EverRealm: A LitRPG Novel (Level Dead Book 1)

by Jake Bible

  “Four will work. Let’s do this thing. Piece of cake.”

  “Initiating sync.” Jill switched on her laptop controls. “Stand by for the feed.”

  “Roger.” Collin squinted behind the visor of his Mindbender Rift headset, as the choppy video stream began to flicker before his mind’s eye. He fought to control his heartrate and breathing before Takashi had a chance to point it out. Nausea passed within a minute or so, but the psychosomatic effects of a deep dive into a host’s stream of consciousness could be more serious than a case of vertigo. In Collin’s opinion, it was worth enduring a little neurological turbulence for a chance to rocket beneath the waves at fifty kilometers per hour inside the hijacked mind and body of a dolphin.

  “Testing streams, one through four,” Jill said, as she prepared to switch feeds from one armed dolphin to the next.

  Collin relaxed his mind, allowing Jill to hack the implanted network inside his head. It always felt strange being out of control, but he trusted her. Jill knew her way through the whorls of his brain perhaps better than he did. Collin grimaced as she shut down one relay and activated the next, derailing him from one dolphin’s sensory stream to another. There was no transition between subjects, just a jarring drop between different bodies. “Check two, Disco. Check three, Moxie …”

  “Weapons check, one through four.”

  Each of the team members had received the same cerebral nanobot implants, the same headset, and the roughly same amount of initial training, as dolphin pilots, but none had taken to the water half as naturally as Collin. As a result, Collin was nominated to be the sheepish star of their show. There didn’t appear to be any love lost amongst the others, since each of his teammates had openly expressed their own reasons for relinquishing him the spotlight. J.J. was a physical person, who was more comfortable with the controls of an aircraft in his hands. Jill didn’t have the stomach for deep streaming, and Takashi’s ocular implants inhibited the visual stream, so he was flying blind.

  “You ready to take some pirates to school, Aquaman?”

  Collin clicked his tongue, and gave Takashi a thumbs-up. He always maintained a professional level of modesty, but the truth was that whenever Collin was dropped inside the head of a dolphin, the whole experience felt wonderfully natural. He believed that the source of his strength in the streaming seat was his emotional connection to the dolphins. They were more than test subjects to Collin, who enjoyed playing amongst their pod until his hands and feet shriveled into prunes. Being a lifelong introvert, some of the best friends he’d ever made were those dolphins. When a training exercise was over, shutting down the cerebral sync was just the worst. From the point that Jill killed those relays, and yanked the plug on his ocean world, his inglorious return to an awkward human body felt like a small death. There were times when he thought—and he never thought it too loudly—that he might’ve even been born the wrong species.

  “Looks like we’ve got a couple of inflatable boarding crafts grappled to the bulwarks of the damaged vessel,” J.J. said. “We need to take out those chain gunners first, and then focus all our firepower on the inflatables.”

  “What about the sub?” Takashi asked.

  “Looks like a millennial-era model. Double-hulled Russian, if I don’t miss my guess.”

  J.J. never missed his guesses when it came to being a military geek. For having never enlisted in the armed forces, it sometimes seemed incredulous that J.J. should know so much about the military. His expertise occasionally invited teasing from uniformed soldiers and sailors, until they heard the story of his father’s sacrifice during the End War, and learned—oftentimes, the hard way—how that particular subject was a can of worms best left unopened.

  “I’m saying—can we blow it up?”

  “No. No torpedoes. We’re authorized to kill pirates, not sink subs.”

  “Major bummer.” Takashi narrowed his bionic eyes to burning slits.

  Takashi was just eager. Like the rest of them, he was dying to show the Allied Navy the full power of the NEWT’s destructive capability. Their pod of killer dolphins could sink that Russian sub with no more difficulty than if it had been a child’s bathtub toy. However, today’s mission was a bit of a balancing act. Drones were everywhere, recording everything, and the last thing that any of them wanted was to wind up in some viral video compilation of military fails, right before losing their jobs.

  “First target in sight,” Collin said.

