Soda Pop Soldier (11 page)

At that moment the screen goes black and the game dies.

Chapter 9

A
n hour later I'm standing in the dark, watching the storm roll in underneath Upper New York. Everything is darkness; outside on the streets below, no one. It feels like the night after the world ends. I'm nursing a scotch, confused and wondering what to do with myself. The Black went down for a reason. The only one I can think of is that the feds got close to someone important and the Black runners freaked out and went dark. Like the city.

And I'm out a thousand bucks?

If so, things can't be worse than they already are. It doesn't matter if I have half the rent. The landlord wants it all. If I don't have all, out I go.

My Petey's doomsday ringtone goes off.

Important message.

The Black will be back up in six minutes.

That should make me happy. But it doesn't. All it means is that my thousand isn't totally gone, yet. Maybe the game's been bugged now. Maybe whoever shut it down, the developer, the programmer, the Black runners themselves, got caught and they're flipping the red queen on their subscribers.

Us. Me.

Maybe.

What other choice do I have?

No message from Sancerré.

I finish my drink, make another, and sit back down at my desk. The Black goes live and the word
Begin
flashes across my screen. I can see my HUD. My hot keys, minimap, and Vitality and Stamina meters are all there. But the screen is completely dark.

I touch the movement direction keys. Side to side. I hear the shuffle of the Samurai's wooden sandals stepping and then echoing off something unseen and nearby, fading off into the distance.

My eyes accustom to the darkness of the screen and I realize nothing's wrong. At least not with my computer or the game itself. It's just really dark wherever I am in-game. I can't even make out shapes or outlines. It's pitch-black.

A complete absence of light.

Deep under the earth. Where the light don't go.

The bottom of the pit. The end of the fall.

Great.

In other words, I'm lost in the dark.

The words
Oubliette of Torment
appear across my screen in crimson gothic spike script.

What the hell is an
Oubliette
? I tell my Petey to look up the meaning of the word. It tells me it's a synonym for dungeon. From the French, meaning literally, “a forgotten place.”

So I'm in the forgotten place of torment.

I pan upward. The darkness seems even deeper there.

So how did I survive the fall into the pit? Or did the game just place me in this zone at random? Or does the pit somehow lead to the Oubliette of Torment?

Over ambient in-game sound, a guitar plucks sardonically at discordant strings. Or at least that's what it feels like to me. I make sure the whip is equipped and start out into the thick darkness. A small musical loop begins cycling across the soundtrack. It's the music of flutes swirling downward on a sigh more than anything else. It begins to accompany the sarcastic guitar.

In time, my Samurai bumps into what I think is a wall. I turn right, trying to use the wall as a guide. The wall turns to the right, and I feel like I'm heading into a darkness even deeper than the one I've been in. Ahead, far off in the distance, I see some kind of light. Or a lessening of the dark.

The soundtrack seems to come and go. At times I'm concentrating so hard on finding my way through a maze made of darkness that I barely even notice when the music stops. Then, when I'm least expecting it, the guitar plucks an impulsive string with an odd twang, jolting me upright.

Am I getting lost? Have I made a bad choice and this is the game's way of telling me so?

And maybe I should lay off the scotch.

I arrive in the less dark area, and it takes me a vertigo-filled moment to figure out what's going on. The light reveals itself to be an odd-shaped square. Sides slant off in one direction; I know it's a shape of some sort, I just don't know which one. The square of light is bone white and crosshatched, as though there are bars somewhere high above, between the light source and the floor it's shining down on. I look up. I can see only an indeterminate spotlight and shadowy bars between it and my Samurai. I move forward into the lighted area and realize there are other squares at random intervals, leading off in another direction. There are solid walls of darkness between me and those islands of crosshatched black and white.

Could the light source be the moon, and in between it and me are high grates or grilles, open toward the game's version of night? The desert? The tower? The crosshatched squareish islands of light form a rambling hall leading off in a direction my in-game minimap refuses to identify. All the cardinal points on the minimap are noted with a question mark.

