Axillon99

by Matthew S. Cox

  “That is the plan.” William nodded.

  They wrangled code for an hour or so before William’s ass demanded a break from sitting on the floor of a metal cargo box. He tried to convince Shawn to go get some air by walking around the compound, but the boy didn’t seem thrilled about the idea. When Christina offered to go with them, he relented.

  Once Eric and Dakota had the cargo box to themselves, she found herself increasingly distracted from programming. One well-placed hand on her back set off a most bizarre reaction in her mind, and got her all fired up on a mixture of adrenaline and the thrill of doing something dangerous.

  Dakota leaned into a tongue kiss, her hands roaming his body as much as he caressed hers. When their lips parted, she hung for a moment in confused silence before staring into his eyes. “This is so messed up. Everything that happened yesterday, and I’m so damn turned on right now. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Some things aren’t supposed to make sense, babe. I say roll with it if you want to.”

  She grinned and leapt into him again. Eric slid over to the side and wound up flat on his back with her on top of him. They writhed together, lips locked, fingers slipping under shirts. Dakota couldn’t stop herself, grinding against him, almost ready to explode with her clothing still on. Hungry gasps and mewls leaked from her as she fought with his T-shirt and slid both hands up over his bare chest underneath.

  “Someone’s gonna walk in us,” whispered Eric.

  “So?” She peered back for a second before pushing her hands up higher, spreading them out to cradle his shoulders. “That’s the best part. The risk.”

  The scrape of beard stubble across her neck made her eyes roll back. She let out a long, low moan and her hands slipped down.

  “Gah!” Eric sat up fast, clutching his left arm where he’d been grazed by a bullet. “Ooh.”

  She hopped off him and sprawled nearby, both hands over her mouth. “I’m sorry! Is… is it bleeding?”

  Eric pulled his sleeve up and looked. “No. Just… sore.”

  Dakota lowered her arms, her sexual fire gone as fast as it had come out of nowhere. Cold fear seeped into its place. “Fuck. This is for real, isn’t it? You really got shot.”

  He reached over and grasped her hand. “Yeah. No health packs or respawn.”

  “I don’t wanna go to jail.” She scooted closer.

  “You won’t. You’re way too good. You pulled off better shit than this and walked away clean.”

  She stared out the cargo box at the distant gang punks wandering around, some with visible guns, some not. “Yeah. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I used to be all like, ‘fuck the man’ and ready to literally like, go to war with corporations. Now, I just wanna go home. Be with you. Pour coffee…” Dakota sighed. “Play a game.”

  “Well, you know, my mother always says that there’s nothing quite like being abducted and tortured to make you rearrange your priorities.”

  She squinted at him. “Your mother did not say that.”

  “All right.” He held up his hands. “You caught me. All I’m saying is that anyone who went through that would get into a little knock-down-drag-out with self-doubt. You can do this thing, babe. I know you can.”

  “I’m not exactly about to lead the peasant revolt against the corporate oppressors. I’m writing a module to cheat at a video game.”

  He rubbed her back. “Yeah, but all revolutions start off with some ordinary person saying ‘Aww, man, fuck this shit.’”

  Dakota cracked up giggling. “I can totally picture John Adams saying that exact thing.”

  Still grinning, she scooted back over to the laptop and cracked her knuckles.

  “Okay, CSI. Game on.”

  A Few Moves Ahead

  31

  The others returned not long after. William sat down to continue programming, while Christina grabbed her bag with the medical supplies and headed out to take a look at a few minor injuries among Nebraska’s gang buddies. Much to everyone’s surprise, Shawn wanted to go with her.

  While William developed the routines that aligned an image file of the game’s star map to the proper coordinate matrix, Dakota built the engine around the algorithm that calculated where the game would put the Reckoning.

  Since he had the beefier system, she sent him her portion of the code once she finished it so he could splice everything together and compile it.

  “Good grief, woman. You call this commented code? #Main bit. #Clock thingee. #Mappy stuff here?”

