Immortality Experiment

by Vic Connor

  “Off-campus?”

  “Yeah.” Niko stumbled over casualness, aware that Clark could likely monitor his every move in here. “Somewhere we could… I mean, the campus is neat, but I doubt they let you get into trouble around here. Isn’t there…like, a town nearby, where we can go, uh…party or whatever?”

  Erica took it in the wrong but nonetheless pleasing way, curling up against his side like a cat. “A bad boy, huh? You really that eager to get me all by myself?”

  Indeed, it felt as if it was just the two of them walking alone, until a raspy voice spoke from almost directly behind them. “Fresh meat, Erica?”

  Niko and Erica sprang apart and spun. The voice had come from the black girl Jacob had pointed out earlier, Cal. One hand rested calmly on the pommel of her sheathed dagger.

  Erica puffed. “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Cal.”

  “Your wish is not my command, Eri,” Cal said. She had a radio voice. Not drivetime radio, all round at the top of your throat, but late-night college station radio, the kind that played Sneaker Pimps followed by Bill Withers followed by MJG, all somehow suiting one another. Behind her stood the other new junior, Alonso, who fixed Niko with an icy-blue stare he instantly disliked. Jeny was nowhere to be found.

  “Your name was Nikolai, correct?” Cal asked.

  “Niko, yeah,” Niko said.

  “Well, Niko, I’m sorry to tell you, aside from a little residential area nearby where the instructors live, there isn’t another town for fifty miles. Your and Eri’s rendezvous will take some planning.” Erica, for once, seemed out of her element, looking anywhere but at Cal and Niko. When she didn’t receive an answer from either of them, Cal went on. “So. Niko, with the rare Mythic. I’ll admit to my own curiosity. What can you do, comrade?”

  Students flowed past them, a few catching wind of the conversation and stopping to listen. With a dozen eyes on him, Niko yearned for non-judgmental wilderness. “Uh, I’m not…that is, I don’t really know.”

  “Don’t know?” Cal looked at him with a smirking sort of suspicion.

  “Sounds like he just doesn’t want to tell us.” This was the blond kid, Alonso, with the big gauntlet on his hand. It had a massive blue gem on the back, which pulsed with light in the rhythm which Niko could only describe as “thunderstorm.” He moved up beside Cal, glaring at Niko. He had a vaguely European, action-movie accent. “Well, I know one way to find out.” He went from eyeing Niko to staring into space, swiping at the air as if it were a tablet.

  A UI popped up in the middle of Niko’s vision. “Accept PvP match with Alonso De Luca?”

  It gave two options: yes and no. A surge of whispers started up, and students took a few steps back, creating an open space for the pair to battle. Niko wondered how good an idea it was to battle an experienced…whatever Alonso was, on his first day in the game. Then, he thought of Erica’s face when every time he’d asked her what were apparently stupid questions. Puffing out his chest, Niko reached out and hit “yes.”

  A heads-up display faded into Niko’s vision, showing a health bar at the top, and a line of four square icons at the bottom. All of them were grey with a padlock icon, save the first, black with white text that read ABIL_EditValue.

  Niko looked up from the UI in time for a beam of crackling energy to hit him square in the chest, knocking him backward onto the gravel. Around him, students gasped. He grunted in pain—why was the pain in this game so strong even after calibration?—and checked his health bar. It had been cut down by a nearly a third. Alonso chuckled, raising his gauntleted hand. The gem on the back flared with light. “Didn’t even try to dodge. This is going to be easier than I thought.”

  Niko winced as he tried to stand. My…abilities. I need to use them, but I don’t know how. What do they even do?

  Niko concentrated on the only ability thus unlocked, ABIL_EditValue. The icon lit up in Territoria blue. A white cursor appeared in the upper-left of his vision, blinking, but that was all. Niko cursed under his breath, and another beam hit him, followed by a peal of laughter from Alonso. He could take, at best, two more hits and he’d be dead.

  “Maybe ‘Mythic Zero’ means ‘zero abilities.’” Alonso laughed over his shoulder as his gauntlet charged up again. “This is so sad.”

