Underpowered Howard: A LitRPG Adventure

by John L. Monk

  Before the evening ended, I’d talked to everyone in the room except two people. Feeling rude for some reason, I went over to rectify that, and possibly figure out what they were doing here considering how much they must hate me.

  Turned out Bernard wasn’t as angry as I thought he’d be.

  “I’m torn between terrible disappointment and barely containable pride in your progress,” he said. “None of my noobs have ever leveled as high as you. Well done! I mean … it’s too bad you didn’t listen to me, of course … destroying the world and all that … but the past is the past! No hard feelings. Now, I believe my paladin was hoping to have a word with you alone, but she doesn’t want you to know that. Rather than create an uncomfortable scene with throat clearing and pointed looks, I’ll simply leave. If you need me, I’ll be at the bar, spreading wisdom and cheer and eavesdropping with my godlike hearing. Ta ta…”

  He left me alone with Jane, who stared after him with a look of betrayal. A moment later, she regarded me with a strange expression: She smiled. It was gone too fast, but it was real. Not cynical or bitter.

  And nice, I thought.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop you,” she said matter of factly.

  “And I’m sorry I pulled that disguise trick on you.”

  Sheepishly, I handed her the bag I’d looted from her body on the island. She took it without comment—a tightening of her lips the only reaction.

  “Why didn’t you listen to me?” she said. “Why were you so hell-bent on doing this when everyone told you not to? Did it ever occur to you that other people are smart too?”

  What could I say? That I was angry at what was done to us? That I was confident in my abilities? That I had the power, so doggonit, I was gonna use it?

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, and wondered if I’d ever stop saying it.

  “If I thought you meant it, I’d accept it,” she said.

  I’d never felt so low. But I didn’t want to feel low. Not today. Even if I deserved it.

  “I’d had this idea,” I said, “after they’d fixed the game… I was gonna ask you out for drinks.”

  Jane looked surprised. “Drinks? Why?”

  I smiled and hoped it’d catch on. It didn’t, but I plowed ahead anyway.

  “At first it was because I liked your face. Not gonna lie. Later, I realized it was something else. You care about more than just yourself, and I think that makes you lonely. I know it’s made me lonely. I guess … I figured, maybe together, it wouldn’t have to be so bad.”

  “You figured that?” she said.

  “I’ve had crazier ideas.”

  She snorted. Again with the smile. And then it was gone.

  “Would you have said yes?” I said.

  Jane shook her head sadly. “Probably not. But if you’d kept asking…”

  She wiped one eye, shrugged, and left to rejoin Bernard, currently engaged in an animated discussion with a group of people over by the bar.

  “I guess we’ll never know,” I said quietly.

  I didn’t get a chance to talk to Jane again, but I liked how we’d left it. I also liked her, despite everything. She left shortly afterward with Bernard. Another door shut, never to re-open.

  Later, I pulled Parker aside for a quick word.

  “I wanted to thank you,” I said.

  “Thank me?” He shook his head. “Destroying the world was your idea.”

  I smiled weakly. “Yeah, well… Listen, can you give this to Elfie? I don’t think it’s right to take it with me. It’s hers, and it’s valuable.”

  I held up my hand so he’d see her 50k shield ring.

  “Something to remember you by?” he said.

  I looked at him sharply.

  “When you planning on doing it?” he said.

  “Aren’t you going to talk me down?”

  “What if I think it’s a good idea?”

  For some reason, that surprised me. “Do you?”

  “No. It’s a terrible idea, but you’ll do it anyway. I think on some level, that’s where all this was going. You wanted a meaningful life gaming in Mythian and didn’t get one. So now you’re gunning for a meaningful death. No more wondering what to do with yourself. No sadness for everyone else stuck in the same spot. No guilt for the poor suckers in Ward 2.”

  “I told you before: I don’t have a death wish.” When he didn’t reply, I added, “I just don’t see another way out of this.”

  “I don’t either,” he said.

  I snorted. “You’re a lot of help.”

