by Arthur Stone
“We die and respawn. Everyone knows that.”
“But what a death! This massive piece of the earth resurrects, and in so doing takes your own life. What a paradox! It might be an interesting experience.”
Cheater squinted at Clown. The man’s eyes were clouding over, and he sensed the familiar desire for popcorn and a front-row seat. He grabbed Clown’s hand. “No, let’s get out of here. Right now. New sensations can wait until next time.”
* * *
It was a boring cluster reset. No visible train wrecks, tectonic events, or fleets of jets spiraling downward in smoke and flames. The mist did appear, too gradually for its growth to be observed. Neither of them could tell when it shifted from haze to fog. By the end, though, only the tallest piles of trash were visible, poking out of the deathveil. The only interesting part of the reboot was how the border with the black cluster functioned. None of the fog ever crossed that border. Not a wisp. A perfectly smooth wall of acrid mist formed in front of them.
Then, the world seemed to blink. There was no flash, no sound, no electrical zap, and no shuddering of the ground. In an instant, the fog simply disappeared, as if someone had switched it off, and the glorious heaps of debris rose once more before them, unpolluted by moisture in the air.
They were no more beautiful than before, as Cheater had predicted.
Clown smirked and nodded. “Amazing. I never get tired of seeing that.”
“I wish the fog were still around,” Cheater said. “It helped cover the view, and maybe even the smells.”
“The fly notices the shit, and the bee notices the blossoms.”
Cheater rolled his eyes. “So where are the blossoms, then? Come on, let’s go. How are you feeling?”
“For a man who took a bullet to the liver, pretty good. Don’t expect me to break any groundspeed records, though. Maybe in four hours or so.”
“Look at that!” Cheater exclaimed as soon as they stepped over the cluster border.
“Ah, so the garbage is growing on you!”
“No, no. March. His icon. He’s here! I’ll drop him a message.”
Cheater:
Hello, March? Write when you can.
An answer came back almost immediately.
March:
Don’t distract me, I’m busy.
Cheater scoffed audibly.
Cheater:
Don’t distract you? We’re not just swinging by. We’re in the cluster. Four miles away, tops.
March:
Then start coming my way, but don’t distract me yet. No time for chat. I hate chat anyway.
Clown saw every word, since he was also a member of the party.
He chuckled. “That’s March, all right.”
Cheater nodded. “I know, I recognize him too, this crackpot. Let’s catch up to him before he gets himself into some new kind of trap.”
“I doubt that’ll happen,” Clown said with confidence. “We can find him easily. No one else has him in the party.”
“Oh, put a sock on it. March tends to surprise you.”
Chapter 6
Life Nine. Reunion
Despite Cheater’s fears, nothing bad happened along the way. Except for the long interlude of wading through endless blocks of industrial gray. Filthy roads, with no sidewalks and no transportation available to hijack or to hitchhike on.
At one point, two security guards emerged from a factory entrance to stare at the pair of limping men in tattered clothes covered in suspicious dark red stains. The large backpacks and unusually shaped suitcases they carried only made the suspicion worse. But the guards did not approach them.
This city had just loaded in. None of the digis knew yet what had happened to them, but they were starting to suffer the degenerative effects. Widespread power outages and communication blackouts were not expected in cities. In addition, that invisible parasite that would incrementally transform them into post-human monsters had begun to gnaw at their brains, causing their trains of thought to run off the rails at times.
Cheater hated respawn cities, despite having spent only limited time in them. He wanted to nab March quickly and get the hell out of this one.
Before the real fun starts.
He saw the shabby taxi van when they were almost on top of it. A thin stream of cigarette smoke trickled up out of the driver’s side window.
They could avoid hotwiring the car for now. This one’s owner was still alive—it was hijack or hire.
Thinking himself a reasonably decent person, Cheater preferred the latter. “Can you take us to the center of the city? We’ll pay.”
The driver slowly turned his head, studied this rough vagrant with the backpack and the suspiciously long bundle on his shoulder, and grimaced in disgust. “I’m no taxi.”
“I understand that. But I can’t get an Uber or call a taxi. No service. I really need to get downtown.” Cheater flashed a large bill. “Ten minutes of easy work.”
He had wisely collected some currency from the last stable. Money from the old world only held value in fresh clusters, and only for the first few hours, but smart players tried to keep at least a little on them. Cash in their inventory came in very handy in respawn situations.
It was enough to pay an ordinary taxi to drive around for hours. In fact, it was too much. A couple of suspicious men willing to fork out so much for a short stretch was not a good sign.
The driver’s eyes flashed in surprise, and he frowned more deeply. “Like I said, I’m not a taxi.”
Cheater drew his pistol and sighed. “Clown, you’re my witness: I tried to be amicable. Out of the car!”
