“On it.”
All of a sudden, it felt as if all weight was gone from Kai’s body. But he wasn’t floating either. He noticed that he was frozen and couldn’t move. In the midst of the vastness surrounding him, this effect gave him an unpleasantly claustrophobic sensation. It sounded absurd in his head, the moment he thought it, but it was the only way he could describe what he was experiencing.
Then he was moved while his body remained static, almost as if dragged and dropped by an invisible, oversized cursor. He clipped through the geometrical formation that had been holding him in place in a similar way to how the cars had gone through Topher earlier today, then he was moved upward at high speed, like in an invisible elevator. Looking up, he couldn’t see any hole or trapdoor through which he could have entered this strange place. There only was the same vastness as in all other directions.
Just when he was starting to wonder how they were planning to get him out of there, he clipped through the floor and was back in the dim lighting of the demolished shopping mall.
His team stood a few feet away, waiting. Guns in their hands and unnatural eyes glowing in the dark, they made an impressive and intimidating sight, yet to someone who had just been dragged through the bowels of infinity, they appeared comforting.
In secure dev mode, the dust particles that had formerly been dancing in the beams of moonlight were now still. Behind the food court, several figures stood in T-pose. They were hostile NPCs, waiting to be set back into action and ambush anyone who dared approach them.
“Hey buddy,” Marco said, a strange seriousness in his voice. “We thought we’d lost you. Forever.”
Kai gulped. He had no idea clipping bugs could be so dangerous!
Claudia rolled her eyes and gave Marco a push. “He’s bullshitting you. That’s not a black hole out there, or anything like that.”
Kai could feel his body again as his feet hit the ground. The invisible cursor had let go of him.
“Yes, but it’s still a serious issue,” Viktor said. He was sitting on the ground and had multiple holo-screens glowing in a greenish light in front of him. “If you go too deep, it can rip your avatar into shreds and send your mind into a state of shock. And who wants that?”
For the first time, a smile appeared on his face, and it was a chilling rather than a friendly sight.
“Right,” Topher chimed in. “Which is why we take such massive clipping issues very seriously. Congrats, Kai, you just found your first Severity Five bug. Open your tester UI and write a ticket.”
Kai began documenting the issue he had just discovered the way Topher had taught him earlier.
“Don’t we need to reproduce it?” he asked.
Marco and Claudia shook their heads while Topher’s disembodied voice answered him.
“No. This is such a severe issue that even if it occurs only one in a hundred times, it needs to be fixed. Usually it’s a level designer who screwed up, but sometimes the problem lies in the code.”
“Not our concern,” Marco shrugged, then clapped Kai’s shoulder. “Well done, Kai!”
“Thanks!” Kai said, sending off the ticket.
His Progression stat in the tester UI changed to 8/1000. He had earned five points simply by falling through the floor. Kai grinned.
“Ok, let’s jump back into game mode and finish this crappy level – so we can test it all over again,” Marco said.
Instead of answering, Viktor pressed some keys on his console and the game sprang back into life again. The dust particles danced in the moonlight as if nothing had happened. The T-posing NPCs behind the food court had vanished, turning back into stealthy assassins, lurking in the dark.
“Sometimes, it feels a bit like Sisyphus’ labor, no?” Francois said as they approached the darkness behind the demolished restaurant, weapons at the ready.
“As long as no one tries to eat my kidneys I’m ok with that,” Marco shrugged.
“Eww, what the hell are you talking about? That’s gross,” Josh said.
“Not the kidneys, the liver,” Viktor said. “And it was Prometheus who had it eaten. Sisyphus was the one with the rock.”
“Huh?”
“Google it,” Viktor ended the discussion.
Kai smiled as he listened to his new teammates bantering. They really seemed to be a nice crew.
It should have been impossible to sneak up on anyone chatting like that, but all games were programmed this way. Whatever players discussed in a party, the NPCs couldn’t hear.
“We got five of them waiting for us here and another six inside the movie theater behind the food court. It’s where they set up their bomb,” Marco explained to Kai. “And that shit blows up in less than three minutes.”
“We’re not gonna make it in time,” Francois said fatalistically.
“No big deal,” Topher intervened. “We need to test the bomb explosion on hard mode anyway.”
“Yay.”
Without having to look, Marco lifted his arm and extended his blade, which shimmered silver in the little moonlight that had made it all the way back there. Out of nowhere, a sword appeared that would have cut his head off if he hadn’t parried in time. Josh fired his gun into the air where the blade had come from, and red-flashing numbers indicated that he had hit his target. Marco lunged forward and slashed seemingly blindly into the air, yet his blades slashed the hostile cyborg who was sneaking up in stealth mode.
Kai watched, impressed, but then reminded himself that those guys knew the game so well that they could play it in their sleep – literally.
“Watch out, Kai,” Claudia warned. “Three o’clock!”
Spinning around, Kai activated his scanner. At first, he couldn’t see or hear anything. But then he saw the slight movement of soundwaves, indicating a phantom approaching. He charged forward, drawing his blades, lightning-fast – and managed to impale the enemy through his abdomen. The unpleasant sound of metal cutting through flesh could be heard.