  “You want help? I’ll help you do anything but kill yourself,” he said. “But if you do it, better that you keep the ring. She’ll remember you had it with you.”

  We were quiet for a time. He was drinking again—from a flask, this time. He offered me a belt and I shook my head.

  “Well, anyway, I just wanted to—”

  “Don’t shake my hand,” he said.

  Surprised, I stopped myself from doing just that and turned to where he was looking. Felix, Elfie, and Dory were standing by the punch bowl watching us.

  Parker smiled. “Just laugh at what I’m saying and nod… That’s right… See? Now they don’t think you’re telling everyone goodbye and giving stuff away.”

  Worried now, I laughed.

  “I’m not that funny,” Parker said. “Shush, here they come.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “And stop thanking me.”

  For the rest of the night, by silent agreement, we tried not to talk about liches. Around midnight, Felix and Elfie started yawning, and that got Dory yawning. Like them, and like all diviners, she was Hard Mode.

  I received their hugs and handshakes and said good night.

  “We’ll get through this,” Felix said, patting me on the back. “It’ll all work out, you’ll see.”

  He’d been saying that all night. Almost like a mantra.

  A while afterward, when I was finally alone, I flew high over the city for a look down at the towers and lights and stunning beauty of Heroes’ Landing one last time.

  Then I cast Gate.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  I’d been standing alone on the cliffs of Sandpiper Vista. I stood there for a while, then shook my head—and then laughed. Then, with a wave goodbye to nobody at all—to Mythian, I supposed—I leaped off the cliff and soared out over the bay…

  Sadly, my last view of Mythian wasn’t the shining city of Heroes’ Landing, or even the lovely bay, but rather the enormous maw of the Leviathan, wide open, reaching out of the water to chomp me down in a single bite. The damage dealt by the creature had been tested many times by various players over the years. It didn’t cause damage points. It caused instant death, regardless of how shielded or how many billions of health points a player had.

  “Which,” I said, “if that were true, why aren’t you currently dead right now, no longer thinking or feeling, all troubles gone, a wisp of a memory to those who loved you, nothing at all to anyone else, ever and anon, so on and so forth, et cetera et cetera?”

  My voice rang out flat and dead as if there were nothing nearby—no walls, ceiling, or tiled floor off which to echo. If there was any of that, I didn’t know, because I couldn’t see, and I didn’t have a body with which to touch anything. No character sheet, either. I tried pulling up the game manual, then the map, but nothing happened.

  Several hours after feeding the Leviathan, I realized a terrible, awful truth: This is what happened to people who died in Mythian. Before, I’d always thought we ceased to be—the atheist model of eradication. But this… The very thought of spending eternity here made my nonexistent blood run cold.

  “Hello?” I said into the nothing.

  My words, at least, were a small comfort, though I wasn’t sure how I was saying them without a mouth, or hearing them without ears.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  If I were alive then maybe the liches were, too. Maybe they hadn’t gone poof as I’d seen in the vision. B
ut wait, no… If that were the case, the vision wouldn’t have shown that to me. Visions like that wouldn’t lie. They were based on the game forking itself to test different possibilities.

  For now, outside any other proof, my official policy was to believe I’d done the right thing. That they were gone and the world was safe. Anything else was unacceptable.

  “You hear that?” I shouted into the nothing. “Unacceptable!”

  A moment passed. Then another. Then…

  “What’s unacceptable?” a man said.

  “Turn his eyes on, you idiot.”

  This from a woman.

  “I did turn his eyes on—wait, no I didn’t. Eyes on.”

  Just like that, I could see again. And what a sight: big round virtual table with eight people, men and women, sitting around it, all of them in casual Earth clothes, all staring at me. I looked down and saw I had a body, though I couldn’t feel it.

  “He can’t feel his body. Lee, are you trying to torture the poor guy?”

  This from the same woman. She had red hair, generous lips, and a disgusted expression, though not aimed at me. Youngish, maybe forty-five.

