Nova Project #1 (2 page)

Y
ou are in a room.

Miguel's laughter echoes off the high gray walls. “Ha. Thanks,” he says with exactly as much sarcasm as necessary. The Storyteller says a lot, but she's almost never helpful. His eyes work fine; he can see where he is.

He can't offend her; there's never been any indication that she hears his curses or mocking. Or occasional pleas for help. Conversely, he's certain that every word he utters here is being recorded, uploaded, filed away somewhere. Everything else he does is, but then the flow of information is not just one way. Words, charts, numbers hover in front of his eyes, suspended in the middle distance. Years of practice have taught him to look past them, send them skittering to irrelevance when they're not needed so he can see his surroundings.

He
is
in a room. A new gamescape; he's never been this far before, and the thrill of the unknown makes him want to
run, speed ahead. That's a bad idea even if it was possible. He's trapped here, only a meticulous search will reveal the way out.

It's large, well lit, the shadowy edges and corners darker precisely because of the brightness, a tiny fraction of which comes from a high paned window. The door he entered through locked and disappeared the moment it slammed behind him. An echoing silence sucks at his ears, and the air smells musty, stale, unused. Like no one has been here in years. Just one clever trick in an endless stream of them.

He's alone here now; the four figures behind him don't count. Two over each shoulder, the guys a few inches taller than his five-ten, the girls a few inches shorter. If they turned against him, he'd rather take his chances against the guys. He's seen the girls fight.

But they won't turn against him. Loyal to the end. He could reach out and touch them, feel the solidity of their flesh and the guns in their hands, or make them disappear with one quick movement of his wrist. They are no more real than the Storyteller, but he knows for sure they can hear him.

He keeps his arms by his sides, one finger curled around a trigger.

“Split up. Look. It should be about three inches square.”

Their boots echo on the stone as they spread out to look, scanning floor and walls swept clean of the last speck of dust.
Miguel runs his hands over every imagined crack or lump, crouches down until his knees ache. The room has no purpose but to be a puzzle, and it's difficult to imagine what such a space would be used for outside in the real world. A gymnasium, perhaps; it looks a little like the one at school, painted the same dark gray, the same lights hung from the same visible rafters. The gym has more windows, though.

He looks up. “You two,” he says, pointing at the guys only because of their height, then at the window. If they hoist him, he should just be able to reach, reach and not think about what he's doing. They link their fingers, he steps each foot into their pairs of hands, rises up, up to the tiny square pane in the middle of the complicated geometric design of large rectangular ones. Miguel's done something like this before, earlier, and he remembers. Two taps on the middle, and against all laws of nature, it falls inward.

He nearly drops it in surprise when the lungful of fresh air hits him. Another clever trick. Man, dropping it would've sucked. “Ha. Got you. Okay, let me down.”

They do, gently, and it's a relief to feel the floor beneath him. That much, at least, is real . . . for a given value of
real.

A new door has appeared.

A red light blinks about halfway up on the right-hand side. Nearing, Miguel sees the recess in the brushed steel, dimensions exactly the same as the small object he holds. He
slots it into place, watches the light wink from red to green, stands back as the door opens.

You are in a corridor. You may go left or right.

“What do we think?” he asks his silent companions, who may or may not be capable of independent thought. On the whole, he thinks, probably not, they haven't been programmed for it, and the burly redheaded male one is dumb as a bag of hammers with a punch like one, too. They're here for strength, in physicality and in numbers, but all the decisions he makes are his alone.

And sometimes, like now, there's no obvious choice. The hallways stretch beyond vision in both directions, spotlights every twenty feet illuminating more dark gray walls.

He passes the weapon from left hand to right and back again. “Status update,” he says, refocusing his eyes to one of the input sectors broadcast on his lenses. “Any tips?” There's a keypad on his sleeve, too, but he rarely uses it. Speaking is easier. Officially, cheating isn't allowed, but almost everyone does this for the minor stuff. Usually Miguel wouldn't even bother for this, he doesn't need to, but if he's late for Anna and that godforsaken party, she'll kick his ass. There's no time to run in circles. It takes only a second for someone to check the game's geoloc tag on his message. One word comes back to him.