In order to avoid wasting time on any superfluous wrangling, Cheater shot through a rear side window. The driver quickly and silently leaped out onto the pavement and began to worriedly back away towards the middle of the road.
“Not that way,” Clown warned. “You’ll get run over. Sit on the curb there so you can calm your nerves and clean the shit out of your pants. And remember: you could have kept your car. And a fat wad of cash.”
“You going to mentor him all day?” Cheater shouted from inside the car.
“Nah, let’s go. Sheesh, you ought to learn a little patience, kid. By the way, those guards are coming for us for some reason. From behind. They’ve got guns, and stern looks on their faces.”
“Get in and we’ll be gone before they catch us.”
“Should we shoot them? They might call the police.”
“They can’t. No service.”
“Oh, right. My bad. I guess I’m still not thinking straight. But the guards might have a way to call in. Something wired, or short-range radio.”
“Now we’re debating their communication options? Let’s go!”
* * *
They did not reach March within ten minutes. He wasn’t far at all, but he just refused to stay in one spot. His marker had moved an inconveniently significant distance across the map. Unfamiliar with the local traffic patterns, Cheater and Clown worked their way over, trying to cut through narrow alleys along the way. One alley was blocked off entirely, and they had to back up. The next was occupied by other cars, and they nearly got stuck in the resulting traffic jam. Once again, they backed their way out.
The next time they found themselves stuck, Cheater called it. “Let’s get out. We go under that arch there, and we’ll run into March. He’s only two hundred yards away, but if we stay in the car we won’t reach him until evening.”
Clown sighed. “Time to drag all of our shit around on foot again. Come on, there’s got to be a way through.”
Cheater’s impatience was reaching a boiling point. “Get out. I could walk two hundred yards with my legs cut off.”
But Cheater did not throw caution to the wind. March had been acting strangely. He was a strange man, of course, but Cheater still remembered their last meeting.
Or their last attempted meeting, anyway.
It had not gone so well.
Cheater had no intention o
f repeating that incident. A hundred yards were left. Fifty. Thirty. One last corner.
Cheater rounded it. There, at last, he found his elusive comrade.
He nearly facepalmed, remembering just in time that doing so would smack him in the face with a heavy trunk.
Clown turned the corner and gave voice to the same thoughts Cheater was having. “Well fuck me! Looks like we forgot that March can do just fine on his own.”
Just as he had been last time, March was sitting in the outdoor terrace of a cafe. There was a look of pure contentment on his face and a dozen mugs of beer before him.
He calmly pointed at the two of them as they drew near. “Dig in, guys.”
Cheater sat down so hard that he nearly broke a chair. “That’s it?”
“What? No, you can have however much you want. I’ll call the waitress over.”
“No, that’s all you have to say?”
“What else needs saying?” March replied, unshaken, as he looked up from another mug. “Oh, right! I get it. This unfamiliar liquid is beer. A Czech brew, in fact, and nice and cold. So now that that’s out of the way, relax. It’s not every day you get to enjoy a fresh cold one in the open air. Carpe diem!”
“Effing hell!” Clown mumbled as he grabbed a mug.
Cheater shook his head. “I don’t believe my eyes. A beer?”
“Oh no, don’t worry, not just one beer. Like I said, have as much as you like.”
“Do you have any idea what we’ve been through to get here?” Cheater fumed.
“You can tell me all about your dumb adventures later,” March shrugged. “Now’s not the time to laugh at foolish tales. Oh, stop giving me those eyes. You failed the idiot test, buddy. Got a zero. No intelligent man would have approached me in a situation like that. I’ve met day-one noobs who could figure it was a trap. Now drink.”
“I had to,” Cheater muttered. “I had to approach you. There was no other way.”
“Fine, fine, you can tell me later. This is the time for beer, and nothing else. You’re tired, and there’s nothing like a cold beer when you’re tired. It’s a wonderful medicine, for the mind and body both. So relax! The day is hot, and you’re carrying all that junk around with you. Looks heavy.”
“He’s got a rifle that can kill elephants, plus a shoulder turret from an Elite Nold,” Clown added.
March nodded, somewhat more respectfully. “So your story will be interesting. But after the beer.”
“You don’t have an ‘after the beer’ phase. You’re always drinking beer,” Cheater pointed out.
“Well, fine. After the main course of beer, then. I’m just getting started. This is mug number four. Good beer was hard to find in this town.”
They fell silent, and did as March suggested.
They drank.
Perhaps it was genuinely good beer, but Cheater didn’t taste it. It was cold and liquid, and that was all that mattered to him. Despite everything he had gone through, he felt better. He almost felt good.
After all, he had finally reunited with March.
One more reunion remained.