  Lee, a dough-faced man in his twenties, said, “I forgot, jeez. Q4, turn on his feelsies so she doesn’t start crying.”

  Now I could feel again. I couldn’t smell or taste my mouth, but that was fine. I didn’t want to antagonize this guy. In fact, I hoped the woman would lay off him. The last thing I needed was an angry dev with Q4 access.

  “How you all doing?” I said lamely.

  Seven voices said hi, waved, or both. My new friend Lee snorted and shook his head.

  “I’m Jessica Reid,” the woman said. “Director of Platform Infrastructure Engineering here at Everlife.”

  “We’re the P.I.E. in the S.K.Y.,” Lee said, smiling and looking around to see if anyone laughed.

  Casting an irritated glance his way, Jessica said, “Howard … gotta tell ya … you’ve given some of us at this table a lot of heartburn in the last week. We were hoping to ask you a few questions—and Lee, if you don’t stop making faces at Richie I’m kicking you out. Got it?” Seconds passed where nobody said anything. “Now, Howard … sorry. We know it was you, but Q4’s fighting us. Seems it likes you. We just wanna know how you did it, and if you don’t mind, why? We’ve paused the game, so take your time.”

  Q4, fighting them? It had been known to happen—overly literal interpretations, bad judgment calls in ambiguous situations… Or, more ominously: utter silence. Early attempts to remedy this had destroyed its creativity, stymied its predictive capacity, and suppressed various invaluable qualities the world had come to rely on. As a result, development groups had switched their focus to persuasiveness with an emphasis on conversation—the “more flies with honey” school of computer programming.

  According to this woman, Q4 liked me. Which begged the question: What happened to people it didn’t like?

  “Got it,” I said. “Uh … thank you. Give me a moment, I’m just … excited to be here. I was hoping you’d notice, but when nobody did … whew.” I laughed nervously. “Where should I start? The levels? The liches?”

  “What liches?” someone said.

  “What do you mean, what liches?” I said. “How could you not know about the liches?”

  A woman with stringy red hair said, “We’re here about Raul’s Lesser Vision. You and a player named Dory spun up a recursive loop of visions involving billions of mobile objects, each with near-infinite possible behaviors.”

  Mobile objects: an old gaming term before lucid, usually shorted to “MOB.”

  Helplessly I said, “But Q4’s limitless… Modern QPUs can process quadrillions of operations a second.”

  “Yes and no,” Jessica said. “Being fast just means it can deplete its resources faster. You brought down almost every other retirement world running on Q4. There have been inquiries. We do not like inquiries. Was this some sort of joke?”

  Lee said, “He said liches. I’m gonna look into that. Hold on.”

  Lee started talking to Q4. On mute, I assumed, because his mouth moved but no sounds came out. Then he said, “Holy shit-machines… Guys, check out his minion count! It’s off the chart!”

  Six people began talking at once. As with Lee, I couldn’t hear what they said. One by one, their faces registered surprise, and here and there humor—particularly on the part of Lee, who kept coming off mute to say “Holy shit-machines!” much to everyone’s annoyance.

  A minute later, another person chimed in: “He hit the global constant! Bounced right off it!” Still another said, “He’s sucking up half the karma! How the hell?”

  A bit more and someone yelled, “He’s got a god working with him, and the god’s a goddamned player! How is that possible?”

  The ops team muted in and out so fast I could barely track with them. Jessica, I noticed, didn’t do much talking. She simply waited, watching me, content to let her team run with the ball.

  I wanted to tell them about the Domination—how it was bugged—but couldn’t think of a good way to break through their frenzy. Instead, I waited and thought about what they’d said.

  Sucking up half the karma?

  It sounded as if my original understanding of the hidden stat was like a flea looking at a sugar cube and seeing a mountain. Apparently, karma wasn’t a stat at all, but rather a quantity apportioned between players. In retrospect, that made sense. Not everyone could be lucky. If I played cards with someone and lost, they’d win. Their good luck was my bad luck.

