Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  Our man, who I’m gonna assume is Nickels himself, though the footage really does stray away from showing his face, another indicator for yours truly that it wasn’t real, because that’s a thing game devs do these days, right, they totally keep the face hidden so you can feel like you’re the badass … anyways, our man moves in to deal with these truly old-school horror movie style weirdoes and … well.

  You’ve seen it. I ain’t gonna replay it because even though this is a webcast, I’m still a gainfully employed news reporter and I don’t want to upset the bosses more than I usually do, so Reddit or Vine or 4chan or whatever the footage for yourself. The damage the three freaks take is beyond normal, especially in light of the fact that they take those hits and keep on coming back for more. And the protagonist? His moves are sick.

  I remember sitting there, watching it over and over again, the curious cat in me freaking out, equally convinced I was mental in the head for watching snuff and certain down to the DNA that what I was watching was somehow fake. It was hard going, and after a while, I gave up. Flat out threw my hands in the air and gave up. If this is fake, I thought, whoever did the post-processing is a genius. Hands down the best in the entire world, because even though the damage incurred and the moves laid down are absolutely impossible for normal people to endure, the up-close-and-grotesquely-personal flyby footage after everyone’s dead … well. Something closer to what you’d find on an autopsy table than anything you might find in a video game or a horror movie, right? Realistic to the point of making us all feel dirty and sick, like we were somehow involved in a crime that we would surely hear about in the morning when we rose from our cocoons, right?

  Wrong. So wrong.

  Instead of warrants issued for someone over at the Nickels compound, we’re greeted with a press release issued by the man’s lawyer, the reputable-ish Benny Wall, a statement which essentially allowed every single gamer gurl and guy that spent the night freaking quietly the fuck … sorry, sorry, KRON4 … but this is what you get when you splash into the web hoping to stay relevant … anyways. The press release gave all of us a chance to heave one massive sigh of relief, am I right? Test footage from a video game, the man says. Servers were hacked, he says. Playable demo, he says. Wait a minute and it’ll be available for DL, he says.

  So. Like every gamer out there, I am now full of ants in the pants because if the demo is anywhere near as realistic as the hacked footage, we’re going to suddenly be in the future. Now, because I really am a reporter, mom, I spent the rest of the day on the web, on so, so, so many forums and chatrooms you guys, I am sick of all of you, talking with and mocking everyone and their opinions. So, so many opinions.

  "First, let's deal with the download size, which had half the internet trying to murder the other half. It's minimal, as in 'are you serious right now'. Weighing in at less than five gigs, the local instal files gave everyone the impression that all we'd be seeing is some kind of crummy cutscene action with some heavily compressed video files. Wrong, but more on that in a bit. The other problem with local filesize being so small means that you're looking at Diablo 3 always online crap, which drives people who hate being online all the time bonkers, but in this instance, I'm going to give it a pass because come on you guys, if you haven't played the demo yet, you really should because come on you guys, it's totally worth it, even if you do hate being online for solo play."

  "Second on the menu, we're gonna talk about hardware and software requirements. According to the site, you can use damned near any OS the Universe has to offer except for those we usually find on most tablets, but if you're a super nerd, you already know about Facetiming that stuff. Personally, I'd avoid running this demo on Windows 10 or anything Apple related, because screw those guys. Anyways. Rig minspec is flat out middle of the road, which just boggles my mind because reasons I will get to in a minute or six. You could literally run this game with decent framerate and all those fancy dancy things like god rays and occlusion and whatnot on your five year old PC if you really wanted to, but since I am a Master Race guy I ran this on my beast of a machine and goddamn. I did test run this demo on every one of the PC builds I have here at home, which is not in my parent's basement, and the claims are rock solid. Framerate gets choppy once you get under 4gigs of RAM and if you really don't have a PCI-e card with at least 2 gigs onboard, I suggest you stop sucking because if you're turning off shadows and stuff, why are you trying to be cool when we all know you're an Angry Birds nerd. The one thing that's non-negotiable is your connection. If you don't have the highest of high-speeds, you are not playing this game. Changetech's insistence that all the sourcefiles and graphics and all that remain on their servers and their servers alone means that if you're trying this on anything less than fiber optics, you will want to kill yourself. But you guys, it's worth it."

  "Third, let's look at the graphics. Now, a lot of the time, when stuff like this gets leaked, it's usually those boring-ass cutscenes, right? Devs sink a load of time and effort into making those elements as realistic and amazing as possible, and then spare roughly three-quarters of a wet fart on doing the same for the actual ingame play. Lookin' at you, Fairville Gameplay Guys. You suck, but this game doesn't. Wait. Where was I. Right. Gameplay. Here's where I've got to go back to the first point for a secco; minimal local instal files generally indicates the usual low-rez bullcrap, but not in this case. Also, I don't know what the hell kind of servers Changetech's got going on, but summinabatch, because holy crap you guys, the gameplay is exactly the same as the cutscene at the end!! Squee. I mean that. Seriously. Completely one hundred percent squee. I can see why Changetech … he needs to get a name for the game dev side because that is stupid and I can't say it anymore … insists that you have fiber optic or better for play. There isn't a single stutter, frame skip or screen tear. This demo looks like you are in the real world. It boggles the mind. Okay. Enough of that. Onto the physics engine.

