Axillon99

by Matthew S. Cox

“Got a package for you.”

  A sarcastic response fell stillborn out of her sleep-deprived brain. She mutely signed the electronic pad, accepted the box, and trudged back inside. It didn’t hit her that she hadn’t ordered anything until after she set the box on the desk and fell face-first back into her mattress.

  The helmet? Already!?

  Her eyes snapped open.

  Dakota jumped out of bed and pounced on the box, shredding it open in a few seconds. Beneath a layer of drab brown cardboard sat the shiny box for a Neurona 4 cortical interface helmet. She skimmed the feature list on the side, which touted increased performance. The Model 4 had a secondary data channel for double the throughput, which they claimed would allow game designers to ‘break new ground’ in realism. Enhanced proximity detection could create a view window into reality direct from the helmet hardware, regardless of the game involved, and it supposedly ‘learned’ its user after twenty or so hours of use, making some tasks such as logging out of the game faster and more seamless while simultaneously offering a deeper connection. The last feature claimed to protect even more against UMIs (unintentional motion injuries) caused when players’ real bodies moved during a game.

  “Hmm. Awesome and creepy all at once.”

  She tore open the box. Her grin died when she found herself staring at a hot pink helmet, the ears of a white cat graphic visible past the foam that looked suspiciously like Hello Kitty. The blackout visor even had her name printed on it like a fighter pilot. “I’m going to kick his ass.” Dakota tugged the helmet out of the packing material, revealing the cartoon cat to be a pirate skull and crossbones version of the ubiquitous feline. She grinned. “Okay, maybe I won’t.”

  Inventory Management

  5

  Dakota set her new Neurona 4 on the desk, and fell back in bed.

  Waking up at work time on a day off violated the First Fundamental Law of the Universe. She flopped in bed again after a few minutes of touchy-feely with the new tech satisfied her urge for immediacy. It wasn’t as if the game would drastically change due to a somewhat-improved interface. At least, not enough to warrant breaking the law.

  Around nine, she woke up again, grabbed a quick shower, then walked naked to the kitchen and microwaved a breakfast burrito. Home alone, clothing had become something of a balancing act with the thermostat. If she could tolerate going without, she could do laundry less often and save a few bucks. Some months, a trip to the laundromat meant the difference between actual food and instant ramen. Amazing how well a girl could adapt to a chilly room―or tolerate wearing the same oversized T-shirt for two whole weeks.

  With half of the egg-log sticking out of her mouth, she wandered across the apartment to the desk and picked up the helmet. For a brief moment, she debated sending Eric a picture of her wearing nothing other than the helmet, but changed her mind. An image like that would come back to haunt her eventually. She tended to avoid having her picture taken at all, much less something so compromising. The less of an info footprint she left, the harder a time The Man would have coming after her.

  She held her breakfast with her lips to keep her hands free, taking small nibbles as she set about hooking up the new helmet to her cool custom wire. Once she got all the plugs connected, she flopped in the chair and ran the installation module. While that chugged away, she scoured the net for any information about the Neurona 4, focusing on a handful of deep net sites favored by the hacking community. Already, five known vulnerabilities made the rounds, but the most dangerous one looked like a way to forcibly log someone out of whatever game they were in. No one had posted anything truly scary. Still, the new helmets hadn’t been officially released for a full day yet, so not finding anyone posting about serious glitches or dangerous properties only meant no one had discovered them yet.

  Twenty minutes later by the time the installation finished, she hadn’t come across any horror stories about roasted brains. With a grain of nervousness she hadn’t felt since the first time she used an immersion rig, she carried the shiny pink helmet to the bed, arranged herself flat on her back, and got comfortable.

  Dakota raised the helmet with both hands, giving it the evil eye. “Okay, you. Everything checks out, so I don’t know why I’ve got a bad feeling right now. But I’ll make you a deal. You don’t mess with me, and I’ll take good care of you.”

  The helmet, unsurprisingly, said nothing.

  She gave it a curt nod as though it had accepted her terms and lowered it onto her head.

