by Deck Davis
Sera – Night Blade – Eliminated!
A black hole drifted across to Clyde before latching onto his face, blinding him. The jet-black matter seeped into his nostrils and his mouth. Clyde started to scream. He ran away from the battle, tripping over a hedge and face planting into a bed of roses. His screams rose as the black hole smothered him. He finally grew silent when it seeped into his mouth and down his throat.
Clyde – Battlemaster – Eliminated!
Vorm swung his axe again. He hit thin air. The redhead closed in on him, as did her silver-haired friend. I was just ten meters away now. My golden sword felt heavy in my hand. Adrenaline shot through me, and yet, the ten meters were nine meters too far for me to do anything. Vorm looked me in the eyes. He gave me one last, sorrowful look, before dropping his axe. A sword stabbed through his belly. The tip of a spear pierced his cheek. Next, a throbbing black hole found him, covered is skin, and smothered him, oozing into his every open orifice.
Vorm – Arcane Bowman – Eliminated!
And to think, when we’d left the warehouse, I’d been glad to be back with my team. Now, I was alone again—except for my enemies, of course. The redhead in front of me screamed as an arrow from team Wraith pierced her eyeball, scoring an unbelievably unlikely critical hit. here were four of Team Wraith, two of Team Bassinger and me remaining. I was alone with a golden sword and had been betrayed by my unit. That’s what I was sure it was now: a betrayal. They’d given up. Whatever this was, it had been planned.
As Team Wraith started to descend from their hilltop perch and as Team Bassinger walked toward me, I held my sword up and swallowed the phlegm in my throat. I tightened my grip on the hilt and wondered how many of them I could take out before I died.
Chapter Six
During all the trouble with Overseer Lucas, who was just plain Lucas back then, Dad gave me some advice. He told me, “Speak when you’re angry, and you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.”
Mom, on the other hand, had a different view on it. Her take was. “When you’re silent, you bottle a thunder inside.” That said a lot about how different my parents were, but as I grew up, I came to realize that both sayings were right; it was just about choosing the right time to follow them. This time, I took Dad’s advice. As soon as I awoke from the VBR and saw the thin gel layer capsule surrounding me, I pushed it to one side. I unlatched my oval avatar from the VBR connection. I grabbed my leather bag and my prot-coat.
I might have been angry, but I wasn’t an idiot. Prot-coats protected you from the sun in the same way a prot-layer did, except you could wear them, and they didn’t last anywhere nearly as long as a prot-layer. You had to replace them every few weeks. If you went outside on a clear day without a prot-coat or an application of prot-gel, you’d get a worse sunburn than Icarus.
As I navigated the corridors of the VBR center, a voice spoke from a loudspeaker. “And, please, let’s give a round of applause to our winners, Team Wraith!”
I left the building. I was dimly aware of someone shouting my name—maybe it was Vorm, maybe not—and I headed to Bernli’s transport hub. Given what a dust-filled, two-dime town this was, there was only one solarbus, and it wasn’t due for another hour. Right then, with barely-contained thunder rattling inside my chest, I couldn’t risk waiting. If Sera, Vorm, or Clyde showed up, I was liable to punch one of them. A couple of spectators looked my way as I headed to the private solarbike rank. There, I saw ten s-bikes lined up in a row, with a square display unit on the end. I pressed my thumb against the display.
50 bits deducted!
I uncoupled a bike from the row and sat on it. The seat wasn’t the comfiest, since whoever engineered it had been forced to sacrifice seat room for the small motor on the back. S-bikes stored sunlight as energy, supplementing your own peddling speed with a kinetic boost. Across open terrain, you could reach a speed of maybe twenty-five miles per hour, and the engines were a godsend for steep hills. The beauty of it all was that it was completely environmentally friendly, and it was cheap. Nearly every town and city had a row of solar bikes with a processor connected to the mainnet, so you could rent a bike in one town and return it in another.
