Black Sun (Phantom Server: Book #3) (16 page)

The stairs cut in the rock soon ended in a small landing. Now we had to jump from one rock ledge to the next to get down. Here, however, Kimberly’s behavior became strange. She leaped onto a narrow ledge and pressed her back to the rock, edging her way step by tentative step over the precipice until she disappeared from view behind a large cliff.

“Zander, are you sure about her?” Foggs didn’t look happy. “Where’s she taking us?”

A blood-curdling shriek ripped through the silence, its infinite echoes trapped within the crevice. The dull green mist below rippled and bubbled up.

“Let me go first,” I said.

I wasn’t as agile as Kim. I took a leap but miscalculated and hung over the drop, trying to pull myself up.

My armor scraped against the rock, hindering my effort. Once again the authenticity levels had tricked my muscles into shaking from the desperate effort.

The treacherous ledge, chipped and crumbling, skirted the cliff until I reached another landing which listed dangerously to one side. A bit further on, a cave entrance gaped darkly in the rock.

Gasping, Kimberly crouched over the bodies of two Reapers. I couldn’t hear what she was whispering. The red-hot piece of steel in her hands gleamed weakly.

The cave entrance exuded cold but the thin layer of ice that covered the surrounding cliffs was melting quickly.

“Kim, you okay?”

She panted, unable to speak. The brief but desperate combat had stripped her of her last strength.

Foggs appeared from around the bend first, torch in hand. Charon came next, followed by Arbido who clung to the Haash like a child.

I dropped to my stomach and offered Foggs a hand, helping him clamber up.

“Phew,” he crawled away from the edge and wiped the perspiration off his forehead with the back of his hand. Then he noticed the bodies. His gaze met Kimberly’s who could barely stand. The Reapers’ corpses leaked green mist which began to envelop her.

Foggs leapt to his feet realizing she was somehow trying to stop the neurograms from dissolving. “What can we do?”

“Finish... them...” she croaked.

Two swords whooshed through the air, the Founders’ symbols glowing bright on their blades. Immediately the mist began streaming back toward the girl’s bare feet, then disappeared inside the weapons’ microchips.

Kim staggered. She threw her head back and closed her eyes. “Thanks.”

Her fingers slackened. The piece of construction steel she’d been grasping clattered onto the rocks.

* * *

“Why did you need to risk it?” I crouched next to Kimberly. “You knew that Reapers had ambushed us here, didn’t you?”

“They didn’t trust me,” she cast a meaningful glance at Foggs and Arbido.

“You don’t have to prove anything to us!”

“I wanted you to see me as an equal. Right from the start. I needed to show you what I was made of. That’s how I do these things, Zander. I learned it the hard way. On Argus especially. I didn’t last two months there.”

“I don’t understand,” groaning, Arbido walked over to the edge. “What’s with all the cliffs? What happened to the wastelands?”

“The location’s programs are still working,” Jurgen replied. “Now that their data are destroyed, they’re trying to fill in the gaps by using the terrain randomizer.”

“Couldn’t they have made some nice flat plateau instead?” Arbido grumbled. “Much better for hiking.”

“Stop moaning, will ya?” Foggs studied the indicator on one of his swords. “At least here they can’t attack us all at once.”

I had so many things to ask her about. Our chance meeting was too unbelievable. It felt as if someone had extracted her from my dreams and placed her into this distorted space.

“How did you survive?” I asked.

She must have expected the question. “I gradually pieced my neuromatrix together,” she answered eagerly. “I was lucky that my neurograms were stored on a dedicated server. And once I realized where I was, I escaped. The testing grounds are enormous. They’re self-adaptable too. So this is my home now. I really wanted to hack them somehow and get out into the Crystal Sphere. That would be so, so good,” she paused, deep in thought. “So Liori is the same as me now, isn’t she? An identity matrix?”

“She is indeed.”

“Are you worried about her?”

I nodded. “Think you could come with us? Liori will be over the moon.”

“No. Sorry, Zander. I’m not going back. I’d rather stay here with the Reapers. At least I know I can kill them.”

“What’s wrong with deep space?”

“Decompression,” she answered reluctantly. “You’ve no idea what life on Argus was like at first. Nothing but vacuum, subzero temperatures and mobs that you couldn’t even kill. We didn’t remove pressure suits for weeks. We slept in them. The slightest cut or puncture resulted in death by decompression followed by respawn purgatory until you lost all hope and sanity. At least here you can breathe knowing that oxygen won’t run out. Here I can dream of one day going back to the Crystal Sphere. Space scares me, Zander. I just freeze; I lose control. Just not my thing,” she turned away.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Forget it,” once again she was shivering, trying to wrap herself into her rags. I gave her a friendly hug. Kimberly startled and shrank back.

“Don’t,” she whispered. “I’ll be okay in a moment.”

I didn’t remove my hand. It felt so awkward and so difficult, trying to feel another person’s pain, trying to take a small part of it away and replace it with some of my own warmth. All my so-called experience wasn’t worth a damn... and it wasn’t the first time in the last few days that I caught myself thinking this.

“How did it all start?”

“I’ve been waiting for you to ask,” she answered softly. “Is it so important?”

“Sure.”

She paused, then went on,

“One day they uploaded a model of a space station to the testing grounds. The Corporation was going to test an upgrade. I heard the techs talking about a ‘hybrid’ of some sort. But I wasn’t really interested.”

“A hybrid?” Jurgen and I exchanged glances.

“So I decided to escape to the recreation zone before they started the space simulation,” Kim went on. “It’s always good weather there. I started looking for a suitable data exchange channel. I envision them as roads — or tunnels sometimes. I thought, as there were some big-time tests, there’d be no one in the location so I might be able to go for a swim in the lake. So I got to the network node. I needed to get the worker’s login and password but he was offline. All this slowed me up a little.”

