Soda Pop Soldier (9 page)

The music crescendos and then, after a short interlude of silence, returns to the wanderings of a mournful flute.

I have no idea what the World of Waste-whatever is.

“Behold the tower of the Razor Maiden, the Marrow Spike,” continues the announcer.

My screen clouds over. Blue shadows resolve into swirling dust, and from somewhere nearby over ambient in-game sound, I hear a crack of dry thunder followed by the patter of rain falling mutely into ancient, thick dust. Water drops cascade and echo and I'm struck by the certainty that if Sancerré is truly gone, out of my life, I'll listen to the rain and think of her and it will be little consolation to a very lonely me.

On-screen a fat gibbous moon, swollen, corpulent, and odd, makes its way across the night as its light falls on a lonely desert. In the distance, a rising tower, more perversion or malignant growth than structure, stands out in the moonlit night. Its crazy architecture rises, feasible only in computer-rendered graphics, pushing away from a crumbling city that is slowly being consumed by the dunes of an endless desert. I let go of a fading hope I'd harbored for a simple AK and the clear-cut purpose of merely machine-gunning my way through this game until I'd earned enough money for rent.

Modern warfare is my specialty. Fantasy, not so much.

The spire is jagged and thorny, a black silhouette against the desert night, rising from the jumble of odd-angled ruins in an arid waste devoid of anything living, all made colder by the moon's pale light. Only the most morbid tourist would choose such a place for an online vacation.

A piano in minor chord ponderously strikes cryptic notes as the camera pulls focus. I'm scanning for landmarks, features, anything I can use later to navigate my way to some cash and prizes. I don't see any obvious enemies. Yet.

“Even now, pretty and not so pretty little things,” continues the announcer abruptly, “you're awakening from your crypts, graves, tombs, and sewers . . .” On-screen the view switches to a collapsing graveyard in some courtyard near the the tower, forgotten and abandoned millennia untold. Gravestones with Gorey-like inscriptions denote fallen warriors. The sound of grinding stone caressing stone erupts across the ambient soundscape. A necrotic hand pushes from the earth. The piano continues to strike those minor chords, alternating now with other diminished chords that seem full of suffering and hollow all at once, turning the soundtrack into a march, into a call to nothing good.

I hate the undead.

They make me jittery. In most games, they just come at you in waves. Guns are basically useless. In fact, most things are useless against the undead. In the end it comes down to baseball bats and lead pipes. Which doesn't matter—the more of them you send back to death, the more of them appear. I always wonder, after games I've played that involve the undead, after killing a thousand, two thousand, what that does to my mind. It can't be good. One time I played a game where I had to kill fifty-seven-thousand-plus undead just to unlock an achievement. I can distinguish between reality and games, but . . . some people can't. What does killing fifty-seven thousand humanlike once humans do to players?

The undead are a hard way to spend a thousand bucks.

A hard way to make rent.

“Prisoners and fiends, victims and in-betweens . . . ,” continues the game's unseen announcer. The rattling of chains, a tortured scream, a woman sobs. Everything happens fast and just moments before the game reveals my avatar, the unknown character I'll play as I attempt to beat this game, I see the tower above and hear the whimpering of a child.

“Razor Maiden, devourer of the innocent, eater of life, queen of hell, commands that you die tonight, or live trying.”

In these online tournaments, and might I add, illegal open source online tournaments, the goal is to figure out the game and then beat it before all the other players find and beat you. You've got to start somewhere, and often that's a game in and of itself that must be beat before you can actually start beating the main game. Just like life. I'm guessing the game I'll be playing to start with is “escape.” But from where and how, I don't know just yet. Along the way is where I'll really make money. Contests, treasure troves, even in-game bargains can lead to big cash and interesting prizes. Or so I've been told.

The intro is over and now my story, the story of my avatar, begins.

“Please be
Light,
” I whisper once more in my empty and very dark apartment.

Gloomy clouds thicken on-screen, then a golden shaft of light, something my eyes are starving for, stabs down through the clouds.

In Olde English script, the word
Light
appears as I hear a distant trumpet play a fading call to arms.

