Полная версия
Soda Pop Soldier
What then?
My paycheck, rent, Sancerré? All three seemed tied together. My only answer was to get better at killing WonderSoft, grunts and players.
In sleep, I dreamed hot dreams of sweaty candlelit battlefields of still, tall grass in the night. Billowing white clouds barely moved against the almost light blue of night beneath a bone china moon. In the dream the air felt warm and smelled of sandalwood. Kiwi was there, in the gunner’s mount, and I drove the armored, in-game jeep we call a Mule. Both of us guzzled gallons of amber scotch and listened to a surreal mix of the opening march from “White Rabbit” on a small portable radio as phrases and words from across time and politics, Eastern chanting and wailing, things Sancerré had said, formed a soundtrack for our efforts to kill every one of our enemies.
WonderSoft.
Landlords.
Mario, the world’s greatest fashion photographer, in his own, not very humble in the least, opinion.
Rich guys, kids I knew in high school, rock bands we hated, corporate America and the open source hackers who ruined everything for everybody. Everyone and anyone got it, and even when they should have stopped, they kept coming at us in waves. They kept closing in on us as Kiwi worked the revolving matte-black triangular twin barrels of the Hauser minigun atop the Mule. Kiwi shirtless, sweating, grinning, screaming over and over again, “It’s beautiful, man, it’s beautiful.”
I dream of war …
… and wake to early, soft gray light, watery scotch, and the lock chime beeping softly as Sancerré comes through the door, mumbles a “sorry,” and goes into the bedroom and closes the door behind her.
Chapter 7
Downtown, at Forty-Seventh and Broadway I take the express elevator to the seventy-fourth floor. In the mirrored walls I see my cleanest khakis can’t stand up to the shave I need. My whitest shirt, my only white shirt that might pass as acceptable for mainstream society, can’t look clean enough against the gray-green pallor of my face. At least I had my Docs polished on the way over. And the caramel-colored leather trench, what can you say, it’s the best; it goes with my entire wardrobe and it’s full of surprises, like the aviator shades I find in the inside pocket along with a random matchstick.
Nervous?
Sure. Who wouldn’t be after a couple of beatings like this weekend’s, an assured dressing-down and impending bonus possible termination, rent due, girlfriend probably cheating, and oh, yeah … I’m hungover.
I don the aviators, bite the match, and try to convince corporate America I am the problem. An invisible Do Not Disturb sign wraps itself around me. The suits in the elevator, bright boys of banking and finance and higher education and weekends in a place I’ve heard called the SkyVault, cease their inane chatter of ultramodels, back ends, deals, points mergers, options, and blah blah blah … Bang.
I am the problem!
Mayhem made to order.
I can tell they get the message when they shuffle out whispering to each other as the doors close behind them. I ride out the last stretch to the seventy-fourth alone. In the silence, the bony man, Faustus Mercator, asks me Are there meeting rooms above the seventy-fourth? and …
… Are you happy?
The large, polished mahogany conference table shines thickly as drop-down monitors, paper flat, slide from the ceiling. I can hear Kiwi bantering with JollyBoy. Outside the immense windows, gray morning wafts by in misty cloud banks. Soon all the screens are filled with the fifty-nine others who make up ColaCorp’s professional online army. Of late, an army beaten repeatedly by WonderSoft.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” says RangerSix from the largest screen on the main wall. He’s represented by neither avatar nor real-time image, just an old-school radio wave pulsing with the steady intonations of his speech.
“First off I want to start with the obligatory ‘compliment sandwich,’ which all my self-improvement books tell me I need to use when talking to nonmilitary personnel. S’posed to help me in corporate America. But, dammit to hell, kids … there’s no time for corporate double talk. Everyone gave it their best and we still got beat, and we got beat badly. In the process we lost several assets we very much needed to take back the Song Hua river basin. Vampires got into both tank battalions, and now we’re down to three. I repeat, three tanks. Three tanks ain’t gonna support any kind of counterattack. So, in short, we’re down to the Eightieth Infantry Brigade; two artillery companies, the 661 and the 663; and what’s left of our air wing, which boils down to an attack squadron and the Albatross platoon.”
“We’ve always got snide remarks … oh, and lots of sticks and stones,” Kiwi offers cheerily.
