Versim (9 page)

Rend-V antagonist Ervé Wrighter had broken all records in the last few years as the kingpin of
Steel Edge
, a horror Rend-V in which antagonists from a variety of other popular Rend-Vs were all put together to see who performed the best. Ervé had ruled like a god since it began. He was a legal person who’d applied for Rend-V principal immersion. He got the job because he possessed a super-human intellect package that, even in-V, made him a super star. His stroke of genius: using the strengths of the archetypal horror tropes to his advantage. He had them all under his thumb: the Monsters and Beasts, the Mad Men, the Cannibal Vampires and Zombies, the Ghosts.

He made her psychic gifts look like the cognition of a retarded chimp. Then Harken immersed in
Steel Edge
and arrested him for going off script too many times. After that, everything changed.

She returned to her holovid and swiped.

“Play my favorite scene from
The Borderlands
,” she said.

The light formed an image the size of a large mural projected in the air.

She stared at a still shot of Harken Cole in the role that had started his career: face muddy and bruised, dirty cowboy hat askew, hair wet and in his eyes.
The Borderlands
was a buddy film about two Old West American cowboys on the run from the Oglala Sioux. She had only been a young girl when she’d stumbled on the V, only one of several hundred running at that time.

“Play.”

 
The lights flickered and the action began. She stared at it as if through a window. She watched two tired and hungry men struggling at night through a rocky canyon. She’d been too young to jack in or immerse in any way, so she’d watched it like a film on a 3D screen, just as she was now. At this point in the narrative, for two years they’d been battling the Sioux, who had carved a nation for themselves from the Dakotas to California after defeating Custer. Harken played the role of Buster Boggins, a tough sheriff making a living in the border towns. He loved hard, played hard, and was about to die hard.

“Close on Roy’s primary rider.”

One of the invisible Rend-V riders, a person who’d paid top dollar to always be close to the action, provided a stunning closeup of the scene as the character Roy Jones (played by another specialist named Paul Stammand) valiantly pulled Harken’s character up the steep incline. Paul was blond and blue-eyed and looked like the old Nordics. Where Harken’s character was funny, Paul’s was serious. Together they captured the ratings for two years. Problem was, Harken had an arrow through his calf, was feverish from a gut shot, and was at the edge of passing out.

“Pause.”

Harken’s tattered cowboy hat has just flown off his head and into the canyon below. The war party is edging along a switch back path that will cut them off. Miesha looked into Harken’s eyes.
 

He knows he’s going to die in that Rend-V as Buster Boggins.
 

“Play.”

Dirty spittle flies from Harken’s lips as he says to Paul, “Get goin’ now. I mean, now. You ain’t gonna make it. You ain’t. I cain’t get any more.” Paul Stammand, as Roy Jones, is a rascal but is just as much of a hero as his sheriff friend, and keeps pulling.

“Not letting them scalp hunters get you. Fight, you pecker lover.”

“I ain’t no pecker lover. No more than you.”

Harken Cole yells as he slips and almost falls. She knew this was not acting. This immediacy was what made Rend-Vs so revolutionary, even for simple watchers: the players experience the drama.
Versim
.

 
The audio is clear as Paul keeps yelling at him to struggle up. She was always impressed at how the Rend-V appropriated the dialog and tones of a constructed Old West. These were filtered to achieve the down-home effect, of course, but it worked to create an antiquated feel. And she’d heard Harken speak enough times outside the Rend-Vs to know he had a bit of that folksy quality in him anyway.

“I got you, buddy.” Paul picks up Harken and, with him on his shoulder, climbs the rest of the way.
 

“Pause.”

She stared at the still of two figures rising above the edge. After seeing this scene for the first time, she’d done her research, convinced EA Specialist Paul Stammand was using some form of transhuman augmentation (which would break versim regulation for a traditional Old West milieu), but all the data pointed to an interpretation that he did not. Somehow, he managed to carry his friend up that muddy canon in the dark without any bio enhancements or augmentations.
 

“Play.”