  The thud of Niko’s heartbeat pounded in his ears, and his face was hot with embarrassment. Erica was a few feet away with her face in her hands. With a grunt, Niko pushed himself up, trying to jump out of the way. As he did, where the white cursor had been, a stack of white text printed out.

  X = 367

  Y = 798

  Z = 546

  Then, as fast as it appeared, the numbers scrambled—no, not scrambled, they scrolled up or down in the blink of an eye, until stopping and changing from white to green.

  X = 370

  Y = 793

  Z = 547

  Niko’s vision sort of snapped, like swapping two photographs of the same thing taken at different angles. Niko hit dirt and rolled toward the edge of the ridge, scrabbling to stop his momentum. He looked back, seeing a black scorch mark where he must have been just a moment ago. The crowd gasped, chattering all around him.

  “Whoa!”

  “So his first ability is a blink, huh?”

  “That was crazy-fast.”

  “I thought a rare Mythic’s abilities would be more exciting.”

  Alonso looked irked now. He made a fist with the gauntlet and pulled it back to his ear, the gaps in its armor glowing with blue light, knuckles aimed in Niko’s direction. Niko scoffed. “What are you… I mean, do you plan to punch me from across the lawn or something?”

  His bravado was short-lived. Alonso jabbed forward and the punch propelled him like a rocket in Niko’s direction. He tried again to select his first and only ability, but now it was obfuscated by a timer counting down on top of it. Each time he tried to mentally select it, a mechanical thunk played in his ears.

  Alonso’s fist crashed into his stomach, sending a shattering pain up through his chest and down his legs. His health bar drained down a sliver of green, 10/100. He felt the old wound in his calf groan, and he wondered distantly, through the pain, why it had carried over into the game world. Why there was pain in the game world at all?

  A UI popped into Niko’s vision. “Alonso De Luca has won the match.” Niko’s health bar filled again automatically, and the pain instantly dissipated. The only thing that remained was the pulsing heat of all the blood that had rushed to his face.

  Alonso sniggered down at him. “Easy.”

  “But I wasn’t at zero,” Niko huffed from the ground. “I wasn’t at zero health yet.” He shot a pleading look at Erica, who curled her lip at him.

  Instead, Cal sauntered over. “We don’t play by Phaeton rules here, comrade. Knockout blows cap out at 10 HP as a safety precaution.” She offered a gloved hand to help him up. “I thought that was standard at every training academy.”

  Niko glared at the hand and got up on his own. “All right,” he said, “All right.” He walked past Cal to get in Alonso’s face. “If it’s so easy, let’s go again.”

  Alonso laughed. “Oh, you mad, bro?”

  “Shut up!” Niko roared, pulling his fist back. A hand caught it.

  “As impressed as I am by this flagrant display of testosterone,” Cal said, her hand grasping Niko’s wrist and her voice dripping with sarcasm, “if you fought him again, you’d just make a fool of yourself again.”

  “You don’t know that,” Niko snarled, trying to pull his hand out of her grip. He wasn’t able to. Now, it wasn’t just his face, but his head—it pulsed with another stifling heat.

  “Trust me, I do.” She released his wrist. “Walk it off, Somov.”

  Cal strolled off. Alonso backed away after her, grinning smugly. “Anytime you want a rematch, come find me,” he said, then stuffed his hands in his pockets and followed Cal. Niko caught a fragment of their conversation.

  “You’re pretty smug for beating a guy who
went down in three hits,” Cal said.

  “I won,” Alonso snarled back.

  “Was that all you got out of all that?”

  “What else is there?” Alonso’s laugh was swallowed up by the shuffling crowd.

  The voices around Niko stopped flowing together and instead spiked out, stabbing his aching, heated brain with snippets of derisive conversation. He thought he heard Erica ask if he was okay, but all he could muster was a brief, “Feel…sick…” His vision swam. He couldn’t hope to find her in throng of people now surrounding him.

  He needed to cool off… He wanted to dunk his head in cool water. That’s when he remembered the bathrooms they’d passed on the way out. After taking more than a moment to gain his bearings, Niko pushed his way back, against the flow of students, toward the amphitheater’s exit.