“Not funny, son.” RangerSix sounds like he wants to stomp on Kiwi. On my Petey, Kiwi messages me, “Too bad WonderSoft has rubber armor and we’re made of glue.”
“Right, sir, sorry,” Kiwi says, chastened.
“You’re a good soldier, Kiwi, but I would be remiss if I didn’t let you know our next battle will determine whether you stay on professional status or not. Frankly, it might mean that for the rest of us also. The number crunchers at ColaCorp feel salaries, our salaries mainly, asset fees, and sponsorship could be better spent on more traditional advertising. So we have to do something right here, right now to prove them wrong. In short, boys and girls, we need a win and we need it Tuesday night. So here’s our plan …”
I think about the plan.
I think about it as snow drifts in from the front that’s making its way down onto Manhattan. High above, above the seventy-fourth floor, the bottom of Upper New York pokes through the clouds. Down here on the ground it’s business as usual, as the few commuters who still live in the old city hurry through the fading afternoon light, hoping to get home before the storm hits.
I need to go home. I need to confront Sancerré about where she was all weekend and why she didn’t come back last night. But the check ColaCorp gives me is way too small to pay the rent. So I head to Grand Central Station. I’ve got an hour to get there, and if I don’t make it in time, I won’t be able to earn any money tonight.
It’s money we need, Sancerré and I, to have a relationship before we end said relationship. We are, as of midnight last night, officially ten days overdue on our rent.
Sancerré once told me that Grand Central Station used to be beautiful.
I hate the place.
It smells like bad patchouli and cheap disinfectant. Supposedly it once handled the entire commuting workforce of old New York. Now it’s just a series of huddled stalls. Old hippies from the double “0”s hawking their incense candles, FreakBeads, and tie-dyed Blue Market SoftEyes. I could care less about sand candles and cheap monocles that reconstruct everyone naked.
Some people I don’t want to see naked.
The only thing I’m hoping for right now is to buy into tonight’s tournament and get on Truth and Light.
I hate Darkness. Only freaks play Darkness.
Right now around the world, Darkness fans, many more than those who make a habit of actually playing Darkness, are hurrying home to make sure their subscriber accounts have hand-shaked with the Black so they can watch the sick fantasies of others come to life.
I meet Iain near a stall where two old hippies are listening to Pearl Jam Redux as they try to sell SoftMat knockoffs that probably won’t last out the year. They’re stoned, so who cares if Iain lays a disk on me that carries a minimum two-year Education sentence, federal I might add, along with the obligatory sex offender rap for a take-home bonus. That’s hard time if your log jibes with what the feds will be watching for tonight.
“What’d I get?” I ask him while thinking, Please be Light. Please be Light. I repeat it over and over to myself.
“You never know, bucko,” says Iain. “You … never … know, so buy the ticket and take the ride.”
I stare at Iain. He sports two SoftEyes, both anthracite gray. I wonder what’s going on behind those lenses. Does he care? Is he worried or scared, like I am? If some sicko used the disk he’s just handed me in the last match, I’m now liable for any crimes he committed while logged in using the program contained on that disk. A routine stop, a minor altercation, and the cops run a cursory data surf on anything I’m carrying and I’m busted for sure. If so, who knows? With a good lawyer I could fight it, but good lawyers cost good money, and the only money I’m holding is a small supply of increasingly rare cash, the only form of currency the Black deals in. Iain does not accept MasterVisa.
“Are you in or out? It makes no difference to me?” says Iain, as if he’s trying to push me.
Iain has always been one cold cat.
“I’m in.” Even though I shouldn’t be. Please be Light.
Please be Light.
“Then that’s one large, my brother,” he whispers. I hand Iain a grand. My last grand. The grand earmarked for half the rent.
Please be Light.
I’m home by five just as the storm hits the streets hard. I crank up the heat and find a note Sancerré has left for me.
Back tonight. I promise. I’ll explain. Sorry.