  Never have I ever seen an engine like this in my entire life of playing games and I for sure totally started on Pong. I've been here since the beginning and the physics … they are out of this world. There's no setting. You are on ultra from the beginning and just like everything else about this demo, there is no stutter. Everything is destroyable. EVERYTHING IS DESTROYABLE. Everything. Well, maybe not everything, because the amount of freedom is limited to the lower two levels of the parkade. The moment you hit the third, you fall into the unskippable cutscene that had us all believing this Nickels guy spent the evening murdering three weird freakin' people. But as he proved … he didn't. Or, he did, then spent forever coding this impossibly awesome game. I don't even care … oh wait, the weapons and actual gameplay. Hah.

  Okay, so here … here we get into real heavy waters. The man's included the usual standard fare you find in games over the last ten years. Perfectly modeled, excellently executed. So boring. Anyone who says different doesn't know what the hell they're talking about because we have all been playing the same games with the same weapons for about a bazillion years. In addition to those, though, he's included a handful of lasers, some weird cluster grenades that spread out over a distance of anywhere from ten to a hunderd feet, then when the laser lines are broken, all the 'nades zoom to that location. So dope. Other things that look like those killer balls from Phantasm but, like, eat matter and shit … sorry KRON4 … shoot deathfire … really, there's like eighty weapons all told, and each one of them has a unique design and shoot pattern, and they interact with the physical environment in their own ways. So badass.

  Lemme tell you about what's amazing, though. I noodled around in the localfiles and I found indicators that the man's going to be designing this puppy to play in VR mode, which really opens it up for the melee component, which I'm gonna…"

  ***

  "You did all that in twenty-four hours." Rommen watched the nerd guy's recorded footage of his incredibly detailed test run of the demo Garth had designed.

  "Well, no, not exactly." Garth rubbed his eyes an
d wished he could keep rubbing them for a million years. They ached that special kind of ache you could only get when you've been awake and engaged in serious work for stupidly long amounts of time. “I mean, yeah, I was like, busy the whole twenty-four hours doing stuff, but not all of it was directly related to the video game. Hadda … no, you know what, no. I kept busy.”

  “Let me rephrase.” Rommen’s eyes roved around the private offices that Garth maintained in the bottom level of the facility that was coming together faster than expected. As an initiate into the cabal and leader of the band of monkeys that’d tied themselves to Garth’s meteoric rise –either from an interest to see how weird shit got or out a desire to make sure that the alleged fight coming was kept to a dull roar- he was now officially one of a very small handful of people allowed to be down here.

  Rommen couldn’t remember where he’d read or heard the sentiment about offices and bedrooms being a window into the soul of the person who worked or slept there, but he felt it had to be truer than ever when visiting Nickels in the office: it was … weird.

  From virtually the moment the workers had slapped up the last wall and the pain had dried, Garth had installed a series of those ridiculously large, stupidly thin televisions, upon which played a never-ending stream of cartoons, movies and televisions shows, all of them primarily focused on science fiction, fantasy, horror, a wide variety of martial arts movies ranging from Jackie Chan to Donny Yuen, or anime.

  There was, it seemed, very little room in Garth’s life for comedy or drama.

  Every time –as now- Rommen had come down to speak with the man about this or that, one of Garth’s eyes would be trained on one of those screens while he continued working on … whatever it was that the man was up to.

  Other than the endless stream of stuff Rommen had little patience for –he was seriously considering reading Birchcreek in so he could come down here and deal with Nickels, because the burly Aussie enjoyed this kind of crap more than an adult male who’d served in combat should- there were also the machines, quietly and quickly whirring this way and that, robot arms deftly assembling aerogel cubes filled with what was either circuitry or solid metal. His employer had thus far avoided or evaded answering specific questions concerning just what it was that he was building with such frenzy, but Rommen was committed to discovering the cubes' purpose. A box off to one side held nearly fifteen of the mysterious things and once this latest batch was complete, the yield would be an even twenty.

  Rommen didn’t like the cubes. He didn’t know why, but looking at them made him … uneasy. They represented something he felt he should understand, but couldn’t, and that was the kind of feeling that no soldier should ever experience. At least they weren’t dangerous. Well, he hoped they weren’t dangerous.

  The Securicorps officer also couldn’t shake the feeling that this was Garth’s modus operandi.

  Then … then there were the computers. Also, always on. Always doing something. Dozens of them now, displaying stock trades and sports games and –again- some streaming shows that simply weren’t available for consumption through any of the cable or satellite providers; every now and then, Garth’s hands would move from the keyboard operating the main station he sat at for long hours of the day and they’d fly across one of the dozen mini-boards arrayed around him, and one of those other computers would suddenly start doing something else.

  If bedrooms and offices were windows into the soul, Garth Nickels soul was one forged from chaos and hammered into order.

  Rommen was going to need to take a long walk around the perimeter of the site when he was done. He could tell. Fresh air. Fresh air was the key.

