Strong Signal (Cyberlove #1)

STRONG SIGNAL

By Megan Erickson and Santino Hassell

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by Megan Erickson and Santino Hassell.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

Copyedited by Sarah Henning

Cover design by Natasha Snow

Cover art from Stocksy

Formatting by Daniel W.

First edition February 2016

Dedication

To all the Twitch streamers who make it cool
to be an introverted gamer.

And to everyone who first found love online.

November

Garrett

There’s only one thief in the Army, and everyone else is just trying to get their shit back.

The old saying had proved to be true time and time again during my eight years of service in the Army, so now I was paranoid. It was my last deployment in Afghanistan, and I’d gone into it knowing most of my time would be spent on base since my primary function was that of mechanic. This meant two things—mind-crushing monotony and the next nine months ticking by oh-so-slowly.

So, I’d brought my laptop. After dropping over three thousand dollars on a machine with the hardware needed to run
Fallen World Online
on the base’s shitty Internet, I’d be damned if some knucklehead robbed my shit so they could watch PornHub.

Over my dead body.

I fully intended to spend every moment of my downtime playing the game that took my mind off everything else when the world was driving me up the wall.

“Reid!”

The voice rang out as soon as I was two steps away from the mess hall. If it were anyone else, I’d have kept going. When I had a purpose it was only a commanding officer who could halt my stride.

Usually.

Apparently I also stopped for guys I only spoke to when we were sweating and out of breath in the dark, and I was asking for some tissue or a towel to clean up. I turned around. “What?”

Dominic Costigan strode toward me with his aviators shining my own reflection back at me. I looked more pissed off than usual. Maybe he’d get the hint to make it quick. I’d been attempting to rearrange my workout regime to match my shifts at the vehicle bay and gaming schedule so I could be around for in-game events on the East coast servers. It was a pain in the ass getting the timing right, and now Costigan and his Staten Island accent were holding me up.

“Everyone’s gonna watch the new
Jurassic Park
movie in an hour.” I stared silently, waiting for the purpose of this exchange of pointless info, and he raised an eyebrow. “I seen it already so I’ll be in my bunk.”

Ah. Made sense now. It’d been a couple of weeks since I’d been horny enough to discreetly get him alone. “Okay.”

He wiggled his nose until the sunglasses slid down the bridge, and peered at me with brown eyes pretty enough to get some poor bastard’s heart thumping right along with his motor. Too bad real world Costigan was probably straight. Which didn’t explain why he was squinting at me and waiting for a reaction.

“We done?” I glanced at my watch. It was already after eleven on the east coast. “I got shit to do.”

“Working out?”

“No.”

Costigan rolled his eyes and heaved a big sigh. “Good talking to you as usual, Reid.”

“Yeah.”

I bypassed him without another word. I failed to realize I hadn’t given him a definite answer until I was hunched over the dinky folding desk in my tent with my laptop powering up. Oh well. Either I’d be there or I wouldn’t. He’d figure it out eventually.

It was my second tour and the first time I was sharing a two-man tent. My roommate and I barely saw each other since I spent my days in the shop while he spent his fueling helicopters. When I did see him, he was asleep. It should have been a huge score, but part of me missed the containerized housing unit I’d bunked in during my last deployment. I’d shared the space with five other guys, but it had been easier to blend in the background and become invisible. It was harder to avoid small talk when I was the only other guy in the tent.

FWO
took an eternity to load when I was at home in Pennsylvania, so here it took three-and-a-half eternities. Trying to play on the base was probably more trouble than it was worth, but gaming had become a stress relief for me. Or it was when I wasn’t spending the entire time praying the lag wouldn’t totally kill my ability to hit the next level with my archer.

When I tried to talk to people about gaming, they thought I sounded like the biggest fucking dork to ever join the Army, but I knew at least ten other guys on the base who were way more into it than I was and had been since they were teenagers. These types of games required strategy, cooperation, and serious skill to survive. Not too shocking it appealed to military folks.

The game finally loaded, and I clicked on my archer with his giant black and gold bow and red leather armor. My character—Hazzard—appeared on the screen in the same place I’d logged out—a dank catacomb that was really good for playing solo. I was a part of a guild—a group of other players—but I only hooked up with them for quests I couldn’t conquer on my own. Grouping with them required constant chatting. Or worse—jumping on the headset. There were reasons I liked the game and actually
hearing
other players talk wasn’t one of them.

I wasn’t trying to make friends in the game or even in the Army. The only people I needed were my sister and mom. They were the ones who Skyped me every week while battling the stuttering connection, and who spent a ton of money sending me care packages. As the thought crossed my mind, I snagged an energy bar my sister had sent the week before, and smiled. She’d scored chocolate chip cookie dough this time around.

On the screen, my archer jogged through the gray rooms with flickering fires and hissing demonic creatures. It took a couple of minutes before I found my usual spot, but some jerkoff was already there.

A huge orc mage named Samwise was leisurely flinging fireballs at the monsters and dancing between each kill. What kind of noob wasted time dancing for his own entertainment?

