Spellcraft

by Andrew Beymer

  “You’re crazy,” Kris said. “Did you forget that they just tried to kill us? Besides, we’re not going to be able to do anything now. You heard the guy. They got our brain patterns. We’re banned.”

  “There are ways we can spoof that,” I said.

  “Yeah, and we’d have to disable the safeties that saved our asses just now,” Kris said. “Do you really want to risk having our brains fried to prove to the world they’re frying people’s brains?”

  “You have a point,” I muttered. “I fucking hate that you have a point.”

  We’d probably die unremarked, too. Sure some people might wonder what happened to that livestreamer who griefed the Horizon gamemaster, but no one would care if a couple of teenagers living out in the middle of the rust belt in the unfashionable middle of an arcology suddenly wound up dead on their Lotus earbuds.

  They’d probably blame it on kids overdosing while using the Lotus earbuds like they had with the first wave of deaths and comas. That infuriated me. I knew Diana had never touched anything harder than alcohol and pot in her life, but it’s not like anyone batted an eyelash these days at someone in one of the numerous towers dotting the rotting grain belt of America keeling over from an overdose.

  “Well we have to…”

  “Conlan,” Kris said.

  “Not right now Kris,” I said. “I need to figure out some way to…”

  “Seriously,” she said. “You need to see this.”

  “Is it another cat video?” I said. “Because this isn’t the time or the place. We’re planning revenge here!”

  It was a measure of just how urgent Kris thought whatever she was talking about was that she didn’t shoot back a moderately witty response. Usually a comment like that would be enough to get the two of us sniping at each other for the next twenty minutes, but she was obviously preoccupied by something she thought was important.

  “What’s going on?” I asked with a sigh. There was something on that translucent screen hovering in the air that had Kris’s attention, and if it was enough to interrupt one of our back and forths then it was worth finding out what it was.

  That’s when the trumpets sounded.

  “What the fuck is going on?” I asked as our surroundings, Kris and me included, melted away in a swirling maelstrom of light.

  6

  Big Announcement

  “What the hell is happening to my White Tower?” Kris bellowed.

  That was weird. I could hear Kris even though we were swirling light. Though at the same time I almost thought I could see the tower in that swirl. Like there were two realities and I was having one hell of a disconnect.

  Was the tower crumbling under us? No, the world swirled around us and melted away. Right. That had to be one hell of a glitch to cause the game world to melt away like that.

  I wondered if this had something to do with the shock we’d gotten from HOE kicking us out of that module. Maybe this was some sort of delayed damage so it wasn’t as obvious they were at fault when someone’s brain melted. If it happened when we weren’t jacked into a Horizon module then it made it all that much easier to deny.

  Devious, if that was the case. I could only hope that if they were killing me with a delayed bomb dropped in my brain then I could come back as a ghost in the machine to haunt those bastards.

  Not likely, but it was a pleasant thought in an otherwise terrifying moment.

  The world continued melting around me, oblivious to the terror that melting swirl was causing, until it resolved into a starscape that started to turn. Sort of like the beginning of Final Fantasy VII, both the original and the multiple remakes Square shoveled out as they got more and more desperate in their later years before their various divisions were auctioned off to the highest bidder.

  Only this starscape was way more realistic than anything that’d ever been generated on the many pieces of Sony hardware that gave the various iterations of FFVII life.

  The view shifted until I stared down at a world hovering in inky darkness. Inky darkness was better than the swirling bad trip I’d been on a moment ago. Distant double stars burned in the background, and several multicolored moons hovered like jewels over this strange new world.

  I looked over to Kris who floated next to me looking giddy. Like a kid who’d just come down the stairs on Christmas morning to see a present that was wrapped in just the right shape to be what she’d been hoping for.

  I opened my mouth to ask her what the hell was going on here. She’d clearly seen something on one of her news feeds before we were brought to wherever the hell this place was. Only the stars started shifting around us again before I could ask her what was up. I figured that meant we were moving again, for all that in real interstellar travel stars were so far apart that the kind of moving starscape that was so popular in so many science fiction properties wasn’t realistic.

  That strange new world and its moons moved closer. Or maybe we were the ones moving as it hung suspended. I had the sickening feeling that I was falling. I imagined this was what it felt like to be an astronaut floating in space who'd suddenly found themselves disengaged and floating closer to the nearest gravity well which meant they were very shortly going to get singed then pancaked if they survived the atmospheric barbecue.

  "Welcome to a whole new world of online entertainment. An experience unlike anything ever seen before!"

  “Fuck yeah!” Kris said, pumping her fist the entire way and finally giving me an inkling of what was going on here.

  She wasn’t terrified. She was ecstatic. She had a crazed manic look in her eyes that usually only happened right before she started laying into bad guys with her two-handed weapon of choice, and that manic look on her face could only mean this was something good.