  “Waiting.” Garth found another review of the ‘demo’ and started watching. So far, so good.

  “Ah. Right.” Rommen adjusted his stance and resumed. “How did you do this in twenty-four hours?”

  “I don’t sleep.” Garth responded blandly. “I … once slept for a really long time and since then, it … I don’t do it unless I feel like it. So I keep busy, doing stuff. Tryina save America here, right? Can’t really hire any science monkeys to bang quarks together alongside me, now, can I? Don’t want anyone too close to the event-horizon science type stuff I’m whipping up. Hell, only reason you and some of the others are allowed down here when I’m working is because you couldn’t explain what the fuck you saw if your lives depended on it. No offence.”

  Surprisingly, Rommen didn’t take offence. The man was right. What could he possibly say that wouldn’t also make him out as a complete idiot? ‘I saw a bunch of aerogel cubes with stuff in them and he watches a lot of cartoons with large breasted cartoon women. Oh, and lots of movies where people invariably die. And computers.’ “None taken.”

  “So what actually brings you down here, Rommen?” Garth massaged his eyeballs again and broke contact with the main monitor. The game playing side of the Internet was precisely as enamored with the demo he’d unleashed upon the world as he’d hoped, ranking the brief playability as high as they possibly could. This preliminary exposure to what he had to offer would stand him good stead when he released the enhanced reality video game later in the month.

  Eventually, the bright and shiny would wear off and serious nerds who disliked not knowing things were going to start trying to dissect the code. Hack into the server cube. That sort of thing. When they started failing, they’d simply ramp up their efforts, moving from low-level hackery to mid-level and so on and so on until they were using codes and programs ordinarily reserved to burrow their way into secret government facilities and, like, Area 51.

  When that failed … it was going to be all kinds of social engineering and idiots trying to break into the offices to find the actual hardware hosting the demo and all that kind of fun stuff, which was precisely what he wanted, because odds were by the time the nerds started getting up off their chairs to do so, the arcade would be open to the public. Cue Sparks Dangerously and his insatiable urge to know what the other guy didn’t.

  Which had been the whole point behind designing this demo in the first place.

  The game would bring Drake, the impossibly secure servers would bring Sparks.

  “The usual.” Rommen replied casually, while behind him, the robot arms assembling the cubes –or whatever they were actually doing- began perhaps the oddest part of their efforts, which was basically just spinning and rotating the cubes as fast as they possibly could while a tiny little sensor probe did the exact same thing, over and over again. The odd ballet would last anywhere from five to fifteen minutes and then the assembly line would stop cold.

  Garth said it was a final check of internal integrity. Rommen didn’t know enough about current generation technology to call the man a liar, which put him on absolutely no standing at all with the kind of stuff he was building to even suggest that he might be engaging in the tiniest of fibs but again … something didn’t sit right.

  “Boring sitreps are boring.” Garth groused. “Ever since I let you guys install cameras and shit everywhere, you got no need to come down here and jibber jabber at me about what’s been going on. I mean … I got the GEEPS rocking solid so I know where every damn person is and I’m streaming the feeds … somewhere in this room somewhere, so, I mean, theoretically I know what you know, right?”

  “Do you know what we know, sir?” Rommen asked softly.

  Coming into the basement to talk to Garth about the state of affairs was just a part of what they were doing; they all knew Garth didn’t sleep –or if he did, for fewer hours than was healthy- and seemed not to be suffering from the usual gamut of problems, but they all suspected that he was completely unaware that these days, he spent a lot of time rubbing his eyes.

  It was a small thing, barely noticeable but it was there. Something Garth was doing was causing him considerable eyestrain. It could be the work he was doing on the monitors or it could be something else. The demands of the job kept them away from him nearly all the time and he flat out refused to have any came
ras on him while he was working and no one had any plans on sneaking anything into the offices at all, so they were basically out of luck in terms of catching him doing whatever it was that was affecting his eyes.

  The only thing they could do –because it seemed like he didn’t care or wasn’t aware- was, to pardon the pun, keep their eyes on him as often as they could.

  Garth stopped rubbing his eyeballs. “Well, technically, not at this time, no. But I’ve programmed a … program to watch the feeds and to alert me of anything eminently dangerous.”

  In point of fact, the same almost-AI cube hosting the game demo was responsible for keeping an eye out for teleporting ODDities and other acts of Samiel-spawned revenge, but Rommen didn’t get to know that until he needed to, which was hopefully going to be on tenth of Never because reasons.

  “Don’t you mean imminently?”

  “Nah.” Garth shook his head. “You guys are here for that stuff. I’m waiting for … tanks and shit. Ha! You should see the look on your face. No, the guy who hates me won’t be bringing tanks down the street or anything of the sort. So tuck away your twisted panties. No but seriously, yeah, I meant eminently. Famously dangerous stuff. Not normal boring stuff like people with grenades and stuff. But I don’t got anything to worry about just yet.”

  "What about more of those weird people like the ones you … who were here previously?” Rommen was torn; on the one hand, he genuinely didn't want to bring this up because of how brutally Nickels had dealt with the first batch of Zigg-heads to broach the property line, but on the other …