by Grim Martin
AngelTaker 1
by Grim Martin
AngelTaker 1
In the AngelRealm everyone dies. Not me though. Not today.
The virtual world of AngelRealm is a global phenomenon – a way to escape the drudgery of the real world. Everyone is given one free play-token at birth, their shot at glory and riches. I’m Harvey Nobody. I entered the AngelRealm to save my town from total destruction in real life. But when the GameMakers give me an incredible power, the GodAngel – the bloodthirsty ruler of the AngelRealm – cannot afford to let me live.
Because the AngelRealm was meant to be ruled by two Gods. The GodAngel fears I’m the player destined to find the legendary lost AngelThrone and end her total control. Now her Angels are hunting me down. In order to survive, I’m going to have to tame them and bind their powers to me. No matter what it takes.
Because the price for failure is death. Real death.
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AngelTaker 1
Copyright © 2018 Grim Martin. All rights reserved.
First Release: 2018.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, reposted, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, events and incidents are either the products of the authors imagination or used in a fictitious or satirical manner. Any use of locales and public names are for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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1. Rivertun Beats
“Let us sell your token,” my mother begs. She might as well be asking me to sell my soul.
“No, mom, I need it,” I insist.
Everyone on Earth is given a token at birth. The GameMakers give them away for free because they know once you’ve had a taste of the Game of AngelThrones, you’ll be hooked for life.
Most of my community has already sold their tokens. They think if they pool the proceeds together we will be able to buy back our land so that STONY.Corp can’t build their dam and flood us out of our homes. I know better.
“Please, Harvey,” mom says, her eyes wild and desperate. “Think what the neighbors will say! That my son is more interested in taking his turn playing the game rather than saving Rivertun. Please don’t do this to me.”
I take a deep breath and explain again, slowly and carefully so that I don’t end up shouting.
“I’m not going into the AngelRealm for fun, mom. I’ve got a plan. STONY.Corp will never sell us back our land. But once I start playing the Game of AngelThrones I can meet people who have political leverage in the real world. If I can get just one of them to listen to me–”
“LISTEN TO YOU?” my stepdad booms.
Stepdad. I hate that word. As if he has ever been any kind of dad to me. And yet he insists I call him that. When I turned eighteen a couple of years back, I’d tried calling him Frank. He’d punched me in the face for it. I’d bled bucket-loads, and had to endure mom shrieking that she was going to have a heart-attack if we didn’t stop.
As if there was any chance I was gonna hit him back. The guy is a towering six foot five lump of muscle and lard. He outweighs me by at least hundred pounds. Skinny is what I am. Whenever he is in our trailer, I feel like I am suffocating. He likes to boast he’d taken his turn in the medieval era of the AngelRealm, where he’d died a grizzly death battling angels. But not before bedding a hundred whores and almost claiming the long lost GodThrone, of course. The dirty rotten liar. I wish he’d stayed there.
Right now he is sprawled out on the couch with a beer can in his paw and his muddy boots propped up on the rickety coffee table. Not that we’ve had coffee any time this past decade since the last mutated strain of tree virus killed off nearly all the remaining coffee plantations. These days coffee is for rich people. Sold only by STONY.Corp, if you hadn’t guessed already.
Any second now Frank is gonna crumple the can in his big hammy fist and then mom is going to run to the ice-box to fetch him a fresh cold one. Mom has already sold the refrigerator. That is how keen she is to make sure the neighbors know she is contributing to their Save-Rivertun fund in what way she can.
“LISTEN TO MR NOBODY?” Frank booms again, as if I and the entire neighborhood hadn’t heard him the first time. He throws his head back and roars with laughter.
Mr. Nobody. Yeah, that really is my last name. My real dad might as well have been a nobody. I’ve never met him.
Mom shoots me a pleading look. Please not to say anything to rile Frank up.
I grind my teeth while he chokes on his snorts of self-induced mirth.
When he is finished, I tell him, “You watch me. When STONY.Corp laughs at our tiny fund, you’ll be glad I went into the AngelRealm to negotiate a solution. Unlike you, I know how to talk to people.”
Frank’s face turns a deeper shade of purple than the heatwave has already made it. “You little runt,” he snarls. “You better hand over that token of yours or I’ll–”
“You’ll what?” I retort. “Have a heart attack trying to chase me down the road? You fucking hippo.”
He lunges at me, but I’m out of the door before he gets halfway across the trailer. As if that lump could ever have battled the brutal angels of the medieval era. They’d have snuffed him out in a heartbeat.