“So what happened?” Arbido asked nervously.

I hadn’t even noticed how the others had crowded around us, listening to Kim.

“All of a sudden there was this cold wave. I got so scared. I thought they’d found me. I disconnected from the database, and then I saw the workers running away from the space station model. And I saw that green mist creeping along the ground. It was like a very thick aggressive fog.”

“Aggressive — do you mean toxic?” I tried to clarify.

“No. It was aggressive,” she repeated. “It was as if it was a living thing... a sentient thing. Then it started spewing out jets of discharge, long and strong, a bit like tentacles. Corporate workers were screaming everywhere. They just fell and disappeared in the mist. At first I thought they were logging out. But once the mist thinned out a bit, I saw their avatars lying on the ground! That’s when I knew they were dead. I’d seen enough of it back on Argus. Then the defense programs kicked in and began deleting data. I had to run for my life. Whole buildings were disappearing, the ground was collapsing under me as I ran. Everything around me was leaking, only the Founders’ station kept floating in the mist like a gigantic buoy.”

“Didn’t they try to reload the location from backups?” Jurgen asked.

“No. For a while, nothing was happening. I somehow made it to a safe location where I met up with some guys from security. They thought I was a Corporation worker who’d gone nuts with the shock. They kept mentioning some guy called Gorman — they thought he must have blocked the logout. But I knew already that they wouldn’t get out of this alive. This green mist, it could come from anywhere. It seeped out of cracks in the ground or crept out into the streets from buildings’ cellars. Then it would come straight for us. Its touch scalds you. It fills your head with other people’s thoughts. Nothing helps against it, not even the security’s unique gear.”

“Did they all die?”

Kimberly’s eyes darkened. “They had to fight. The Reapers descended on us from their portals. At first, the security’s weapons worked fine but then they began to glitch and break down. It took the security guys ages to die. You wouldn’t want to see it.”

“Wait a sec,” Jurgen interrupted her. “Does that mean the Reapers didn’t touch you?”

Kimberly paused, then nodded. “They didn’t seem to notice me at all. It was as if they thought I was one of them. Naturally, I took full advantage of the fact. I smoked three of them who were in my way and disappeared into the wastelands.”

“Not good,” Jurgen concluded once she’d finished speaking. “If I remember rightly, Ernst Gorman was the leader of a special squad trained to combat any glitchy mobs. His men had sufficient gear and training to smoke any NPC on the spot, regardless of its level. Their weapons just couldn’t break down!”

“I’m telling you the truth! I saw it with my own eyes!”

“I do believe you! So you think that the problem was caused by the model of the space station?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who this hybrid is?”

“No idea. I wasn’t interested. Once I escaped from Argus, I kept a low profile. I wasn’t trying to pry into anything. I just tried to enjoy whatever life I could make for myself.”

“The hybrid is a synthetic identity,” I explained. “He was created with the neurograms taken from dead players.”

She gasped. “Why?”

“The military together with the Corporation wanted to establish their presence on one of the space stations in the Darg system and recreate it in all its ancient glory. The gamers apparently weren’t up to the task.”

“Why do you say that? We did our best to restore Argus. Okay, so it took us some time, but-”

“But you were restoring it by introducing human technologies,” Jurgen gently corrected her. “And here the idea was to reconstruct the original technosphere of the Founders. You need a number of specific skills to do that: Mnemotechnics, Alien Technologies and in this particular case also Exobiology. All of which have to be leveled up to at least 100. Know many people who can do that?”

“No one,” she agreed. “I only knew a few players who’d leveled up Mnemotechnics and Alien Technologies to 7 or 8.”

Charon listened attentively. “Levels and abilities!” he growled. “They don’t exist, do they? You made them all up. Just like you made up all these non-existent worlds.”

Jurgen shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong. Zander and Liori have analyzed the known interface types and arrived at the conclusion that they were all based on a single development model built originally by the Founders. It’s the same for all civilizations. I’m surprised you’re asking these things. Didn’t you receive new levels or level up your abilities?”

“I received experience, yes. Because I was learning! I risked my life training!”

“No one’s doubting that. For us it looked like a highly realistic game. For you, Charon, it must have been a battle for survival. And for the Dargians it must have been a religious experience. All of it still boiled down to one thing: we were there to study the Founders’ technologies and to follow their development branches created by some ancient civilization eons ago. Every new discovery brought us new levels, skills and abilities allowing us to move on.”

“Let’s go back to this hybrid,” Kimberly interrupted him. “Apparently, the testing of the space station went terribly wrong. I just can’t see what he’s got to do with it.”

“Good question. I’m pretty sure that the Earth’s military space forces have all the answers,” Jurgen replied. “First they swallowed up the Corporation and then they began using these testing locations for their own experiments. It was they who built the hybrid.”

“What is the point in combining neurograms that belong to different humans?” Charon asked. “Even I can see that it can only result in more problems.”

“The risk is huge,” Jurgen agreed, “ but it must have been worth it. Personally, I can’t see how it can be possible to extract skills from neurograms, sum up their levels and place them under the control of a cybernetic system. In this case, the only possible solution would be to create a hybrid identity matrix. Some sort of collective mind, if you wish.”

Charon sniffed. “A collective mind which would immediately lose the plot!”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “I think I know how the military got around it.”

Jurgen gave me a long look. “How? Tell us.”

“They created a dominant identity. It was a guy called Ingmud — a shop vendor who’d died during the battle for Argus. When I later met him again on Oasis, he was bent on restoring the station back to all its ancient glory. Incidentally, he had all the skills necessary for the job.”