Wrong.

“Thanks,” he says to the helpful stranger.
Wrong
, the opposite of
right
.

He turns left, his assistants follow.

It's a long corridor, which can mean only one thing. Each step takes them a fraction closer, the dread building a fraction more. He's been close for weeks and now it's here and he wishes there were a few more rooms to search, a few more treasures to unearth. A faint twinge joins every heightened heartbeat. He touches his right index finger to his left wrist, measuring, the results beaming into view just above and a few inches out from his right eyebrow. Yellow, the color as important as the number etched in it. Okay. Could be better, but he's been much worse. It's only the anticipation.

A second red light blinks ahead, and Miguel scans the hall for another glass square before the voice of the Storyteller returns.
There is a keypad in front of you. You must enter the correct code.

Oh, hell. Miguel steps closer to see the markings on the keys. Numbers, not letters. Fine. He closes his eyes to think. There'd been a puzzle a dozen rooms back, a box locked with a combination that, once solved, had opened to give him the weapon in his hand.

He remembers not knowing whether to laugh or cringe when he'd figured it out. 2-1-0-4. Anna's birthday. As well as he knows these rooms, this building, this world, they know
him better. And they want him to know it.

The air smells of stillness, of the point of no return. Too late, as the final number clicks and depresses slightly under his finger, Miguel realizes there is no door. He barely has time to brace his knees before the floor drops out from underneath him. The fall isn't long, exactly the length of time it takes for his stomach to lurch into his throat, for his body to guess—correctly—how much it's going to hurt when he lands. Pain rattles through his muscles and bones, blood pools on his tongue with a copper sting.

After him, his team lands cat easy, already assessing the threat.

It's all around them. The air and Miguel's ears fill with the roar of fire. Heat crackles, rivulets of sweat drip down his forehead and into his eyes, blurring the information broadcast on his visor.

There is a path through the fire.

“I can see that, barely,” he mutters, feeling the words form but unable to hear them, though the voice of the Storyteller had been loud and clear. The path leads from the platform they're standing on and is just wide enough for them to slip between the towering flames on either side, if they walk single file.

One step, and the heat intensifies, hitting Miguel like a wall he has to break down, brick by brick. Breath simmers in his lungs. Gasping, half blinded by sweat and haze, he takes them
forward, arms tucked in close to his chest. And they haven't even gotten to the boss yet. Maybe he should've gone the other way back in that corridor, found a save point, waited to do this tomorrow. Too late to back out now. Forward, forward. He's never been so hot, so sure his skin is melting off inside his clothes, which are designed to protect him but don't feel like it at the moment.

Come on. Another step. This can't last forever. The metal butt of his gun brushes his chin, and he screams, this sound, too, devoured by the starving fire.

The pain does something. Reminds him. He wheels around, grinning at his helpers. They grin blankly back, mirrors, the firelight reflecting off their teeth. “Come on!” he yells. There's a boss here somewhere. Save points are for wimps. That taste on his tongue isn't a mix of blood and sweat, it's how much he wants this.

Through the red shimmer, Miguel sees the welcome end to the heat, the fire, the sensation that his face has become a featureless pool of flesh. Clever tricks. The next phase is glassy, crystalline, turned glowing orange by the flames. A ledge, a corridor he can't yet see the end of. It can't be as simple as walking into it, of course. This is Chimera. But the gap he has to jump, over a molten, bubbling pool, isn't a big one. He's jumped bigger.

“Back up,” he tells the others, getting into a stance for a running start, trying to breathe in enough air for this one effort.

Run. His foot hits the lip at the end of the path. Jump. Land, the front halves of his boots just making the edge on the other side.

Slide.

Not glass.
Ice.
Slick, skidding ice, its surface turned treacherous by the licking heat. His equally treacherous heart rises to his throat as he slips, spins, throws himself flat on his stomach. Made it. He wonders how many people have fallen into the fire, had to go back and try again. They aren't him.