  The NEWTs quieted. All heads swiveled to the monitor that displayed Collin’s perspective. Green abysms were rushing by, as Collin maneuvered Rowdy’s sleek form alongside the massive submarine. Everyone was surely tingling with the same temptation. Sending that hulking machine to the ocean bottom with one well-placed torpedo would’ve been just as easy as jabbing a sleeping hog in the butt.

  “Oxygen levels?”

  “Seventy percent,” Jill replied.

  The well-being of his dolphin was a top priority, because Collin didn’t need to wonder what it felt like to be cerebrally hijacked. Through training simulations, he’d found himself on the receiving end of that transaction more times than he cared to remember. Having your mind commandeered by an outside presence could be a pretty terrifying experience. You had to learn to trust your phantom puppeteer to bring you up whenever you needed a breath, and to release their control whenever the stress levels in your bloodstream indicated that you were having a panic attack. The big difference between dolphin and human hosts was that the dolphins never understood what was happening, or grasped the danger into which they were being thrust.

  “Alright,” Collin said, “I’m bringing Rowdy up into firing position.”

  “Permission to fire, when ready,” J.J. replied.

  Trained dolphin programs in the military were nothing new. Naval forces worldwide had dabbled for more than a century with the notion of transforming the so-called clowns of the sea into living torpedoes. In the end, these earlier programs all fell to the wayside when trained dolphins proved inferior to war machines. Dolphins didn’t always follow orders to the letter, and they liked to play around. That was the root of the prejudice that the NEWT program struggled to overcome, despite the fact that their fantastic spin on an old idea was unlike anything that had ever been imagined before.

  “Engaging weapon.” Collin flipped the left switch on the handgrip. A red circle in the top-left corner of the viewfinder indicated that the dorsal cannons were armed.

  “Stand by for shooter mode,” Jill said.

  The view in his mind’s eye was constricted to bobbing crosshairs. Paralyzed beneath the surface, the dolphin’s body was being tossed by the waves. That was a situation that could make a pilot become seasick in a hurry.

  “Activating stabilizers.” Collin closed his eyes, as he flipped a toggle on the handset that closed eight circuits to mercury switches in the lining of the dolphin’s vest. Pneumatic valves came to life, and leveled the animal’s body with precisely timed jets of seawater. Collin opened his eyes and blinked. Up through the green curtain, atop the black wall of steel, perched a pirate high in a machine gunner’s nest. “Locking onto target.”

  The big difference between the NEWT program and anything preceding it was that the NEWT dolphins weren’t trained for combat. Hardly the living torpedoes of the old days, these guys enjoyed the better part of their lives swimming around in the wild, just being dolphins. Their training was limited to responding to coordinates beamed to receptors in the prefrontal lobes of their brains. If they obeyed, and followed a beacon to its destination, they earned some playtime with Collin, and a fish snack. They seemed to genuinely enjoy the human interaction. Highly intelligent creatures, they often towed Collin back to the boat by the little handles on the sides of their vests, as though they understood that boats were where human beings belonged, and not paddling around in the open sea.

  Collin twitched when a wet and velvety tongue began lapping at the knuckles of his left hand. Just a little bit distracting becau
se, at the moment, Collin was pretending to be a dolphin. Dolphins didn’t have hands, nor did they have pet golden retrievers, beneath the sea. Collin released his controls for a moment to tousle his best buddy’s hair. Good dog, but very bad timing. “Could somebody please call the dog?”

  “You kidding me?” J.J. was not a fan of their furry mascot. “Hotspot, kennel! Now!”

  “Easy, J-man. He’s our good luck charm.” Collin couldn’t see the dog loping away, but he felt the swish of a tail against his arm, and he heard the chuffing breaths and jingling tags fading into the back of the hovercraft, where his kennel and a few favorite toys were stashed. Hotspot didn’t have much choice but to obey, because the dog knew that if he ignored an order, his phantom puppeteer would snatch hold of his strings, and override his doggy will. Hotspot was the team’s first test subject. The dog was equipped with the same cache of cerebral nanobots as the dolphins, not to mention a few bonus items.