“Noble Son”—it's a different voice than the game announcer, kindly, a sage or a king perhaps—“I am Callard the Wise of Rondor, and I'm here to help you. You must rescue a child of hope from the clutches of the diabolical Razor Maiden. Your training as a Samurai of the mysterious East has given you the
Focused Slash
ability and the
Iron Hurricane
attack. Armed only with your katana
Deathefeather,
you have journeyed many leagues into the southern deserts to reach a fabled lost city buried beneath shifting sands so that you can climb the jutting ruin of the Marrow Spike and confront evil itself.”

Pause.

Wait for it,
I tell myself.

“Alas, you have been captured by the nightmarish horde of the black witch Razor Maiden . . .”

There it is. Captured.

I hate games where you start off in the hole.

The question now is, How many of my fellow contestants are also captured? Whoever's not captured has a big advantage. Even worse, am I captured by one of my fellow players? Someone playing
Darkness
?

“The Black horde has taken your hand in payment for daring to approach their forgotten realm,” continues Callard the Wise of Whatever. “But fear not, Samurai, there is hope! Somewhere within this ancient desert lies the Pool of Sorrows. If you can find it, maybe its restorative waters will return your lost hand, and then, once you've found your legendary blade
Deathefeather,
perhaps you might dispense the justice Razor Maiden so richly deserves.”

I feel cheated.

Damn Iain.

A thousand bucks down the drain on a one-handed Samurai that's probably being tortured and raped from the get-go.

The picture on-screen dissolves as the voice of Callard reminds me to “find the child.” What child, I'm not sure, but apparently a child must be found.

The screen changes from panorama to point of view. I'm inside the avatar's skin. The HUD comes online and I'm checking the layout. Vitals are down 50 percent. But who's exactly a million bucks after having their hand lopped off? My right clicks are enabled, so I scroll through a menu of available feats I can slave to the mouse and bind to the keyboard. I like the old-fashioned mouse, none of these reticle-cued, SoftEye enhancements everyone's trying to sell me these days.

With part of my mind on the screen that shows my surroundings, and the other scrolling through a submenu checking what skills I can employ, most of which are offline, I see the grotesque feet of a large monster shuffling toward me. My POV is only responding to the vaguest of movements, like I'm drugged or chained up or something. Over ambient, beyond the scrape of the jailer-monster's feet, I hear an agonized scream followed by repeated cries for mercy. Then the obligatory tormented scream punctuation as hot iron sears flesh. Again, the screaming.

The Dungeon of Endless Despair
flashes across my screen.

The jailer nears my body and hauls me upright. I stare from the darkness of my snow-swamped apartment in midtown Manhattan, into the face of an Ogre on-screen. Protruding canines and bleeding gums compete for computer-rendered audacity with an oozing gash that was once an eye.

“Wot's yur name, maggot?” growls the Ogre through my DellTashi display, something I purchased on credit after being confirmed for professional status with ColaCorp.

A QuickMenu opens up asking me to type in my name.

“Loser” springs to mind along with “Thousand-Dollars-Down-the-Drain Guy.”

I can't use PerfectQuestion. If ColaCorp knew I was gaming in the Black, I'd lose my pro status immediately.

What comes next comes from nowhere. It doesn't mean anything to me, and I can't remember ever hearing it before.

“Wu,” I type in.

“Wu!” shrieks the Ogre and roars with laughter and flying spittle right in my face. My POV spins crazily about as the Ogre, easily well over seven feet tall, hurls my Samurai at a far wall. Ragdoll physics take over as the laws of the universe in this online world send me flying through the air. After a bone-rattling impact into a wall, I land on a thin pile of straw in the orange light of a nearby guttering wall torch. The damage deducts 2 percent from my Vitality and now I'm down to 48 percent.

I'm still searching all the Samurai's submenus. He has some awesome skills and devastating attacks. But all of them are offline, probably due to the missing hand and damage. I find one called
Serene Focus
. It's live, so I enable and drag it onto the right mouse button. I read the quick hint description of the skill as once again the Ogre lumbers toward me all grunts and wheezy laughs.