  Soft whirring came from tiny motors that reconfigured the interior padding to the shape of her skull. The sensation of it moving caused her to grip the bedding and squirm. A few seconds after it went silent, she reached up and pulled the eye cover down. Neurona helmets had blackout visors since the first generation. Reducing sensory input to the eyes made it easier to send visual data directly to the brain and prevented conflicts or ghost images. A bright enough light to the eye could appear in the game world, creating a distraction.

  “Welcome to Axillon99,” said a pleasant female voice via speakers. “Neurona 4 interface initializing. Security option has been set to cortical imprint.”

  She waited for the familiar head tingle, but nothing happened.

  “User DM01852 authenticated,” said the voice. “Press start button to initialize.”

  Her breath echoed in her ears. “Okay. Here goes nothing.” She reached up and pressed the login button by her right temple.

  “Synchronizing to game server in three… two… one…”

  The blackness of the helmet visor brightened to a field of pure white. In seconds, the constant thrumming and beeping of high technology broke the silence, along with the ever-present background music. The blank whiteness faded back to the login chamber. She stepped into the portal and appeared in the main room of her crew’s starship, the Stormbringer, seated in the same chair she’d flopped in before logging out the previous night.

  “Wow.” Fawkes blinked and looked around at the weathered lockers, weapon cabinets, the giant round table, and the beat up chairs. “That was way smooth.”

  The air tasted like metal. Her boots and butt vibrated with a never-before-noticeable sensation, like an idling big rig. She touched the table, which also pulsed. Fawkes hopped to her feet and crouched, putting a hand on the floor.

  Dusty grit met her palm―another new sensation―as well as the vibration, which she figured came from the ship’s engines.

  “Huh. Wow.” She glanced down and brushed her fingers at her hand to clear dust. “Guess this is ‘increased resolution.’ New feels and smells.” She glanced up at the metal grid ceiling and flickering LED light tubes. “I really hope the developers aren’t going to start making us go to the bathroom.” Those sensations still reached players’ brains, but represented real world needs. Adding character ‘bio functions’ would probably cause many unfortunate accidents.

  She headed to the right, down the ship’s central passageway to the engine room. With each step, the vibration became somewhat stronger. Her workshop looked much the same as she remembered, a large room full of machinery, with a row of three huge components in the middle. Some of the tools on her rack looked more complex, as if they’d gone from having twenty moving parts to forty. A few changed color as well. The whole engineering bay smelled horrible, flooded with the caustic throat-scrape of the fictitious chemical ‘Teslin,’ essentially liquid electricity. The glowing-blue substance powered almost everything bigger than a backpack, from the ship’s showers to its weapons to its jump drive. The game developers made no secret they’d named it as an homage to Tesla, but she doubted many players got the reference. Most people in Axillon99 possessed only the most rudimentary understanding of Teslin: if you shot a container of it, it blew up big.

  Some areas even had randomly placed barrels of the stuff. She always forgot to shoot them when an enemy stood too close to one, but they never missed a chance to nail a barrel and catch her in the explosion.

  She sighed and
went to check over her station.

  Characters in the game all had a ‘class,’ which represented their skill set and abilities. In Axillon99, player characters had two distinct classes. The ‘primary’ class such as rogue or gunslinger took most of a character’s time, but players could also choose a secondary class that represented their role as part of a starship crew. A sneaky shoot-them-from-behind rogue compared to a knuckle-dragging heavy soldier wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference in starship vs starship combat, so the designers created a split system. The game tried to balance ship action with character action, but a player could still choose to ignore one side entirely. Some pilot characters never left their ships for example. Few people truly understood the game’s enormity in that one could play a single character on the surface of a planet and run missions for literal years without running out of things to do. Multiply that by a ridiculous number of planets… Though to be fair, the randomly generated missions didn’t change all that much from planet to planet.

