Too Young to Die

by Michael Anderle

  Justin decided that was probably for the best. His mana bar was low, and he couldn’t continue to shoot fireballs forever. He followed hurriedly as he tucked the book into his satchel. And, he reminded himself, he intended to get payment before he handed it over.

  That, and maybe ask the mercenary to join their group. He had a good feeling about the man.

  They made it to the door without any more spirits targeting them and Lyle practically wrenched it off its hinges to exit. It was still raining, which Justin acknowledged with a shiver and a flick of his hood over his head.

  The mercenary waited exactly where they’d left him. He almost did look frozen in time, but when they approached, he raised his hooded head to look at them.

  “You found it.” Justin couldn’t tell what the man thought of that.

  “Yes.” He folded his arms. “So, why did you want it?”

  With only a smile, the mercenary vanished into thin air.

  He stared at the place where he’d been and leaned sideways slightly, then leaned the other way. Although he narrowed his eyes in focus, he couldn’t see the character at all.

  “Do…do you still see him?” he asked Lyle in an undertone. This wouldn’t be the first time a quest giver had glitched out of thin air in an MMORPG.

  He’d better get the XP for this quest, though.

  “No,” the dwarf said. “He’s gone. Didn’t ye say that book taught ye magic?”

  “Yes. I mean, a spell. Well, and the magic. And there are other spells.” He brought up his inventory to make sure the book was still there. It was. “He’d have been able to become a wizard if he took it.”

  “Kid, sometimes you’re real dumb,” Lyle stated gruffly. He started down the road.

  Justin hurried after him. “What does that mean?”

  “A man vanishes into thin air and you say he could become a wizard? Wake up. He was one already.”

  He looked over his shoulder. “But why—”

  “You want my advice, kid?” His companion shook his head. “What am I saying? Of course you don’t want it. You opened a magic book and started reading. You went into a wizard’s abandoned hideout. But if you did want my advice, I’d say this.” He stopped and gave him a look. “Don’t expect wizards to make sense. They’re a nasty lot who’ve forgotten what it’s like to be alive.”

  “Well, sure,” Justin agreed. “But they also have castles full of beautiful serving girls.”

  The dwarf snorted. “I’ve seen what you humans think is beautiful and let me tell you, it’s a miracle you ever have babies. Your women are all…” He gestured. “Spindly.”

  “Spindly?”

  “And they have no beards!”

  He spluttered with laughter. “Beards?”

  “Only your men ever have beards,” the dwarf said and grimaced with something close to distaste. “I call that unnatural.”

  Justin rolled his eyes and followed as he silently endured a monologue about beards and broad shoulders and whether or not a proper woman should be able to swing a battle-ax. His mind, however, was occupied with other things.

  Was the man who had waited for them in the rain a wizard or was he more of an echo? He had seen him, heard his words, and retrieved the book. But if he was right about Kural, the wizard might have left something of himself behind to defeat Sephith.

  Thoughtfully, he patted the book. However it had come about, he was glad it had—and for the first time, he looked forward to the next adventure.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Nick shifted to a more comfortable position in his chair and looked at the pod.

  It had been one month since Justin had arrived. Although he hadn’t woken up, his physical condition hadn’t grown any worse and even Dr. Goli, who had come at the senator’s request, grudgingly admitted that nothing was going wrong.

  When PIVOT acquired Forever Echo, they’d been excited to be able to keep playing their favorite game. The AI had responded to the three of them, changed quests, opened different paths, and even learned one’s language. It wasn’t actually AI, of course, although the game developers had given it a deeply sarcastic way of responding to people.

  Now, Nick thought they should probably write to the Forever Echo team and tell them what the game had become. It was saving lives.

  “Helloooo.” Amber snapped her fingers under his nose.

  “Oh, sorry.” He had rocked onto the back legs of his chair but now came down with a thump. “D’you want some champagne?”

  “Maybe once we’re turning a profit,” she replied.

  “Good call.” He took a sip and made a face. “We’ll be able to afford better champagne then.”

  Jacob snickered into his glass.

  “No jokes,” she said and pointed severely at them. “No celebrations. We’ve managed to keep the lights on and the pod running, but that’s it. The three of us are living on bulk dehydrated noodles and we haven’t been able to pay DuBois at all.” She lowered her voice at the last statement but swept a hand in the direction of the doctor.

  “Relax,” Jacob told her. “I don’t think he’s noticed.” He grinned. “I also don’t think he sleeps.” He cleared his throat. “And I know he doesn’t shower enough.” He waved a hand. “The point is, it’s going fine. We’ll be able to roll this out soon.”

  “Will we?” Amber leaned on the table to look at him. “The Williams have paid enough to run all this, but that was for us to break even—and, lest we forget, Justin isn’t improving.”

  “He’s interacting more fully with the game,” Jacob pointed out. “He seems to be taking in more sensory input. He’s learning various skills.” Between the patient’s long periods of unconsciousness, he had indeed shown an increased responsiveness to the game.

  “He isn’t waking up,” she stated. “What’s this worth if he doesn’t wake up?”