“I'll baste yur bones with yur own blood 'n' crack yur skull between me teeth, I will.”

A very ogre thing to say.

Meanwhile back at the skill description, I read that
Serene Focus
allows the user to slow down in-game time while still moving at an intensely fast speed.

Yay, now I can watch the Ogre beat me to death in slow-mo.

I scan the jail cell. Torchlight and shadows, more alcove than cell, it opens into an undefined gloom beyond the flickering light. I do not see my Samurai sword,
Deathefeather,
anywhere nearby. The guttering torch along the wall of my cell reveals nothing that would be useful right about now. The Ogre is almost on me again, grunting and laughing. I pan up and see the great sabers of his fangs rending his own scarred and bloody welt of a lip.

I have to admit, whoever wrote this software, even though they're stealing my thousand bucks, did a great job. It sucks to be me right now.

The Ogre's tumorous Adam's apple bobs up and down. The game's soundtrack cranks up to do or die with the bleating tribal horn of triumph every dark beast that ever walked the worlds of fantasy is known by.

Imagination.

I know what to do.

I right-click
Serene Focus,
and the blaring war drums and horns slow down as though drowned in a thick syrup of sugary sonic deadness. The edges of my screen distort to soft focus. From somewhere nearby, I can hear the delicate strings of the Japanese koto plucking out singular, poignant notes.

I don't know why, but I understand now.

It's as if the programmer wrote a quick cut-scene illustrating the point of
Serene Focus
and dropped it onto my mental deck for a frame or two.

“The hands of the Samurai are like the legs of a crane in a shallow pond.
Early morning, fog and mist, they do not disturb the water, or hesitate.
They lift and descend and the water remains unmarked.”

Yeah, I understand how the crane walks through a shallow pond and doesn't disturb the mirrored surface of the water.

Creepy, huh?

I target the Ogre's bobbing throat and attack with my left mouse button. The Samurai's only hand reaches out from my POV. In this instant, I hope the developer spent good money on things other than great graphics and good physics. A well-built game will render an opponent's entire body, allocating damage based on anatomy and physiology. When computer games were first invented, all you could do was attack another player. It couldn't differentiate if you hit him in the legs, head, or chest. Hell, even a hit in the nuts or gouging out an eye were undefinable. Computers couldn't crunch that level of data. But games evolved. Eventually you could make head shots. That was at the beginning of the new millennium. Now, technology can target specific muscle groups. I hope whoever built this circus of pain paid enough for that level of design. Otherwise, I'm dead digital meat. And homeless.

On-screen the Samurai's hand reaches out. The represented on-screen digital world fixates on the great bobbing tumor that is the Ogre's throat, as the hand of the Samurai grasps . . .

. . . then crushes it a second later.

In a game like this, where players and watchers are looking for the sickest of not-so-cheap thrills, the likelihood was high that the designer went all-in for the best in blood and gore. My
Serene Focus
gamble pays off as the Ogre stumbles backward, gasping and reaching for its shattered throat. It stumbles, falls, then dies in the shadows beyond the cone of torchlight.

Now, I'm in the game.

If you count having one hand, 48 percent of your health left, and most of your options offlined, as “in the game,” then yes, I am in the game.

I check my Samurai's inventory. I find only the robelike gi of the Samurai and a pair of wooden sandals. Both equipped. No lacquered armor or sword for that matter.

I move forward and hear
chock . . . chock . . . chock,
the wooden sound of his sandaled steps, echoing in the dark. Underneath that is the breeze-whipped guttering sound of a torch. And underneath it all, wandering rhythmic drums and the full chords of a baby grand piano play, striking out harsh tone clusters that cry doom, gloom, and the loneliness one finds beneath the earth in lost and forgotten places.

Music is important in games. A tempo change can mean an impending attack. A certain chord can indicate the state of affairs, good or bad. Even though I like to keep my own tracks going, I still keep ambient in-game sound and soundtracks in the groove just so I can check in on that level. Some gamers don't, and more often than not they pay for it.