It was a six-hour journey from Bernli to my house. I covered it in four, fueled by the adrenaline only pure anger can give you. When thoughts of Sera, Vorm, and Clyde surfaced in my head, I peddled faster. I tried to push myself to exhaustion, but the fury inside me supplied a never-ending source of energy. Don’t think about it yet, I told myself. Check the battle feed, and then decide what the hell happened.
I biked over the freeway to get home, knowing full well that it’d be free from traffic. Nobody risked driving down it anymore, as it was full of abandoned old-style cars and trucks, which were relics from another age. These were cars from a time when people didn’t care how much smog their vehicles pumped out as long as their cars looked good and had the right logo on the front. I guessed that, at some point, cars had started as a means to get from A to B but had morphed into something else—not just a utility, but a symbol, a way of showing how much money and prestige you had without having to be arrogant enough to just say it.
After the freeway, I hit a bridge. Underneath was a river of crystal-blue water. At the far end of the water, I saw the wheels of a turbine turning, sending frothy water crashing all around and harvesting the resulting energy for use elsewhere. The bridge itself was made of metal, though it gave uncomforting creaks as I biked over it. The rails to either side of me and the cables rising to the suspension were covered in a mossy-green overgrowth. Lots of man-made structures were like this now. Every abandoned building, bridge, and road was covered by weeds and moss. It was as if nature saw the things we abandoned and thought, ‘Okay, I’m taking that back.’
With the freeway and suspension bridge behind me, I finally hit grass—lots of it, neck-high and a deep, deep green. Once I got closer to home, I came to a path carved through it which Dylan and I took turns maintaining. I took this route and got home. Home was the only place I’d ever known, and the only one I’d wanted to know. It was a collection of yellow-stone buildings set miles away from the nearest town. My great-great-great grandfather, Neville, had built it, and every Wollenstein after that had put his own finishing touches on it. Neville’s son had added the insulating clay. The one after that had built the separate guest house that would one day be my father’s studio. The Wollenstein that followed him had installed the local prot-layer, meaning that we could unplug from the nearby town of Duisben and be totally self-sufficient.
Nowadays, I wasn’t so self-sufficient. Farming had never been Dad’s thing, and he’d sold most of the animals. From the outside, the Wollenstein ranch looked like an old-style house, where what counted for the newest technology would be a color TV. But inside, particularly in the guest house, it was a different story. The ranch housed a localnet VBR system and all the gadgets that had been hot when Dad was around.
I set the bike at the gate, knowing nobody would ever venture near enough to steal it, and I headed into the house. As soon as I stepped inside, a computerized voice spoke.
“Hello, Harry,” it said. “The weather today is sunny, with patches of rain. Suggested attire: T-shirt, jeans, and an umbrella. Would you care to hear the contents of your kitchen?”
This was an AI that Dad had installed years ago. It was called the Live Hive, and it was supposed to help with stuff like temperature control, though, sometimes, it took liberties. It was as though the damn thing was sentient. Dad had gotten sick of it and tried to disable it, but, somehow, the thing kept coming back.
“I’m good, thanks,” I told it.
“The time is 3:00 p.m. Would you like to hear recipe suggestions for dinner?”
“No, thanks.”
“Would you like—”
“Self-destruct, please, buddy,” I told it.
Silence. No more voices, no more offers of recipes. But no sound of it self-destructing, either. It’d be back the next time I w
alked into the house.
I switched the localnet on and heard processors whir to life. Above me, the roof started to retract, and sunlight shone in and hit the blue gridlines of my mini-solar panel in the corner of the room. We had a generator outside with energy stored in it, of course, but I liked to save it as an emergency backup.
There was a desk in front of me, with a plain white wall behind it. On the desk was a transparent tub. It was made from something that looked like plastic but was completely renewable and non-toxic. Fastik, some people called it, though I’m sure it had a more scientific-sounding name.
