Tori grimaced. She had no idea if they existed or not, but she was in no hurry to prove they were around.
She came over a small rise and stopped. She squinted her eyes to make sure they weren’t playing tricks on her. She shook her head and grimaced. No, she wasn’t hallucinating. She looked at the others. They, too, were looking at what she saw.
Standing before them was a tall, cloaked figure standing atop a small rise in the landscape. She could see his exposed skin in the pale light of Jupiter. His cloak billowed in the non-existent breeze, which she thought was pretty cool. He wore some strange glove that glowed slightly whenever the cloak moved. He carried no weapon that she could see, and even more curious, his status as a gamer or Moderator was hidden from view. A cowl covered his face, but she could see bright glowing eyes.
“Uh, hello?” she called out. “We’re referees, and we don’t want any trouble. We’re just out here to, uh, make sure everything is going well. How’s your gaming experience today?”
“‘How’s your gaming experience today’?” Shane quoted her in a teasing voice over the comms. “What are you, sixty?”
“Shut up,” she hissed. “I didn’t know what to say, and I panicked!”
“Perhaps you should ask him how he’s out in the middle of the plains without any sort of environmental suit on,” Tyler pointed out. “He should at least have an oxygen mask.”
She blinked. Tyler was right. The figure standing before them didn’t have any protective gear to withstand the elements of Ganymede. She knew there were some codes out there which allowed this for a short period of time, but they were more for emergency uses, such as when someone gets blown up while in a fight. The absolute disregard of any negative effects the figure showed was disconcerting.
“Hello?” She broadcast louder. Perhaps the figure hadn’t heard her?
“Tori Adams?” the voice replied, surprised. She stopped dead in her tracks. The voice was vaguely familiar, something from her past she should remember but couldn’t. She knew who it wasn’t, however, for which she’d remain eternally grateful. No, she knew the voice, but from where she couldn’t tell.
“Yes?” she answered in a hesitant tone.
“You aren’t someone I would’ve expected to find in The Warp ever again,” he stated.
He’s definitely a he, she realized. But who?
“Do I know you?”
“In a way,” he replied and shrugged beneath his cloak. “Our fates are intertwined, it seems.”
“Are you a Moderator?” she asked.
“No, never a Moderator,” came the reply. “More of a designer. A dabbler as well. A renaissance man.”
She had no idea what that meant. “Okay, sure buddy. Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“How’re you out here without a suit?”
“If I said ‘magic’ you wouldn’t believe me,” he chuckled.
“Okay, one last question, and then I’m leaving,” she said.
“Go for it kiddo.”
“Why are you out here?”
“Because,” the figure said as he threw back the cowl which had hidden his face from view. His lean jawline had remained unchanged from memory, his black hair identical. His lips were thin to the point where they almost couldn’t be seen. A shadow of a beard clung to his cheeks, and his nose was lean and pointed. His eyes were an unnaturally bright blue, no longer glowing, as he stared hard at her. She gasped as she saw Gargoyle’s face. The man continued. “It’s not every day I meet a celebrity.”
“Get back!” Tori screamed to her team as she recognized the most wanted cyber terrorist in the world. “Run!”
* * *
“No luck getting ahold of Laszlo,” Vilim said as he walked into Leo’s office. WarpSoft’s CEO was staring intently at his laptop and frowning. “Boss?”
“Hmm? Oh, sorry,” Leo said as he waved for Vilim to take a seat. He turned the laptop around for his subordinate to see. “Watching his presentation at the TED talks last year. Fascinating character with a very mysterious background.”
“Strange accent,” Vilim commented after a few minutes of watching the video.
“Montenegrin,” Leo reminded him. Vilim shook his head.
“Not what I meant.”
“Elaborate,” Leo encouraged.
“Well,” Vilim paused as he struggled to put his thoughts into words. “Humans naturally have the ability to talk, you know? We’re very social creatures. Even if our languages are different, we tend to pick up on visual cues and whatnot, and can discern verbal cues as well.