  After a dizzy, lumbering walk through the stifling press of chatty students, Niko at last spied the stick-figure pictogram over a stone opening. Sweating, he stumbled over to it, bumping into someone on the way who cursed loudly at him in a tart Scottish brogue.

  After a restful, bleary moment leaning against the bathroom door, Niko pushed inside. Someone, a blue and yellow smear in Niko’s vision, was hunched over the sink. “Niko? What’s wrong?” The man’s voice sounded far away. Niko tried to stumble to the sink but misjudged the distance and collapsed on the floor. The last conscious thought he had before passing out was, hot. It’s too hot.

  Niko woke in a different room, staring at a different ceiling. The heat in his head was gone, replaced with dull static. He lay there for a while, appreciating the gentle quiet. Instead of hundreds of students chatting, there was only the soothing sound of a pen—no, a pencil—writing on paper. At last, Niko groaned and sat up, hearing the pencil drop. When he shifted, he realized this was his dorm room. Hunk was looking up at him from a fold-down writing desk.

  “You’re awake,” he said.

  “What… I mean, how’d I get here?”

  “Jeny and I carried you. She’s strong for being so short. She, haha, of course complained about it the whole way.” Hunk laughed again, a real laugh, bright-eyed and worthy of his nickname. “If you’re still feeling a little under the weather, I can cast a healing spell.”

  “I’m fine,” Niko said, rubbing his temples. “You’re a real idiot, y’know? Helping me out when I picked Erica over you.”

  Hunk laughed again. “Jeny said exactly that. But I think there’s enough people in the worlds who only think of themselves.” Hunk smiled again, small but genuine—hopeful. That was something Niko hadn’t been in a long, long time. He thought, for an instant, to smile back—but no, it would look stupid. He frowned harder.

  Hunk didn’t seem to take it too hard. “How do you feel now? Cooled off? You mumbled something about it in the bathroom, being too hot.”

  “Yeah...”

  “In…your head, right?” Hunk ventured. “It heats up until it’s pounding, and you can’t see or stand?”

  “Yeah, exactly.” Niko said, perplexed. “How’d you know that?”

  Hunk frowned. “It… It happens to me, too.”

  12

  The Edge of the World

  That night, Niko ran.

  He found sneaking out of the dorm pathetically easy compared to the lockdowns at his old group homes. The only other person he ran into was the owl boy, perched up in a windowsill reading a book. He peered at Niko, waved, then went back to his book. Niko got past the quad, then out through the front doors without any further incident.

  If the day had been cool, the night was freezing. Phaeton was dark now, and covered the sky, blotting out a vast disc of stars. Niko thought he could see the bright outlines of cities on its surface, full of electric light. The gibbous moon chased after Phaeton. Niko tugged his coat around his shoulders, telling himself the cold wasn’t real, that he was in a tube back in the penitentiary. It didn’t help.

  Niko followed the small, cobbled path tracing along the ridge, leading from the dorms to the amphitheater. Eventually, he came on the fork he’d seen earlier that day. The main path lead to the amphitheater, but the other side, hardly more than a deer path, led down an incline to the forest. Niko shuffled down, taking the last incline at a jog, until he was surrounded on all sides by the ghost pines.

  Most forests were dark; shady in the day and pitch-black at night. Here, the white trees reflected the moonlight, casting specks of light on the ground. The dark earth was scattered with ice-white needles and the trees’ pale-blue cones. Niko kicked them around as he followed the trampled path, and marked the translucent trunks to remember where he was going. His clothing was proving woefully insufficient against the weather, only his head remaining a comfortable temperature.

  The exercise helped, but the cold was steadily seeping into him. It was stupid to come out at night, when temperatures were this crisp, but who knew if Cygnus even had changing seasons? An old, familiar disappointment seeped into him. He couldn’t make it, he told himself, he was too weak, not prepared enough. A cynical knowledge, one that he’d buried deep because it was too true to think about, told him that he had never, could never be, prepared enough. He could never survive alone. He was just too weak.