The Rend-V continued as the two men struggled for as long as they could before the war party caught them.
 

“Forward to next marker,” she said.
 

The holovid clicked off, the nanofog turning into a gray cloud.
 

The light returned and she stared at a wall-sized image of Specialists Cole and Stammand surrounded by fierce Native Americans in a ramshackle hut.
 

One of the braves was a white man named Hawkeye, a clever reimagining of an archetypal American hero, played by her very own favorite antagonist, Ervé Wrighter. Hawkeye was the reason they were chasing Harken and Paul’s characters. Hawkeye wanted revenge because his brother was killed. Ervé was stoic and unrelenting in this role. Ervé as Hawkeye had as many fans as the good guys. He also won her heart, and the first time she watched she wanted to see him stab out Harken’s eyes. Harken was shivering in a fever—and she could see him, the real person, there. Not the character, but the real man. He was suffering. At the time, he wasn’t a big name yet, but she had seen enough of him since to know for certain this was no performance. The beauty of the Rend-V experience was right there in living flesh. He knew he was about to die.
 

His good buddy Paul is standing over him, like a protector, ready to fight. The natives appear to allow the two men a final word. She remembered the first time she’d watched, she was sure the two heroes would be tortured and executed. But then Paul gives a speech, which she never listened to anymore, about how they should take him and leave his friend. He was sacrificing himself—it was obvious. She couldn’t believe her eyes when the braves fall for it. Ervé tries to intervene, but the lead brave has made his decision. She assumed the directors had written this in somehow. But, she couldn’t be sure.

But when Paul Stammand leans in for a final hug, something extraordinary happens. All footage from all angels shows Paul whisper something to Harken. The invisible riders who were there all later claimed they didn’t hear. The lead brave had two high-paying riders, and Harken and Roy each had at least fifty riders experiencing what the principals experienced. Ervé was there in the flesh and said he didn’t hear what was said. None of them heard the exchange. Paul used a privilege specialists were given and dampened the space around him.

Harken nods and clearly says, “You got it, brother. I’ll do it. I promise. No matter what.”

The Promise
.

“Pause.”
 

She stared at a close up of Harken’s dirty face looking imploringly at the friend now being grabbed on all sides to be taken away to a painful death. At the time she had thought specialists like Harken and Paul were the most admirable humans alive, even as Ervé was winning her heart with his unrelenting portrayal of dignified rage.
 

None of these principals would jump out of the Rend-V with a parachute. They would endure and die, if necessary. For extreme cases, many specialists used Deus Ex Machina insurance policies to extract them out of the worst spots, but this Rend-V’s premise was based on its realism. Neither specialist could.
 

Paul Stammand, as Roy Jones, was flayed and roasted by Ervé, as Hawkeye. It lasted six hours. And word was EA spent two years of therapy to cleanse Paul of that death experience after he awoke in reality. He was never the same afterward, and disappeared. Everyone wanted to know what he’d demanded of Harken Cole. Paul had refused to say. Harken as well.
 

The Promise.

She began to formulate a way to reveal to the world what Hark and Paul had hidden from them. Originally, she thought she’d force him to reveal it in some Rend-V production. She deduced that Paul wanted Hark to protect his illegitimate son he’d had in-V with a constructed woman. She wasn’t sure this was, indeed, the subject of the promise. But in time, she learned it was true. She contacted EA and suggested they use her knowledge of
the Promise
to contractually bind him in to keep him under their thumbs. But they resisted.
 

Then everything intensified when Harken immersed in
Steel Edge
on a bogus story line. He kidnapped Ervé and took him to another V, all under new regulations that allowed characters to legally move from one V to another (under special circumstances). The audacity of such hypocrisy made her blood pound. Harken Cole imprisoned Ervé in a high tech thriller Rend-V,
Hellworld
. They’d inserted Harken to get Ervé back on the script. Harken did it as revenge for Paul Stammand. Ervé ended up buried underground in solitary for three years.

Miesha had cried herself to sleep every night for six months.

