“No one got a ten yet?” asked Fawkes.
“Nope. Leveling up ships is more of a bitch than getting a character to sixty. A lot more.”
Three fighters popped out of the Elite’s hull and turned toward them. A rapid barrage of incoming laser fire shaved twenty percent off the Stormbringer’s shield.
“Crap, you better get in a turret.” Fawkes poked a cooldown slot and the shield snapped back up to full.
“On it.” Rallek ran off down the central corridor.
Nighthawk wheeled the Gremlin around, chasing fighters. Fawkes poked a tool at the shield generator, using her ‘active ability’ to boost the ship’s max shield by twenty percent. She watched the screen, mesmerized by the veritable ballet of spacecraft. The Gremlin skimmed around the smaller fighters’ attacks with apparent inches to spare, almost causing two of them to crash into each other trying to stay in firing position. Nighthawk seemed to be toying with them. The steady ripple of small red laser blips from the Stormbringer’s two turrets peppered one of the enemy fighters enough to send into a death tumble that resulted in an explosion at the end of a twisty, sparkling trail.
The Gremlin spun over and flipped like something kicked it in the ass, a maneuver that left him leveled off directly behind one of the enemy fighters. A dual blast from the particle cannons incinerated the light fighter in one shot. The last one wheeled around, trying to bring its weapons to bear on him, but he accelerated, keeping the Gremlin a few feet to the right of a steady stream of red laser beams.
“What’s the matter dude? Can’t quite turn tight enough?” said Nighthawk. “Heh. Okay, I’m bored.”
The Gremlin rolled to the right and stopped dead in place, causing the other fighter to zoom straight through where it had been seconds before. He pulled the nose up and melted the last light fighter down with another blast of orange.
“Wow. He’s really good at that,” said Angel813.
“Are you that good or did those guys just suck?” asked Fawkes.
Nighthawk laughed. “Both. They’re only level thirty, so they don’t have as many micro-bonuses as I get from my fighter pilot secondary class… but space combat is all twitch. Levels don’t really make that much difference. And I am the twitch master.”
“Well played,” said the voice of the Elite’s pilot, an instant before the buzz of laser cannons vibrated the hull.
On the chase view, four strands of scintillating blue light connected the Stormbringer’s outer edges to a rapidly expanding orange fireball where the Elite had been seconds ago.
“Wow, I almost feel bad,” said Fawkes. “That wasn’t even a challenge.”
“Don’t.” Rallek put an arm around her. “It’s like being the new guy in prison. Kick someone’s ass hard the first day, makes people leave you alone. Word gets around that they tried to attack us and we didn’t even go under seventy percent shields, might make more idiots think twice.”
“Those aren’t the ones I’m worried about.” She leaned against him. “What about those people with the tier seven ships? What if Army of One decides they want the prize money more than being the first group to kill the big raid boss?”
He shrugged. “Well… then it gets complicated.”
The Armadillo
23
Nighthawk stayed out in the Gremlin, flying escort for the rest of the flight to DB224, docking only a few seconds before they began atmospheric entry. No one else tried to attack them, and Angel813 found an option in the settings to block incoming messages from senders not part of a friend list.
The planet had one major colony and one star port. All ships hard-disabled weapons within two miles of a star port, since no one at CSI wanted to deal with the sort of bitching that would happen if griefers could strafe helpless starships on the ground. An army of players locked out of space for a week at a time would threaten the bottom line. Also, they didn’t want the griefers firing starship weapons into cities, incinerating crowds of players.
No amount of map gazing yielded any clues, so the group decided to explore the colony on foot. Drab brown or beige buildings huddled close together on narrow streets paved with dirt or cobblestones. The architecture resembled a blend of the Middle East and Mexico, with a heavy helping of drudgery and little bits of futuristic tech. A change in the background music added stringed instruments and an Arabian feel.