Critical hit!
Red numbers counted down so fast that a human eye could hardly see it, then they stopped at 100/3500.
Finish off enemy?
Y/N
Hell yeah! Kai thought, quickly selecting Y.
Next to him, Claudia had engaged another hostile, while Marco and Josh had made short work of the last Wasp in the darkness.
Suddenly Kai lost control over his body as the game took over for him and maneuvered him into a scripted finishing sequence – and a spectacular one. He jumped up, high in the air, with inhuman speed, then descended on the struggling enemy like a bird of prey. His legs performed a perfect split while both his blades rammed into the hostile’s skull from above, slicing down his neck and through his whole body, cutting him in two.
“Whoa,” Kai said when the scripted sequence had ended and he gained control back over his body, his bloody handiwork finished.
That had been ultra-realistic and brutal.
He turned around and saw that the others had finished the job, too, and were already on the move. No one had noticed his spectacular stunt. Or maybe they’ve seen it so often that they simply didn’t care.
Pleased with himself, Kai wanted to follow, but Viktor called after him.
“You missed something here, Kai. Maybe you should write a ticket.”
Kai looked down at the bloody mess that had been a soldier only seconds ago and furrowed his brow.
The bloody mess was twitching and moving erratically.
The body was split in two, surrounded by blood, organ tissue and metal pieces, yet both parts moved as if the killed NPC was trying to walk. It was a highly disturbing sight that made Kai’s stomach churn.
He forced himself to stop staring and to keep cool.
“What do I write in the ticket?” he asked Viktor, opening the menu in the tester UI.
“We call this a ragdoll,” Viktor explained. “It sometimes happens with dead NPCs, although this one is a particularly interesting case. I assume it was triggered beca
use of your finishing move. Make sure to reproduce it the exact same way later.”
“Ok.”
“Hey, what’s going on back there?” Marco called back. “We got less than 90 seconds left.”
He and the rest had already advanced to the heavy doors of the movie theater.
“Kai found a ragdoll,” Viktor said as he, Francois and Kai quickly closed in on the others.
“Damn it! You’re a bug magnet!” Marco laughed.
“Seems the special melee finishing animation triggered the behavior.”
“Oh shit, something’s telling me Master and Commander will have us test every damn NPC on this level,” Marco groaned.
“Let’s use Rush and assault the remaining NPCs as quickly as possible. We still can do it easily,” Claudia said.
They all activated the inhuman speed ability and sprinted into the movie theater. Kai, who was still a bit behind after writing the bug ticket, hurried after them as fast as he could. He entered the huge, black-walled hall and saw that Marco, Josh and Claudia hadn’t bothered to use the stairs but had leaped down to the lowest part instead, their cyborg limbs easily absorbing the impact. There they engaged the remaining six hostiles, killing them quickly. It didn’t matter if they had played this level many times before or not, those people were exceptional players, there could be no doubt about it.
When Kai arrived downstairs, there wasn’t much left for him to do. Marco ripped open the curtains that covered the screen. And there it was: the bomb.
It wasn’t very big but nonetheless looked impressive and nasty, with its neon-green glow and blinking lights. The lower part had the classic yellow symbol for radioactivity printed on it to make it clear to even the dumbest player that this was a nuclear device.
Josh was already leaning over it.
“We did it,” Marco smiled. “It’s a mini-game to disarm it and not a big deal once you figure out how. When Josh is done the boss will appear, a mech that will crash through this wall.”
He pointed to their right.
“We haven’t tried him on hard mode yet and he’s a badass son of a bitch, but we’ll manage… unless you fall through the floor again.”
“I’ll try to watch my step from now on, I promise.”
“All done,” Josh said, straightening up, with pride in his voice.
The green glow vanished from the bomb and it made a sound that indicated it was powering down. The timer stopped at 00:19 seconds.
Everyone readied themselves for the boss that was expected to crash through the wall. But nothing happened.
“What the fuck?” Marco scratched his head after they waited for a couple of seconds.
The team members exchanged surprised looks.
“Seems we have a showstopper here,” Claudia said.
“Um… guys,” Josh pointed at the bomb.
They had been so focused on the boss who didn’t show up that none of them had noticed that the bomb had reactivated itself. The menacing green glow was back, and so was the timer.
“I thought you disabled it, Josh!” Marco said, irritated.
“I did!”
They all looked at the timer.
4…
3…
2…
“Merde,” Francois said dryly.
1…
For a very brief moment, everything froze, then moved in slow motion. Kai saw how the bomb turned into a raging fireball, which quickly expanded. Josh was closest to the detonation and was consumed by the fire first. Eyes wide with horror, Kai witnessed how the flesh burned off his body, leaving only bones and metal augmentations. Then the rest of him disintegrated into ashes.
The fire expanded rapidly, and even though the scripted sequence played out in slow motion, it happened extremely fast. Kai didn’t even have the chance to react in any way before the fire hit Marco and then him.
An unbearable pain shot through his body as he felt the fire consuming it, burning through his flesh, vaporizing his blood, melting his metal parts. It felt 100% real and sent his mind into a panic.