  Fawkes’ ‘ship class’ of techie gave her plenty to do, though it lacked the glory of being a pilot. If the Stormbringer suffered critical damage, she could fix it during the combat. Otherwise, she sat at her console, shifting power allocations and providing temporary buffs. So far, they hadn’t run into a space fight difficult enough to really need that, so she sometimes planted her butt in a turret for a little more fun.

  While a full-immersion rig could be used to teach actual engineering skills, Fawkes’ proficiency in Axillon99 dealing with made-up spaceships with made-up components didn’t. It involved picking up a crazy tool and sticking it in a socket somewhere. A bit like a wizard in a fantasy game mixing various reagents to perform different spells, if she poked a particular component with a particular tool, she’d do something to the ship. Same tool, different component would do something else.

  “Well, this stuff looks more or less the same. Smells worse. Yay! $500 helmet and the best part is I can’t stand to be in my workspace anymore.” She pursed her lips as that nagging feeling of dread came on. “Okay, gotta test something.”

  She closed her eyes and triggered the log-off command.

  “Logout request detected. Please confirm?” said the pleasant female voice.

  “Confirm.”

  “Logging you out in three… two… one…”

  The engineering deck flashed back to the bright white haze. A sense of vertigo swirled around her brain for two seconds before the light dimmed to black. She flicked the eye-shield up and stared at the ceiling of her bedroom.

  For some reason, being able to log out surprised her.

  “Ugh. I’ve been watching too much anime.” She set the helmet on the mattress. “Right. Good to go. Just need to prepare.”

  After a run to the bathroom and a quick snack, she flopped on the bed again and logged back in.

  The faster and less disorienting process might’ve been worth the cost of the new helmet all on its own. Since none of the other players in her crew showed as online, she walked back through the main room and into the hallway leading toward the bridge at the nose end. About a third the way down, the airlock let her out to a boarding tube that she followed into the starport concourse.

  A cool breeze laced with the fragrance of Chinese food brushed at her cheeks. Gazing up at a lattice of amber-tinted metal beams, she suppressed a shiver. The thin leggings her character wore hadn’t felt thermally inadequate before, but now her teeth almost chattered.

  “Must be the helmet. Wow, it’s cold in here.”

  Hundreds of people and creatures milled about, the vast majority computer-controlled NPCs. Repetitive thudding drew her attention to a large Draath male. He approached nine feet in height, the upper third of his body gliding well above the rest of the crowd. They had the general shape of humans, but their biology amounted to living rock, in this character’s case, a deep blue crystalline. Darker sapphire spots formed his eyes, and his fists looked bigger than Fawkes’ entire torso. The Draath had a reputation for being stubborn, pragmatic, and slow. They made excellent ‘tanks,’ especially for raiding groups, since their natural armor allowed them to take one hell of a beating.

  She jogged to the right, passing a trio of brown-robed Simarin monks who all stared at her with their row of onyx eyes. Those aliens gave her the creeps, with their tall necks, heads shaped like upside-down raindrops, tiny mouths, and three perfectly round eyes. Their society revered the concept of three as a divine thing. The race got major bonuses to the ‘aura’ stat, which made them obnoxiously powerful with magic. That they somewhat resembled folkloric ‘grey’ aliens stretched tall and thin only made them creepier. A little kid player she’d randomly grouped with before joining the crew once called them ‘buttmouths’ since the tiny wrinkled opening beneath their nostrils bore an unfortunate resemblance to a particular orifice.

  Still, Dakota tried as much as she could to avoid them, as well as magic in general, since she didn’t think it belonged in a science fiction game.

  Of course, fate’s a sarcastic bitch.

  Eric played a technomancer―a magic-user with spells based on affecting, enhancing, and in some cases creating, technological objects. She blamed her dad for that hatred of magic in games. Not so much the magic itself, but the need for purity in a genre. He’d played some old fantasy-based game way back before full-immersion caught on. That game had elves and magic and whatnot, but it also had gnomes with crazy machines and even guns. Her father hated that the developers put guns in a fantasy game. She had to have inherited that unconscious dislike for genre-bending from him.

