Dungeons of Strata (Deepest Dungeon #1) - A LitRPG series

by G. D. Penman

  He probably would have slunk off to bed completely contented if he hadn’t heard the whispering just on the edge of his perception as he navigated to the logout screen. The awful soft voice of that same Master of Strata encroached on his thoughts from every direction at once.

  “It seems I was right. You aren’t special at all.”

  Fifteen

  The Tear in the Veil

  It was only 2 a.m. when Martin got to his bed, and despite the slight tremor of rage that still shook him even as he was drifting off, exhaustion won out quickly.

  He woke with his first alarm feeling surprisingly well rested. The tension headache that had haunted him all day yesterday was gone and he had the strangest feeling that he’d had a good dream, even though he couldn’t quite remember it beyond a distant whisper that still lingered in his mind.

  “Come to me,” it had said.

  Weird.

  Logically, five hours of sleep should not have been enough, but Martin was hopeful that he could make it through the whole day before logic caught up to him.

  Even if today went badly, it hardly mattered. He had the whole weekend stretched out in front of him after just one short shift of being stuck out here.

  He went through the motions of a normal morning like he was in a dream, eyes locked onto his smartphone, still mining through comment boards and half-hearted fan projects to gather whatever information he could about the road ahead.

  The way Martin saw it, there were two options: The people playing Strata were so obsessed with it that they never did anything else in their free time, abandoning all of their previous hobbies and interests and choosing not even to talk about the game when they could be playing it.

  Or there was a high level of data-discipline on display, a degree of organization that went far beyond what Martin would usually have expected from gaming guilds.

  Here and there he would come across a question about a specific monster on a fan forum, but ninety percent of the time those questions went unanswered. Either the spread of information was being deliberately suppressed by the guilds, or every single individual who was playing Strata had their eyes firmly on the prize and nobody wanted to give away the slightest advantage.

  If this was what the Masters of Strata were up against every time they asked someone how a monster was defeated, it wasn’t surprising that they were getting a little draconian in their methods of extracting information. Still, what kind of game developer couldn’t see the contents of their own game? And what kind of asshole stalked a player around so that they could make snide comments when they died?

  Martin would have filed a complaint if there was any way to contact the company, but it seemed like the developers were even more mysterious than the game content. He couldn’t even find the name of the company online, and raking through the game industry news sites showed a level of confusion on par with his own. The game had been released through a smaller publisher that was mostly known for mid-budget indie productions that looked promising and went nowhere.

  They were a dead end. Every attempt to pry information about the developers had been met with an almost eerie silence in an industry that was usually so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think.

  As far as marketing went there was practically nothing. The NIH headsets had been showcased online with very little fanfare alongside basic information about the game, and both the tech and the game had been announced with nothing beyond the press-release statement about Strata’s grand prize.

  Three weeks later, Strata hit the shelves and interest in the game had spread almost entirely through word of mouth. It was possible that all this mystery was some sort of marketing ploy in itself.

  Now that he was digging into articles about the game, there was a sort of manic fascination starting to emerge in the language of the reviewers and pundits, but if it was a deliberately manufactured mystery, why wouldn’t they have dropped something mysterious to keep that passion burning instead of staying quiet all this time? It didn’t add up.

  The NIH seemed like the easiest path to pursuing the developers. New technology like that, particularly technology that was such a leap from the previous generation of VR, had surely left a paper trail somewhere. Research and development couldn’t happen in a vacuum. Someone had to have applied for patents. Someone had to have gotten the device through health and safety checks. Even if software could be secretly coded and dumped out onto the web, hardware was trackable.

  Martin was in the middle of digging through patent records when a polite cough made him look up from his phone. Gillian. Shit. He’d made it all the way to the office without noticing. A quick glance down confirmed that he had at least dressed himself before leaving the house. That was a small comfort.

  “Your shift started five minutes ago. You arrived here in plenty of time, but you’ve just been standing there staring at your phone. Has something happened? Is everything all right?”

  Martin could feel the flush of embarrassment creeping up his neck, heading for his cheeks. He took that rush of shame and he used it for all it was worth. “I am so sorry, Gillian. I was completely lost in thought.”

  “Lost in thought?” Gillian raised an eyebrow. Martin had missed eyebrows. They were so expressive.

  “For ten minutes?” she added.

  He groaned internally. “It was a particularly large thought?”

  Gillian clasped her hands.

  “Okay, let’s just pretend that I’m not your boss. I am just a concerned friend right now. Are you sure you are all right? These last few days… you’ve looked ill. You’ve been distracted. You haven’t been at all like your usual self.”

  Martin didn’t growl. That would have been unprofessional. “Has my productivity been down?”

  “No, Martin. This isn’t about your work. I’m concerned about you.”