  I couldn't be entirely sure, but I got the feeling the developers at Lotus, they were the only people who could pull us out of whatever we were doing in the simulation and put us here like this, were throwing some shade on their competitors at Horizon Online Entertainment. If they were throwing shade then they were doing it in a clever way, too, getting in a dig without actually coming out and naming names.

  I could understand why they wouldn't want to outright piss off a company that was probably paying them a crap ton of money in licensing fees to use their technology.

  The falling sensation continued. The world kept rotating below us, and I started to really get a feel for how quickly it was spinning as we moved closer. Entire continents, oceans, seas, and mountains flew past. And I couldn't shake the feeling that we were going to slam right into that world and it was going to be very painful when we did.

  I glanced over to Kris again. And blinked. She was staring at me, and she actually looked worried for all that she’d been pumping her fist a moment ago. Maybe our continued fall towards the planet without any braking had her double guessing why we were here.

  “What did you see before we got pulled in here?” I asked.

  “Lotus Online!” she said. “Rumors of an announcement were flooding the feeds and…”

  I grinned. So my inkling had been right. Though there was still the problem of that planet rushing up to meet us awfully fast.

  "Are you sure this isn't Horizon screwing with us?" Kris shouted, giving voice to her doubts. “Like I know I saw that Lotus announcement hitting the streams, but maybe that was part of their scheme to fuck with us?”

  Oddly enough I could hear Kris's voice just fine even though we were flying through the air with wind whipping around us.

  Though the more I thought about it, the more odd it seemed that we’d hear anything at all since we hadn't entered the planet's atmosphere yet. In space no one could hear wind. I figured it was the devs taking some dramatic license with their game intro that, to be fair, was totally kicking ass so far.

  "I don't think this has anything to do with Horizon," I shouted, though it wasn't like I needed to shout to be heard.

  "A world unlike anything you've ever seen," the booming voice continue
d, oblivious to the minor panic this situation was causing among the gamers who were supposed to be enjoying it.

  We entered the atmosphere, though thankfully the only indication that we were in that atmosphere was a slight uptick in wind noise. I was really glad the realism in this announcement didn’t extend to having us catch fire as we hit the atmosphere.

  We swept over mountains and seas. Over lava fields and volcanoes that erupted, looking for all the world like pictures I’d seen of Io from some of the manned expeditions to Jupiter's moon when I was a kid. Though there hadn’t been lava creatures and dragons in those pictures from the distant parts of the solar system, and those elemental monsters were definitely in abundance on the Lotuscape below.

  I wasn't sure if we were getting a highlight reel from a world that was sparsely populated, something that wasn't entirely unheard of in the gaming industry when they were trying to entice gamers with bullshit previews, or if the world Lotus had created truly was this vast and relentlessly interesting and filled with cool shit to see.

  I looked around and blinked in surprise. There were other streaks moving through the sky. So many that the sky was alive with streaks of light swirling and dancing in amazing patterns.

  "Are those…"

  Kris was also looking at the streaks. They filled the air around us with a web of bright light, and I figured every one of those streaks was getting the same introduction we were. Presumably that meant there were just as many interesting things where those people were flying as there were on the path we were taking. It’s not like Lotus would take those players on a tour of nothing while we were getting the grand tour.

  If that was the case, and this wasn’t so much bullshot, then this game was going to be fucking amazing. My mind boggled to think of the sheer size of this strange new world.

  “I can’t believe this!” I shouted. “It’s finally here! It’s finally fucking here!”

  The enormity of what we were seeing boggled my mind. Lotus must’ve pulled everybody who was logged into their hardware into this new world to have that many streaks shooting over this world.

  Forget spending money on press releases. Those clever bastards merely let their hardware get popular and then stole everyone's attention while they were playing games made by other devs who gave the platform content to make it popular in the first place.

  I shook my head and let out a triumphant laugh. I threw my head back as I looked to Kris who stared at me as though I was going crazy.

  "What are you laughing about?" Kris asked.

  "If this is what Lotus has come up with then Horizon is going out of business!"

  I couldn't help but let out another laugh even as I felt just a little guilty for that laugh.

  On the one hand I probably shouldn't have been happy at the thought of Horizon going out of business. After all, if they went out of business then there’d be no money for families with loved ones who'd been killed. Insolvency would mean a bunch of other creditors lined up ahead of those families.

  At the same time the hatred and loathing I felt for the bastards at Horizon was so great that I couldn't help but be overjoyed at the thought that their company might not be long for this world.

  I looked up. We were hurtling towards a shining wall made of a shimmering material. As I stared it formed into words hovering over the virgin world beneath us.

  A shiver of anticipation ran through me. This would be the first major MMO that had been created within my lifetime. Most of the market had been dominated by players who'd been in control of that market for decades, not counting the MMOs that rose and fell regularly without being much remarked over in the Asian markets, but I could already tell this was going to be a game changer that put all those dinosaurs out of business with all the force of a miles-wide asteroid slamming into the Yucatan.

  The massive sparkling letters finally coalesced.