“He lacks this. He doesn’t seem to understand when to time inflections in his words or statements, so he emphasizes the wrong word. It’s very unusual, even if he’s eastern European. He should have some basic level of language cues to help him along.”
“Maybe he’s on the spectrum?” Leo suggested. He was referring to the autism spectrum, where social cues weren’t always interpreted with verbal or physical communicative skills. Autism was still mostly misunderstood by the common populace, but awareness was on the rise, thanks in no small part to tech companies such as WarpSoft. Their hiring practices encouraged everyone to apply, whether or not they had a degree, or any form of disability.
“No, I doubt it.” Vilim frowned. “I mean, he could be, but it’s not likely.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Too comfortable in the spotlight, no unease whatsoever,” Vilim explained. “He seeks out approval instead of just doing it because he can. He doesn’t come off as a narcissist though. It’s almost like he learned how to be human from a machine. It’s creepy.”
“Or some computer program?”
“God. That would be a scary thought.”
“Yeah, I can imagine his behavior thought process started at ‘balls of steel’ and degraded from there.” Leo chuckled. “That would be horrifying.”
“Well, hopefully we can get a meeting with him before too long,” Vilim said as he offered Leo his laptop back. “Outside of some nuclear physicists in Los Alamos and the people down in Oak Ridge, I seriously doubt there are any other people around who get quantum entanglement as well as Laszlo seems to.”
“What about Huntsville?”
“Sure, we can bring them in as consultants.” Vilim nodded. “Want me to do that?”
“Bring them all in,” Leo stated. “The sooner we get to the bottom of this the more comfortable I’ll be.”
“Big brains mean big egos,” Vilim warned him.
“Nobody has a bigger ego than I,” Leo reminded him.
* * * * *
Chapter 7
“Back! Back to the station, now!”
The others stared at Tori as she began to sprint back as fast as her environmental suit would allow, but the cumbersome thing was heavy and impeded her progress. Exactly as the game had designed, a small part of her brain said smugly. This was a trap designed by someone with time on their hands, and she’d waltzed right into it. Damn it! She mentally screamed as she ran. Over the radio she could hear Stacey yelling at her.
“What’s going on? You’re making a racket!” Stacey shouted over the radio, her tone filled with fear and confusion. “Repeat your last!”
“Run!” she yelled into the comm. She hurried back to the station as fast as she could, but deep down knew it was already too late. Moments later her worst fear came to realization. She skidded to a stop and stared, her chest heaving painfully as she struggled to regain her breath. Sure enough, between them and the station was a large pack of furballs. A very, very large pack, she saw as she began to regain control over her breathing. She sighed and cursed some very unladylike words.
“Some grenades sure would be handy right about now.”
A yell brought her attention back to the rest of the team. Startled, she turned and watched as the ground beneath their feet seemed to boil like a pot of hot water and turned into quicksand. She watched helplessly as the others sank into the ground, s
truggling to run as hundreds upon thousands of furballs erupted from the ground around them. The cunning creatures swarmed the area and flooded the plains in numbers she couldn’t even contemplate.
The sand came up to their knees, making any sort of fast movement or escape impossible. She saw just how cunning the trap had been. The furballs had dug beneath the ground in crisscrossing patterns on the plains, designing a perfect collapsible tunnel system. When the time came, they simply knocked out one or two key support structures beneath the ground, and the entire area turned to sandy mush.
“What I wouldn’t give for a weapon that had an ominous sounding hummmm right about now,” she grunted as she continued back to the team, ensuring her plasma rifle had a full charge. Though technically it had unlimited power, sometimes the plasma within the rifle could overheat should the charge get too low. There were two ways of dealing with this, she knew from past experience. The first was to ensure the power behind each shot was at a low enough level to not disturb the charge. The second, and more dangerous method, was to expend the charge fully, then hurl the rifle at whatever the target was and hit the dirt. If one was lucky, the explosive plasma would blow a huge hole in the opponent. If not, the rifle exploded in your hands, killing your character instantly and making a general mess of the entire area while it was at it.
