Soda Pop Soldier (29 page)

“Great,” I murmur, almost to myself. “In-game lore manufactured by some hack writer to add depth and texture. In the end, it all breaks down to getting the loot to get better loot. Right?”

“Often true enough, Samurai,” replies the world-weary sage. “But this world is something more. Something I've worked on my entire life. Do you read books? I mean, have you ever read a book?”

“Of course . . .”

“I mean a real book. An actual book with paper pages and binding. Have you?

I pause. Remembering. Trying to remember.

“Yeah . . . once. My mom had one she'd kept. It was called
Stuart Little
. I read it over and over one summer when I was a kid.”

Callard smiles. It makes his face come alive. Like there's real joy being displayed by all that EmoteWare. “That's a beautiful book,” he says. Then, “Children don't read much anymore, but this lore, as you call it, was once the stuff of books I wrote when I was young man. Books about mighty kingdoms of elves and men, and epic battles between the dark and the light, and mysterious wanderers who journeyed to lost places and fought evil beasts, rescued maidens, and gained fabulous treasures. Many, many tales. I've lived in this world my entire life, Samurai.”

He seems lost, remembering, in his fantastic past.

“So how do I fit into all this?” I ask, bringing him back, too aware of Plague's impending arrival.

“You are Wu the Samurai. An ancient and fated hero who . . .”

“No, I mean me, the guy at the keyboard who seems caught between a madman bent on ruling the world through advertisement, and an in-game hunter named Plague. Me, Callard or Grandpa or whatever your name is. Listen, I'm grateful for the help, but what's your angle? Why help me?”

“I know you, PerfectQuestion. I've watched you play. You possess skill, which is important, but you also possess honor and a love for the art of the game. I've been holding the Samurai back for a very long time. It's been difficult to hide him from these thugs. Wealthy patrons have begged for his code. But . . . I didn't feel any of them were truly worthy enough to do what must be done. Until you came along, PerfectQuestion. Though you don't know it yet, you too are noble. As noble as the Samurai is.

“My angle is . . .” Callard sighs. “Well, I'll need to tell you my story. We have a few moments until your nemesis shows up. I've dropped an entire legion of undead Centurions of the East in his path. All of them are from my book
The Thousand Dead
. It'll take a bit of time for Plague to chew through them. But I suspect he will soon enough.”

“Who is he and why does he want me dead? Or my character dead?”

“I don't know. In the novels, Plague is a despicable assassin. He was the nemesis of my greatest hero. Many times they fought. When that hero went down, it was Plague who'd finally destroyed him. Although he too lost his life.”

“And you don't know who bought his code?”

“Private bidder. Plus, it's a Black game. Identity is a treasure worth guarding. I knew something was up once I authorized you to take Wu into the game. The game started slowing down, and we realized we were under attack from an unknown entity. That was the interruption. Then, while you were in the Oubliette, a private bid came in and . . . well, I had no choice. The decision was out of my hands. Plague went after you. I hacked into the server, hoping you'd look in the mirror. Then I warned you, remember?”

“So, no idea then?”

“None as to his real identity. It seems he merely wants to kill you just as he did the Samurai in my books. I imagine he could be some deranged fan of one of my novels. If he can't play Wu, well, then he may be trying to be the arbiter of Wu's demise.”

“So what's your angle, for the umpteenth time?”

“Ah, yes. Well, I need you to save the child, PerfectQuestion. Money: none. Prizes: what you find along the way. I control very little of the game now. These thugs who run the game are running a very aggressive virusware to keep me out of the system. But if you rescue the child: gratitude much, my friend.”

“I don't follow.”