  Not wanting magic in a game about spaceships had even resulted in her friendship with Eric taking longer to start. For the first few months, she totally ignored him, reasoning that she could pretend magic didn’t exist in the game if she simply refused to acknowledge it or interact with anyone using it. As time wore on, she’d acclimated to having a technomancer about and stopped acting as if he didn’t exist.

  She trotted over to a large wall of brushed steel with a billboard-sized display monitor. A handful of other player characters stood by it, each checking out posted quests in small mini-windows. Unlike the NPCs, whenever she looked directly at an avatar representing a real person, their character name would appear over their heads. Fawkes had taken a low-tier special ability that also let her see the exact character level of other players and hostile creatures. Much to her annoyance, all the people around her scanned as level forty or higher, except one: a blue-eyed, blonde Niath woman in a skimpy ‘battle tunic’ and sandals.

  The Niath, another alien race, resembled angels: essentially ridiculously pretty humans with wings. Some even had pointed ears. She figured they represented this game’s version of ‘elves,’ to appeal to players who usually went for ‘the beautiful’ race. In the game’s lore, the Niath visited Earth thousands of years ago, mistakenly believing humans more advanced than they were at the time―and started religion by accident.

  This particular one scanned as level six. Fawkes smirked at the revealing pink-coral colored tunic that exposed quite a bit of cleavage and leg, assuming the player was likely a man. Though, the game allowed vast customization when creating the character, and this Niath had relatively tiny breasts. Usually, guys playing female avatars did it to stare at themselves, so they made their female characters’ proportions ridiculous.

  She shook her head, dismissing those thoughts, and turned her attention to the job board.

  The usual array of random quests scrolled out in front of her. One paying 15,000 credits leapt out at her, an oddly high amount for the random generator. She tapped it and read the description: the local law enforcement had run out of patience with a crime boss, and rather than lose even more officers, decided to post a bounty on him. The mission called for the assassination of an organized crime figure, who probably had bodyguards. She started to reach for the button to dismiss it, figuring it a combat quest meant for the kick-in-the-door types like Nighthawk, but hesitated.


  Hmm. He might not start off in combat mode. Maybe I can ambush him and haul ass? Oh, why not. I can always abandon it if it’s impossible. She tapped the button to accept the quest.

  The edges of her vision flashed red the same instant a deep male voice said, “Pickpocket attempt failed.”

  Fawkes swiveled around, locking stares with the rather startled Niath woman who’d moved up behind her. Normally, some shithead trying to steal her stuff would get her fuming, but this ‘girl’ was only level six. No way in hell did she have even a tiny shred of chance at succeeding a pickpocket against a level thirty-seven rogue.

  “Oops!” The girl spoke with a child’s voice. She cringed back, covering her mouth with both hands, her white-feathered wings quivering as she trembled. “I’m sorry. I clicked the wrong button. I was only trying to look at your stats.”

  Fawkes relaxed. “Oh. It’s okay. No worries.” She returned her attention to the job board.

  “I’m Rhiannon.”

  She twisted back to look at the winged woman. The nameplate over her head read, ‘Angelgirl1344.’

  “Hi. I’m Fawkes.”

  The Niath emitted a little girl’s giggle. “Hi.”

  Again, Fawkes started to glance again at the job board, but stopped when the woman flared out her wings to their full fourteen-foot span.

  “I have wings!” cheered the woman with the child’s voice. “Aren’t they cool?”

  Oh, shit. This is an actual kid. She cringed inwardly at the thought of a pre-teen showing so much skin. “Umm. Yeah, they’re cool.”

  Rhiannon bounced on her toes, giggling. “Thank you. It’s so fun to fly!”

  Fawkes opened a private whisper channel. “Mind if I ask how old you are?”

  “Ten. My birthday was last week. Got this game ’cause it had an angel on it. I love angel stuff! Your pink hair is kinda cool too.”

  “Your parents got you the game? Do they play?”

  The Niath shook her head, her nearly butt-long hair swishing gracefully behind her as if underwater. “No. They don’t have time for games. Both of them work a lot.”