Neither prospect was all that appealing, since they couldn’t defeat the furballs with the lower-charged shots, she thought as she began firing her rifle at the maximum charge. The small rounds contained the energy of the sun, and they tore through dozens of furballs instantly, their bodies exploding into fine green mist as the plasma round hit them.
While she hated option two, it’d potentially be far more effective than option one.
“Jump out of the mud and let’s go!” She shouted and kicked a lucky furball who had gotten through her field of fire. The ravenous creature yelped in a high-pitched squeal and flipped to the side, ego and kidneys bruised from her booted foot. Just for good measure, she shot it as well. It quit trying to get up and kill her. God, she hated furballs. “Now!”
The team paused in their struggle for a moment as they each activated their jump codes, a special code they’d received from the WarpSoft game engineers. The WarpSoft programmers had created some new codes which, while similar to the ones she’d used in the past, were so strong they almost broke the game mechanics. One of these codes was a jump code, which vaulted the user to over fifty feet in the air and allowed him or her to land without injury.
One by one they erupted from the liquefied dirt, each ready with their plasma rifles. As they fell back to the surface, their fire reaped furballs with a vengeance.
She had her hands full with an enormous pack of furballs. The beasts realized she was the leader, no doubt with help from Gargoyle, and had attacked her full on, the whirling balls of fur and fangs a terrifying sight to behold. She was forced to use the butt of her rifle to swipe at them, since they were too close for the plasma. She was well aware the backwash from the explosive round might kill the furballs and her as well.
Furry head after furry head was split open as she swung the rifle to and fro, using her enhanced strength and speed to cut a bloody swath through the furballs and get to the rest of her team. The more she killed, though, the more appeared to take their fallen brethren’s place. She grunted in exasperation. The unstoppable tide versus an irresistible force, she thought.
Stacey dropped from above and landed directly on her left, only two feet away, and she immediately began firing into the mass of furballs, unconcerned about the backwash from the plasma rounds. Tori glanced briefly at her and nodded, words not needed. They were gamers. They’d been training to do something like this from their very first consoles. It was simply what they did. This, she thought as she wasted an entire line of furballs before flipping the rifle around to begin firing again, is off the hook.
One by one the rest of the team landed near her, each of them firing their own weapons at the furballs that continued to erupt from the soft Ganymede dirt. The team was nothing more than a finely-tuned killing machine now, each gamer completely in her or his element. She noticed vaguely her plasma charge was getting low, as planned. She continued firing for all she was worth, every plasma round striking and destroying a furball and a dozen more behind it.
“Focus patterns,” she ordered tersely and the team began firing in a concentrated effort, their plasma rounds cutting huge holes in the mass of furballs. However, while each shot would clear a hole, a second later the hole would be filled with more of the seemingly endless furballs. “Let them taste the heat. Clear a path through them! Concentrate on one area for a moment!”
The four then turned their plasma rifles onto one small area of the advancing hordes and managed to open a permanent hole in the aliens. She nodded in satisfaction as she saw they’d followed instructions and continued to fire back at the furballs, who seemed to be growing in anger and numbers as they managed to creep ever so close to the team. They stepped over the remains of other, less fortunate furballs as the aliens pressed the team. She grunted as one furball got through and slashed at her suit, the force of the impact nearly knocking the breath from her lungs. Fortunately, the sharp claws bounced off her environmental suit’s chest plate and glanced harmlessly to the side. She rewarded the furball’s extraordinary efforts with a full shot to the face with her rifle, turning the alien to a fine mist.
The ground rumbled slightly as more furballs erupted in the distance, showing her how deadly the trap Gargoyle had laid out was, and how badly they’d been tricked. She knew it wasn’t a random location—Gargoyle had ensnared them in the middle of a synapse pack.
