Rune Waker

by Jamie Hawke

  It wasn’t her. Not at first, anyway. Instead, I found a swirling steam as if the shower was on, but it wasn’t. A silver glow formed in the steam, taking on her nude shape, but vaguely. Not quite there, but still clear enough for me to recognize it was her.

  My voice caught in my throat as I tried to ask her what she was doing there. All that came out was me saying, “How…?”

  Her eyes formed, clearer now, and as her mouth moved, her voice seemed to come from all around me. “They went too far, created a rift. I see it now, I get it. And I’m going as far away from it as possible… if possible.”

  “Katie…” For the first time, I realized I was actually speaking with my Katie. Not some computer programmed version of her, not some hallucination… Well, maybe, but I didn’t think so. This felt more real than anything ever had before. “Don’t go.”

  “I have no choice.” Her eyes looked away, then started to fade. “Don’t follow me. Please, don’t…”

  “Katie, stay.” My voice was firm, but pleading. I needed her to stay.

  “You don’t understand,” her voice came, now focused in the silver glow as it started to vanish, only a ball in the steam. “It’s all… changing.”

  “I’ll find you,” I promised. “I won’t leave you.”

  “You… don’t…. belong…” The words faded, and the silver and mist with it, as if pulled back into the wall.

  6

  My first thought was to throw myself through the wall, and fuck did I try. My shoulder stung like hell with the first hit, cracking the tiles. The second brought more of a dull pain, but the wall gave. Only, there was no portal, no sign of Katie. It was insulation, boards, shower piping and a heating duct or some bullshit.

  I clawed at the insulation, the fibers stinging my fingers and the palms of my hands. It was no good. She was gone. My VR setup was in the next room over, my only hope, so I went to it and logged in. Getting ready to chase her down in there, I would tell her it was all going to be okay.

  Error: LivreCorp does not exist.

  The message froze there, nothing else happening. Large, red letters threatening to burn into my retinas and my soul. If it was gone, if the simulation was… wait a minute—it said the company didn’t exist. Not just the game was offline.

  That didn’t make sense.

  Mind racing, trying to figure this out, I made for the door, slipped on my shoes, and went running for the car. The frigid night air should’ve been my first warning at how this was going to go, the realization that I didn’t have my pants or keys the second. Cursing, I ran back and grabbed them, not even bothering to throw my pants on, just throwing myself into the car and peeling out as I made for the building of LivreCorp where I’d met Cynthia.

  “Dammit, Brad, pick up!” I shouted, hitting the display on my dash, then shouting for my car to call him.

  It rang several times before he picked up, cursing and asking me what the hell I was interrupting him for.

  “It’s down, Brad! Can you log in?”

  A moment of silence followed, then he said, “No, that’s what I was trying to figure out. I’d been in the middle of a session, this gorgeous Asian redhead, and—”

  “Don’t give me the fucking details. Just… dammit, this is crazy, but I’m going over there.”

  “They didn’t pick up?”

  I blinked, realizing I hadn’t even thought to call. At that point, though, I was already pulling off of the road, staring at the building in front of me. There’d be no point in calling. They were definitely gone.

  “Brad, I’ll—I’ll call you later.”

  “Sure, but—”

  The phone disconnected as soon as I’d exited the car, which I did on the side of the road. It wasn’t like I needed to get any closer, because the building was not only dark, the sign that had been there before, big green letters that had said the name of the company… gone. The large images that had been displayed on either side of the building, showing happy couples reunited, a family with their lost dog, and more… gone.

  What. The. Fuck.

  Still, even though I’d seen just fine from the road, I had to be sure. I ran up to the building, banging on the doors, about to freak out until one opened.

  I was in! Charging through empty halls, upstairs and onto the floor where Cynthia had convinced me this simulation would change my life. She hadn’t been wrong. But now… now she was gone, too. All of it was gone, not even a desk or power cord left as evidence they had ever been there.

  Maybe I would’ve thought this was a crazy Michael Douglas movie, if not for the fact that I was definitely no M.D. Maybe a Ryan Gosling or possibly even a Ryan Reynolds, if I was lucky. Regardless, this shouldn’t have been happening. Not to me, not to anyone.

  All I could do was break a fucking wall, hoping there’d be a portal behind it. No such luck, and the kick left my foot hurting like a motherfucker, even though I’d used my heel.

  Storming out of there, I called Brad again, and told him about the empty building.

  “Hold on,” he said. “Damn. I pulled up HQ and dialed on my screen. Nothing.”

  “This is so fucked.”

  “You know… I actually agree.”

  “With me?” I almost wanted to make a joke about not knowing which was crazier, what had happened in the building, or him agreeing with me. But no, the answer to that was clear.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” he went on. “A company we both clearly know existed only yesterday. A company many other people know about… It’s going to be on the net. Searching now…”

  I was back at my car by then, so sat and swiped up my screen from the dashboard, a holo-projector, which I used to scan for news of LivreCorp as well. Nothing in the news yet. The regular hits weren’t showing up either, like the company website and all that.

  “Didn’t you just say you called HQ?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “If you found the number on the net, I’d like to know where.”