  It made him angry. That rage thundered between his ears, ran through his veins, and it fueled him, made him hot with it. He marched and jogged, punching, kicking, clotheslining branches and bushes as he went. His breath puffed out of him, real enough to be seen. He gulped down the cold as sweat bubbled off his brow. He was running now, stumbling on fallen logs or broken branches, weaving through trees, knowing the faster he went the harder it would catch up with him, until at last he saw a low branch too late. His forehead slammed into it so hard he saw stars and dropped onto his back.

  The pain felt so real. He tried to will away the dizziness, but it faded at the same pace it would have in real life, leaving a hot pounding in his skull. He cracked open his eyes. The offending branch hung above him, directly in his vision, bobbing back and forth, up and down.

  There was something odd about it. A number of sharp, pointed offshoots extended off it, but they looked…wrong. They didn’t branch like twigs did. Instead, they shot out like long spikes, and the translucent bark was sort of blurry, y’know, like stretched out. Then, in a snap, the offshoots moved, stabbing out in different directions now, then shifting again, like a stuttering, eldritch horror. The scent of pine became sharp and powerful, then instantly it changed to cooking meat, then to rotting garbage. At the bottom of his hearing was a low, familiar monotone buzzing.

  The damn thing glitched, Niko realized, like the computer glitch during his logging in that had given him this weird, crappy Mythic. With some effort, he got to his feet. He examined the strange branch from a few angles, and started back when it shifted again. This time, the branches framed around something farther down the path. It was a warm, golden radiance, twinkling at the very end of his vision. The blow had already given him a headache, warm and thundering between his temples, making it hard to make out. Niko moved past the glitched branch and walked toward the golden radiance.

  As he did, the environment started to change. Some of the trees intersected, crisscrossed like they could just clip through each other. Another ghost pine wasn’t the right colors; Niko could notice the image of a cloud stretched across its trunk. Branches ended in jagged, pixelated edges. A squirrel—it was blue, had six short legs and four tiny black eyes, but a squirrel was the closest thing Niko could compare it to—ran up a tree, snapped out of position, then scurried across the empty space into the sky.

  Worst of all, now Niko was sure that the pain in his head wasn’t just from his injury. His head was heating up again, like it had during orientation. Rationally, he should turn back right away, because if he passed out here, the exposure alone might take a few fingers and toes. Yet, the glowing—whatever it was—appeared just ahead, close. It twinkled against the dark sky, ribbons of golden light peeling off its bright center. Just a few more steps. He�
�d grab it, then go back. Niko’s heel met ground, but his toes met air. He slipped, gasped, teetered, then stumbled back.

  The drop-off was so unnaturally sheer that he’d mistaken it for the horizon. It wasn’t a cliff, but more like he was standing on the edge of the world, as if the ground had been sliced with a massive, razor-sharp knife. Out ahead of him was nothing but open sky—not even the curve of the planet. The ball of light bobbed just off the precipice; just out of his reach.

  Why Niko felt the need to touch it, he didn’t know. Maybe it was some game design thing, y’know, like tapping into the lizard-brain. Nearby sat a tall bush, grey-blue and spotted with berries, growing up from the edge of the world. It was nearly Niko’s height. He looked back to the glowing orb. Maybe…

  He knelt down, tugging the bush’s trunk with one hand, testing its capacity to hold his weight. Then, he leaned out, extending his hand. His fingers brushed the ribbons of gold wafting off the orb. The ribbons dissipated like smoke, then reformed again. Niko shuffled so one foot was on the edge, one off, and reached again. The branch stripped as his hand slid down further. Cloudy-pink berries fell off with a rustle of leaves. Niko watched them plummet down the expanse below, with no ground to hit, just endless dark space. His foot slipped from the razor’s edge of the world and he fell forward, his hand, at last, grasping the orb. It’s warm, he thought, before existence disappeared.

  Niko opened his eyes, and he was somewhere else. His feet were on solid ground, but he was low to the floor. Everything looked big, from the kitchen table at eye-level to the flatscreen TV playing PBS NewsHour, to the man humming over a kitchen counter, the sleeves of his pale button-down rucked up to his elbows. He sang in a language that sounded deeply familiar, though for a moment, Niko couldn’t understand it. Then it came to him: Oxana, Clark with his accent, the sudden memory before he entered his Vat. Russian.