  It was a trap. Every time a boss told Martin that they were friends, that the office was a family, it was the preface to asking him to work for free. Every time he shared any personal details, they used it as leverage to try to get him to do something he didn’t want to do.

  There was a reason he kept to himself. There was a reason he didn’t try to “make friends” at the office. If something wasn’t about work, then why the hell was Gillian talking to him about it?

  He smiled. “Nothing to worry about, Gillian.”

  She wasn’t buying it. Every line of her face and her body was screaming that he was a liar, but there was nothing that she could do about it. At the end of the day, his work was still getting done, and he was doing it better than everyone else.

  “All right. Well, if you need anything, you know that you can always come to me.”

  “Come give me the rope to hang you with,” she meant. No thanks. If she decided to drop the “let’s all be friends” nonsense and actually write him up, he had memorized the disciplinary procedures.

  He was entitled to one verbal warning, one written warning and then a meeting with HR before she could touch him, and that was for tardiness only. Any other issues had to be handled separately. Even if this hippy intervention nonsense could be considered a verbal warning, he still had plenty of second chances, and the warnings reset every year.

  This didn’t matter. It wasn’t a loss. It wasn’t even a setback. Even if Gillian pulled him up in front of HR, he had his numbers to back him up. She’d never convince them to get rid of the most productive member of the team. Never.

  Martin slumped into his seat and booted up the computer with the same automatic movements that he did every day. He could probably have gotten away with continuing his hunt through the patents on his phone, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

  Gillian was definitely going to be watching him today, and while she’d have to start down a separate branch of the disciplinary tree if he was messing around at his desk instead of working, it still would have felt like too much all at once.

  Her obsession with him and his behavior would just be exacerbated. The spec
ific disciplinary procedures might have been on separate cooldowns, but her fixation got ramped up by anything that he did outside of the routine.

  The next few weeks would have to be exemplary. He would have to act as normal as she wanted. He might even have to sit with someone at lunch and pretend he cared about their inane conversations about nothing so that she wouldn’t pester him to be “part of the team” as she usually did when there was nothing else for her to latch onto. That would be a smart move to keep her settled until she’d forgotten about this. With a shake of his head, he started work, almost fifteen minutes late.

  He took a glance at the “Team Screen” where everyone could compare their productivity. The highest score on the board was still in single digits. Martin scoffed, then his hands started to move and he forgot about everything else except the orders on his screen.

  When he came out of his processing fugue, the numbers had tilted back in his favor. Drastically back in his favor. The fifteen-minute head-start that the others had picked up must have been burned away within the first hour. He was absolutely killing it today.

  It took him a couple of blinks to realize that he hadn’t stopped because of the regular lunch break alert that he’d set up; that was still almost an hour away. Something else had snapped him out of work mode.

  A quick glance around showed Gillian hovering over someone else’s desk, pointing at something on the woman’s screen as if she had a clue about any of the actual work that was done in this office. If it wasn’t Gillian, then what the hell had distracted him? His phone buzzed again, silently against his leg. That would do it.

  Double-checking that Gillian hadn’t moved, he slipped the phone out of his pocket. It was a message from Lindsay.

  Dude. You’d better be there tonight. Not kidding. Will leave your ass behind. Not really. Please show up. We can go all night long. Like students or joyfully unemployed slackers. No work tomorrow. Usual time tonight. Already missing you, Snack-size.

  Martin rolled his eyes, then shot a quick message back.

  Will be there. On time. As usual.

  She responded with an animated clip of a breakdancing kitten, which he took to be a positive thing. He turned his attention back to the computer, only to be interrupted again by another buzz on his leg, then another and another as Lindsay bombarded him with dancing cats of all shapes and sizes.

  He gritted his teeth and tapped out.

  Please stop. Trying to work.

  There was a long silence, during which he almost reached for his keyboard again, but some sixth sense warned him that this wasn’t over. Lo and behold, his phone buzzed again.

  You love it.

  He sighed and turned his phone off. There were still three-quarters of an hour left before lunch and he was damned if he was going to fall behind just because Lindsay had nothing better to do than stuff cats into every electronic device she could access.

  At some point he was really going to have to pick one of the cliques in the office to linger next to during his lunch break, but now wasn’t the time. He slunk off to the bathroom where he was sure no eyes would be on him and turned his phone back on to receive the inevitable avalanche of cats. He should not have let Lindsay know she was getting to him.

  Before Gillian interrupted him at the start of the day, he had been on the tail of something important. The patents. At some point between home and work, the hunt had stopped being about reporting the abusive Master and turned into a new challenge for him.

  Little indie productions could come out of nowhere but the idea that something this cutting-edge could do the same was ridiculous. A big company would have been needed to make something like Strata, which meant that same big company was being hidden deliberately.

  Why would a studio hide when their game was being hailed as the greatest thing that had ever been made on every message board Martin came across?