I'm either lost, or I've gone into a zone where east and west, south and north, don't have any meaning.

That can't be good.

A thought occurs to me as I try to reason out what's happening. What's happened. I don't like this. I don't like this for a lot of reasons. The main reason revolves around my thousand bucks. Maybe I've wasted my money, died in that fall into the pit, and now the game is wasting my time by sending me to its version of the afterlife.

Am I in the game's hell?

Can I escape?

Maybe there's no escape.

My fingers are paralyzed, hovering like claws over the keyboard and mouse. I feel like taking a drink from the nearby scotch, but I don't.

This is not supposed to happen. They can't rip me off like this.

Why can't they? It's an open source Black game. To myself I think,
What'd ya expect?
A shooter channeling you down narrow lanes full of explosions and action just like some ride at DisneyIsland or the latest game of
MegaWarrior
?
The whole game on rails to keep you in the story and completing the game, so some big developer can give you a good time for your dough, at cost?

This, that ain't.

This is an open source illegal online game, akin to gambling. Mom used to say, “The house always wins.”

Well, Mom might have been right. Again.

I follow the crooked path of bar-covered light and in time I see them. Beautiful women. They're barely clothed in a variety of costumes ranging from slave girl to merchant princess to slutty elf, and they're all chained on either side of the hall. Crosshatched light swims along their undulating bodies as they raise their shackled hands in supplication.

Obviously I'm distracted. The bodies are rendered perfectly. Each of them is, like I said, beautiful. Different. No two the same. They reach for me from the dark as I pass, and I know this has got to be some sort of trap.

Succubi?

But they're chained.

A raven-haired statuesque Amazonian in flimsy silk whispers “Please . . .” at me as I pass. Then I hear another voice. A man. Middle Eastern. “She's real and waiting, my friend. Just slay her and you can watch us beat her live via the feed.”

“What?” I say into my mic.

“You heard me, my friend. Pick one. Chop off her head and you'll be invited into her real world. You'll see what she's doing. And what's being done to her. I promise you, it will all be very thrilling . . . and humiliating for her.”

I stare at all the girls, computer-rendered models of real-life models. A programmer's promise of what they look like in the real world. What I'm seeing now is what I'll see when I join her feed. Each of them was that prettiest girl in school we all wanted to know. Guys like me had crushes on girls like these. Just crushes because guys like me would never say or do anything about a girl like that. They were epic; we were just . . . us.

Somehow their beauty took them away from high school and all the towns and cities they came from. Took them to the ends of the earth. And then some. Some girls became actresses. Ultramodels. Trophies of the rich. And some . . .

. . . end up in online brothels on the other side of the world. In the Middle East where their owners can get away with this stuff because women are still just a possession there. Always have been. Probably always will be.

If you have the dough, you can have them. But that's not my style.

I continue on, leaving the moaning beauties behind me, their bodies burned into the folds of my mind forever.

Light begins to illuminate more and more of the dungeon, and I can see cages and bars. Within the empty cages I find rusty manacles and chains. Broken furniture. There are long hallways leading off into other darknesses. I avoid those places.

There's no rhyme or reason to this dungeon. The cages and bars and cells cluster the debris-littered spaces between deserted hallways and gray silent passages. I weave through it all, carefully, ready for an attack that never comes, lost and getting more lost. This game world is nothing but a city of empty cages . . .

. . . until I find the man dressed in rags chained to the stone wall of a small cell.

“Hey there!” His voice is raspy and high. “Hey there, buddy. You wanna have some fun?”

Emphasis on fun.

Trap.

I approach the cage slowly.
Chock . . . Chock . . . Chock.

“Samurai, huh?” asks the raggedy man.

I say nothing.

“Where's your sword?” He begins to laugh. Coughing and laughing, he shakes his manacled wrists in delight.

“Like I said, wanna have some fun? That is . . . if you're interested?”