  “WELCOME TO LOTUS ONLINE.”

  I slammed into those letters and a bright sparkling buzz surrounded me. Engulfed me. Covered every inch of my body with a strange and not entirely unpleasant tingling sensation that was sort of like when my arms fell asleep, but not as annoying.

  The world went black. I grinned even though I’d become a disembodied consciousness floating in a black void.

  Horizon Online Entertainment was in so much fucking trouble. The masters were back, ready to reclaim their throne.

  7

  IRL Danger

  “That shit is gonna kill you if you’re not careful,” I said.

  “Yeah?” Kris asked, taking another pull from her vape stick. “Supposed to be a hell of a lot safer than what they used to smoke. Besides. No one’s proven the link between these and anything nasty.”

  I waved the cloud of fruit flavored nicotine away as she blew it at me. At least it wasn’t that nasty old shit. Smoking wasn’t allowed on any level of the arcology, though of course how much those rules applied depended on how much money someone had.

  Or how little they had to lose, for that matter. It was one of the strange things that the super wealthy and the super poor had in common.

  People smoked all the time on our level and no one came after them. Mostly because that was the least of the laws being broken around here on the regular.

  “That’s exactly what people said about smoking for years,” I said. “Didn’t do shit for all the people who died thinking it was safe.”

  “Whatever,” Kris said. “You ready to do this?”

  I looked out across our level and up towards our school in the distance high on the massive center support column. This early in the morning, before the few lights that still worked turned on to create the twilight that passed for daytime, those lights from the center column were the only thing twinkling around here.

  At this hour everyone was either logged into their Lotus hardware or sleeping. Or on whatever old fashioned non-VR drug of choice they were chasing as they came down from their overnight high.

  “Yeah, I guess we should do this,” I said. “Not like the trip’s gonna get any easier when the lights come on.”

  I sighed. At least at this time of day most of the tweakers were still high enough on whatever they managed to score overnight that they wouldn’t be coming at us.

  Maybe. If we were lucky as we made our way through the rat’s nest of alleys we had to navigate every day to get to the school elevator.

  I looked out to the massive grimy window running around the outside of our level. Supposedly the thing had let in real sunlight once upon a time. At least it’d provided light during the times of day when the sun briefly shone at the right angle to get in here.

  Not anymore, though. Sunlight was something for people who could afford to live on a level where people still maintained shit.

  I dropped down to the street beside my house. It was safer to be on the roofs for hanging out, but running across the roofs was a good way to get shot by someone with a contraband weapon firing through those roofs thinking you were a thief.

  Kris did the same. I double checked that the back door to my place was locked. The last thing I wanted was to come home to a security team trying to confiscate my earbuds because some asshole tried breaking in and that gave them a convenient excuse to officially rob the place. Then Kris and I moved into the darkness.

  “I checked the views on our video this morning,” I said. “That thing is doing pretty well considering the Lotus announcement hit a half hour after it was uploaded.”

  “Don’t remind me about Lotus,” Kris growled.

  I sighed. “Sorry. I’m just as pissed off as you are.”

  “I mean who the fuck gouges people like that for the privilege of playing their game a month ahead of everyone else? They’re no better than Horizon,” she groused.

  “Don’t say that,” I said. “Lotus was up front with investigators about how their hardware could be abused. Horizon stonewalled. No one is as bad as those murdering motherfuckers.”

  “The early access thing still
sucks,” Kris said.

  “Preaching to the choir,” I said.

  “I guess they waited two fucking years to get the game out,” Kris muttered. “They could delay the actual launch another couple of years and it’s not like it’d be any different from where we were before.”

  I took a deep breath. I knew what was coming.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Kris said. “Except it is different because somebody pissed off Horizon and got us banned from their modules so now all I can do is sit in my tower redecorating in between browsing porn!”

  “It was worth it,” I said, my voice level.

  Kris rolled her eyes, but there was nothing else to say. She knew getting them to admit what they’d done in such a public way was totally worth getting banned from Horizon modules, even if she was pissy about it.

  I opened my mouth to tell her to stop bitching and paused. There was something pinging in the back of my mind. That feeling on the back of my scalp that said there was something wrong.

  It was an instinct I’d come to rely on both in the real world and in the digital world.

  The big difference being that in the game world you came back from having the shit kicked out of you with maybe the loss of some gear. In the real world things could get a hell of a lot more nasty.

  “What is it?” Kris asked, her hands instinctively flexing for her two-handed hammer that didn’t exist in the real world.

  “I really wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said. “It’ll just make them think you have a weapon.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “Did you ever think maybe if we run into a couple of tweakers they’ll think twice about fucking with us if they think we have a weapon?”

  “I don’t think that’ll work as well in the real world as it’s working in your imagination,” I muttered, listening intently for any noises that might indicate some of the skeevier denizens of our level were starting to wake up from their drug-induced haze to go looking for someone they could rob to get the next hit.