Love,
Goon
It’s Monday. She doesn’t have any kind of shoot I remember her talking about. I’ve got four hours until I can crack the disk, so I pour a small scotch and fire up a little reggae. Soon I’m asleep and Kiwi and I are once again fighting our way across that nightmarish landscape, a battlefield of candles and sawgrass. Night winds drive unseen wooden wind chimes against each other. We kill a hundred medieval knights conjured up from an Eiger nightmare. Kiwi works the twin Hauser, screaming, as the sound of our guns turn orchestral at some point. Gregorian darkness. The knights are lurching, off perspective, bullet-riddled charcoal sketches that remind me of Picasso’s Don Quixote. They’re too much for us and they refuse to die, swinging wide-bladed two-handed swords as we are overrun. The moon fades, the barrels melt down, and only the medieval chanting remains in the dark and the shadows that survive.
“It’s beautiful, man … ,” whispers the voice of an unseen Kiwi.
I wake, wonder where I am, remember, then mutter, “Please be Light.”
Chapter 8
At nine thirty I’m mostly sober, though I’ve filled a nice big tumbler of scotch and pulled out half a pack of smokes I’ve been meaning to throw away.
The stuff you’re liable to see on the Black is often just too much for a sober mind.
I lock my disk in, run my cracking daemon on it, then my computer screen turns black.
Maybe my computer couldn’t handle it.
Abandon All Hope … appears on-screen.
I hate this stuff.
I’m trying not to run the lights in the apartment to keep our electric bill down, and I know there’s no one in the room with me, but already I have a case of the willies. The pervasive sense of dread that accompanies the Black is already making its way into my mind. My old speakers begin to thud out the beat of ancient tribal drums as hammers strike anvils, nailing out high ringing notes. I look at the clock.
9:33 P.M. New York time.
Across the world, weirdos with a taste for the twisted that can no longer be satiated by the SimDungeons they’ve constructed in secret are logging on to an illegal open source i.p.
Looking for thrills.
The words open source are enough to get federal data surfers interested in what you’re doing, while at the same time dropping the AG’s office an e-mail to start filing blanket charges. Open source just isn’t done anymore. I know the reason why, all the reasons why. They teach them in history class. But it’s the only way to make money tonight, right now. Money I need yesterday. Who cares if open source was once responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of lives and a worldwide global collapse, pandemic, and famine. I need rent money.
Please be Light.
On-screen, blood red fades to gray, becoming concrete, stone, then finally grit.
I’m wondering what kind of game we’re playing tonight as I catch myself again repeating inside, Please be Light. Please be Light. Please be Light.
Will it be third world dueling crime syndicates in an open-world version of Kinshasa in the never-ending quagmire that is Greater Africa? Drugs. Hit missions. Gang warfare in the streets. Genocide.
Or …
Some over-the-top science fiction classic that’s been rewritten for the Black and its particular take on lust, torture, and ultraviolence? There was a Star Wars tribute Black game that got busted and made the news last year because some Hollywood actor hadn’t told the feds about his undeclared income from the game. He’d made an extra hundred thousand dollars playing a rapist C3PO who was fairly good at poker.
I stop.
Please be Light.
“Boys and girls, gents and ladies,” begins a soft, malevolent voice through my vintage Grundig Sharp speakers. Vintage meaning old, but they still do the trick. “Saints and sickos, tramps and troublemakers, predators and prey … it’s dyin’ time … again.”
Please be Light.
“Worldwide we are registering over fifty-five million subscribers for tonight’s event,” continues the announcer in his overstylized carny-of-the-damned tones. “And we ask ourselves, my fellow little perverts …”
Pause.
“Who will hack, slash, rape, and loot their way out of our little horror show tonight and for all the nights we play our game until everyone be dead or damned? Who’s ruthless enough to backstab, steal, and cheat their way out of hell? Tonight, my lovelies, we begin … again, in”—the voice is musical, singsong, melodic, its cheery note a counterpoint to the death carnival I’m sure I’m about to find myself in—“the lost World of Wastehavens.”
The music crescendos and then, after a short interlude of silence, returns to the wanderings of a mournful flute.
I have no idea what the World of Waste-whatever is.
“Behold the tower of the Razor Maiden, the Marrow Spike,” continues the announcer.
My screen clouds over. Blue shadows resolve into swirling dust, and from somewhere nearby over ambient in-game sound, I hear a crack of dry thunder followed by the patter of rain falling mutely into ancient, thick dust. Water drops cascade and echo and I’m struck by the certainty that if Sancerré is truly gone, out of my life, I’ll listen to the rain and think of her and it will be little consolation to a very lonely me.
