by Vic Connor
Immortality Experiment
A GameLit RPG Thriller
Vic Connor
A.L. Utterback
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Copyright © 2019 by Vic Connor
All rights reserved www.austinbriggs.com
Click here to subscribe — so you can learn about Vic Connor’s new book releases and discounts.
Also by Vic Connor:
Hunters of Arkhart
Istoria Online: Square One
Diary of Anna the Girl Witch
This book is dedicated to an awesome group of beta-readers whose hearts were large enough to share with me their precious comments and ideas.
I sincerely thank Bryan David, Kris Schnee, David McCord, James Hodge, Darren Vallee, Bailey Atkinson, and Kyle Kovar for their thoughts and support.
All good in this book comes from its readers; all the book’s faults are mine.
Contents
1. Run
2. Waste
3. Those People
4. Never Heard that Before in Prison
5. The Tall Man
6. The Long Walk
7. The Vat
8. Choices
9. The Mind Merge
10. Boys and Girls
11. Wave of Heat
12. The Edge of the World
13. The Duel
14. EditValue
15. The Hunt
16. Stabilized
17. Z Minus
18. Kings 14:23
19. The Third Memory
20. A New Glitch
21. The Scrim
22. Two Can Play this Game
23. Home
24. Out of the Vat
25. The Split Pine
26. Team Coach
27. The Grotto
28. View from the Moon
29. The Playoffs
30. The Sacrificial Type
Epilogue
LitRPG Group
LitRPG Books
IF YOU ENJOYED THIS BOOK…
1
Run
Niko woke up on a hardwood floor. It was springy and not quite smooth. Maybe this is what real hardwood feels like, he thought. Odd—y’know, like funny-odd—because he’d never felt the real thing in his life. Foster parents pulling in another kid for the government check weren’t exactly the type. Children were like dogs to them. Once you got one it didn’t cost that much to get another and another, y’know?
There was a familiar smell in the air, the way smells can remind one of a taste, but Niko couldn’t place it. Too sore to move, all he could see right now was the ceiling way, way up above. Up was about the only space left in the PNW.
Three-story Lego-brick townhouses had long taken over the backyards the natives used to have. Every poor neighborhood Niko had been shipped off to had steadily filled to the chin with relocated tech bros until government checks could’t pay the rent much less the water bill, no matter how many strays the foster parents took in. In the city, at least. Out past Redmond, past Shoreline, past Kent, it was all open road, lonely and evergreen.
Wasn’t that where he’d been going? He struggled to grasp his last memory. He’d snuck out of the group home on a school night, he remembered. He remembered, too, paying for a ferry ticket with soft, crumpled, stolen bills. He remembered crossing the Sound. The water had looked like black glass under the gibbous moon. He remembered skulking off the ship with his hood up, bundled against the crisp, wet November in his greying goodwill jacket. He remembered a wrinkled Indian guy—y’know, like Asian-Indian—asking, in a familiar way, if he was going camping. He’d seemed nice, but Niko had scowled at him anyway, shouldered his pack then darted off into the woods. He remembered unzipping it, taking inventory by crank-powered flashlight: canteen, pup-tent, wire, Zippo, emergency blanket, the crowned jewel, and the black-bladed hunting knife he’d nicked from a pawn shop four blocks from his group home. This time it’s going to work, he remembered thinking as he stuffed everything back in his pack. This time, I’m not ever going back.
Niko didn’t have his pack now, or his Goodwill coat or his fraying hoodie. Chill air was pulling goosebumps on his bare arms. The back of his t-shirt felt…wet—y’know, like sticky-wet. Sirens wailed in the distance. Niko grimaced and managed to turn his head. Bay windows, thrown open. Outside was a residential street, one of those oh-so-Seattle sardine neighborhoods of postage-stamp houses and tall, ugly-modern apartment buildings, shrouded in morning-grey mist. The gossamer curtains on the bay windows were a translucent white, except at the bottom, where they were spattered with a fresh, scarlet red. Niko put his chin to his shoulder, and with a turn of his stomach, he finally recognized the scent just before he lifted his pale arm to find it slick with blood.
With a strain, Niko reached for his stomach, his chest, his arms, his neck. No cuts that he could find, at least nothing fresh and egregious enough to have spat out this much blood. He fingered the Russian Orthodox cross on its chain around his neck, smearing blood on the three lateral bars of metal. Grunting, Niko managed to get up on his elbows and blink the fog out of his eyes. Long, matted, dark hair came into focus. She was spindly and twisted, laying face-down on the blood-brindled floor. A woman. A body.
“Oh, God…” Niko’s hand closed on his cross. He scuttled back, away from the body, then slipped and smacked against the floor. With a wheeze, he rolled over. He pushed himself up to his knees, took a breath, made himself look again.
It was worse than he’d thought. Tangled up with the woman was another figure, a man, broad-shouldered with dusty-blond hair. A pair of cracked glasses—y’know, like black-rimmed hipster glasses—sat broken a few feet away. His crisp button-up was soaked through, a hunting knife buried in his shoulder to the hilt. Niko remembered cleaning fish with that knife. Stripping branches, peeling apples, carving out paths in the Washington woodlands. Pulling it out from behind a glass display then stuffing it in his sleeve when the shopkeeper wasn’t looking. He didn’t remember stabbing a guy with it. Outside, the sirens still wailed, getting closer.