I shout goodbye at mom, and leg it fast before I have to hear her wailing for me to come back. I won’t be seeing her in a while. I already have my few belongings stuffed into my backpack. I’m on my way to the city to get into the AngelRealm.
Once I am out of sight of our doorway, which only takes turning one corner, I slow down. We have a ground floor trailer cuz Frank is too much of a pig to make a daily climb up to a cheaper one.
Not that he contributes much to the rent. He has money – hell if I know where he gets it from, since he never works – but he spends it all on beer.
I meander through the grid of tightly packed trailers of our town. With fresh eyes I admire the innovative way my community has stacked our homes up one on top of another, with dare-devil walkways strung between the top levels. If I fail, I might never see this again.
I spot a familiar figure up high waving at me. My mate Darryl who, like the rest of the kids around here, played the game as soon as he turned sixteen, using up his token before any of us knew what STONY.Corp was planning. I saved mine so I could train up for a few years in the hopes of having half a chance of striking it rich while I was in there. Problem is I ended up spending most of that time earning a living, telling myself I’d go next year instead.
And now my time has come.
Darryl knows where I am off to. He thinks my plan sucks. Even so, he salutes me before heading back into his trailer. He knows I migh
t be our one shot at a miracle. He doesn’t come down to wish me luck. He knows I want to be alone for a bit.
When I finally reach the shore of the river, just a few dozen meters from the stacks, I take a seat on a rocky ledge. This is my favorite view of Riverhaven, a stretch of river several miles long that is teeming with wildlife.
This ecosystem has somehow survived the ravages of all the vegetation viruses. The shore on both sides is thick with trees and plants. This is my childhood refuge, and STONY.Corp wants to destroy it. They should be protecting it. This is the largest place left to nature inside the whole damn country.
The thought it might not be here when I get back infuriates and scares me. I take a deep breath and try to absorb the feeling of being here in through my lungs. A cacophony of birdsong fills the air as dusk approaches. A kingfisher’s wings flash blue as she skims the glimmering water and comes up with a fish.
This right here is a little piece of heaven.
I try to focus on those things and not the hum of the news-copters circling overhead. One is casting a huge hologram behind it proclaiming, ‘Save Riverhaven, save the world!’
Until the news got interested in the story of STONY.Corp destroying ‘America’s last nature reserve’, nature was something most Americans had forgotten to care about. The story is getting bigger by the day, despite the newspeople’s corporate sponsors being pissed off about it. The corps decided long ago there was no money in saving nature.
The news-copters have riled up a movement of people who want to save Riverhaven but don’t give a damn about Rivertun and the people in it who protected and nurtured Riverhaven these past few decades.
I’m pretty sure the public interest in Riverhaven will blow over the minute Riverhaven drowns. So now I’m finally off to spend my precious token. I’d begun to think I might never go.
I wish I could stay here to watch the soft veil of night descend onto the river amongst the chirruping of insects and the ribbiting of frogs, but I need to bust a move.
I take one last look at the view before trudging back through the stacks. The setting sun is casting monstrous long shadows from our buildings. Smoke is rising from brick fire pits where groups of families have gathered to barbecue PsuedoMeat patties and grill piles of cheap PseudoVeg. The price of fuel is currently too high to not share it.
This is how we do things here. This is our own little high-rise city made out of buildings and shipping containers and trailers in what used to be an old shipping yard. Rivertun. Our own little slice of this heaving, polluted earth. A place to belong.
Not for much longer though.
This might be the last time I hear the pell-mell of the many musical beats emerging from open windows to intertwine into the unique song that hums through Rivertun on summer nights.
It’s time to put my money where my mouth is, or when I come out, all of this will be gone forever. Two weeks is all I have.
2. Money Where My Mouth Is
It’s not like I’ve got any money to ease my passage into the AngelRealm, but my token is all I need. It is a little green and gold coin. As I wait on the side of the highway into the city, I flip it over and over inside my pocket, keeping it out of sight. I don’t plan on being mugged for it.
Tokens come in different sizes and colors. Plain blue or red ones are common. Mine is unique, or so I hope. In all my research, I’ve never heard of another like it. The green crystal disc at the center of the coin is dazzling - like inlit emerald – and it’s surrounded by a thick band of flattened gold. The token is stamped on one side with the insignia of the GodAngel herself, giver of life, and with a group of frolicking naked angels on the other. Like on old-style coin currency.