On-screen a fat gibbous moon, swollen, corpulent, and odd, makes its way across the night as its light falls on a lonely desert. In the distance, a rising tower, more perversion or malignant growth than structure, stands out in the moonlit night. Its crazy architecture rises, feasible only in computer-rendered graphics, pushing away from a crumbling city that is slowly being consumed by the dunes of an endless desert. I let go of a fading hope I’d harbored for a simple AK and the clear-cut purpose of merely machine-gunning my way through this game until I’d earned enough money for rent.
Modern warfare is my specialty. Fantasy, not so much.
The spire is jagged and thorny, a black silhouette against the desert night, rising from the jumble of odd-angled ruins in an arid waste devoid of anything living, all made colder by the moon’s pale light. Only the most morbid tourist would choose such a place for an online vacation.
A piano in minor chord ponderously strikes cryptic notes as the camera pulls focus. I’m scanning for landmarks, features, anything I can use later to navigate my way to some cash and prizes. I don’t see any obvious enemies. Yet.
“Even now, pretty and not so pretty little things,” continues the announcer abruptly, “you’re awakening from your crypts, graves, tombs, and sewers …” On-screen the view switches to a collapsing graveyard in some courtyard near the the tower, forgotten and abandoned millennia untold. Gravestones with Gorey-like inscriptions denote fallen warriors. The sound of grinding stone caressing stone erupts across the ambient soundscape. A necrotic hand pushes from the earth. The piano continues to strike those minor chords, alternating now with other diminished chords that seem full of suffering and hollow all at once, turning the soundtrack into a march, into a call to nothing good.
I hate the undead.
They make me jittery. In most games, they just come at you in waves. Guns are basically useless. In fact, most things are useless against the undead. In the end it comes down to baseball bats and lead pipes. Which doesn’t matter—the more of them you send back to death, the more of them appear. I always wonder, after games I’ve played that involve the undead, after killing a thousand, two thousand, what that does to my mind. It can’t be good. One time I played a game where I had to kill fifty-seven-thousand-plus undead just to unlock an achievement. I can distinguish between reality and games, but … some people can’t. What does killing fifty-seven thousand humanlike once humans do to players?
The undead are a hard way to spend a thousand bucks.
A hard way to make rent.
“Prisoners and fiends, victims and in-betweens … ,” continues the game’s unseen announcer. The rattling of chains, a tortured scream, a woman sobs. Everything happens fast and just moments before the game reveals my avatar, the unknown character I’ll play as I attempt to beat this game, I see the tower above and hear the whimpering of a child.
“Razor Maiden, devourer of the innocent, eater of life, queen of hell, commands that you die tonight, or live trying.”
In these online tournaments, and might I add, illegal open source online tournaments, the goal is to figure out the game and then beat it before all the other players find and beat you. You’ve got to start somewhere, and often that’s a game in and of itself that must be beat before you can actually start beating the main game. Just like life. I’m guessing the game I’ll be playing to start with is “escape.” But from where and how, I don’t know just yet. Along the way is where I’ll really make money. Contests, treasure troves, even in-game bargains can lead to big cash and interesting prizes. Or so I’ve been told.
The intro is over and now my story, the story of my avatar, begins.
“Please be Light,” I whisper once more in my empty and very dark apartment.
Gloomy clouds thicken on-screen, then a golden shaft of light, something my eyes are starving for, stabs down through the clouds.
In Olde English script, the word Light appears as I hear a distant trumpet play a fading call to arms.
“Noble Son”—it’s a different voice than the game announcer, kindly, a sage or a king perhaps—“I am Callard the Wise of Rondor, and I’m here to help you. You must rescue a child of hope from the clutches of the diabolical Razor Maiden. Your training as a Samurai of the mysterious East has given you the Focused Slash ability and the Iron Hurricane attack. Armed only with your katana Deathefeather, you have journeyed many leagues into the southern deserts to reach a fabled lost city buried beneath shifting sands so that you can climb the jutting ruin of the Marrow Spike and confront evil itself.”
Pause.
Wait for it, I tell myself.
“Alas, you have been captured by the nightmarish horde of the black witch Razor Maiden …”
There it is. Captured.