  “A ton of them don’t wake up,” he argued. “Some people lie in comas for years, Amber. Some of them…well, some of them die. We can’t base this off one person and honestly? Even if he doesn’t wake up, they’ve been able to get a message to him. He was able to send one back. We know now for a fact that people in comas can respond to a scenario that conscious brains can interpret. That’s huge!”

  “Right,” she replied. There was panic in her eyes now. “Yes, of course it’s wonderful! All we did was hook a comatose patient up to an experimental machine with no real proof of concept and no FDA approval! We won’t go to jail at all.”

  “I think you have to be a doctor to get charged with medical malpractice,” Nick said. Both his teammates glared at him and he shrugged. “I’m just saying. Justin’s next of kin approved this, we have research that hasn’t ever been overturned saying this was based on sound foundations…and he’s still alive. I mean, that’s a fair amount weighing in our favor.”

  Amber tipped her head back and covered her eyes with her hands.

  “Amber.” Jacob leaned forward on the table. “This was the right thing to do, right? We had a technology that could help someone, so we used it to help them. No matter what the law says, we did the right thing.”

  She pulled a chair out and sat, her shoulders hunched. “I don’t doubt that we did the right thing. It’s only… I used to think you could grow up, do the right thing, and people would see that you’d done the right thing and it would work out, right? But that isn’t how it works. Look at DuBois.”

  The outside door opened and closed, and footsteps came down the hall toward them. When Senator Williams came into the kitchenette, he looked like he hadn’t slept. His hair was disheveled and his eyes had bags under them. He gave a vague nod and moved to the coffee like a drone. When he couldn’t find a cup, Nick could swear the man considered drinking out of the pot. He stood and put a mug in the senator’s hand before he resumed his seat.

  Tad drained the entire beverage. “Thank you,” he muttered hoarsely. He rummaged in the cabinets and busied himself brewing a new pot.

  “Is something wrong?” Amb
er asked tentatively.

  “With Justin?” He looked up sharply. “He’s all right, isn’t he?”

  “Justin is fine,” she said patiently. “How are you?”

  Williams sighed and leaned against the counter. “It’s a…vote. Coming up.”

  The three PIVOT team members considered their response and made their decision together. When you’d been best friends for ten years, you tended to do that. They scooched their chairs together and Jacob went to get a fourth for the senator to sit.

  Tad dropped into the chair with a nod. He was close to dead on his feet. “There’s a measure coming before congress next week. On paper, it’s boring. It merely reclassifies some types of emergency services.”

  “And yet,” Jacob said with a theatrical flair, “I sense there’s a dark side.”

  The senator gave him a look that suggested this was no joking matter, and from Jacob’s wince, Amber had stomped on his foot under the table. She gestured for Williams to continue.

  “The emergency procedures the paramedics used to keep Justin alive on the way to the hospital, things like that—they’d double in cost overnight as a result of their reclassification.” The senator shook his head and chewed his lip. From the way it was cracking, he’d done that too much lately. “People already can’t afford these things. We have a good insurance policy and it covers him for five hundred thousand dollars, but it wouldn’t have lasted three months in the hospital after those procedures, and it would last so much less time after this bill. And that’s not even including physical therapy or rehabilitation.”

  “So, it’s a bad bill.” Nick was confused. “Did they tack something onto it that you want or something?”

  “No.” The senator took a deep breath. “You see, they’re trying to blackmail me.”

  Jacob had a very interested facial expression, which dissolved into a grimace when Amber kicked him again. “The plot thickens,” he mouthed to Nick.

  “Right after you came to talk to me the first time, the lobbyists came to ask me for a blank check. I told you that. What I didn’t tell you was that they photoshopped some lovely photos of me and a woman at a hotel. Ultimately, I can have them analyzed and prove they are fraudulent, but that will take months and the damage will have already been done.” The senator gave a dry laugh. “I tell you, what I wouldn’t give to be out on dates instead of sifting through endless paperwork. With Mary, of course, but still.” He lowered his head into one hand on the table, looked at the coffee machine to check its progress, and sighed. “And they have leverage—more leverage now.”

  “Oh?” Amber asked. She looked embarrassed by the silence but equally as embarrassed to have spoken.

  “Insurance won’t cover Justin’s treatment,” Tad told them. “They say it’s experimental. Which means we have to pay out of pocket now.” He looked at each one in turn. “We will,” he assured them.

  “That’s not what we’re worried about,” she said, although Nick could see the worry in the set of her face. She would never let Justin’s parents know how she felt about this, but Nick could see her panic rising.

  “You should be,” the senator said. He shook his head. “Because if I don’t give the lobbyists what they want, my career in Washington is as good as over, and then where’s the money to pay for anything?” He downed the last of the coffee in his cup and stared into space. “My constituents elected me to stop this kind of thing.” They could tell he was speaking as much to himself as to any of them. “If I vote no, I lose my salary, I lose my reputation, I lose…” He looked into the other room and his face changed when he saw the pod. “And if I vote yes, they’ll never re-elect me. And they shouldn’t. I’ll be another sellout. I’ll be someone who backed the interests of the lobbyists over the people. So what am I supposed to do? What do I do with any of that, huh?”

