Nova Project #1 (9 page)

“Nope,” says Miguel, hating the edge of defensiveness that
creeps into his voice. As if the Gamerunners had offered to tell him what to do and he'd refused, preferring to figure it out for himself. Did Josh think he was an idiot? Maybe. “I'm just going to do it like normal, see what happens. Gloves and visors on.”

Blindfolded by the visor, he waits until he can hear that everyone's stopped moving. “Select: start,” he says.

The air changes. His wrist burns, and his leather bracelet vanishes. Okay, noted. He can't bring anything in from outside, even things earned in the regular game.

Normally he'd go straight to his cache. Normally he knows where he's going, has a pretty good idea of what he'll need there.

“Chimera: overworld,” he whispers. The sudden burst of green light makes him blink inside the visor, and when his eyes refocus, a globe is spinning gently in the center of the circle they've made. Through its transparent glow, he sees Nick's eyes widen, the visor, gloves, and sensor strips made of materials that don't render in the game. He just looks like Nick, albeit the surprised version.

“Well, that's new,” says Grace.

A few weeks ago Miguel's overworld was a string of hexagons that looked like the DNA strand of a mythical creature, now it's a globe like the ones he's studied in geography. That feels so far away.

Welcome,
says the Storyteller. That's new, too. They aren't in a level yet.

You will find that this is only the first of many ways in which the Chimera that awaits you is different from the one you have experienced in your playing careers. You are accustomed to a game in which your own goals, and your own enjoyment, are the only things that matter.

Miguel glances around the group. Everyone is silent, listening, curious.

Rest assured you will still have the opportunity to earn the rewards you seek, better ones than ever before, and you may find similarities between the competition levels and what you already know. Challenges, mental and physical, are designed to test you. Puzzles and bosses brace themselves for your attempts to defeat them.

Okay. He's used to that.

But the similarities end there. Gone is a game seemingly without end, where you are battling only for personal gain.

No one has ever completed the normal game. It's rumored to be theoretically possible, but the amount of time it would take is more than anyone has. More than Miguel has, for sure, so he hasn't spent much time guessing what would happen if he did. Probably nothing. He'd be more biomech than human, though, after a hundred levels, a hundred upgrades.

The earth outside is damaged beyond repair, you know this. Whatever your age, you have grown up with this as truth. Chimera is not the real world, and anything can happen here.
The virtual world before you is damaged, too, but you have the chance to save it. It has been invaded by a demon, a demon that has laid traps for you. A demon that lies in wait, biding its time. If you do not defeat it, it will rise up and take over, and nothing will ever be safe again.

Scattered across the world, hidden in often disparate and unnatural landscapes, are the tools you need to break into the demon's lair and destroy the threat for good. Some will be guarded by monsters familiar and not, some difficult to find or obtain. You must get them all. You must save the world. Every choice you make will matter. Some paths will lead to personal reward, but away from your ultimate goal. Others lead to nowhere, and you will have to retrace your steps. Yet others will end in disaster.

You have the chance to stretch your rendered limbs beyond the reach of humanity and become like the mythical gods of old, ruling and reshaping the earth. Every decision will inform the next, will dictate how quickly you reach the finish line, now that there is a finish line. You have twelve levels to defeat before you get there. Some may take you hours, some may take you days. Some will have to wait while one of you receives an enhancement. On all but the last level, there is an item you must collect, in addition to any rewards or enhancements you might win, or bosses you must kill before you can progress. Reach the final level, defeat it, before your rival teams, and you will
be admired, worshiped, revered by everybody watching. And
everybody
is watching. Good luck.

Miguel's mouth hangs open for several seconds after the Storyteller finishes the longest message he's ever heard from her. On the bright side, the best time to look like an astonished idiot is when everyone else around you does, too.

And the more he thinks about it, the more it does make sense. It's kind of genius, really.

“We have to save the world?” Grace asks.