Neither is his team. Two of them don't make it, their programs designed to allow for failure. He blinks, and they're replaced with clones so identical he might not have noticed the switch if he hadn't watched it. Carefully he climbs to his feet, touches his wrist again. Still yellow. A higher number, but that's to be expected. He's fine.

A door appears at the end of the hallway.

“Hang on,” he tells the Storyteller. He made it, but somewhere in the slide his weapon didn't. From his cache, he summons everything he's earned that might be useful, everything he can think of. He doesn't know exactly what's waiting for him behind that door, but whatever it is, it won't be easy to bring down. They wouldn't be worth the reward if they were.

Hands and pockets full, he squares his shoulders, glances left and right. Everyone ready? Good.

“Come and get me,” he whispers.

Miguel blinks, shifts his back against the solid, slightly bouncy, cool floor of a nearly empty room not much larger than he is. If he stretched his arms and legs, he'd almost touch the walls, but his muscles dismiss the suggestion as too stupid to follow. The burn on his chin is only a memory, and his tongue is fine, injuries that don't translate no matter how real they felt at the time. The whole-body ache is fair, though. He's been running around this room for—he blinks again, and a clock replaces the words in his visor—ten and a half hours straight.

Worth it. So worth it. A smile spreads on his face, turning to a laugh that bounces off the ceiling. He's sore and tired, and if he doesn't get moving, he's going to be late for Anna, but in this one moment, nothing can take away from this feeling. All he'd needed was a solid day with no school or homework to worry about, and wham, he'd done it.

One step closer. Miguel smiles, wider and wider until it hurts more than the rest of the pain dancing around his body. Laughter bubbles and bounces off the walls. That demon had been a real bitch, crawling its way back from the brink of defeat every time Miguel and his team had thrown everything they could at it. Like that mythological creature that kept growing heads when one was cut off, only this creature had just kept growing bitchier.

All the more satisfying when he'd cut its damned entrails
out. He'd seen his chance, its arms raised in defense against one of the girls beside him, its eyes suddenly lit with the panicked fire of
mistake.

One swipe of the knife, summoned from his cache, turned into a second, a third, until its guts spilled onto his feet.

Against everything he knows to be true, he raises his head to look down at the (reasonably) clean toes of his boots. Nothing but street dirt.

Sometimes Chimera feels that real.

Sometimes, like today, the game feels like a nightmare, and he doesn't know what that makes his actual nightmares, the ones from which he wakes blinded and soaked by cold sweat.

Sometimes nightmares feel like victory just because he's alive to have them.

He stands and begins to strip off the sensors, the boots that weren't much help on the ice. Nice try, game, but it wouldn't get him that easily.

Alone, his team ready to rejoin him the next time he comes to play, he tucks his equipment into a hard-shell case. The combination is
not
Anna's birthday, though he has no doubt this one is recorded somewhere with billions of others, each one representing a person who hopes there'll never be a data breach. He checks a glass-doored cabinet set into one wall, but it's empty. Today he's earned something bigger than one of the trinkets that could be left here. In the corner of his visor, a
message asks if he would like to receive a new enhancement. Just in case, he checks the list of available options before dismissing it. Not yet. He can't have what he wants yet.

His fingertips brush over the eyepiece as he takes it off and puts it away, remembering the words that had flashed across it.

LEVEL UP.

Billboards glow over the water, reflected fractures of themselves in the rippling waves. His muscles feel like those shards of light; jagged, breaking, re-forming. Every time he blinks, he sees graphics on his eyelids, though he's had the visor off for an hour and hasn't put his normal glasses back on. Once Anna arrives he'll have to go be social, and tomorrow he'll start a new level, but right now he can savor this triumph. On the opposite bank, another Cube shines starkly in the night, this one edged in a vision-insulting lime green that doesn't make its contents any less tempting. Winning only makes him want to win more.