She dedicated herself to showing her bosses what they had wrought by using Ervé’s arrest as an experiment. They had allowed Hark to drop him in hole, which stopped Ervé’s fans from seeing him for three years. With the help of contacts in the Voxyprog and EA, she changed her direction. Now, she would setup Harken Cole for a fall. Instead of simply revealing the truth of his mysterious promise she convinced EA to bind Hark in a secret contract that would be the center of a future Rend-V: he was to fulfill whatever was asked on him on a certain day each year in exchange for the protection of Paul Stammand’s boy.

Years of planning came to fruition a month ago when she’d dressed as a traditional Sersavant hacker, something she hadn’t worn since her initiation into the ranks as a licensed cognopsychic. She’d been destined for greater things than programming Rend-Vs and quickly transferred to the director’s corps. This gave her the access she needed to corner Harken.
 

Miesha stood in a line of autograph seekers in an Upper Deck restaurant on the day she snared him.
 

Harken chatted idly, as he often did, with his legions of fans. She’d gotten at least fifty sigs in the last few years, each time, listening with her unique gifts to the endless chatter of people’s minds in her close vicinity as she waited for him.
 

Like most people with superior cognitive skills, she had a few gifts. Hers had manifested themselves in a prized ability: she could, under the right circumstances, and given enough time, hear a person’s thoughts. This took work, hours and hours of keeping someone in mind, the planning, the scheming. Harken Cole was a sincere individual, she knew, which did little to lessen her disgust for him as she watched him smile and sign.
 

“You take care of yourself,” one fan was saying as she shook Harken’s hand. “You were amazing in
The Borderlands
. Will you be going back to visit Saul and his mother?”

“I always do, don’t I? They spread me thin, though. I never know where they’ll send me next.”
 

Miesha pulled the hood tighter across her face and edged forward as a young woman batted her eyes at Harken. Miesha shut her eyes to focus on his thoughts. His voice came in clearly today:

Why’d she just bring that up? Hell, Paul died eleven years ago today. I hope she doesn’t ask me anything. Don’t ask me anything, lady. You’re cute, though. I promised Paul I’d take care of his son, Saul, no matter what, and the bosses are using it against me. I had to make the agreement to keep the boy alive, the heartless bastards, and they’re making me pay: whatever someone asks me to do today, I got to do it, or they shut down The Borderlands and Saul dies. One day of the year they have my ass in a sling. And that day’s today. Don’t ask me anything.

She saw Harken look away, as if something had distracted him, but she felt the emotional pull of a man preparing to grit through a tough task. She heard:

One day of the year, I do what’s asked of me. And I will to keep him safe. Just this one more time. Then he can leave the Rend-V and live in the real world. I just need to get through today without making any promises.

She stepped forward. “I have a favor to ask of you.”

He paused. “A favor?”

Such a request wouldn’t cross the minds of a regular person. Harken was a super celebrity. Why on earth would anyone ask him a favor? She could hear his confusion.
 

He leaned in close, his face a mask of kindness, even though he was thinking he was in trouble.

“Did you say favor?”

“I need you to free my mother from her Rend-V.” His eyes widened. She could hear his thoughts,
oh-shit oh-shit oh-shit oh-shit
. The brilliance of her performance surprised even her. She nailed him to his honor with a final question: “Will you do that for me, Mr. Harken Cole? Free her one way, or another?”

He guided her toward a VIP area of the restaurant where Rend-V superstars congregated to talk shop. She poured on an extemporaneous story about a young girl (her) whose mother had been in a Rend-V for years (which was true). Miesha swore up and down she missed her mother (which wasn’t true) and that she needed Harken to free her mother from being enslaved in a stasis vat.
 

Miesha pretended to be a heretic Sersavant who believed hosts and constructs were slaves. She dampened her knowledge of her plan, playing the coy young girl, abandoned by her mother. She also didn’t tell him that she’d been working in the Rend-V industry as a controversial but up-and-coming Sersavant director for a few years. Her name was beginning to make waves as a radical trendsetter who pushed the Versim envelope.