Run! The instinct screamed at him, the same one that sent him flying from group home after group home into the wilderness. Niko pushed himself up from the floor, his center of gravity wavering as his bald sneakers slipped on the floor. His shirt was covered in blood. How was he going to get out of here looking like this?
Doesn’t matter. Run.
Niko stumbled back and fell against a pale plaster wall, leaving a flat handprint. He pawed until his hand found the antique doorknob, then stopped. What if those people are hurt but not dead yet?
Doesn’t matter, he thought. Run. Everything in him screamed that they were dead already, that the cops were coming, and he should just go. Still off-balance, Niko cringed, kneeling down in the blood to reach a hand for the woman’s pulse. But when his fingers touched her flesh, it felt like ice. When he tried to nudge the man’s body, it was stiff. He knew enough about dead things to know he was far, far too late to help them. He pushed himself up, sneakers slipping on bloody floor, then burst through the front door, out to the sidewalk.
The sirens were deafening, and red-and-blue flashing lights were weaving through traffic a few blocks down. Nothing looked familiar, but then again, this was a neighborhood with real hardwood floors. Niko had definitely never been here before. He turned on his heels and ran in the opposite direction as the wailing grew louder at his back. Then, up ahead, from around the corner came another flashing police car, hazy through the morning fog. Niko’s pul
se thundered in his throat. He looked around, spied a gravel road up ahead, ran for it. He heard tires squeal at his back, but he couldn’t stop to look.
Niko was fast, long-legged, and the gravel of the alleyway barely slowed him down. Up ahead, a copse of evergreens grew out from the skin of the earth like great, green feathers. Watching them quickly gave him tunnel-vision. The heated strain in his legs felt far away; the blood sloughed off his arms or dried into the thin, dark hairs. Sweat cleaned his back. The cops were yelling something he couldn’t hear. Doesn’t matter, he thought. Run.
A hammer of pain ripped through his calf, destroying his focus and sending him rolling through the gravel. His body skidded to a stop at the base of a tree. Pine needles glued themselves to his wet shirt. He tried to get up, but his leg collapsed under him, and he landed back on his chest. A uniformed weight fell on him; cold metal clasped around his wrists. Niko tried to crane his neck to look up at the trees, but he couldn’t see them.
2
Waste
“It’s a waste, is what it is.”
A steady, chirping rhythm wormed its way into Niko’s brain as he emerged, muzzy, out of unconsciousness. He cracked his eyelids open, then squeezed them shut again when artificial light—fluorescents, y’know, like the kind that yelled—seared his eyes. The scent of antiseptic coated his brain.
“Taxpayers puttin’ down their hard-earned cash so a murderer can get surgery.” Someone else was in the room; a woman’s gruff, nasal voice sounded harsh and hostile. Niko didn’t recognize it. “Shoulda left the bum to bleed out, you ask me.”
“Habeas Corpus, MacCready,” a man said. He had a salt-of-the-earth northern accent that you only hear out in the sticks. “Kid needs to go through the system.”
Niko squinted his eyes back open, peering through his eyelashes. He saw, almost felt, two figures standing a few feet away, near a blurry doorway.
“Yeah, well, I’ll say it again, it’s a waste! Goin’ through all the court fees and red tape.” The MacCready woman grunted. She was a stout, government-blue blob in Niko’s periphery. “I wish they’d do away with it already.”
“They practically have,” the man muttered. He was funnel-shaped, like a bodybuilder. “But even I’ll admit this one’s pretty open-and-shut.”
“Right? A waste. They’re just gonna stick a needle in him anyway.”
“You think they’ll put the kid in the Queue?”
“For a double murder? With his record? Of course they will.”
“He’s seventeen, MacCready.”
“They put a sixteen-year-old in the Queue just last month. Killed her mom’s boss, and it weren’t so gruesome as this.”
“Younger and younger… I know there’s no end in sight to the drought, but these executions are getting ridiculous. I mean, should we really be killing kids?”
Niko pinched at his roughspun, bleach-weathered blanket, because it was the only outlet for his anger he could manage. He imagined a cool, muddy creek in the peerless deep of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. He remembered bringing his cupped hands to his face; feeling it drip down his chin and into the collar of his shirt; splashing it on his sweaty face; combing it into his short, dark hair.
MacCready grunted again. “You want this trash-guzzling freeloader to have water in a cell for a whole murder sentence while innocent kids go thirsty?”
Niko thought of the weekly communal showers, taking turns under the cold dribble from the public showerheads. He thought of its coin-op, clockwork timer and its game-show buzzer going off, the water going off with it. He remembered thumbing his last quarter into it for Mateo, the mousy Puerto Rican boy two group homes ago, who always got shoved to the back of the line, water shutting off before he could step inside. You’re starting to stink, Niko had spat when Mateo tried to thank him.
“He’s a stain on society. A waste. You ask me, they should bump this scum to the head of the Queue,” MacCready said.