Nearly a half hour passed, along with a few mugs for Cheater and dozens for March. At last, the former placed a small bundle in front of March, and then a very tiny bundle next to it. “Here. This is your share. A little more than your share, actually. The numbers weren’t always even. In particular, these cannot be divided. The pearls. Five of them, indivisible and invaluable. Tat... Well, your suspicions about her were correct. She betrayed me. I walked right into it, really. It was stupid. I didn’t expect that from her, not then. But it doesn’t matter now. Now, we divide it up in two instead of in three.”
“That’s all the loot? You didn’t lose anything?” March asked without emotion, and without touching the packs.
Cheater shook his head. “Yes, some of it was taken from me. There was too much to safely stash in my inventory. They didn’t take the most valuable items, though—and they didn’t have them for long. I got them back. Plus interest, even. They did use one Shard of Invulnerability, but the monster dropped plenty of those. All the rest is here, besides the items from among my share that I consumed. Even then, I didn’t touch the most valuable ones.”
March unrolled the smallest parcel and silently stared at its contents for a good half minute. Then, he handed Cheater three golden pearls. “Here. Three for you, two for me.”
Cheater struggled to hide how overjoyed he was. “That’s generous.”
“It’s wise. You need them more. You intend to give them all to your bit—uh, your loyal girlfriend—anyway. But it is in my best interest that you take at least one. Not that that one’s entirely mine. As you said, we couldn’t exactly cut it in half.”
“If you’re worried about region binding problems, well, I know how to solve those without pearls,” Cheater added cautiously, without explaining how he could also earn extra lives. “I’m not even sure why Romeo has such trouble. He’s a veteran player. It was no problem for me to handle, in fact, and several times over. Thank the System, I guess.”
“The System doesn’t work for your thanks. That’s right, isn’t it, Clown?”
The other man nodded. “The System won’t even shovel shit at you without making you buy it first.”
“Exactly, Clown knows what’s up. I’m not worried about your region binding,” March continued. “You’ve earned those privileges, Cheater. Of course, the System doesn’t abide by our sense of equity, but for some reason it is quite generous with you. Many try to appease the System and walk away empty-handed. Why do you think that is? Well, because the System has goals, and no one knows what those are. You have pleased the System. You are doing as it bids, and so it is pampering you. Romeo, however, has not earned this honor, and so it is only with great difficulty that the poor fellow accomplishes anything. He has to rely on the diplomatic ties he has built up between regions. Having a network like that can really pay off.”
“If it’s not the region binding that is troubling you, why did you give me the third pearl?” Cheater asked.
“I never said something is troubling me. I am in perfect peace. As you can see, I’m enjoying another beer. Troubled spirits and beer live on entirely separate planes of existence.”
Cheater ignored his babbling. “So do you think I have a better chance of getting an ability I need?”
“That’s quite a possibility.”
“Well, don’t worry about that, either. I have the ability to gaze into the brain-guts of an infected. Or—”
“An Unnamed One,” Clown finished. “Cheater told me everything. It’s a great story. No, don’t worry—I’ll never tell another soul. I know you’re not accustomed to trusting people, but I give you my word. I’ll take that story to the grave. Over and over again, if need be.”
March nodded. “Good. I’ll drink to that.”
Cheater snorted. “You drink to everything.”
“And you would be wise to follow my example. Nothing you said changes anything, Cheater. You get three pearls, and I get two. There’s no point arguing. You should be glad, I think, but don’t consider me a good person. I’m not. Sometimes, I’m evil. Especially when there’s no beer. To put it bluntly, I need to get a bigger share of another kind of item. I need more than half of the crystals.”
“No problem,” Cheater answered. “I don’t need them. I won’t even miss the opportunity to sell them. Divide them up however you will, or take the whole damned pile, if you want.”
March frowned. “Is there something you’re not satisfied with?”
“Oh, I’m satisfied. I’m thrilled to have finally reached you. I thought you’d share the joy. Or at least that you’d be glad that I wasn’t yet another traitor who would betray you for the sake of a sack of goodies. That seemed to be important to you, back then.”
“It still is. I am happy, Cheat. I'm overjoyed. Here I thought that all of your affection was for your beloved Kitty. How was I supposed to know that you’d be upset when I
didn’t give you a big hug? My apologies, friend. I’m callous. Untrusting. Unsociable. Now, let’s drink to our restored friendship. You drink too, Clown. Does that work for you, Cheat? Or should I kiss you and weep for joy?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“By the way, on the market nowadays, a crystal is worth more than a golden pearl. A lot more. Many people are looking to upgrade their abilities. Massive demand with barely any supply. So you should make sure we divide them up, rather than just giving them all to me. Or, we could assign some to our party treasury. We’ll need a lot of things in the near future.”