I hate games where you start off in the hole.
The question now is, How many of my fellow contestants are also captured? Whoever’s not captured has a big advantage. Even worse, am I captured by one of my fellow players? Someone playing Darkness?
“The Black horde has taken your hand in payment for daring to approach their forgotten realm,” continues Callard the Wise of Whatever. “But fear not, Samurai, there is hope! Somewhere within this ancient desert lies the Pool of Sorrows. If you can find it, maybe its restorative waters will return your lost hand, and then, once you’ve found your legendary blade Deathefeather, perhaps you might dispense the justice Razor Maiden so richly deserves.”
I feel cheated.
Damn Iain.
A thousand bucks down the drain on a one-handed Samurai that’s probably being tortured and raped from the get-go.
The picture on-screen dissolves as the voice of Callard reminds me to “find the child.” What child, I’m not sure, but apparently a child must be found.
The screen changes from panorama to point of view. I’m inside the avatar’s skin. The HUD comes online and I’m checking the layout. Vitals are down 50 percent. But who’s exactly a million bucks after having their hand lopped off? My right clicks are enabled, so I scroll through a menu of available feats I can slave to the mouse and bind to the keyboard. I like the old-fashioned mouse, none of these reticle-cued, SoftEye enhancements everyone’s trying to sell me these days.
With part of my mind on the screen that shows my surroundings, and the other scrolling through a submenu checking what skills I can employ, most of which are offline, I see the grotesque feet of a large monster shuffling toward me. My POV is only responding to the vaguest of movements, like I’m drugged or chained up or something. Over ambient, beyond the scrape of the jailer-monster’s feet, I hear an agonized scream followed by repeated cries for mercy. Then the obligatory tormented scream punctuation as hot iron sears flesh. Again, the screaming.
The Dungeon of Endless Despair flashes across my screen.
The jailer nears my body and hauls me upright. I stare from the darkness of my snow-swamped apartment in midtown Manhattan, into the face of an Ogre on-screen. Protruding canines and bleeding gums compete for computer-rendered audacity with an oozing gash that was once an eye.
“Wot’s yur name, maggot?” growls the Ogre through my DellTashi display, something I purchased on credit after being confirmed for professional status with ColaCorp.
A QuickMenu opens up asking me to type in my name.
“Loser” springs to mind along with “Thousand-Dollars-Down-the-Drain Guy.”
I can’t use PerfectQuestion. If ColaCorp knew I was gaming in the Black, I’d lose my pro status immediately.
What comes next comes from nowhere. It doesn’t mean anything to me, and I can’t remember ever hearing it before.
“Wu,” I type in.
“Wu!” shrieks the Ogre and roars with laughter and flying spittle right in my face. My POV spins crazily about as the Ogre, easily well over seven feet tall, hurls my Samurai at a far wall. Ragdoll physics take over as the laws of the universe in this online world send me flying through the air. After a bone-rattling impact into a wall, I land on a thin pile of straw in the orange light of a nearby guttering wall torch. The damage deducts 2 percent from my Vitality and now I’m down to 48 percent.
I’m still searching all the Samurai’s submenus. He has some awesome skills and devastating attacks. But all of them are offline, probably due to the missing hand and damage. I find one called Serene Focus. It’s live, so I enable and drag it onto the right mouse button. I read the quick hint description of the skill as once again the Ogre lumbers toward me all grunts and wheezy laughs.
“I’ll baste yur bones with yur own blood ’n’ crack yur skull between me teeth, I will.”
A very ogre thing to say.
Meanwhile back at the skill description, I read that Serene Focus allows the user to slow down in-game time while still moving at an intensely fast speed.
Yay, now I can watch the Ogre beat me to death in slow-mo.
I scan the jail cell. Torchlight and shadows, more alcove than cell, it opens into an undefined gloom beyond the flickering light. I do not see my Samurai sword, Deathefeather, anywhere nearby. The guttering torch along the wall of my cell reveals nothing that would be useful right about now. The Ogre is almost on me again, grunting and laughing. I pan up and see the great sabers of his fangs rending his own scarred and bloody welt of a lip.
I have to admit, whoever wrote this software, even though they’re stealing my thousand bucks, did a great job. It sucks to be me right now.