After escaping that particular home, Niko had made it three weeks before he was starved into crawling back to child services. Dozens of times on the trail he’d zoned out—y’know, like stared into space—wondering if Mateo was able to shower. He still wondered.
“Two damn years to work through the execution queue is more than he deserves,” MacCready said.
“Yeah.” The man sighed. “Maybe you’re right.”
3
Those People
Niko limped into the small, windowless room on his crutches, then sank down at the metal desk in the center, into the provided plastic chair. His lips twitched when the prison escort handcuffed him to the armrest. What was his angle—y’know, like where did they think Niko was going to go?
Fifteen minutes of dull silence passed. Niko was dozing off in his seat when the door clacked open. A woman with a slight build and big hair spun her JC Penny pantsuit into the room, closing the door with her foot, the same way she’d opened it. Her arms were full of manila folders that spilled out onto the table as she sat down. She was out of breath, combing her fingernails back through her tight, frizzy ringlets. “What’s your name?”
Niko looked up at the guard, who did not look back. “Nikolai Somov.”
“Somov… Somov…”
“Who are you?”
“Jamyllah White,” she said without looking up. “I’m your court-appointed attorney, Mr.… Somov! Here we are.” She victoriously picked up a folder, flipping it open. “I—…oh. Ah.”
Niko couldn’t see inside the folder, but he could imagine. Jamyllah read the rest of his file with tight, pursed lips, her expression getting steadily duller.
“Didn’t you read my case file before you came to see me?”
“Oh, of course, Mr. Somov, I combed over it in excruciating detail while lounging in my breakfast nook sipping espresso until ten a.m.” Jamyllah snapped the folder shut. “You’re my sixteenth appointment today and I’ve got five more to get through before I get to go home. It’s six p.m. and I should be halfway through a glass of wine getting a foot rub from my exceptionally attractive husband, but instead I’m in here looking at this.” In one fluid motion, Jamyllah reached into his case file, pulled out a crime scene photo, and slapped it on the tabletop. It was as bloody as Niko remembered.
He looked away from it, swallowed to hide his turning stomach. “So... I’m guessing you don’t actually have a breakfast nook?”
Jamyllah finally looked up at him. “Cute. You know how bad this is, right? I mean, I don’t have to explain it to you.”
Niko didn’t answer.
Jamyllah’s mouth made a flat line. She looked up at the guard. “Can I have a moment to speak to my client?”
“I’m here for your safety, ma’am.”
“Well, you handcuffed him to a five-pound folding chair so I’m sure that’ll keep him restrained,” she said sarcastically. “But feel free to wait outside the door just in case he tries a daring escape on crutches.”
Niko smirked. The guard made a face. “Ten minutes,” he said, and left the room.
Jamyllah watched over her shoulder until the door closed, then looked back at him. “Is that your knife?” She tapped the photo.
Niko, thankfully, didn’t have to look to know where she was pointing. He didn’t answer.
Jamyllah licked her teeth and started collecting her folders. “If all you’re going to do is sulk, I have an appointment I could actually get to on time for once.”
“You already, I mean, you think I’m guilty, y’know?” Niko shrugged, and it pulled at his handcuffs. “So what’s the point?”
“I’m going to be straight with you, Nikolai,” Jamyllah said, stacking her file folders. “I see a lot of cases, a lot, you understand? And in the current judicial climate, with the twenty-year-drought coming up on thirty, guilty or not? Doesn’t matter. It’s about what you can get from the DA, and with this? You aren’t getting much, kiddo.”
Niko shuffled in his chair.
“Maybe, maybe, if you were a sque
aky-clean little tot, a mild-mannered white kid trapped in the system, I’d be able to drum up a little sympathy. But…” Jamyllah flipped a few photos over, ran her finger down a printed sheet of paper. “One count of grand theft auto, multiple reports by your foster parents of petty theft, numerous complaints of violence, and on top of all that, you ran away from placement homes, let’s see…five times?”
“So you’re saying, I mean…even if I didn’t do it, like, it’s hopeless anyway, y’know?”
“If you can drum up some tears, the DA might take the death penalty off the table,” Jamyllah sighed out.
“I’m not, y’know, a big crier.”
“If you want to see your next birthday, kiddo, I’d start practicing.”
Niko looked up at her. “I didn’t kill those people, Mrs. White.”
“Those people? Mr. Somov, I’m your attorney, everything you tell me is privileged, so please, don’t BS me.” Jamyllah leaned back in her chair, folding her arms across her chest. “Was it your knife or not?”
Niko looked down at the table.
“How did you get there?”
“I don’t know, I mean… I don’t remember.”
“You’re going to have to help me out here, kiddo.”
“I don’t! I don’t know, I remember leaving on the ferry and going out to Vashon, y’know? Then going into the woods and then…then I woke up, and there was so much blood, and that woman was…” With one hand, Niko pushed the crime scene photo away from him. The other he tried putting over his mouth, but it was handcuffed to the chair, so he just gagged into the air. Jamyllah clicked her tongue, took the photo, then put it back in his file. It was the kindest thing anyone had done for him since he’d been arrested.