“Just this one,” Miguel says, pointing at the green globe. “It's called a story mode. They've totally stolen this from older video games. I've always wanted to play one. What?” he asks, catching Grace's dubious expression. “I read.”

“Okay. Where do we start?”

Leah, on the other side of the globe, glances at Nick. “There,” she says, fingertip an inch away from a spot glowing slightly brighter than the rest.

“Excellent. Fine. What was it the Storyteller said?” Nick asks. “Let's go be gods. Easy.”

Miguel grins. Yeah.

Easy.

T
he overworld is different, but the cache looks mostly the same. Emptier, though, and the weapons and gear that fill the racks aren't as sophisticated as stuff he's used recently; all that has to be reearned.

As in the gaming room currently housing their bodies, there are five cabinets along one wall. Private compartments, one for each of them. Some of the things they find will be theirs alone. Good to know.

“Twelve levels,” Leah muses.

“Does that matter?” he asks her.

“I don't know. Probably not.”

“What do we need?” Grace asks, moving from one shelf to the next, inspecting. Miguel studies her perfectly rendered profile, accurate as one of his mother's photographs. Pixels don't alter how much he trusts her; he'll have to keep an eye on her. But it's Nick who picks up a gun, fires it at a blank expanse
of gray wall. The bullet ricochets, glass shatters.

Miguel ducks, instinct overruling his brain as the volume of his heartbeat cranks up. The readings on his visor are for his real heart, not his rendered one. One breath, two, he calms it before raising his head to stare at the hole in the door of what must be Josh's private cache, if they line up the same way as they do outside.

“Oh . . . my . . . god,” says Leah.

Nick gazes at the weapon in his hand as if he's never seen it before. “Sorry, Josh.”

Josh glares at Nick, finally shrugs.

“The bullets are real?” Leah asks.

“Maybe not real exactly,” Miguel answers, stepping closer to the destruction. “But that's new, the game shouldn't react like that.” Normally when you shoot something inanimate in Chimera, it repairs within a few seconds, a clear message that you made a wrong move. “I think it's telling us that whatever we damage stays damaged.” He thinks for a second. “That would make sense. We're supposed to save the world, not break it more.”

“Including us?”

He looks at Grace. “Inside the game, I'm guessing so. Outside, who knows?”

“Well, we're not going to be shooting each other,” offers Josh, “so it doesn't matter, right?”

Right. Sort of. They won't be, and they won't see the other teams—he thinks—who might have reason to kill them, but the
bosses are a different story. They've killed him too many times to count. If the harm they cause is real, and permanent, this really is a very different Chimera.

The greatest risks. The greatest rewards.

“Like a dream.”

“What?” he asks Leah.

“Even if it is only inside the game . . . what is it they say? When you die in a dream, you die in real life?” A shadow crosses her face.

She's right. There's always been something very dreamlike about Chimera. Jump off a building, feel yourself falling, wake up on your back in a room, pulse racing, unable to remember the exact moment of impact but certain it happened. Step back into the dream and do it again.

Game over
here could really mean . . . game over.

“Okay. We take the guns and we be really fucking careful, got it? I know you all know how to use these things, I've seen you when we were practicing. They're the same models we're used to.”

“Got it, Captain,” says Nick, holstering the one he fired and slinging a rifle over his shoulder.

“Armor up, too.” Miguel checks out a vest. It's the good stuff, spun from harvested, genetically modified spider silk.

For now they leave the tents, sleeping bags, boxes of matches, but their presence in the cache is interesting, another thing that points to enhanced real-world effects. They can
sleep
in the game if they want to. Whether it would be restful is a different question, and heading for their suites and huge beds after hitting a save point will probably be way more appealing, but it's worth noting.

There is water, though no food. So the Gamerunners don't actually want them to play 24-7, unless the first 'scape is a tavern stocked with bison and mead, served by Vikings. Hell, it might be.