Citizen NPCs in the robes of desert-dwellers roamed about, offering limited dialogue that complained about late water shipments, bad hydroponic crop yields, or missing goats. The missing goat turned out to be a quest, but Nighthawk advised everyone to ignore it as the goats remains lay a short walk out of town surrounded by three massive scorpions. For a measly 5,000 experience points, that fight wouldn’t be worth it.
“Can we complain to CSI about that leaderboard,” asked Kavan. “It’s made us a big target.”
“Oh, like the company cares about PVPers slowing us down. They want them to.” Fawkes scowled.
“Ooh! I fucking hate PVPers.” Angel813 fumed.
Nighthawk snickered.
“Don’t candy coat it, Angel.” Rallek winked. “Let your emotions flow.”
“I’m serious.” She balled her hands into fists, arms shaking. “Damn PVP idiots are always whining and crying about classes being overpowered because they got owned in PVP, so CSI gets tired of the bitching and they nerf something to shut them up, and that nerf takes a giant shit all over me in PVE.”
Nighthawk scrunched up his face. “How does PVP affect PVE? One’s killing players, the other’s raiding or doing instances.”
“Because they cry about abilities. CSI nerfs those abilities to make the PVP kiddies stop crying, and then those same abilities used in PVE start to suck. Like, empaths used to have a level forty-five spell, Essence Barrier, that put a big shield on them. It stopped them from attacking at all, but it gave a 2,000 point damage soak and a twenty-five percent boost to healing output. We had a raid strat that relied on me using that cooldown to survive the boss’s big enrage explosion at ten percent life. I’d pop that, the bubble would keep me alive while everyone else but the tank died, and then I’d light off Soul Rebirth to bring everyone back on their feet. Well, the PVP jackasses cried about Essence Barrier being overpowered, so instead of changing how it worked only in PVP, they got rid of the force field. Now it’s just a twenty-five percent boost to healing output.”
“Oh. That’s shitty,” said Fawkes. “I hate PVP, too.”
“’Cause of nerfs?” asked Rallek.
She laughed. “No. Because I get too pissed off too fast. If I die to an NPC, I know it’s either me screwing up or bullshit. When another player kills me, I get insanely angry at them for being better than me.”
Kavan stopped walking and shifted toward her. “How do you tell the difference between screwing up or the game cheating when you die to an NPC?”
“If the NPC is five or more levels over me, I screwed up by attacking it.” She grinned.
“So, basically, any time you die, it’s the game cheating?” asked Kavan.
With an exaggerated tongue-sticking-out face, she nodded rapidly, hoping he’d take it as the joke she meant.
He laughed.
Nighthawk approached another NPC townie and rushed through a dialogue about a missing boy. He shared a quest to find ‘Mot.’ When they reached the village square, he ran around grabbing twelve more quests, sharing each one. Collect teeth from dust wolves, extract the brains of desert lizards for an alchemist, find a lost toolbox, and so on.
“Why are you grabbing all these quests?” asked Fawkes. “I thought you said they weren’t worth it? Most of them are like ten levels under us.”
“Habit. I’ve never done them before. It’s cool to see stuff for the story, yanno?” He shrugged.
“That lizard brain quest is stupid,” said Rallek. “Only one in like thirteen lizards you kill drops a brain.”
Kavan chuckled. “So you’re saying these lizards are MMO designers?”
&nb
sp; Everyone snickered.
She followed him around for another few minutes as he checked every NPC in the town square for quests. While he discussed with a fruit cart vendor the problem of someone poisoning a poor man’s goats, she yawned and looked around. Sun glare made a few of the buildings painfully bright, so she shifted to face back the way they’d come.
This city radiated such a degree of drab boredom that she gave serious thought to logging out and going to bed.
She started to turn back to face Nighthawk when his conversation ended, but stopped at the sight of a small sign mounted to a narrow three-story building on a corner about a block away. The dark brown rectangle had a tan armadillo pattern on it, but no words. Beneath it, one narrow door sat inside a recessed alcove with a curved top.
“Hey. Follow me,” said Fawkes, a little over a whisper. “Act natural.”
