like the numbers were telling me something, but I couldn’t make it out. I had come within just a few health points of being offed by a beginner mob. Let’s have a quick look at the pittance that a Desert Hare is worth in exp and get to a town and equipped as fast as we can.
You have vanquished
DESERT HARE level 1!
100 EXP rewarded.
My God. 100 experience points for a level one mob was an astounding haul. Something was very off. I double checked but no. Desert Hare was a level one mob with an effective challenge level of 1/3. It should have been worth about 20 exp. Was this some sort of recompense for the pain? If no pain equals no gain could Rea Silvia or Amulius be trying to make it up to me for putting me through such an epic battle? No, that made no sense. Amulius would want to grind me down out of loyalty to the Eastmans, and I was distinctly convinced that Rea Silvia wouldn’t be able to override that with any arguments based on fairness or giving me a decent shot at winning the wager.
I thought about logging out now that my combat status was over. I knew who I could ask who might have some answers. Father dearest. But as soon as I thought about this I knew what he would tell me. You shouldn’t theorize out of one data point. At this point, I’d be coming to him with an anecdote about a killer rabbit. Time to collect
some data. And some scars.
CHAPTER FIVE
I was in good scientific company. Along with mice and rats, rabbits have been a staple of scientific experimentation for a long time. They are mammals with similar anatomy and organs to humans, but they breed faster and are small enough to react to things in time frames that generate useful data. So we as a species had long used them to learn what would happen to humans under similar conditions. Want to know if some new make-up would burn out your corneas before you sell it to women? Stick it in a rabbit’s eye. Now it was my turn. Karma seemed to have been stored up. All the vivisections, radiation, burns and other painful cruelties we had inflicted on lagomorphs and rodents in the name of increasing human understanding were apparently going to be paid back to one Miles Boone.
I eyed the second specimen of a desert hare I came across as I made my way down the road. The vicious monster was nibbling on some desert sage with one ear cutely flopped across its face. It didn’t fool me for a second.
I braced myself. I had another handful of stones. I was regretting not starting somewhere more developed or at least wooded so I could have a branch or something to keep the hare off of me. The stupid trees here were some primordial specimens that were too spongy and curved to be of any use as a weapon. I had a hypothesis to test that might stop me from suffering the fate of a carrot. I began my assault from farther away hoping that once again only a successful attack would trigger the mob’s aggro. I cocked my arm back and threw the rock with all my might. It missed by quite a bit. Despite cracking against another rock loudly within yards of the hare, the animal took no notice. It looked like I’d get one free first shot. I picked up my next rock and tried again. It took four tries from that distance to get a hit. Given that I didn’t have to focus on accuracy, I threw with all my strength.
You have successfully struck
DESERT HARE with
SMALL STONE for
2pt of damage!
1 dmg from Small Stone
+1 from focusing on Str/Dmg
8/10 health remaining
And so the hare and I began to collect data. It rushed me and I managed to hit it three out of the five times my greater starting distance gave me. I also managed to kick it once on its first lunge at me.
You have successfully kicked
DESERT HARE for
2 pt of damage!
4/10 health remaining
And then the hare got his chance. Yes, pain was still in full effect. That is much too mild a way of putting it but, honestly, unless you want to get yourself a three-pronged garden trowel and scrape it down the length of your arm, nothing I say about it will really let you know how the rabbit's clawing felt. The only small improvement from my last fight is that I was not bitten groin adjacent. It hurt like a son of a bitch but wasn’t quite as awful as the unexpected shock of my inner thigh being gnawed.
Science is grand and all but I had no desire to get more info than whatever I couldn’t avoid on the pain front. Along with the pile of stones for throwing, I had collected a larger rock with a jagged edge. I brought it down on the hare’s head. Once, twice, and on the third blow the fight was over.
You have vanquished
DESERT HARE level 1!
100 EXP rewarded.
There it was again. One hundred experience points. I was 20% of the way to the next level in just two encounters. The speed of my leveling was slowed down by the fact that it took me half an hour to recover and get myself psyched up enough to take on another hare. In the back of my mind, I knew that this was as easy as all this was going to go. Beginner hares are a mild torture. How was I going to handle the monsters I knew were coming? I couldn’t imagine what it was going to be like getting stabbed by an orc’s spear or being covered in the acid spit of a giant spider. But those worries had to be for another day. All I could do was kill more hares, get to some outpost of civilization, and then go see my father. Maybe he could help me figure out what was going on.