I opened the tub. I reached inside and took a handful of the clear goo. The sudden shock of cold made me curl my fingers. I rubbed them together to heat the gel a little, then reached across to the wall in front of me. I started to spread the goo in a square shape, roughly four meters by four. Then, I took two thumbtack-sized connectors and stuck one in the gel and one on the localnet processor. The gel on the wall turned light blue. Small text and numbers flooded it, indicating that the boot sequence was in effect.
After that, I linked my avatar dock to the system using another thumb-tack connector, and I set my avatar in it. Certain that it was connected and syncing, I left the room. It would take a while for my avatar to catch up to the mainnet, given the connection out here ran on a decades-old net infrastructure, and I didn’t want to sit there watching a progress bar.
Out in the open air, away from my technology, I couldn’t help thinking that there was something deeply wrong about the way we’d latched onto the planet like leeches. We’d sucked the place dry, and then we’d held on tight as it tried to shake us off. I mean, it all just felt a little strange. Out here in the country air, all I could see were grass fields with the stalks swaying in the wind, the odd bee buzzing from flower to flower, clouds drifting lazily overhead. Everything was so natural and predictable, to a point.
Then, I lifted my wrist up and saw the two square-shaped grooves in my arm, one of which was empty now that I’d removed my avatar chip. There was nothing natural about an empty space cut into a person’s forearm, nothing natural about the obsession with VBRs and bits, and nothing wholesome about the betrayal from the assholes that were supposed to be on your team…
I took a breath. There was no point in sweating yet. My avatar was syncing up. As soon as it was done, I’d be able to see what damage had been done to it after dying in Bernli, and I’d be able to pore over the battle feed and find out just what the hell had happened.
Deep breaths… Deep breaths… Wholesome country air…
As I told myself that, I heard the sound of rocks scraping. It was not unlike the noise the serpent had made when it attacked me in Autumn Steampunk. For a second, it actually set me on edge, before I reminded myself that digital serpents didn’t follow you into the real world. I was pretty sure I knew the source of the noise. Sure enough, as soon as I took a few steps forward and looked in the direction of it, something thudded into me. I was used to it by now, and years of the same ritual had developed my calf and thigh muscles enough that I could stay on my feet.
A bulky, over-excited, farm-yard-smelling-shape put its giant paws on me and then licked its rough tongue across my face.
“I’m happy to see you, too, boy,” I said, finding openings between the lashings of a tongue.
I stepped back and looked at my pal, Bennie. Bennie was a Kafka wolfhound, a big mass of muscle and fur that was taller than me when he stood on his hind legs and put his paws on my shoulders. As he leaned toward me and slurped his tongue on my face, I avoided his wild licks and saw the right side of his body, where large patches of his fur were missing, showing a mass of scars. Kafka wolfhounds were bred for fighting—not for fighting people, but for fighting each other. In towns far away from the reach of the government, unscrupulous breeders stood around oval pits and bet bits on two wolfhounds fighting one another. They screamed for blood, yelling at their own wolfhound to tear the other one to pieces.
For decades, the Wollenstein family had made a practice of adopting the wolfhounds that were abandoned when they were either too old to fight or were found to have too soft a nature to be bet on in a pit. It started with my great-grandfather, Cosma Wollenstein, and then his son and his grandson (my father) had carried on the tradition. Now, with Dad gone, the responsibility had fallen on me.
We had five wolfhounds that lived on the Wollenstein property, and Bennie was the oldest. I know you’re not supposed to have favorites in this kind of thing, but there was no point hiding it. Bennie was my guy. That big, stinking, lump of fur was my best friend—or, my beast friend. That would have been a better way of putting it. I pulled Bennie into a tight hug, and for a second, I forgot about the VBR. I forgot about my avatar syncing up on its dock. The sting of betrayal left me for a fleeting moment as I breathed in Bennie’s unique dog smell.