I stood there, watching, and wondered how long Samwise would take to get the hell out. My goal today was to increase my experience level, and this was the best room in the catacomb to do so. Sharing would be tough. Or impossible. “Fuck this,” I muttered.

Stationing myself near the door, I hurtled arrows at the nearby monsters. Samwise paused, turned toward me, and watched me work.

I was immediately on edge.

The best part of
FWO
was that you could fight anyone anywhere and at any time. On a lot of games, there were safe zones. The bad part, or the more challenging part, was that you couldn’t pick your battles by looking at a player’s profile and gear. Samwise’s stats were a total mystery to me, but I thought I could take him. If he was soloing in this catacomb, he had to be around my level.

I released two more arrows into the remaining demons, clearing the room, and waited for Samwise to get pissed that I’d just stolen all his kills. Which he did. He launched a single fireball, which halved my health. I sat up straight, eyes wide, and hit the hot key for stun shot. It failed to affect him, and I was dead before I could remember the rest of my attack rotation.

A message popped through from Samwise—a single wink emoticon.

What. The. Fuck.

The orc once again started dancing in his shiny metallic tunic while my human archer lay dead on the floor at his green feet.

I was so pissed.

It wasn’t even the fact that I’d lost a fight. I lost fights all the time.

It was the fact that I’d lost a fight that had clearly not been evenly matched. Either the dude had massively overpowered gear, or he was too high level to be in this place. And now my experience bar had dropped by ten percent because he was a jackass. It took a good two hours to grind that much experience.

I hit the button to respawn in town and typed a quick message to my guild.

I tabbed out of the game without bothering to waste my life speaking to them further. I didn’t care how unbeatable this Samwise fuckface thought he was. I’d figure out how to beat him eventually. And then I’d dance on
his
green corpse.

After opening Chrome, I navigated my way to the
FWO
armory, I typed in Samwise’s name and was graced with the sight of armor and weapons that were all max level, top tier, and enchanted. With all of that plus his actual level advantage, he had triple my stats. He had to have known he was going to wipe the catacombs with my pathetic archer.

“Piece of shit,” I muttered. “We’ll see.”

The character profile linked to the forum’s player profile. Samwise’s owner was some dipshit named Kai. There wasn’t too much information except for a city (he lived in Philly, so only about two hours from my hometown) and a link to a Twitch channel. Looked like fuckboy had himself a live gaming stream. Maybe he’d just murdered me in front of an actual audience. How lovely. Asshole.

It was only my masochistic streak that prompted me to follow the link to his channel. Twitch was sort of like YouTube for gamers—except you could watch people play games live. Channel hosts broadcasted themselves via webcam as they played, and viewers got to interact with each other and the host in the channel’s chatroom. Popular enough streamers made money off it, and I failed to understand why people spent so much time watching a bunch of losers play video games.

I clicked the link to enter Kai’s channel, and waited for the WiFi signal to stop flickering so it could bypass the ads. Once it did, I blinked in surprise.

I’d assumed Kai was some macho dudebro gloating in his mother’s basement, but what I saw was…not that at all. He was a slim, pale skinned, onyx-haired youth with expressive blue eyes and a very pretty mouth. Almost too gorgeous to be real.

Holy shit.

I’d just had my face owned by a hot little twink.

In front of his thousands of viewers.

Pressing my lips together, I typed out a snarly message to his chat.

I stared at it for a moment, glanced at his twinkling blue eyes once, then jabbed the enter key with more force than was necessary

Kai

I’d switched from
FWO
to a first-person shooter called
Aftermath: Zombie Apocalypse
. I’d received an early copy to play and review on my channel, and so far so good. Besides donations and subscribers—anyone could view a Twitch stream but subscribers got special perks—the bulk of my income came from companies paying me to demo games.

Typically I preferred fantasy games like
FWO
to first person shooters, but I needed a distraction. Hazzard’s appearance in my chat had me on edge. His crappy comment about me preying on low-levels couldn’t have been further from the truth, but I hadn’t bothered to defend myself since Chat had done it for me. They’d capslocked at him for trying to take my room in the catacomb, and for kill stealing, but he’d just sat in Chat and watched. Silently. And he was still doing it. My mods were freaking out, wanting to ban him, but he hadn’t done anything ban-worthy yet and I didn’t like policing people just because they didn’t agree with me. Garvey, my most overprotective Chat mod, was not pleased.

Chewing on my lower lip, I tried not to think about it and nailed another zombie in the head. There was an abandoned building on my left and a chain link fence to the right, and I wasn’t sure which was the better option for a quick escape.

“Chat, I have no idea what I’m doing,” I muttered.

In my scroll log, my viewers were trying to help me out by telling me where to go before the brain-eaters got me. My core groupies were on, the ones who watched me just about every night. They were a mix of badass gamer girls (my die-hard fans), gay guys, and straight guys who either didn’t give a shit about my sexual orientation and were there for the demos, or wanted to impress their girlfriends with their open-mindedness.

I didn’t need to know why they showed up, I just needed them to do it. They kept a roof over my head and food on my table with their subscriptions.