Thank god that resting outside of combat allowed healing as usual for the game. I wondered if I should have added more to my Con stat to speed up my regeneration even more.
By the time the town came into sight, I had killed nine of the desert hares. I had set myself the goal of keeping at this until I had made a level.
Here was the last hare I needed and just past it a sad little town. Rundown buildings lined the dirt road for a few hundred yards. The better places were adobe, but there were plenty of buildings with walls covered in poorly fitting wood. The local trees all had so many twists and turns that getting uniform lumber out of them must have been impossible.
With a final scream, I launched myself at the hare. I had discovered the hard way that attacking with a heavy rock at melee range, especially if I struck it in the head, made for a quicker kill with fewer attacks from the rabbit. God did I need armor. And a spear. But I finished him. I had done it.
Congratulations!
You have gained a level!
You have gained 1 skill point.
3,000 Exp to next level.
Picking up the tenth hare corpse, my scraped and exhausted hand put it in my bag. I stumbled into town laughing in triumph. I was level two! I had fought through pain and blood across a blasted landscape to make it here. I had hope. Today I had victory! I yelled my triumph.
A few players and NPCs had watched my battle from a rickety porch. An old prospector type with a massive bushy beard larger than the rest of his head took off his hat and scratched his dirty hair.
“Whoopee. You killed a rabbit. What do you want, a parade? Crazy dadburned fool.”
On that note, I logged off.
Reality and sensations disconnected and randomly associated for a bit. Lilac tastes like boredom apparently. But with another wrench, I was back in my pod in my apartment. Its shabby banality a comfort. Shadows of the pain and injuries I had suffered floated through my nervous system.
I wrestled myself out of the pod and grabbed myself some water and a meal pack. A lot of people prefer to do all their eating, drinking, and such inside the pods, but it costs nano to change the aesthetics unless it is natural to the game. So my options were basic meal pack in reality or eating raw desert hare. Then I went to the bathroom. Not to be too disgusting but my toilet connects back to the pod. Sewer systems are a thing of the past. You flush and it all heads into the pod. Waste not want not. It is all just biomass to the nano. I could have just gone right inside the pod. It is what happens while you are logged in after all. Is it still a social fiction if it is a lie you tell yourself to ignore how our waste systems work? Nothing has changed really. In the olden days waste was treated, and eventually fertilized some plant that was eaten by a cow or something and so on and so forth till a human ate it. Waste got cycled back to us eventually. This is just a lot more efficient and direct.
I took a memory stick and inserted it into the port on the pod and downloaded all the logs and details including tech specs from my roll up and first game session. I locked the pod and armed the surveillance on it as well as my door on the way out. It was time to go see my father. I had to see him because he didn’t allow connection to the web. He was convinced that letting information flow into your system was impossible to completely keep under control. Access was exposure. As the author of most of the architecture of our systems he should know. Still, it meant another cross-town trip for me.
I took the stairs down to street level a few at a time, barely seeing the steps and my hand floating down the banister. Jumping around another corner of a landing with long familiarity I clotheslined on someone’s arm and landed on my back, the air rushing out of my body. I had that moment of confusion and lack of pain that happens when you are suddenly hurt. Then I had that moment where you realize what just happened to you. Finally, I had that moment where your brain is convinced that it is the understanding that is bringing the pain. That if you could stay confused the pain wouldn’t come. Stupid brain. I couldn’t move, and my breath was caught in my ch
est.
That was when the kick landed in my ribs. I looked up, and three Eastman trainee cadets who lived in my building were around me. They wore the Eastman coat of arms as a patch on their shoulders. I knew them: Aabid, Marshall and another guy whose name I couldn’t recall. I’d met them a couple of time at events that Jude had dragged me to. It turns out I could breathe and move if it meant not getting kicked again. I scrabbled up against the stairs.
“Hey, Miles. Word is that Maya Eastman would like you to fall down a hole,” said Aabid.
“So, what? You going to suck up to her and throw me down one?” I gasped.
“Maybe,” he said nonchalantly.
“You aren’t worried about getting tagged for assault? You aren’t worried about…” I started to ask but then looked and noticed that the security camera in the stairwell was broken.
“Who is assaulting you? You fell down some stairs. We all saw it. Three witnesses to one who is known to have a grudge against the guilds.” They laughed.
“Maya Eastman isn’t going to thank you for interfering in her business,” I told them.
