by D. J. Bodden
I took another mouthful of stew. I suppose it made sense. Most players would stick with an MMORPG for one year before quitting or moving to another one. We hoped V.G.O. would keep their attention longer than that because of the self-generating world and quests, but there would be other NexGenVR games released, maybe in worlds that were more appealing to the players, and life happened. Sometimes you weren’t in a place where logging into a game for hours every day was a possibility or even a want.
So players needed a leg up on the competition, and seeing as I was just one person in a city of three million, that competition was pretty stiff.
“Do you know you’re an NPC?” I asked him.
“An enpee-what?”
“Never mind. It’s a term from my world for someone in Eldgard.”
Horace grunted. “It didn’t sound complimentary. I’d keep that one to yourself.”
We finished our meals. I paid the four coppers for another round of beers and did a few coin tricks for the people around us. Horace used his voice-throwing trick to tell dirty jokes to the general hilarity of the room, and Henry comped us the third round. I was buzzed and happy by the time the diners left, the sleepers barred the door, and we set the tables against the wall. Henry pulled some pillows out of a crate by the bar, and people made themselves as comfortable as they could on the floor or on a bench.
Horace chose a bench. I followed suit, though it seemed like a recipe for falling on your face in the middle of the night.
About thirty minutes after the lamps went out, I heard the sound of scurrying feet on the floor below me as Henry’s cleaning crew went to work. Yet another of V.G.O.’s mysteries solved.
THE MONITORING SOFTWARE was recording, Alan was stable, and even the AIs were settling down. There was nothing for him to do but stare at a blank screen. Jeff pushed himself back from the desk and stood, yawning. It had been a hell of a day.
He gathered up the trash from the junk food he’d lived on, like some kind of post-apocalyptic urban survivor. He felt tired and dirty, dehydrated from last night’s drinking, and the mix of caffeine and sugar was running out. He’d be glad when all this was over, and he could change clothes and sleep in his own bed.
He left Alpha Testing and passed through the programming farm. All the offices but his were stripped bare. He’d liked some of the people here. There were people whose papers he’d read in robotics journals, and people who’d had experience with mind-machine interfaces from gaming who’d helped him simplify the complex task of controlling a simulated body with full sensory feedback. The AI guys were weird, but they’d taken the skeleton of a control system he’d built and fed it into Kronos, and he’d been grateful for that, too.
He stepped into his office and turned on the light. There wasn’t much that was his. He’d hung his bachelor’s and master’s from Penn on the wall, as well as his doctorates in Nanoscience and Nanoengineering. There were some declassified screenshots from an American soldier’s eyes in Ukraine, as well as some nanobot model printouts the AI guys had Gaia generate for fun.
His desk was clean. He’d shifted to Alpha Testing three months ago, only using the office for calls, private meetings, and to get away from the mouth breathers HR had sent him to test the gear. He was going to talk to Osmark about that. If someone of Alan’s caliber was all it took to make it work, Jeff had been set up for failure.
Then again, he knew from his experience with the Department of Defense that a technical solution that required a smart—a fairly smart—individual to operate wouldn’t stand up to the requirements of users who were tired, drunk, stoned, or just average, which as the word implied was most of the population.
He had a picture of Cheryl and Krissy on his filing cabinet. He smiled.
He’d been working in Home Depot when Cheryl came down the aisle looking lost and carrying a baby. The porch at her parents’ place had rotted through, and her dad wasn’t in good enough shape to replace it after his stroke.
“Jeff? Is that you?” she’d said.
He’d been so embarrassed to have her see him stocking shelves, he’d almost missed the wonder in her voice. “Hey, Cheryl. It’s been a while.”
They talked. They had coffee after his shift. He spent the summer fixing up her parents’ place, after work, and they’d kind of dated, though neither of them had called it that. It was just Jeff Berkowitz and Cheryl Jones spending recess together and touching elbows. Sometimes, he held the baby.