“Long story short, PerfectQuestion. Way back at the beginning of the century, I was a writer. I wrote a lot of fantasy books. Books about this world. Fans by the millions. For a while I was a rock star. But that seldom lasts. Games, I always played them. The things I could tell you. These games, these things you play, they have a history. I was a child at the beginning of that history. One of my earliest memories is playing Pong at a house with a tennis court. That had to be the 1970s. The '80s came and there were arcade games. A quarter from your dad after dinner for the Pac-Man machine in the lobby when your family went out to a restaurant. Your only thought, as you ate fajitas or potato skins, was the machine, the game, and what you might do within its confines. If I say too much more, I might turn our time into a mere history lesson. But in time, games turned into worlds, and eventually after the writing, I began to build this world in secret. I hired the best programmers rock-star money could buy, layering texture and detail with each fresh million in royalties into my own little living world. In the end, years after I was no longer a rock star, I'd used up almost all the money that remained from my novels in bringing them to life. Then I began borrowing, hedging, refinancing the engines and optimizing the graphics as an army of designers was reduced to a simple platoon. Finally, in the end it was just me. And the debt. In hindsight, I can say this: it became a bit of an obsession.

“But there were some even more obsessed than I was with this world. In time the collectors, fans, and others wanted my living world after they'd found out I'd been building it all along. They'd pay me money to run their favorite character from the books. Some just wanted a taste from their long-gone youth. Others, a new experience. In the end, I borrowed unrepayable amounts of money to protect it for just another year. I wasn't really thinking. I was just . . . I don't know, honestly, what I was doing, what my goal was. Like I said, I was obsessed. And the money I borrowed, I borrowed from the worst kind of people.”

“The Black?”

“Exactly. Now they use my world to run their contests and provide a place for the sick and twisted fantasies of their customers. It's totally corrupted now.”

“So how does saving the child at the top of the tower change the fact that you owe the mob a grip of money?”

“The child at the top of the tower holds a doomsday file. Whoever rescues her can execute the file and crash the world. The whole thing, down to its runtime code, will disappear if that file enters the main stream of the nebulae server. These thugs who call themselves the Black, they don't know that. No one does but you and me. Whoever rescues that child can crash the world, or do whatever they want with it. The Black . . . they think it's just a big prize. A million dollars. But I've stolen most of the money, changed the code, and inserted a worm that will go live should the winner of the contest choose to execute the file, which I'm hoping they'll do out of anger at being cheated out of their million bucks. Most players would do it, or at least I hope they would, but I can't absolutely count on them to do it. But you, PerfectQuestion, you've got a chance to win and if you do, I want you to destroy my game.”

“But you'll destroy your life's work!”

“I can live with that.”

I thought about the world. I thought about people who destroyed things, fragile things that were little more than hope and someone else's dreams. I thought about Sancerré.

“I understand,” I mumble. I did.

“Somehow I knew you would, PerfectQuestion. You truly are a noble Samurai at heart.”

“I seriously doubt that,” I say with a snort. “What am I gonna do against an army of deranged gamers, the Black mafia, and Plague?” I can hear myself whining and I don't like it. I didn't sign up for this. I'd signed up to get rich, quick.

Callard laughs. A chuckle really. Then he speaks. “Well, it's about to get very difficult indeed.”

“My axe hasn't got much left in it; anything you can do about that, Callard?”

“About that, I actually can do something.”

Callard walks over to a dusty cobwebbed urn lying within a deep shadow near the wall, and reaching in, he pulls out a cloth-wrapped item.

“I hid
Deathefeather
here when they made me cripple the Samurai. Once I managed to drop you into the Oubliette, it was easy for me to rig the randomizer algorithm so that the end gate would transport you to the desert and the Pool of Sorrows. From there, all you had to do was kill the Troll and survive the Halls of the Damned. Then it's a straight line to the crypt of Kal Tum. With the sword now, you'll be quite formidable. Take it and enter the crypt. On the other side, you will find the courtyard of the Marrow Spike. At the top, the child and the doomsday file.”

“Are you sure, Callard? Are you sure you really want to destroy this world? It's a beautiful MMO and it sounds like you've spent a very long life working on it.”

“This . . . this abomination isn't what I wrote about. These aren't my stories anymore. If it can't be the way I wrote it to be, then I'd rather burn it to the ground.”

Seems a little extreme. But I owe him one. I wasn't getting murdered, “accidentally,” in an Internet café back in New York. So the least I could do for him was destroy his hijacked life's work.

A resounding
craaack
echoes across the empty burial cathedral. Shattering stone rumbles distantly as the ring of metal being struck repeatedly punctuates a rising bass grumble of impending doom.

“It's Plague. He'll be through the wall shortly. Hurry now, into the crypt.” Callard hands my Samurai the cloth-wrapped sword. It appears in my inventory.