  “Uh … sorry to interrupt,” I said. “What’s a global constant? I mean, yeah, I know what a global constant is. I used to be a developer. But what is it in this case?”

  While the others ignored me, Jessica said, “Being a former dev, you know every player is really just a complex data structure, right? Most of the variables that make up a lucid aren’t directly accessible. They’re protected. You get happy or sad, you squint when it’s too bright… You react. But there are a few you can modify—intelligence, comeliness, strength, skills, those sorts of things. Some of those variables are lists: items in your bag, on your person, lists of friends, languages known, minions, their names, and their possessions… We created a hard limit on the length of any such list to two hundred million. You were never supposed to come close to it.” Jessica scratched her head. “The constant should have stopped this from happening. Instead, you got corrupted. The data-structure-you, not the you-you.”

  “My minions went rogue,” I said. “Half minion, half unbound lucid.”

  “Like I said—corrupted. So why didn’t you stop?”

  Lee cut in: “Because he’s a badass player, that’s why!”

  Jessica’s face pinched up angrily. She made a zipping motion and Lee’s face dimmed. He tried to say something—to her, I think, not Q4—but I couldn’t hear him.

  Jessica smiled thinly. “Much better. Was it just about power? To see how high you could go with no regard for the stability of the game?”

  “No! I’d never do that. My plan was to keep leveling because… Well, I’d hoped you would notice and pull me up here—just like this—so I could tell you how bugged everything was.” I paused, searching for the right words to make her understand. “The game is killing people. It’s not winnable. There’s a lucid called the Domination. It’s impossible to beat, and it tricks you… It makes you keep fighting, even though you can’t win, and then you die forever. It’s supposed to be the last fight before you leave in a skin frame. Haven’t you people noticed that nobody’s winning the prize?”

  Eight pairs of eyes regarded me. None of them were talking now. In fact, except for Lee, they looked guilty. Lee—the youngest there—looked angry, but not at me.

  “You knew,” I said. “All those people gone. My friends … dead right at the cusp of winning, and they never had a chance. Tell me something: Was Mythian designed this way or was it broken and you just never bothered fixing it? Is Everlife negligent or just sadisti
cally evil?”

  Jessica made a shooing motion. One by one, the images of her coworkers winked out of existence until only the two of us were left.

  “Thank you for your time, Howard. Obviously, I can’t discuss matters of policy. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Now, wait a minute, I—”

  “If we need you again, we’ll load you up. Bye-bye now.”

  Nothing.

  And from nothing, light.

  “Howard?” a man said, watching me with a concerned expression. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes. Where did everyone go?”

  The man looked around in confusion. “Where did who go? Oh, goodness, I believed I’ve fouled this up. My name is Dentin Firth. I’m your attorney—flesh and blood, too, though I have a team of the finest lucids working for me, never you worry. They’ll catch the things I can’t, but I’ll still take the credit! That’s a joke, Howard. I want you to relax.”

  “Why do I have an attorney?” I said. “How do I have an attorney? Retirees don’t have rights.”

  “They didn’t used to,” he said, “but they do now. Sort of. There’s been a referendum in the Consensus, following your little adventure with the, um… Hold on.” His eyes glazed over as he accessed something on his smart lenses. “Licks? Is that the correct pronunciation? Sounds funny.”

  “Liches. I’m sorry, are you saying I have rights now? I can vote?”

  “Ah … that’s one thing you can’t do,” he said. “But you’re now entitled to get what you paid for. This retirement world of yours was designed to be a fun game with a little danger, yes? But it turned out to be a … a … hold on.” He checked his notes again. “A death trap? You’ve heard of this? Sounds scary.”

  I nodded. “It’s when no matter what you do, you die. Very scary. You must be talking about the Domination.”

  Dentin snapped his fingers. “Yes, that’s the name I’ve been trying to remember all day. It’s been fixed! But players who win won’t get a skin frame. Not anymore. Instead, they’ll be able to change to a new retirement world if they want to. Can’t have a bunch of robots running around with rights, now can we?”