“Come on,” he orders, aiming it more at Grace than the others, irritated with her and himself for his uneasiness. It would be easier if he had something more than a gut feeling, something she'd actually done during practice that he could point to when asking the Gamerunners to replace her. But there's nothing, and he has no idea what would've happened if he'd made the request. They might have laughed or ignored him altogether. Come to that, he doesn't know whether it's the Gamerunners themselves who are monitoring the special inbox he's been given in case of issues.

He refuses to be the first leader to cry like a baby the first time the game doesn't go his way. They let him in. They believe that he can do this, or at least that he'll be entertaining while he tries.

They could be generous, benevolent dudes who want him to earn his new heart and know what he hasn't told anyone: that he won't pass through the regular game fast enough to do it.

They could be
anyone.

And whoever they are, they've invented a hell of a fun time.

“Ready?”

A chorus of agreement sounds. His digital assistants never spoke. “Chimera: overworld,” he says again, expecting the room change, the violet globe, but still awed by it. He finds the place Leah spotted first, slightly brighter than the rest. In the real world it would be several hundred miles away. Here it sits just under his hovering biomech. He waits for the others to gather behind him, pretty sure they're not going to step right into the jaws of a demon. If they were, he'd send Grace first.

He closes his eyes and touches the globe.

The room changes.

It's a city street. Not his city, which is definitely by design. Don't want anywhere too familiar, anywhere he might know the way. Somewhere in Melbourne or Florence, a team might be outside the park he hangs out in with Nick and Anna. He'll check later, that would be funny.

Skyscrapers tower overhead, their roofs from this angle looking as though they touch the heavy rain clouds.

“Status update,” he whispers. The mic in his visor picks up the command, a red light blinks in his field of vision. “We are in a city. Let the game begin.”

A bleep in his ear lets him know it posted successfully. If anyone out there is paying attention, watching, replying, he'll read it later.

“Which way?” Leah asks. “We have no idea what we're looking for, or what we're supposed to do. The Storyteller said we're supposed to find something, but what?”

True . . . and not. “Right. And what usually happens in Chimera when you don't know what to do next?”

“You find a map.”

“Exactly.” Miguel scans the landscape, turning his head left and right, up and down a street filled with moving but driverless cars. His team is behind him, protecting, Grace angled slightly away as they look. There's always a sign, always a way forward for the sharp eyed and smart.

A faint aura of light outlines a building a few blocks ahead. Not the tallest, but eye-catching. An ivory tower of white marble and mirror glass.

“There. See?”

“Yesssssss,” says Josh.

They head toward it. Into difficulty or danger, because Miguel's damn sure it isn't filled with sunshine and girls in bikinis, but whatever's in there isn't going to be the worst thing they see. It's only the first level.

There are no people on the streets. If there were, it would be hard to tell that they were in the game, but there's nothing and no one to block their way. Miguel could be out for a walk in the real world, though if he were the silence would be eerie. He sets the pace, they reach the tower in minutes.

Locked doors.

“Well, shit,” says Leah. “We haven't found any codes or keys yet.”

“Which means we don't need them,” says Miguel. “It's something else.”

“Or we ran straight past whatever it is,” says Grace, frowning.

“I doubt it. Let me think.”

“Do we have that kind of time?”

Miguel elbows Nick in the ribs. Not hard, but hard enough. “Oof.”

There are no keypads, no slots, and nothing to put in them. No fingerprint sensors or retina scanners. He taps the tiles around the doors, fine red threads running through the white marble like trickles of blood along flesh. They don't give way.

“Hold up,” Leah says. He doesn't turn, but he listens. “Who says we have to go in the front door?”

Wordlessly they run around the outside. The tower backs onto a filthy alley, blocked with chain fences that give way easily to Josh's brutish shoulder. Miguel nods thanks and jogs along, looking.

Another door, steel instead of glass, a handle that turns at the slightest touch.

“Good job.”

Leah grins. Okay, they're in, but that doesn't solve the whole puzzle.

You are on the ground floor of a building. It is filled with offices. Somewhere there is a map.

“I was wondering when you'd show up in here,” Miguel says to the Storyteller. She doesn't answer.