  If it was a flaming trashcan of a game then Martin could understand quietly sloping off, but this made no sense. If something made no sense, it was a clue.

  The patents database was easy enough to find, but narrowing the search down to the specific date was a lot harder. Martin knew the date that Strata had launched four months back, but the patent could have been any time before that, and searching through VR gaming patents when the industry was in a massive boom was less than fruitful.

  He searched for “neural interface.” Nothing. He searched for “VR headset.” Nothing useful. In desperation he even searched for “NIH” which brought up about a million patents to do with the National Institute of Health. He flicked the screen off and stared at the cubicle door for a few seconds, mind buzzing, looking for angles of attack.

  Maybe this other “NIH” was a hint in the right direction. Maybe the patents weren’t in video games at all. Maybe they were in healthcare. “Neural interface” did not scream “smart tech-bro marketing” to Martin. It sounded like a medical device.

  With only a few minutes left before he had to be back at his desk, Martin dove into the medical patents, filtering everything out that didn’t have the world “neural” in the name and then scanning through them as fast as he could, trying to cut through the jargon.

  There were more than he could count, and he was running out of time. His eyes darted back and forth between the complex legalese of the patents, the dense medical information and the tiny clock at the top right of his screen. Two minutes left. He cursed and tabbed the patents away for later.

  His fingers hovered for a moment over the latest cat picture. Apparently, this particular kitten was in desperate need of grammar lessons as well as a cheeseburger.

  The classics never went out of fashion for Lindsay. Not when she had a whole folder on her desktop called The Classics, where she had been stockpiling miscellaneous images from the internet for a decade. Before he could regret it, he typed:

  We need to make some serious plans.

  There was only a moment’s pause before Lindsay started typing a reply. Where the hell did she work that she could mess around on her phone all day?

  If you are asking me to marry you, I should let you know, I will be forced to cheat on you a lot since in my mind you are a giant bipedal rat dude.

  One minute left. He really needed to head back to his desk.

  Ha. Ha. Ha.

  The reply came back quickly.

  Creepy.

  He washed his hands out of well-ingrained habit before typing back.

  We have a solid 48 hours of prime Strata time. Do you have any other commitments? Do the rest of the guild?

  More dancing cats.

  Nope. We are playing all weekend. AAAAAALLLL WEEEEKEEEENDDD.

  When he glanced up, he was back in the office, Gillian’s eyes already burning into him.

  And the other two are fine with that?

  Another soft buzz on his palm as he ducked into his cubicle.

  EVERYBODY. ALL WEEKEND. CAN’T STOP THE RIOT. CHOO CHOO.

  He let out a little snort of amusement.

  All right. See you tonight.

  Lindsay couldn’t help getting the last word in.

  Where would I find a tux to fit a giant rat anyway? #TailProblems.

  Martin rolled his eyes and turned off his phone again before she could get him into any more trouble.

  The rest of the day was almost suspiciously painless. Gillian got dragged into one of the seemingly endless meetings that she had to attend, leaving the whole office a little more upbeat and energetic than usual.

  It wasn’t that she harassed any of the other workers the way she dogged Martin’s every step; it was just the usual general camaraderie and positivity that appeared in a workplace when there was no boss. Even Martin found himself getting caught up in it. Smiling in the office felt vaguely wrong, but he still found himself doing it.

  A quick check of the productivity scoreboard confirmed Martin’s suspicions that everything was gradually grinding to a halt, but it did that every Friday afternoon anyway. Even if everyone els
e was working at full pelt, they wouldn’t come close to his numbers for the day. He could afford to slack off a little.

  He went back to his patent hunt with one hand while clicking slowly through the automated order queue with the other. If anything was wrong with the order, he glanced up for the half second it took him to diagnose it, then turned back to the phone.

  The general buzz in the office was a good enough alarm system in case of Gillian’s return and there were too many patents and not enough hours in the day; even less once you took the time that he planned on playing Strata into account. Practically none, as a matter of fact.

  Practice made perfect. Before long he could dance through the patent applications as easily as he managed an order or guided a raid group through a boss, checking in just the vital areas to find the gist of what he was looking for before jumping on to the next one.

  It was a process of elimination, working backwards from Strata’s release date and raking through each individual “neural” patent from there back towards the dawn of time.

  The trouble with patents was that they could be filed long, long before a product was actually being made. The underlying technology could have been invented a decade ago and quietly patented with no practical applications in sight.

  Gillian didn’t return before the end of the day and Martin found that he almost missed their usual bout of fake smiling while wishing death on each other. Almost, but not quite. He slipped back into autopilot as he headed for home, diving further and further back into the records, growing more and more determined with every passing moment to find whoever it was who had made Strata. To work out why they were hiding. What they were hiding.