  “One day, I’m going to hack into that dog’s head and walk him right off a pier,” J.J. said.

  “Don’t do it,” Collin replied. “Nobody hacks into Hotspot but me. You’ll be very sorry if you try. Trust and believe.”

  “Fine,” J.J. said. “I don’t even want to know.”

  “We’ve got a problem,” Takashi said, swiveling over to the main radar screen.

  “What is it?”

  “Got a blip coming in hard and fast, six o’clock.”

  J.J. seized the periscope controls, and swung the topside camera one-hundred-eighty degrees. “Looks like a Mark VII special ops craft,” J.J. said. “We’ve got SEALs on the scene.”

  “You’ve got to be joking,” Collin said.

  “Wish I was.”

  “What the heck are they doing out here?” Jill slammed her fists against her armrests. “This is our mission!”

  “Probably deployed from field command in Shanghai. Someone in the SWCC is losing confidence in us.”

  “Like they ever had any to begin with.”

  “We’ve got no order to abort,” J.J. said. “Carry on.”

  “We must be working cooperatively with the big dogs,” Takashi said.

  “Not cooperating,” J.J. replied, lowering his voice to a growl. “Competing.”

  “Then what the heck are we waiting around for?” Jill shouted. “Collin? Take your shot, dude.”

  Collin thumbed the zoom control until the face of the chain gunner filled his sights. He felt his breath catch in his throat, as though he’d just swallowed a bug. Pneumatic stabilizers kept adjusting until the deadly crosshairs were locked and floating on the target as a bright red dot, right between the girl’s eyes. Collin could see the sunlight in her eyelashes, the freckles on the bridge of her nose. She was maybe sixteen.

  “Collin? You good?”

  He heard J.J.’s question, but he wasn’t quite ready to answer. He needed a moment. Pirates were supposed to be grizzled men with missing limbs, scarred faces, and tangled beards. Not young girls with expressive eyes that stared right back into his soul.

  No matter how many hundreds of exercises he’d completed against inanimate targets, no amount of training could have prepared him for the moment when he’d have to pull the trigger on a living human being. Collin wasn’t a hardened soldier, after all. None of them were. They were a bunch of civilians—nerds, to be exact—with a government contract and a gamer’s enthusiasm for engaging one another in geeky battles. However, there was nothing the least bit redeeming about shooting a young girl right in the face.

  “Collin? Hello?”

  “I c—” Collin said, choking on what felt like the worst word in his vocabulary. He was in way over his head, and he realized that now. The NEWT program was better off in the hands of trained soldiers than privateering civilians, just as their opposition in the SWCC had been arguing, all along.

  “Alright, dolphin time’s over, buddy. Move over.”

  Collin felt J.J.’s hands snatch hold of his headset, as Jill yanked the plug on his out-of-body experience. His arms felt too weak to resist. The strong cocktail of blood and adrenaline that once filled his head had gushed down into the pit of his stomach, and he felt like he was going to be sick. When he opened his eyes, Collin found himself surrounded by a very disappointed team.

  J.J. hauled him out of the pilot’s seat. He pulled the Mindbender Rift over his own head, and adjusted the visor. “Jill, patch me in.”

  “It’s too late,” Takashi said. “SEALs beat us to the punch.”

  Collin staggered over to the periscope, and grabbed hold of the sweaty controls. He did so more for physical support than to be of any further assistance to the mission. However, what he saw in the viewfinder snapped him back into character. Through the spraying wake off the bow of the SEAL gunboat, there was a sneering face that he knew all too well. It was none other than the spearhead of their military opposition, a warrant officer and deep-sea specialist who harbored a special kind of hatred toward the NEWTs. He’d managed to block them from training anywhere near his jurisdiction, which was here, in the heart of the Yellow Sea. A bad situation had just gotten a whole lot worse.

  “Mad Hatter’s on board,” Collin said.

  “You serious?” Takashi gaped up from his radar screen.