  A moment of silence followed, then he gasped. “It’s gone. It’s fucking gone.”

  “Someone’s taking them down, erasing proof of their existence.”

  Brad clicked his teeth. “You said weird shit was happening, right? Maybe the government got involved.”

  “You think?” The sites going down, the building clearing out in such a rush. If what had happened to me was somehow connected to the sim, then that could make sense.

  “How many alpha testers would you say there were?”

  “Fucked if I know, man. Probably not many.” It hit me why he was asking. “If we could find the others, talk to them, see if similar things happened…”

  “Exactly. I’m checking the dark net, see if—”

  “The what?”

  “You know, the underground. The channels people like you don’t know about, apparently.” He chuckled. “Just… Oh, here we go.”

  “You got one of them?”

  “No, but people are talking about it, confused. Not much more than what we know, but there’s a link—Pan0469 put a link, says it allows you to get into the simulation, even though everyone else says it’s been shut down.”

  “Let me see.” The screen in front of me flashed to a receiving message, then mirrored his, showing the chat. Sure enough, there was a link, and a couple of people were saying they’d already gone in. They weren’t reporting anything strange like I had, though. Mostly just that it was still going, and that it was amazing. Like really being in fantasy worlds. One guy said he’d found a world that was full of super-hot fairies, all nude, or mostly nude, and saw a dragon.

  “It’s like really being there,” the guy wrote. “I mean it—I couldn’t tell the difference if it had been all for real, you know? Crazy.”

  “I’m trying the link,” I said to Brad. “As soon as I get home.”

  “Good, you can join me. Because all this is so crazy, I’d have to be an idiot to sit it out.”

  “You might not want to get involved.” My
car purred into action and I pulled out of there, anxious to get back and try this out.

  “Ryan, you couldn’t pay me enough to convince me not to.”

  “All right. I’ll see you in there, pal.”

  My hand was visibly shaking when I reached out to shut off the call, but in a way I was excited. If this worked, I could get back in there, find Katie—or at least, find their version of her… Fuck, my head was spinning with this.

  7

  While my hand had been shaking earlier, by the time I got into my rig and was ready to login to the system, hacker link ready and Brad on my party chat, my whole body was shaking.

  “You’re with me on this?” I asked. “You can still back out.”

  “Fuck that. And let you have all the fun?” Brad’s boisterous laugh came through and, as I lowered my headset into place, his avatar appeared in a white space. “I’ll put in the link, since you joined my party.”

  I grunted in approval, and waited. He stood there, staring at nothing, and then all of the white pixelation dropped away to reveal what looked like a portal. It only hit me then that this link could be complete horseshit. For all we knew, some troll dipshit had created it as a way of pulling us into a trap, where he’d be able to take all of our shit or even destroy our systems from the inside.

  A panic flowed through me in the form of a chill, my blood pounding in my head, and then… we were through.

  Without a doubt, this was LivreCorp tech. Nothing else on the market came close. A complete sense of reality, and we were even in that field where I’d first met their version of Katie.

  “This is the place?” Brad asked, turning to me and frowning.

  “Yeah…?”

  “And when you met her, you had this going on.” He motioned to his body, which I then observed still had that death servant avatar look. When I’d last been in the field with Katie, we’d each appeared as ourselves. No different. But Brad had his ashen face and red eyes, sharp armor and nasty scythe strapped to his back. He was in full-on death servant mode. A glance down at myself revealed my Angelic Host body. Not that I was complaining, as I looked and felt like a genuine badass, but I had to wonder why the system had kept us in these avatars this time, even in this place

  “If they’ve taken their servers down, what is this?” Brad asked, taking a few steps and then taking his sword and slamming it into the ground. It stuck there, and he frowned. “I’d have expected it to fall off into a collectable block, like this is all some fanservice mod.”

  I actually laughed. Maybe it was for a release of the tension, I don’t know. “If this were…” My voice caught in my throat, the words too strange. With a scan of the sky—perfect blue, almost, but for several thin clouds drifting by—I tried to think how to not sound like a lunatic.

  “Yes?” He pulled his sword from the ground and then swiped his hand, so that a stats window appeared in front of him. “Hey, levels and everything carried over. Wicked.”

  “Right. Cool.” A tingling sensation ran up my arms, and I blurted out the question. “If this place were real, and I mean, just go with it for a second… If it was the real Katie I’d met in here, how would I go about finding her now?”

  Brad turned to me, and even though he was his avatar, the eyes were his. A strange sensation, considering the fact that in every other game or simulation, it would be the game version. Even the ones that copied your face didn’t actually project your real-time eyes, but there was no doubt in my mind that this was him looking at me with those eyes full of concern.

  “Buddy, pal—” he started.

  I held up my hands in surrender. “Humor me.”

  “We’ve had this conversation. So, fine. Assuming you didn’t listen to me at all, it’s as simple as this—their goal was to make you believe. You believed… but that doesn’t make it real.”