The others muttered amongst themselves, evidently Angel813 and Kavan not having heard her. She walked out of the square, following the street to the suspicious building. Rallek let out a stifled squawk like a stepped-on chicken, no doubt noticing the sign for himself. She strolled right up to the door, grabbed the knob, and opened it.
Inside, the room had the look of an abandoned dwelling. Small cracks ran across the walls near the ceiling. Cheap furniture lay scattered about in front of a smashed fireplace. Plaster fragments and plastic bits crunched under her boots. She approached a small stairwell in the back and made her way up to the second floor, emerging from a hole with no railings into a barren space. Tiny flecks of white plaster dusted a hardwood floor full of gouges, casting long shadows in the light radiating from one street-facing window. White walls with the same hand-troweled stucco pattern as the outside held no paintings, smudges, or any other sign that someone had ever cared about this place.
She stood in silence, trying to make sense of this, until it dawned on her that she experienced total silence.
“Do you hear that?” whispered Fawkes.
The others surveyed the room.
“Hear what?” asked Kavan. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly.” She twisted around, her boot soles squeaking. “There’s no background music in here.”
Jaws hung open.
Nighthawk’s eyes bugged. “Whoa. Yeah. There’s always background music.”
“I can hear my fridge,” said Rallek. “Like my real fridge. It’s so quiet in the game, reality is seeping into my consciousness.”
Fawkes crept forward, tracing her fingers across the rough plaster wall. “There’s gotta be something important in here.”
“Background music comes back as soon as my head’s below the floor,” said Nighthawk from the stairs. He peeked up into view. “As soon as I stick my head into the room, it stops.”
The group spread out. Rallek walked the other way, feeling at the walls for ‘secret doors.’ Kavan searched the floor. Nighthawk moved around the edge, kicking the walls, and Angel813 glided about with her eyes turned to the ceiling.
Fawkes brushed her hands back and forth over the wall, noting the texture, coarse and dry. The wall appeared to be hand plastered like something out of the Old World, but it felt like stone.
Click.
Everyone froze at the sound of a pull-chain light switch far louder than a pull chain light switch ought to be.
Angel813 had stopped roaming near the back of the room, two steps from the wall. Her right arm extended up over her head to clutch a thin filament hanging from the ceiling next to a dead light bulb. She pulled on it again and the same too-loud click sounded. The light bulb remained off.
“This is something,” she said, before pulling it again.
Click.
“It’s a broken light.” Nighthawk shook his head. “This place is a dump. A broken light doesn’t stand out.”
“But a click that loud…” Fawkes walked up beside her, staring upward, mesmerized by such an ordinary object.
Again, Angel813 pulled the chain and made the loud click. Fawkes twitched, expecting the light to come on, but it didn’t.
She inhaled a breath full of the stink of moldy plaster… and a hint of coffee.
“Coffee,” said Fawkes. “Did I smell that or is it in reality?”
Angel813 lowered her gaze to the wall, then rotated her head to Fawkes like an android. “What is reality? What if we’re a bunch of space adventurers who escape our dangerous life by playing a simulation of society as it was a thousand years ago.”
“Girl, whatever drugs you took, share some of that shit,” said Rallek. He pursed his lips, tilted his head, and raised his hand. “On second thought, don’t.”
Angel813’s creepy calm cracked, and she laughed. “Sorry. I’m being silly and messing with you.”
Fawkes glanced up at the ceiling. “This is something.” She reached up and grasped the pull chain. When she tugged it, a faint silver thread glinted in a rectangular shape around the bulb, as big as a door. “Aha! Perception skill for the win.”
She pulled harder on the string, and kept pulling. The ceiling creaked. She added her left hand to the cord and dangled all her weight on it. On screeching rusty hinges, a hatch like an old attic stairway opened downward. Instead of a rickety ladder, it morphed into a solid staircase.
“Wow. I know this is a game and all, but that looked freaky as hell,” said Rallek.
Fawkes examined a set of white wooden stairs that appeared more modern than the anachronistic colony, but more primitive than a futuristic game. They appeared solid enough, and led to a plain white door even with the third story. She climbed without hesitation and grasped the knob.