He’d found the grounding to finish his degree, so he left again, but this time they’d e-mailed each other every day, and he stopped cutting, though he still struggled sometimes. At the end of the semester, Cheryl drove down to Baltimore, and he got his first tattoo.
His watch beeped. Time to head outside.
He left the programming farm and passed through the outer office. It was quiet, sterile, deconstructed. The movers were gone for the day. There was no guard on the outer door; it was locked to anyone not on the access list.
Cheryl was already there. She’d parked her station wagon next to his Explorer.
“Hi, Daddy!” Krissy yelled, and Jeff felt his face split into the widest grin he could manage.
“Hey, kiddo! Shouldn’t you be out partying with the other freshmen?”
Krissy rolled her eyes. “Mom says I need to study more. I bombed my Western Civilization midterm.”
“What about calc?” he asked.
“Ninety-seven.”
“That’s my girl.”
Cheryl squinted her eyes at him, but he could tell it was for show. They were both proud of their daughter. “Don’t encourage her. She needs to be well rounded.”
“An engineer’s paycheck can pay for a lot of therapy,” Jeff said with a wink. He saw a flash of hesitation in Cheryl’s eyes, but she laughed with them. Jeff’s mom and his tattoos weren’t something they talked about in front of Krissy. She wasn’t his, thankfully, even though he’d never treated her like anything but his daughter, so she wouldn’t have the same problems, and he didn’t want to burden her with something she didn’t need to know.
“Speaking of paychecks, Dad, I need money.”
“Do you?”
“Yep.” She stuck her hands in her pockets and rocked back and forth on her heels.
“How much?”
“Just enough for dinner and a movie?”
“How much is that in math?”
Krissy pouted. “Thirty.”
Cheryl crossed her arms. “You can catch a matinee for five bucks, and food is ten dollars if you eat before.”
Jeff grinned. He pulled two twenties from his pocket and gave his daughter a wink. “Bring a friend with you.”
“Thanks, Dad!” Krissy took the money off his hands and kissed him on the cheek.
Cheryl smiled at the two of them. He reached for her and wrapped his arms around his family.
“Um, Dad? You kind of smell.”
“Yeah, babe, you do. And isn’t the parking lot kind of empty?”
Jeff looked at the loves of his life. “It is. We had a problem with the project, and the boss gave everyone the weekend off, but I’ve solved it, and everything’s going to be okay.”
I DREAMED OF POPS. He was old, probably as old as I’d ever seen him before he died, but we weren’t at the house near Empuriabrava, we were in the alpha server. I could tell because I recognized the hill and the grove, and because the textures weren’t as perfect as they were inside V.G.O.
So Pops was standing there with his back to me, one of his giant hands resting on the bole of an olive tree and the other knuckled into his hip. He was looking toward the bay. He was wearing the sleeveless white shirt and khaki pants he always wore when he was working in the gardens, and he’d worked until the day he couldn’t anymore.
“That you, nieto?” he asked, looking over his right shoulder.
“Yeah, Pops,” I whispered. “It’s me.”
FOURTEEN
SOPHIA SHUDDERED. IT was all going wrong. She could feel
all the precursors of catastrophe clicking into place, but she felt powerless to stop it. She couldn’t directly interfere in the player’s experience, not without giving her sister, Enyo, equal license to act. Meanwhile, New Viridia burned with fear, plots, and counterplots since the Griffin’s pogrom at the shelter. Going there would be like bathing in boiling water. She would have to ease herself in.
Worse, Thalia, her own Mistress of the Sicarii, was co-opting the assassins for personal ends while Sathis hid in his chambers. Thalia was a star in Sophia’s universe, both inescapable pull and cataclysmic heat. The Overmind of Balance had left her daughter to pickle in her little bar too long, and now she was spoiled. There was no avoiding what was to come.