  She shrugged. “Usually, the stuff I write, no one else is gonna read.”

  “Except for you reading it years from now and getting lost in your own code.”

  “Purist,” she muttered.

  “Slacker,” he muttered.

  “Naw,” said Eric. “She’s just bucking convention. You know, that whole anarchist thing. I’m sure she’d comment code someone paid her to develop.”

  “Oh, and completely sell my soul to corporate America. Become a cube fungus.” She shivered.

  “For someone so averse to corporate America, you picked a really weird place to work. Amazon Café? Can you get any more mega?” William grinned.

  “Ugh. Don’t remind me. But hey, they didn’t change it too much when they bought it. We still even have the mermaid logo on everything. The coffee is still good, so.”

  “Speak for thine own self,” said William.

  “Oh, you like Disney Donuts?” Dakota stuck out her tongue. “That stuff’s like brown water. It’s the rinse-water after we clean our brewer.”

  “DD coffee tastes like coffee. Not the burnt ashes of suffering.”

  Dakota gasped, open-mouthed. “Your coffee is weaker than a paraplegic grandmother with one eye.”

  William and Eric both stared at her.

  “Uhh, what’s having one eye gotta do with how strong the ol’ lady is?” asked Eric.

  “Argh!” She grabbed two fistfuls of her hair. “Forget it.”

  “Wow, she’s passionate about coffee.”

  Dakota narrowed her eyes. “You have no idea.”

  “Okay.” William held his finger over the keyboard like a spike. “Ready to compile.”

  “Wait! Jinx.” Dakota shifted to kneel and held her hands over his laptop like a priestess blessing holy water and chanted, “Pro omnibus et. Pro I’m-on-da-bus. Shit, I missed da bus.”

  Again, the guys both stared at her.

  “Sorry, habit. Every time I don’t say that before compiling, there’s a billion bugs.”

  “There are always bugs. No one writes code without bugs.” William hit the button.

  “Yeah, but I’m talking about a program code contaminated with a couple of bugs or bugs contaminated with a couple lines of functioning program code.” She winked.

  The compile finished in a few minutes. William ran the program, which displayed a star map with a blue icon flashing near the southern border, roughly in the middle.

  Dakota pointed at the map, tracing an almost plus sign shape over it.

  “The spawn algorithm is mostly random, but it has exceptions that I think translate to areas of high player density, the core systems. Also, that doohickey at the end is a population check. Basically, the Reckoning isn’t going to teleport anywhere players are congregating. It’ll pick a new location.”

  Christina and Shawn walked back in.

  Dakota looked up at them. “Just in time.”

  “For?” asked Christina.

  “Cool. Can we log in now?” asked Shawn.

  “I think so.” She gestured at the map. “We’ve got a way to tell where the Reckoning is. Since the last mission clue we got appears to be a really stupid way to try and follow this thing, I’m sure the next thing we need to do is find the ship. With this, we can. It predicts where the ship will appear using a random seed value based on the current time, with exceptions for high-population sectors.”

  “Great,” said Eric, “but we’ll still be racing all over the place to get
to it before it moves. It’ll probably jump before we reach it.”

  “We can sit in the middle of the map.” Shawn tapped the core-most system. “Makes for the shortest possible trip to any point.”

  William rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It still takes over an hour and a half to fly to the edge, and this thing teleports every half hour.”

  “Wait.” Dakota held up a finger. “We can go back to DB224. I’ll dive into the network again, maybe I can modify the game files to give the Stormbringer the same teleportation drive?”

  “No way.” Eric shook his head. “They’ll definitely know we cheated then and disqualify the prize for sure.”

  “Yeah.” Shawn gestured at the map. “But didn’t we already cheat with this thing?”

  “Technically… yes.” Eric nodded. “But, it’s nothing they can prove. This doesn’t modify the game files or even touch their network at all. Unless they read our minds, they won’t have any way to know it existed.”

  “Reading our minds is evidently not off the table.” Christina tapped a finger on her head.