Frolicking angels. That’s damn funny. Angels are in-game warriors. Both stunningly gorgeous and notoriously cruel. When your time in the game is up, they are the last ones you want coming for you. Heck, they can kill you even with their angelgasms. Some perverted GameMaker must have programmed that. I plan on avoiding death by angel at all costs.
But their presence on my token makes it special. A unique token might mean I get a unique power in the game. They call them Gifts, and they are bestowed by a few special first-life tokens. A coin like this has got to come with a Gift. It’s going to help me get to where I need to go inside the AngelRealm. It’ll help me save Riverhaven.
I’m counting on my token being special.
As I wait by the side of the busy road, hectic traffic blaring past and blasting gusts of hot air on my face, my stomach is churning.
The trouble is that highly convincing fakes have been doing the rounds ever since the GameMakers have been giving tokens away. You only know you’ve got a fake when you go to exchange it at a GameCenter. Frank could have easily switched my real token for a fake years ago. It’s just the sort of thing he would do, and never tell mom.
I had been shocked when she had finally given my token to me when I turned sixteen, after years of me pleading to see it. The last thing she ever wanted was for me to go into the game. She’d got it into her head that I’d never come back.
I run my fingers over the fine detailing on the coin and try to convince myself it is real. It has to be. Who would go to the trouble of making such a cool fake? I never even saw the thing until I was sixteen, so why bother? And anyway, Frank can’t have switched it before that. Mom had hidden it away from him. It’s the best thing she ever did for me.
Even so, worry makes me seethe inside. I plan on never seeing Frank again. Perhaps I can find a way to negotiate his removal as part of my Save-Riverhaven mission. Maybe I can get him sent to a fricking Salk Mine in Antarctica. That would be awesome.
Even thoughts of what I want to do to Frank don’t make me feel better. Fat lot of chance I’ll have of getting rid of him if the token is fake. I squash down the urge to take it out of my pocket to examine it again.
I am so busy stressing that I almost miss the truck. I hear its distinctive thunderous noise coming just in time to throw myself towards it by instinct as it rushes past.
I just about manage to catch hold of one of the long vertical poles at the back of the truck, like prison bars. STONY.Corp’s delivery trucks are built like they are made to survive an Armageddon. My friends and I have hitched rides into the city like this hundreds of times. The drivers know we do it, and they usually don’t give a damn.
Traffic is smooth and it doesn’t take long to get into the city. When we get to a crossroads not too far from the GameCenter I am headed to, I throw myself off the truck, landing on my feet through plenty of practice.
The little old lady I land near does not have the same confidence in my abilities. She is dressed in a tailored pink PseudoSilk suit, and even has a pearl necklace on – like in old movies. When she has stopped flinching at my sudden arrival, she throws me a scathing look, as if I am a bug that has landed on her windshield. Clearly she wishes I had splattered.
Rich is what she is. But nowhere near as rich as she’d like me to believe, because that kind of rich wouldn’t be seen dead walking down a street. That kind of rich sees pavement life like a distant documentary if they ever glance down from their hoverpods as they fly by. Maybe I’ll get me one of those someday.
I wink at the old lady. She scurries into a nearby building.
By the time I get to the GameCenter my heart is going crazy in my chest. The GameCenter has a retro door, the kind you actually have to swing open with your hands. I enter like I own the place, trying not to look like I am shitting myself, even though this establishment definitely has a pulse-monitor scanner that has already told a security AI somewhere exactly what I’m feeling.
This is the city’s flagship GameCenter with state-of-the-art facilities. I wanted the best in-game experience. The interior walls are gleaming glass and real white metal. And unlike the cosplay-clad staff you might get in other centers, the ladies here are all dressed in short white tunics that look like retro nurse’s uniforms.
One, a petite blond with hair i
n pigtails, does some sort of gliding strut over to me. She is frowning.
Someone like me is supposed to go to a GameCenter more suited to my means. It’s one of those unspoken rules, even though technically you’re allowed to play your free token anywhere. I speak quickly before she can tell me to get lost.
“I’m here to play my first-life token,” I tell her.
I hold it up. The green and gold gleams. The expression on her face changes the instant she sees it. Her shiny pink lips form into a perfect little O. Just like mine had when I first saw it.
3. Ready Or Not
The stunning girl reluctantly tears her eyes off my token to look at me. Her scowl has already changed into a smile that is not just welcoming, but down-right seductive.