“Find the synapse lord!” She cried out, looking for something that resembled the mythical creature. The synapse pack was simply too large and too smart not to have something of the sort, she thought as she fired another round into the swarming masses. Dozens were obliterated but more filled the hole. She began to worry. These things are acting too smart. A synapse lord has to be real. But where is he?
“There!” Royce shouted, pointing into the distance with his off hand. She turned slightly and blanched as a horrifying sight filled her eyes.
Sure enough, synapse lords were real, and this one was over ten feet tall and appeared to be a furball on steroids. Four arms, each one equipped with razor-sharp claws, protruded from the sides like a badger. Its elongated snout was filled with long, sharp fangs. Scales, dark and foreboding, gleamed in the light. She looked into the cold, beady eyes of the creature and shivered. It roared a challenge at her and the rest of the team. It rose up and began to charge toward them, its low slung body moving far quicker than she’d have originally given it credit for.
“Take it down!” Stacey cried and began firing rapidly at the beast. Despite its larger size, though, it managed to dodge and weave through the pack as it made its way toward them. Large, car-sized holes began to erupt closer and closer to the synapse lord, but nobody seemed to be able to land a direct hit on the massive beast; it was simply moving too fast.
“It’s going to get us,” Tori swore just as the beast sprung high into the air, all of its claws and teeth bared as it roared a challenge one last time. She activated a code she hadn’t wanted to use and closed her fist tightly. Power, pure and hot, ran through her body and into her fist as the code charged. She glanced up at the beast, which was about to land directly on top of her, quit firing, and used the code. She pulled her fist back, ready to swing.
It landed on her just as she swung her fist, slamming it into the head of the angry, four-armed badger-like creature. The code, a simple one which encased her fist in a fiery ball, cut through the beast’s head like warm butter. The creature’s claw bounced off her chest, but with little strength. The creature’s bellow was cut off in mid-cry, but the momentum of it carried through, knocking her off her feet. It was dead before it hit the ground.
She hadn’t wanted to use the code so soon, since it was a one-off, but
she hadn’t had a choice.
She stared woozily at the massive creature for a moment before pushing the corpse off her, then looked up at the others. They seemed okay, she thought, but then she heard something more horrifying than the roar of the synapse lord had been.
A small hissing sound came from her right leg. She glanced down and saw, to her horror, the synapse lord had managed to puncture her suit. She had maybe five minutes before she was out of air. She reached down, ignoring the tide of furballs that was threatening to overwhelm her once more, and grabbed a fistful of the thick, gooey dirt the furballs had disturbed and smothered it onto the suit. The leak stopped! The suit wasn’t fixed—far from it—but it’d hold for a few extra minutes. And every minute, she knew, was precious. She didn’t want to die from lack of oxygen, videogame or not. It was a crappy and embarrassing way to go.
Tori grimaced as she struggled back to her feet. The synapse lord was heavy, and it’d hurt when the massive creature landed on top of her. She felt like she’d been hit by a truck. Shaking it off as best she could, she grabbed her plasma rifle from the ground and checked the charge. She sighed and shook her head as a crazy, last-ditch plan formed in her mind. Heroes happen because somebody screwed up, she thought. And this, more than likely, was going to be a huge screw-up.
She switched the fire mode to fully automatic and began to lay a constant stream of plasma into the furballs, who were now in a confused frenzy; their cohesion had been lost with the death of the synapse lord. Everything became automatic for her as she continuously poured fire into the alien critters.
“Tori, your plasma rifle is glowing hot!” a startled Stacey cried out suddenly. Tori, shaken from her reverie of massacre and death, glanced down at it and blinked. It was past time for her to activate the almost-suicidal part of her plan. She flipped the charge over into reverse suddenly and fired. The plasma round that fired was enormous, roughly the size of a basketball. The round traveled slowly across the plain, allowing some of the more attentive furballs to dodge the slow moving ball of energy. Stacey shouted again as Tori, in the blink of an eye, hurled the rifle away. The trajectory of her throw followed the giant plasma ball.
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