  “We’re good. Fawkes gave us head condoms.” Shawn patted the helmet.

  William shifted awkwardly while everyone else laughed.

  “Think of it like chess,” said Eric. “We gotta be a couple moves ahead of the game.”

  “He’s right.” Dakota grabbed William’s laptop and swapped to the compiler window. “Let me add a couple lines here… timer plus thirty minutes, timer plus one hour. I’ll add two more ship icons, one green for where it’ll be in a half hour, one red for where it’ll be in an hour. Blue is now.”

  “That’s a ship?” Shawn tilted his head, staring at the icon on the map display. “Looks like a turd in a circle.”

  Dakota cackled. “It’s based on the in-game art for the Reckoning. It’s kinda shaped like a giant icicle. Pointy at the nose, fat in the butt.”

  “Sounds like my ex mother-in-law,” muttered William.

  “Ouch.” Dakota grinned. “Okay. Compiling.”

  “You forgot the chant,” said William.

  “Already chanted this app. Mods don’t count. Just the first compile.”

  Nine minutes later, she ran the updated program and three ships appeared on the map.

  “So, blue is where it is. Green’s thirty minutes from now, and red’s the one hour location,” said William while pointing at the screen.

  “Correct.” Dakota nodded.

  “Well…” William tapped the red icon. “We should just go there now and wait.”

  “Wouldn’t that look a hair suspicious if we’re sitting on top of it when it appears?” asked Eric.

  Dakota rubbed her hands back and forth over her knees to burn off energy. “That’s a possibility, and it might not go to a sector with any player ships in it.”

  “Best if we make it look coincidental,” said Christina. “Even if we act like we’re doing the quest right. Go to a spot it’s been at so the game triggers a log update when our ship’s sensors pick up the trail that prototype warp drive left. Then we grab a mission that will send us to a system near the ship so we can say we just stumbled onto it.”

  “That’s going to take some coordination and planning.” William rubbed his chin. “But it shouldn’t be impossible. Let’s do it.”

  Everyone scrambled to get their helmets on before attempting to position themselves comfortably on the cruddy mattresses and sleeping bags.

  Dakota held her helmet to her face, breath from her nostrils forming two fog patches on the pink plastic. “You be good now. Don’t go poking my brain where you’re not supposed to.”

  As messed up as the past day and a half had been, being about to log back into the game felt right, like a little kid getting their lost security blanket back.

  The blackout visor came down over her eyes as she settled the helmet in place. For a few seconds, the sound of her slow breathing drowned out the world before a pleasant female voice broke the quiet.

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

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

  She reached up, her hand shaking from excitement and nerves, and pushed the little rubber button.

  “Synchronizing with game server. Welcome to Axillon99.”

  Firelight

  32

  Axillon99 had a built-in mini-game by virtue of an inventory item, the targeting drone. The baseball-sized bot would fly around at varying distances, playing target to whatever ranged weapon the character had equipped. In a fit of realism breaking, when the drone was active, the player’s weapon didn’t cause damage to anything else and didn’t consume ammunition.

  Consequently, players tended to use them only in safe places where no wandering creatures could start a real fight while the player’s weapons behaved like toys.

  To blow off steam at being kidnapped, Fawkes spent over an hour in the Stormbringer’s engineering bay trying to shoot her target drone. She pictured it as Light Voice, a man whose face she had never seen, and he became an amalgamation of two boys from high school she’d hated plus a handful of movie villains. Over and over again, she shot the robotic orb as it zipped and glided about, or tried to ‘take cover’ behind objects. It had a mode that let it fire back, but she wanted to punish something, not have a contest.

  During that time, Kavan flew them toward the blue icon’s location, with no expectation that the Reckoning would still be there. He’d found a mission fairly close to that spot, and plotted a meandering course that would take them through the sector where the ship had been.

  Sure enough, they did not encounter the giant, mysterious vessel―but the viewscreen displayed a ghostly blue apparition somewhat like the Aurora Borealis in appearance. A mission update announced that their ship’s computer had detected a trace of the prototype drive, and a new map mode, ‘tracking’ became available. That would show all the locations where they found traces, as well as the times of when the computer estimated the Reckoning had been at each location.