“I'll hold them for a bit while you get the chains off the door,” vows an overdramatic Callard. “It'll be my ‘you shall not pass' moment.” He pauses as if I should know the reference.

“All right, then,” he mutters to himself, realizing I haven't gotten it. “I'll . . . do something about Plague.”

I turn the Samurai to the Ogre warlord's crypt and break the chains with the
Axe of Skaarwulfe
. Behind me, I can hear the rattle of Plague's skeletal soldiers entering the expanse of the shadowy vault, then the wheezing cough that seems a constant companion of my Samurai's mortal enemy.

“How did you find out my professional tag, Callard?”

“Oh, I am all over the Internet. There's a lot more to this old man than meets the eye.”

I roll the stone door to the inner crypt aside and turn as I hear the raspy grinding of lids being pushed up and away from sarcophagi. I watch as bat-winged vampires rise like wraiths from their sleep. Each is impossibly tall, each a pale, bloodless thing.

“All's fair, Plague . . . ,” I say to myself as I enter the tomb of the Ogre warlord, leaving my mortal enemy to deal with the vampires.

Chapter 23

E
quipping the sword brings up a new menu of special attacks. Skills and abilities in other menus, previously grayed out, also come online.

“As long as the sword is equipped, I can chat with you,” says Callard out of the ether, his voice as though from the bottom of a garbage can. The face of the sage wavers dimly in the reflection of the flat of the sword's shining blade. “But I can't be of much help right now. The administrators are watching. Wu, you've got to get to the top of the tower and rescue the child. Once you do, activate the doomsday file and destroy this world. I can't offer you anything other than what I've hacked for you already. But maybe you're the kind of player who might just accept the gratitude of an old writer as payment enough. Maybe. I don't know anymore. But you're my only hope . . .” He chuckles to himself as if remembering some lost memory. “Samurai.”

“What's between me and the kid?” I ask.

“Merely hell, Samurai. Merely hell,” he replies and disappears.

Behind me, the vampires are whirling about Plague and his remaining skeletal warriors. I hear the bang of deflected attacks rebounding heavily off their shields. The massive sculpted crypt behind and below me is littered with dusty bone fragments and rusty, broken weapons as nightmare battles nightmare. I'm standing in front of the gargantuan bronze shield-door, embossed with those fanged and horny runes spiraling from the outer edge in to the center. As I stare at the runes, they suddenly rearrange themselves into readable words.

Cringe, slave, and know you are both feeble and without honor. Within lies the still mighty Kal Tum, warlord of the Ogre tribes of Gaash, breaker of the Walls of Far Kattir, murderer, beast-slayer, man-eater, and eternal foe of Kurm the Venomous.

Inspecting
Deathefeather
's stats, I find as I'd suspected I would, that one of its minor abilities allows the wielder to read forgotten runes and ancient languages.

Sword drawn and held back with one hand, ready to strike, I tap once on the giant bronze shield-door. I hear a hollow ring that echoes out past the barrier in front of me and seems to carry off into hidden spaces beyond the door. As I move close to the shield-door, a small menu opens, asking me if I'm sure I want to move the shield. I want to. The hands of the Samurai push the edge and center of the shield, as his straining grunt erupts across ambient. The massive rune-worked bronze shield slowly slides aside. Beyond is a dark corridor filled with shadows and patches of sickly yellow light.

I hear Plague's blunderbuss fire and fire again. Vampires are moaning in some kind of torment, hurling curses, as they swirl into dying piles of ash and dust.

I don't have much time left before I'll be face-to-face with Plague.

I enter the crypt, hearing the squish of wet mud instead of the dry
chock
of the Samurai's sandals. Dim alcoves set at intervals along the walls lead off into foggy distances. I swivel the POV of the Samurai and inspect the darknesses within the alcoves.
Deathefeather
doesn't give off any light like the
Axe of Skaarwulfe
did. Down dark narrow side passages, the fog-shrouded skeletons of tall Ogre warriors dressed in tattered and rusting armor, axes and spears crossing their chests, wait. Their giant-browed skulls and broken fanged teeth seem to scowl at me across the distances. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before these things come back to life. Or undeath.