“Screw this,” Grace says. “It could be anywhere.”

Miguel ignores her. He'll listen when she brings something useful to the game, and she's wrong.

“It would take us—any of the teams—weeks to go through every office. It's somewhere important. We're in an office building. Where are the important decisions made?”

“Boardroom,” says Leah.

“Exactly. Let's find the tile.”

In the lobby a square of marble floor is slightly darker than the others, just large enough for the five of them to cluster together away from the edges. The ledges. He leans ever so slightly into Nick and concentrates on each shallow breath until the tile reaches the top floor, slides sideways, and docks into place.

It's nice for a guess to be right. The boardroom is easy to find, windows dimmed by dark glass but lit by the map on the huge screen on the wall. It's of a building, but not this one.

“We're going to need it later,” says Josh. “Can we make a copy?”

Miguel turns to Grace. He'd known the first time he saw her eyes.

“Fine. Everyone get behind me so you don't block my shot.” She blinks. Click.

“Send it to me,” he says.

“I will.”

“Now.”

She doesn't look happy, not that he knows what that'd look like, he hasn't seen it yet. But a tiny corn appears in one corner of his visor.

“Thank you,” he says, pressing a blue button under the monitor. A save point.

“Yeah.”

“Status updates and let's go. Don't say anything about the map, just that we're making progress.”

The first challenge down. God only knows how many to go.

His first Chimera level was like this, some others have been since. Less battle, more treasure hunt—the nickname they're often given in status updates. All about finding things that will help later. After locating the map, they spend the rest of the day exploring the city. Leah discovers a pair of antigravity boots in her size that will allow her to scale walls. In an unlocked store Miguel finds a couple of weapons more like the ones he's used to.

“How are you feeling?” Nick asks, the others ahead, turning
over wooden crates, scattered to look like trash.

“This? This is easy. I was expecting it to be a lot harder.”

“Me, too, but that's not what I meant.”

“I'm fine.”

“You're still not going to tell them?”

Miguel cuts his eyes at his friend. “I still don't see why I should.”

“It's the right thing to do? Especially now that we know the goal. Oh, hey, by the way, if I run too fast I might faint or die or something, just so you know.”

That there's some truth to what Nick says only makes Miguel scowl. “It's none of their business. There could be something fatally wrong with any of them—hell, with all of them—and they're not telling me.”

“That's not right, either.”

“You're way too concerned with what's right.”

“You're way too concerned with winning.”

“Yup.”

He gets Nick's point, but he can count on one hand the number of people who know, other than doctors required to keep his secret, and he's not about to use the other one on a couple of people he just met. Especially not Grace. He stares across the street at her for a little too long.

“You don't like her.”

“I don't trust her.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

They always agree on the important things.

Night falls, streetlights illuminate their way and turn the level into a game of shadows and glow, shadows in which anything could be hiding. Treasure hunt levels are meant to help; they're also meant to lure the player into a false sense of security. He resists the urge to check his feed too closely, read the tags and see how the other teams are doing. Either they're behind, which means they don't matter, or they're ahead, which he doesn't want to know.

But this is too quiet. Too easy. Even though some levels have always been this way, about preparation, gathering, he can't shake the feeling in his belly. They're all on a ledge, and something's coming. After years of the game, he knows better than to rush forward to find it. That's a good way to get dead. If
dead
is only an inconvenience, he doesn't want to start over, and their last save point was at the map. Their cache is full of things they've found, having to find them a second time would be a waste. He remembers the bullet. It might not be only an inconvenience.

Either way he doesn't have the energy or life to spare.

He slows down. Turns over everything he can lift to inspect the ground for items underneath. Makes note of any numbers that might later end up being essential codes. Watches the shapes of clouds for the faces of monsters lying in wait for them.

When the ground begins to shake, he's almost not
surprised. The road begins to crack. At first a hairline fracture, it soon splits before him to an unhealable wound, the vibrations rising through the soles of his feet and up to rattle his teeth.