  “I don’t know how they expect anyone to find this damn thing,” said Angel813. “By looking at this, you would think the ship follows a predictable series of jumps.”

  “You would think.” William nodded, making funny eyes at everyone as a reminder not to speak about their little helper. Anything they said as their characters inside the game might be recorded somewhere on a CSI server.

  “Well,” said Rallek, sounding mostly sincere. “I guess we just keep running around until we have enough traces to figure out where to go.”

  Fawkes glanced back over her shoulder at the voices echoing down the ship’s main corridor. The targeting ball peeked up from behind a large metal component in the middle of the room, something supposedly vital to the engine, and emitted a raspberry noise, complete with holographic fluttering tongue. Screw it. I need to unwind. She decided to ignore the conversation on the bridge and shot the little orb, which careened into the back of the room while emitting an overacted wail of agony.

  The mission Kavan picked didn’t involve leaving the ship, and probably wouldn’t have been appealing to a full crew, as it had been intended for a solo pilot. Fawkes mostly disregarded the space combat, though she did slot a couple ship buffs while they sparred with a pirate corvette. Winning involved simply blowing up the other ship, which Kavan and Nighthawk handled rather easily. Knowing the brain behind their ace fighter pilot belonged to an eleven-year-old made looking at the twenty-something Nighthawk a bit awkward, but it explained everything she’d ever thought weird about him.

  After the pirate battle, Nighthawk walked around the ship saying dumb things with his natural childish voice emanating from the body of a muscular, handsome pilot. Once the amusement value of that fell to nil, he set it back to the ‘character voice.’

  Kavan threw the Stormbringer into warp, crossing the universe to
a location nearer the system core. Hours melted away as they played cat and mouse with old spawn locations. Eventually, William suggested everyone else log out for some rest and he would keep checking the mission boards for something that lined up with the predicted location of the pirate battlecruiser.

  Dakota ran off to use the bathroom, which occupied the innermost of a series of crumbling chambers under a section of bridge closer to the water. Whatever building it had once been probably belonged to the Transit Authority or something. It hadn’t been a bathroom at the time, but after being abandoned, some of Nebraska’s friends Frankensteined three functioning commodes with some creative use of garden hose, old toilets, and a cobbled-together series of pipes that went off to who-knows-where. The gang had been living here for two-ish years, and the toilets hadn’t backed up or overflowed yet, so she trusted them enough to sit down.

  Of course, no one had bothered with any sort of privacy barrier other than them being in a mid-sized room with cinder block walls and a tarp over the only way in. She tried to cover herself as much as possible while sitting on the bowl. The place didn’t even have electricity, so she peed by the light of her smartphone.

  Soon after she started, Shawn walked in and stopped dead in his tracks two paces away from the entrance, staring at her. For a few extremely awkward seconds, only the echoing drips of an interrupted stream broke the silence.

  “Crap. Oops!” He whirled away, putting his back to her. “Sorry.”

  “Uhh, yeah. Wow, this is uncomfortable. Not your fault.”

  “I’ll, umm, wait outside.” He hurried out without looking back.

  Whew. She finished up as fast as possible and used a dangling garden hose to ‘flush.’ On the way out, she tried not to make eye contact with him. Not that he could’ve possibly seen much given the dark and her defensive posture, but still.

  He muttered, “Sorry,” again and ducked past the tarp.

  Dakota trudged across a chamber several times bigger than the bathroom littered with trash, while the wind whistled over the cracked remnants of the bridge superstructure overhead. A distant radio spat out the last few seconds of reggae before an old Carlos Santana song started. She slipped past another hanging plastic tarp serving as a door out to the area beneath the bridge that didn’t have solid walls on the side. Thousands of tons of concrete and steel blocked out the stars overhead, but offered no protection from a stiff breeze blasting in from the side.