  The foreboding presence of Miles Bent in Shanghai’s field command base was akin to a rolling thunderhead through that labyrinth of corridors. While Bent disliked civilians working for the military, he particularly despised the NEWTs, because their techy approach danced smartly around those primal confrontations that epitomized his more glorified and straightforward style of combat. Over the years, the so-called “Mad Hatter” had leveraged every ounce of his clout in the SWCC in an effort to crush the NEWT program out of existence. Rumor had it he’d earned his nickname by decorating his barracks walls with the hats of vanquished enemies, and rumor further had it that he’d cleared a spot on his trophy wall once he decided to make dismantling their program his pet project.

  “Topside, give me a visual,” J.J. said. “Dolphin’s moved out of position.”

  “I can’t see anything,” Collin replied. The Mark VII had swerved right into his line of sight. The gunboat fishtailed back and forth, as if the pilot’s intention was to block his view of the situation.

  “Jill, switch my feed. Rowdy’s gone too deep.”

  “Pepper’s in a good position,” Takashi said.

  “Switching feeds.”

  “Bingo. Pepper’s on. Got a visual on multiple targets. We’ve got pirates in the water, boys and girls. Arming cannons.”

  “They’ve spotted the SEAL gunboat.” Collin zoomed past the oscillating bow of the Mark VII to steal a glimpse of his teenaged girl, who was swiveling her roaring chain gun right onto the SEALs. No hesitation. Looked as though she’d been shredding people with flying lead for the better part of her young life. Collin began to feel a bit like a schmuck. It occurred to him that if any SEALs were wounded or killed in action on account of his failure to take her out, then that was going to be something rather sour to chew on for the rest of his life. The SEALs returned fire. Flames spewed from the Mark VII’s deadly armaments, chopping the corridor of seawater between the vessels into foam.

  “Something’s wrong,” J.J. shouted. “I can’t see!”

  Collin pulled away from the scope, and gawped at the view on the overhead monitor. Torrents of bubbles spiraled up through a swirling crimson cloud. Round and round, the camera spun. Round and round. The glowing orb of the sun waned faintly with every pass until the monitor faded into blackness.

  “Switch feeds!” J.J. gripped the sides of his pilot’s chair as though he’d actually felt the spray of bullets that had ripped through his dolphin’s body. His stricken reaction was shared by every member of the team. This situation had somehow been overlooked in all of their training exercises. They’d failed to ask themselves what would happen to a pilot, if a dolphin was killed while the two were cerebrally synched. “Hurry! God, I’m going down!”

 
; “You’re right here, buddy. Don’t believe it.”

  “Takashi? Which dolphins are still with us?” Jill’s voice was cracking.

  “I can’t tell. They’re all in there, but …”

  “Switch my feed!”

  “Switching to Moxie.”

  J.J. arched his back and screamed. He clawed at the visor of the Mindbender Rift headset, as though whatever sight was being streamed into his brain was actually burning his eyes. The overhead monitor was a cauldron of fire and foam. At the red heart of the inferno leered a hellish face, with lips peeled back in a joker’s grin. All the dolphins were smiling, too, even as they burned. That was the irony of dolphins. Like sad clowns, they always appeared to be smiling, and they were wearing those false smiles to the grave.

  “They thought those pirates in the water were us,” Collin said. He felt like he was going to be sick. “They thought it was time to play.”

  “They’re burning alive!” Jill began to cry. “Do something!”

  “There’s nothing we can do!” Ripping the headset away from his eyes, J.J. slammed the technology against the floor. He leapt up from the pilot’s seat, palms pressed to his forehead, and stormed off in the direction of the cabin. As big and intimidating as he was, the former boxer had one of the softest hearts on the team.

  Collin left the periscope. He strode up to the window, and stared in horror at the raging horizon. Swarms of drones spiraled like motes of ash over a flaming sea, where the submarine was slipping beneath the waves. Everything on the surface was left to burn. The bad guys had escaped. The dolphins were gone. The Mad Hatter had won.

  “It’s over. We blew it,” Takashi said, shutting down his hologram displays with a single wave of his hand. “The NEWTs are finished.”

  “They never saw us. No one did.” Jill thumbed tears from her eyes. “The world never even knew that we were here.”