  Nick realized his hands were clenched and he wrapped them carefully around his mug. The three of them had spent the first four years of their adult life at MIT, believing that they were immersed in the toughest problems humanity had to solve. After that, it was the pressure cooker of Silicon Valley, where the money was endless and the next big idea was all anyone cared about. Both places had burned people out and had eaten them alive. He could name ten people off the top of his head who lived on the edge now and felt like failures for not establishing billion-dollar companies.

  He hadn’t thought politics was that bad. Honestly, he must have been naïve.

  “We’ll think of something,” Jacob assured the senator. He nodded to his companions. “We’ll find a way to get this covered and have the money taken care of, and…well, we aren’t politicians, but we’ll keep thinking about this, too. You shouldn’t have to choose between your conscience and your son, sir.”

  The senator responded with a bitter smile. “I used to think the people who sold out were such greedy bastards,” he said. “I wondered how they could go home at night and look their spouse in the eye, play with their kids, and feel like good people. Now I know what really went on.”

  “We’ll find solutions,” Jacob assured him again. “Come on, come see Justin. I’ll tell you some of the progress he’s made and Nick will bring you coffee as soon as it’s ready.”

  They went into the other room to see the monitors DuBois was watching over, and Amber sighed.

  “I sure hope we can live up to his promises,” she said. “Now, if we can’t do our jobs right, Justin dies and millions more people go into bankruptcy.”

  “We’ll think of something,” Nick told her. “I’m scared, too. When you were little, you thought you could do the right thing and it’d work out. Well, when I was little, I thought everything would work itself out. So clearly, I’m not the brightest bulb in the shed but also, Jacob is right. We both got here and we were able to help Justin.” He nodded at her. “Right now, you’re walking around looking like an aneurysm on legs and I’m downing a whole bottle of TUMS every night before bed, but we’ll find the answers we need. I promise. We will.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The village of East Newbrook was deceptively far away from the mountain, and it took Justin and Lyle almost an hour to reach it. The lights glimmering through the rain seemed like an impossible promise until they finally stood at the swinging sign that announced the town limits.

  If Riverbend had been a picture-perfect fantasy village, East Newbrook looked like it had been through the wringer. The houses were run-down, the walls crumbled, and the thatch had been haphazardly covered with mud, slate, and canvas. The only things that looked well-tended were strange little greenhouses outside almost every house.

  Justin stopped to look at one. “What is that?”

  “It’s to protect the vegetables,” Lyle explained. “What with those embers drifting down all the time, you can’t eat anything you pick up. Around here, barns have four doors so you can have a safe way to open them, no matter how the wind is blowing, and all the vegetables are grown in those structures.”

  “They must be expensive,” he said.

  “The big explosion that caused the embers happened toward the start of the war between Sephith and Kural,” his companion told him. “Kural made sure everyone had these. Good thing, too. Sephith never would, that’s for sure.”

  “Hey!” The shout came from an old man who hobbled to the fence to stare at them. “What’re you looking at?”

  “I’m new here,” Justin explained in an attempt to placate him, “and my friend was explaining about the covering on your vegetable garden.”

  “It’s not for sale,” the man said and radiated unfriendliness.

  “I’m not trying to buy, sir, merely looking around East Newbrook.” He began to back away.

  “Well, don’t,” the man told him. “I suggest you head back the way you came. You don’t want to be here and we don’t want you here.”

  Justin backed into the rain without answering and continued along the road. “These are not friendly people,” he said to Lyle.

  �
�Yer an outsider,” the dwarf said with a casual shrug. “People don’t usually like outsiders ʼtil there’s coin involved.”

  “Good point.” He looked around him. “Let’s find the tavern.”

  “That’s the first good idea you’ve had in days.” His companion increased his pace. “This way.”

  He followed without protest. “How do you know where it is?”

  “Always in the town square.” The rain had begun to slow, and Lyle’s voice floated through the patter. “Everyone wants a pint, don’t they? Plus, with the rain gone, we might as well be inside.”

  The dwarf wasn’t wrong. The tavern stood on the far edge of the town square. At the center were a fountain that didn’t seem to have run for years and cobblestones that had not only grass growing between them but giant spikes of it and strange, nettle-like plants. Justin gave them a wide berth.

  “Now, remember,” he told his companion and slung an arm around his shoulders as they approached it, “we are not going to get in any fights with these people.”

  “I thought you said we were going to the tavern.” Lyle sounded confused. “Didn’t you say that?”

  “Yes. But only to sell our goods, buy new supplies, and maybe have one pint,” he cautioned. “No bar fights, Lyle. No breaking benches and especially not with other benches. We don’t know the innkeeper here and I don’t want to have to bargain you out of another jail.”

  The dwarf muttered a grumpy and inaudible response.

  Inside, it was dark with smoke and Lyle disappeared almost immediately. With a sigh and a mental preparation for breaking up a bar fight later, Justin went to find the innkeeper or a merchant.

  The man behind the counter was both, and he accepted the assortment of animal fur scraps, pieces of foraged plants, and giant cockroach carapaces with good humor. Justin, seeing the opportunity to ask a question he’d always wanted to ask, seized the moment.