The door opened into a mundane office with blue carpeting, bookshelves, a ceiling fan, and a big window with silver blinds. Outside, the scenery appeared to be San Francisco in the late afternoon, the Golden Gate visible in the distance. An ordinary desktop computer sat on the lone black steel desk, next to an expensive padded ergonomic chair.
She stepped around and took a seat.
An otherwise blank screen displayed a simple prompt.
Login:
“You ever have that feeling that you’re about to do something really bad you probably shouldn’t be doing, but can’t wait to do it anyway?” asked Fawkes.
Rallek twirled his staff back and forth. “Sometimes.”
She glanced at it, then up at him. “You shouldn’t spin your scepter. Makes it look like a baton.”
He clamped his hand shut, stalling the rotating weapon. “It’s a staff.”
“More like a walking stick,” said Kavan.
“Hey now.” Rallek raised his hands. “Don’t be talkin’ small about a brother’s rod.”
Fawkes laughed. “Okay, here goes.”
She tried the username TURBAN with the password from the data pad. When she hit the enter key, the username changed to a mess of letters and numbers and the screen flickered dark before she could make sense of it.
“Well, that didn’t―”
An ordinary desktop appeared on the screen.
“Oh, wow.” Nighthawk leaned close. “That’s like an Easter egg or something. Looks like the PC I have at home.”
Fawkes glanced at a line of dark blue text embedded in the wallpaper image of floating metal plates, something generically artsy. It read: Property of Cognition Systems Incorporated. All activity on this workstation is subject to monitoring. Authorized use only. “Huh… they got the company name wrong, but I think we just found a back door into their real network.”
“Wait.” Rallek leaned close, his chin hovering by her right ear. “This could be a recreation of Tom Urban’s workstation. When he still worked for them, they were ‘Incorporated.’ They didn’t change it to ‘International’ until after Axillon99 went super-mega.”
Kavan leaned on the desk. “What I’m wondering… If Urban got the ax, quit, or whatever… why did his credentials still work?”
“They didn’t.” Fawkes pointed at the screen. “As soon as I clicked login, the username
shifted to a long string of meaningless letters and numbers. The TURBAN username exists only in the game code somewhere, buried as a passkey. When I used it, the game must’ve replaced it with an actual account on their corporate network. Something he added before he left that they didn’t find.”
“So you’re saying this guy knew he was getting fired and left the keys in the ignition for someone to go nuts inside CSI?” asked Kavan.
She looked up at him. “Yeah, basically.”
“Huh.” Rallek scratched his chin with his ‘staff.’
“Don’t break the game,” said Nighthawk. “I like it.”
Fawkes cracked her knuckles. “I’m not going to break it. CSI hasn’t pissed me off. But I am a curious little kitty.”
She popped Reckoning in the search box. A whole mess of results came back including exterior artwork, text files containing the words spoken by NPCs who might discuss it, audio files of the same lines, and a whole mess of program code. She dragged one of them into a compiler, and started sifting through it.
“Wow, that looks boring,” said Nighthawk.
Kavan took a knee beside her and also examined the screen.
They skimmed it, mostly reading comments for the better part of the next twenty minutes before one line caught their attention.
‘Random timer teleportation destination algorithm’
“Holy shit,” said Fawkes and Kavan simultaneously.
Nighthawk snickered.
Kavan narrowed his eyes at him and grunted.
“Wow. This is… ten million bucks.” Fawkes copied that section of code into a notepad file, opened a web browser, and used a throwaway email account to send it to another throwaway email account, then re-sent it to a few more. Once she logged out, she’d go through a couple countries and grab the text in the real world.
“So, what good is that stuff?” asked Rallek.
She leaned back, gripping the armrests of the fancy chair like a victorious queen about to pronounce judgement on a peasant. “Those couple lines of program code are how the game decides where the Reckoning is going to teleport. It’s not following a fixed path after all. It’s completely random.”
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