Just when he thought he would go insane, it stopped.
Black infinity surrounded him and he heard the game’s iconic title music, played in a slow, incredibly depressing way.
You died.
Critical mission failure.
The nuclear blast was so powerful that it reached and devastated Olympias City.
There’s nothing left of you to be reconstructed.
(No save point reload possible on hard mode.)
Slowly the darkness around Kai faded and he found himself back in the game lobby. Yet his mind was still in a frenzy. Back in his avatar’s body, he collapsed to the ground, shaking. Blood rushed through his head and buzzed in his ears with such intensity that he thought his skull would burst.
Far away, he heard voices and recognized his teammates sitting on the floor, too. His vision was so blurry that he only recognized their shapes.
He was suffocating. There wasn’t enough air…
His heart was racing, pounding so hard as if it was about to burst through his chest at any second.
“Kai,” he heard a sharp, commanding voice. He thought it was Lex, but he wasn’t sure. “Kai, listen to me. You’re fine. Do you understand? It was an illusion… God damnit, he’s going into shock. Initializing cocktail!”
Kai felt a burning pain in his wrists. For a moment, he thought he was dying.
Have you never wondered what happens to people who die while they’re connected to VR?
He heard a voice echoing in his mind. It could have been Marco’s, but he wasn’t sure.
“I’m dying…” he whispered.
“No, you’re not.”
He could breathe again. Clean, cool air filled his lungs. He opened his eyes – and found himself back in the real world.
Lights were blinking all around him in his pod and he could see Lex’s frowning face.
“What happened to me?” Kai asked, confused.
At the same time, he was astounded how quickly his body and mind had gone back to normal. It almost seemed like waking up from a bad dream, with the nightmare that had been horrifying only a second ago now fading away.
Lex’s stern expression turned friendly and she smiled, petting his cheek.
“He’s here, he’s fine,” she said, pulling the plug out from his skull while the tubes released his wrists. “No worries, kiddo. It’s all good. Your mind was tricked into believing the explosion was real and went into a state of shock. I’m sorry you had to experience this on your first day. It’s the reason you wear this suit and have those–”
She lifted her hands and pointed at her wrists, yet her skin was smooth and pale. Where Kai and other testers had had their ports implanted, she had nothing.
“I feel like shit,” Kai said, sitting up and inspecting his own wrists, which had been released from the chair. The skin around the ports was red and felt burned.
Topher approached him and clapped his shoulder. “Don’t worry, that’s normal after a cocktail injection. You did great in there! Amazing performance.”
“Thanks… I guess.”
He still felt confused and as if someone had mangled him. And he now understood why this job was considered high-risk. What would have happened if Lex hadn’t watched out for him and given him the injection in time? Would he have died? Or gone insane?
“It’s not usually like that around here,” Topher said. “And it certainly wasn’t what Lex meant when she said you were getting your baptism of fire. You not only demonstrated remarkable skills as a game tester in there, you learned the hard way why we dress up like gimps. Certainly not for fashion reasons.”
“Ha! Who knows,” Lex threw in with a grin.
“You mean, I would have been burned if not for the suit?” Kai asked, stretching his limbs. Everything felt normal.
“Well, not to a crisp like your avatar,” Lex said. “But you might have suffered burns on your real body. When the human mind is tricked i
nto believing what’s happening is real, the body might react as if it had suffered real injuries. It’s a fascinating phenomenon science hasn’t fully explained yet.”
Great…
“What the fuck, Topher?” he heard Marco’s voice behind him.
Kai turned and saw the other testers waking up. Marco’s dark eyes gleamed angrily.
“That was way too intense!”
“Yes, we know that now,” the team lead replied calmly. “We’ll write a report to the dev studio advising them to curb the intensity on hard mode.”
“That was too much,” Claudia complained.
“Agreed,” Francois said. “I hate this stupid bomb on normal and casual mode, but this? Merde…”
Josh nodded in agreement. Only Viktor remained calm and silent.
Topher lifted his hands. “Ok, ok, noted. But you guys know full well that it’s our job to test exactly this. It’s an unpleasant experience for you, but you have a safety net. The players out there don’t. If the game had been shipped like that, people could have been hurt.”
“Kai got hurt,” Claudia said.
“No, I’m fine,” Kai said quickly, wondering why the experience had sent him into shock and simply made the others angry. “I’ll get used to it, I guess.”
“You will,” Topher said. “Next time won’t be half as bad.”
“There’s also a major showstopper issue in there,” Marco said, calming down a bit. “The boss didn’t show up. Instead the bomb reset itself. Total bullshit.”
“Yes,” Topher replied. “Since it only appears on hard mode, we won’t test that again until the studio sends us a new build with a lower intensity.”
“I’ll see to that at once,” Lex agreed.
The lead smiled at his team. “How about everyone gets ten points and the rest of the day off?”
The testers exchanged a look and Marco grinned.
“Now we’re talking.”
Chapter Fourteen
When Kai left the sickbay, he found Josh waiting for him in the corridor.
Cyber Squad - Level 1: A Gamelit/LitRPG Lite Cyberpunk Adventure Page 16