“I'm looking,” I say over my mic, “for the way back to the tower.”

He laughs. “The tower. That's . . . now that's just odd.” His avatar's face seems puzzled. Then, “Tower's a long way from here . . . or maybe it's better to say it like this . . . you're beyond the tower now. Yeah, that's much better.”

I'm in front of his cell. He's chained to the far wall. Images float across the back wall of the cell, around his body and above his head. Like an old projection movie screen with pictures running across its dirty face.

“Everybody's watchin', Wu. You got a big share right now. Over three hundred thousand subscribers just waitin' to see what you're gonna do next. They wanna see what you're gonna do down here. Congratulations, you've made it all the way down to the bottom. Fun, huh?”

“Is this . . .” I feel stupid saying this. “Is this hell?”

The raggedy man laughs, coming closer to the bars. “No, man, this ain't hell. More like heaven. Don't you get it? This is what the Black is really all about. Not all that fantasy stuff up there. Slayin' dragons and gittin' treasure. Down here's where the real action is. Trust me.”

Treasure sounds good. Dragons, not so much.

“What if I wanna get back up there? Is there a way out?”

“Funny you should mention that,” says the raggedy man. “Funny indeed.”

Within the moving images flashing across the wall at the back of the cell, a man sits in the corner of a small room. It's almost a cell like the one in front of me. But it's covered in green padding. Like it's a drunk tank or something.

“So here's the game, Samurai. You a player? Well, we'll see. This one's called, ‘The way out.' Just for you.”

The man in the movie, in the padded cell, is thin. Bony thin. Gaunt. Drug addict gaunt. His tiny eyes dart in random directions every so often, as though he's seeing something I'm not.

“That there's Yuri,” says the raggedy man from his place on the floor. “Yuri's a real class ‘A' drug addict. Multiple convictions. His case file even states that he is quote unquote, incorrigible, but it says that in Russian, so it's the Russian word for ‘incorrigible.' Never knew his father. Mother was a high-class prostitute until she got AIDS. Then she was just a low-class one. But she kept him in public school long enough for him to develop a nice drug problem. Then he became a criminal, 'cause even though drugs are legal, well, my friend, hell, they ain't free. Hence the crime. Anyway, he's a real waste of human life. His career highlight came when he beat an old lady into a coma for the thirty-eight dollars in her purse so he could score some meth. She lived another three years in an institution. She never regained consciousness. But what the hell. So be it. So here's the game.”

Within the moving images, a metallic drawer slides away from the padded green wall of the cell. Yuri pushes himself upward and off the wall and staggers unsteadily toward the drawer. He snatches something unseen from it quickly, then retreats back to his corner. Kneeling down, his mouth slightly agape, I can see what he's holding.

It's a syringe.

“Yeah,” says the raggedy man in the cell in front of me. “He's an old-school, hard-core junkie. Anything'll do. So we'll start him off with just a little taste o' the junk. Just something to get him going, y'know?”

Yuri, hands trembling, pulls back his sleeve, slaps a vein into shape, and spikes his way-too-thin arm. His shoulders slump at the end of the fix. He takes a shallow breath.

“Fun, huh?” asks the raggedy man in the cell beneath the images. “Wanna play?”

I say nothing. This is the Black's idea of fun. I've heard rumors. Apparently they're true. I'm pretty sure whatever the game is, I don't want a piece of it.

“You want out, don'tcha, Wu? Wanna get back in the game, said so yerself.”

I do.

I've got to make this thousand bucks pay off. Strike that. I
need
to make it pay off. If Sancerré ever decides to come back, I have to have a place for her to come back to.

“Tell ya what,” says the raggedy man. “He's an addict. So, y'know, anything'll do. Now, how 'bout we play for just a little bottle of hard liquor, nothing serious. A little old liter of bum liquor. We won't even give him a loaded revolver or nothing, I promise. We did that one time. It was hilarious. Ya ever see the video? It went viral.”