  “But you have to admit, it’s all a bit crazy. The company vanishing, the—”

  “No doubt.” He swung the sword around to his back to leave it there as he would in the game, but it fell to the ground. He frowned, looking down at it, and then laughed. “Huh. I’ll give you this, the mechanics of this place add an extra element of realism.” This time when he picked up his sword, he checked the straps on his back to secure it.

  “Okay, so we agree it’s insane. And we agree that maybe I’m losing it, but… on the off chance that they somehow actually connected to the afterlife, that my Katie could’ve only known certain things—”

  “Like what?” He scrunched his nose, then shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. That was their job.”

  “There was no way they could’ve replicated that, no way they could’ve known some things.” I stood tall, determined. “The Katie I met in here was, somehow, my Katie…”

  “Pulled from the afterlife.” He scrunched his nose, clearly trying to not come off as condescending.

  “Maybe. Maybe we’re in the afterlife right now. Fuck, Brad, there was something in my house. Ghosts, maybe—her. I don’t know, but it was there.”

  “Or you’ve lost your mind.”

  “Yes. Or that.” I spread my wings, testing them out to see how real they felt. Sure enough, it was as if they were part of my body. “Nothing has seemed more real than this place, and when all of that was happening—in the real world—nothing seemed more real, either. So maybe I’ve lost my mind. We’ve established that. But work with me, help a crazy person out. If, and we’ve established it’s a big fucking if, any of that could possibly be real—”

  “Where would you find Katie,” he finished for me, nodding. “Fuck it. Fine.” He spread his arms out, indicating the fields of grass as far as the eye could see. “Maybe it’s the afterlife, but we know for sure we logged in to get here, so we can assume it’s part game.”

  “Right. And… I’ve been looking up more of the chat boards.” Brad took a second, then continued. “People are definitely talking. Asking where the company is, saying it has completely vanished. No news yet, nothing official. They’re saying it’s a major glitch, but—”

  “But it’s more than that.” I laughed. “A glitch. If this is a glitch, I’m a fucking dragon.”

  “Sure.” He stepped forward, looking around. “Last time you were with her, you were here?”

  “No. We went through the Livretech into Gods End, actually. Were having fun in the plains, halfway to the Fortress of Baladdair.”

  “Seriously?”

  I laughed. “I don’t think either of us really expected to reach it, you know. Just… enjoying each other’s company. Playing around.”

  He shook his head, laughing. “They’ve been begging me to join them, you know. I think they’re planning a major raid on you all soon. You would’ve been torn apart.”

  I shrugged. “Sure, but… Doesn’t matter, now.”

  “You can’t get back there?”

  “It was like the Livretech layered over that game, but the link you found didn’t give us that option.”

  “Well, shit.” He turned to me, scrunching his nose. “What’s the first thing you do in a game when you’re trying to figure something out?”

  “Find villagers to talk to.”

  He nodded, a finger to his nose. “Bingo, pal. So, fly up there and give us a look around. See if you can find anything here other than grass. Because if not, we’re shit out of luck.”

  I nodded and spread my wings, leaping to give it a go. But no luck. Again I tried, but even when playing the wings had been more for show, giving me only boosts with certain types of attacks. Realizing the rules mostly applied here, I spread my wings again and moved my hand in the pattern to select my flying attack.

  In an instant, a gust of wind caught and flew me up, giving me a brief moment to glance around before I was flung forward in an attack against empty air. The result wasn’t impressive, the only reward, a good laugh from Brad. I’d seen nothing but more grass and hills in the short amount of time I’d had to try. His smile faded as he made for the next hill. We reached the top
together and stood there, looking around and confirming what I was starting to fear. Nothing here. Nothing but grass.

  “It’s beautiful, in its own way,” he admitted. “Stunning imagery, amazing tech. But… that’s all.”

  “I know.” I hated to admit it, but there was nothing more we could do here. “Just… I’ll look around. Hang out for a bit.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, get some sleep, man.”

  He held my gaze, then nodded. “You’re a good man, Ryan. Maybe there’s another way than this?”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “I can hang out, talk it through. Whatever you need.”

  “Nah, go on.”

  He gave me one more glance, then nodded, fading out of there as he logged out. I watching the spot he’d been, then turned back to the fields of grass and sat cross-legged, eyes focused on the horizon.

  For a long time I sat there like that, simply thinking. Remembering days spent with Katie, the time we’d gone on a day cruise to Catalina Island, playing mini golf and then wandering the hills, making out along the side of a trail. We’d laughed so hard when, thinking we’d been bad, we rounded a bend on our way back to the path only to find an old couple fucking like champs.

  The man had noticed they’d been found out, but hadn’t even stopped. Just gave me a thumbs up before shooing us off.

  I remembered a time at a musical we’d attended in San Francisco, part of a trip to visit her brother, and we’d both fallen asleep. It had been our first and last musical, but I remembered how peaceful it had been, her head on my shoulder, mine leaning on hers. The best nap ever, in spite of the show trying to wake us but failing miserably. We’d had a good laugh at that later on. But it was really the little moments in life that stood out to me, the walks around the lake by my house, the smoothies she’d make in her attempt to keep us both healthy—not that either of us had to really worry about that. And now… now she was dead, so what the fuck did it matter in the long term?