Then I heard more paws scratching across the dirt. I looked up to see the four other wolfhounds sprinting toward me, the excitement on their faces making their eyes seem wild. Someone who wasn’t used to them would have been terrified at the sight of a pack of wolfhounds running toward them, but I knew what softies they were.
Behind the animals, his face red and puffy as he tried to keep up with them, ran Dylan. Dylan was a wiry teen with bushy, brown hair and gangly legs. He was holding up a leather sack that I knew would be full of treats for the hounds.
“Slow down, damn it!” he shouted.
When Dylan reached me, he held his hand out. I gripped his hand and shook it. When we stopped, Dylan scratched the side of his head.
“I, err…saw the fight,” he said. “I just wanted to say—”
“Come on. Let’s not talk about it yet. My AV’s syncing, and I’ll know more then. Right now, I don’t want to think about those assholes. How are the pups?”
“Retch was being an…an…an…”
Sometimes, Dylan struggled to find words. He wasn’t slow or anything. In fact, Dylan’s problem was one of concentration. Sometimes, when he was talking, his brain leaped two stages ahead in the conversation, and he found himself wondering what he had been trying to say originally.
“…So, I started with the training,” he said, apparently unaware he’d missed a beat in what he was telling me. “Y’know, from the books? The guy who wrote them, Crosby Hawthorne, really knows his stuff. I used some of the tricks when Retch was taking food from Bennie’s dish, and y’know what? He stopped straight away!”
Dylan Fourleaf had been living on the Wollenstein ranch since he was ten. Dad had taken him in after Dylan’s family, who traveled the country in an animal-free circus, was murdered by a roving band of bit raiders. This was the reason for Dylan’s mind-skips. When the raiders had attacked, one of them had beaten Dylan’s skull with a crowbar and left him for dead. Forty-eight hours of surgery later, the doctors had managed to plant a chip in Dylan’s mind that held back some of the brain damage he would otherwise have sustained. The trade-off was that prot-layers sometimes interfered with it, messing with his thoughts.
Dad and Mom had fostered a few kids when I was younger. Mostly, I got on with the kids who came to stay with us, except for one: Lucas. Even the thought of Lucas made me grit my teeth. I shook the thought away and focused on Dylan, the gangly kid who Mom and Dad had liked so much they’d adopted him. I smiled at him.
“You’re doing good,” I told him. “It’s obvious how much Bennie and Retch and the others love you. I’m a little jealous, honestly. How’s the prot-layer?”
Dylan sucked in his cheek. A dark cloud passed his usually cheery face. “Went down to twenty-five percent this mornin’. Then the solars kicked in and… Hey, guess what trick I taught Retch?”
There he went again, his brain skipping ahead to another conversation. I always imagined that Dylan’s mind was like the old paper books that Clyde loved so much and that, sometimes, when Dylan tried to turn a page, he accidentally flipped over three or four.
“Dial it back,” I told him.
“What’s the prot-layer at right now?”
“Twenty-four,” he said.
That was not good. Our prot-layer was getting worse by the day. The innovation of gel-tech, the same gel substance that I had used to spread a TV display on my wall, had made it affordable to install a prot-layer on an individual house, rather than having to live under an industrial-sized one in a government-sponsored town. The problem was that ours was decades old, and I didn’t have the bits to replace it. It was a disaster waiting to happen.
It wasn’t that we’d have nowhere to go; if the prot-layer failed, we could always move to the nearby town of Duisben. They’d let us live there. The issue was that there was no way the town would let us move the wolfhounds there. Most people distrusted fighting dogs after a media campaign had highlighted every single instance in which a wolfhound had turned on its owner. They neglected to mention the fact that the owners were breeding the beasts to fight and that they’d keep dozens of them cramped up in sheds barely big enough for two, or that they’d withhold food from them until the animals were ravenous, or that they’d whip them with frozen gel-lashes and turn their gentle natures violent. Under the right circumstances, you could turn any animal or person on earth feral.