ROBERT OSMARK OPENED his eyes. The ceiling fan again. Round and round. The sound of his wrist alarm going off. Osmark sat up in bed. He’d slept dreamlessly from the time he’d lain down until now, a full eight hours, and he felt nothing. Not well-rested or tired, just wide-awake nothing, like he’d never gone to bed. He swung his legs out and padded into the kitchen.
The coffeepot had just started to burble. The sky outside the balcony window was the pale gray of pre-dawn. He walked to the bathroom, took a leak, flushed, washed his hands and then his face, then headed back to the kitchen.
His coffee was ready. He pulled the pot out from under the automatic brewer and poured himself a mug. Sumatra, today. It was Saturday; Saturdays he tried new things. It smelled earthy and rich, like freshly turned soil and spoiling fruit. He deferred judgment, just like his high-priced Harvard creativity seminar had told him to, and took a sip.
The almost scalding hot coffee was sweet and complex. It made his tongue tingle and his mind buzz. He could have sat in one of those snobby coffee shops that were growing like fungus in newly gentrified Brooklyn, back home, and spouted nonsense of how round the coffee was, and how the middle note reminded him of the loamy taste of jungle earth and pepper, but the truth was, he hated it. He took another sip because his mother always told him to try things twice, and because morning mouth could throw his palate off sometimes, but no, he definitely hated it, and while young Osmark never would have wasted the caffeine, Osmark in his prime was too busy and rich to drink bad coffee. He poured the rest of it down the sink.
He rinsed his mug out and refilled it with fresh, filtered water. Sometimes he passed on coffee just to prove to himself he wasn’t addicted. He wasn’t going to dig through his cabinets for an alternate cup for the same reasons.
He stepped out onto the balcony and leaned his arms on the railing, drinking his water, listening to the waves and the rising wind as the sun rose somewhere behind him. A woman jogged across the beach below him, and in his mind he wished her well. The world belonged to those who rose and chased after what they wanted. He finished his water and went back inside.
He sat down at his desk with a second glass of water and a Granny Smith apple, biting into the fresh, tart fruit as he clicked his way through his executive dashboard. The move-out was 62% complete. That meant the packers might be able to start on the programming farm early. He shot an email to the dev team leads to remind them they had until noon to retrieve any personal belongings they didn’t want packed. He already had placements for most of them on projects that would add value to the company and redeem them for Viridian’s failure; letting them grab the crap they’d hung from the walls was just a way to keep them happy and loyal until he could put this mess behind him.
He took a second to wipe his glasses and wrinkled his nose. He’d thought of laser surgery; as much as the glasses were acceptable in the tech world, he hated depending on them. But for every ten success stories he read about PRK or Lasik, he heard at least one where the patient ended up legally blind, and that wasn’t a risk he was willing to take.
He checked the security status on the building and saw that both Jeff Berkowitz and Alan Campbell were still there. Alan hadn’t left since yesterday. Jeff had stepped out briefly last evening and then spent the night in Alpha Testing.
Robert got goosebumps down his arms. He stabbed the home button on his smartphone, logging in with his fingerprint, and said, “Sophia, call Sandra Bullard mobile.”
“What’s wrong?” Sandra said.
No stupid questions, just straight to the point. He made a mental note to give her a raise. “I need you to get to the Viridian building right away.”
PROVUS SHOWED UP AT the precinct near dawn, before his regular duties to the legate started. His uncle had sent word that the commoner who’d saved him might be there.
The precinct was an old building—an inner fort from New Viridia’s more turbulent past when the outermost ring had been breached more than once, and the Legion had used forts like these as fallback locations. Since the last decade had been peaceful inside Imperial borders, the fort had been given over to the watch.
It was just before shift change, so most of the watchmen were in the building. The desk sergeant, a Svartalfar woman who was friendly to the point of giggles, wouldn’t help him until her captain authorized it. He waited for nearly half an hour. Then the captain, his social peer in rank if not in lineage, assigned a watchman named Gork to take him to the prisoner.
Provus followed the half-Risi watchman to the cells in the back of the precinct. There were only four, enough to hold prisoners who made it to the building alive for a short time before sentencing or transfer to the labor camps; Imperial roads didn’t build themselves.
There were two prisoners in the cells. One was a woman whose brown robes completely covered her except for her hands, which were thin, wrinkled, and veined. She huddled in the corner of her cell, away from the door. Opposite her, a man in workman’s clothes was curled up on his side in the middle of his cell, with his back to bars and the light.
“You, prisoner! Get up!” Provus snapped.
The man groaned and shivered.
“He’s coming off an Affka high, sir,” Gork said, unlocking the cell.
Provus frowned. Charging into a losing battle sounded right for an Affka user, but he’d hoped for more.
Gork grabbed the man by the back of the neck and lifted him to the bars like he was holding a stray cat. “This him?”
The prisoner had dirty brown hair, blue, bloodshot eyes, a scraggly mustache that ran down both sides of his mouth to his chin, and the wiry physique of a manual laborer. A string of drool trailed from his slack mouth. Provus could see light blue veins underneath the Wode’s pale skin, even in torchlight.
For all his screaming over a trivial injury, Provus’s savior had been Imperial, dark-skinned, and somewhat handsome. Provus was annoyed and relieved at the same time. “It’s not him.”
The watchman set the prisoner down more gently than Provus might have. “What should we do with him, your lordship?”
Provus shrugged. “Charge him for Affka use or let him go. I couldn’t care less.”
Gork kept his tone respectful. “Your man paid him a silver for his silence, sir. I think it may have been more money than he’s used to having.”
But Provus was already walking back up the stairs. The Wode couldn’t talk in his state. This had been necessary, but further engagement was a waste of his valuable time.
SANDRA SWUNG HER LEG off her new Kawasaki Ninja and ran up to the door, helmet in hand.
“Good morning, Miss Bullard,” Frank said.
“Frank.” She swiped her card and went in.
She passed through the shell of the content creation spaces, swiped her way into the programming farm, and jogged to Alpha Testing. All the while she was running through scenarios of what might be happening in there, from a disgruntled employee to industrial espionage, with a few foreign actors scattered throughout. She wished she had a gun.
She reached Alpha Testing and swiped her way in. A glance told her the vault was physically secure, and she doubted anyone could get through Thanatos’s security protocols in one day, not through a single access point and without bringing people and hardware in. She tur
ned into the testing bay and found Jeff Berkowitz and Alan Campbell asleep on the hospital beds.
She paused, unsure of what was going on. She’d expected them to be stealing files, or equipment, or to be drunk off their rockers. She hadn’t expected this. “Berkowitz!”
The big nanotech engineer jerked and sat up, arms flailing like he was under attack. He blinked, saw her, and said, “Oh, shit.”
“Alan! You too! Get up, and get over here!”
“Umm... he can’t,” Jeff said, walking up.
Sandra glared at him.
“He’s in the game.”
Sandra continued to stare at the engineer. Part of that was because she needed a few seconds to herself to process all the implications of what the man had just said. The other part was that in spite of being shorter, lighter, and younger than the man standing in front of her, the company she kept and a personal history of violence meant this had often, in the past, encouraged people to spill their guts as fast as they could manage.
“It was his idea! I mean, he couldn’t have done it without me, but he basically said Osmark wanted him to solve the problem, and then he bet me he could stay in the test server for a few minutes, and I was hung over, so I thought, ‘What the hell?’”
Sandra kept staring. She’d learned not to blink while aiming down a rifle scope, years back. It really made people uncomfortable.
“And then he puked his guts up. Twice. But I cleaned it all up and changed the settings because the doctors were wrong. His idea, too, just in case, so we’re probably not liable, but the readouts don’t show any lasting damage at all.”
Sandra ran her tongue across her teeth while he stammered, feeling the tip of her left canine. The guy didn’t know whether he should take credit or shift blame. Sandra wasn’t sure either. She crossed her helmet-carrying arm at her waist and chewed on the side of her left thumb.
