Start the Game (Galactogon: Book #1) (28 page)

Chapter 10

The Patch

“Good morning, Master!”
Stan chirped as soon as I opened my eyes. My night had been a restless one. I kept having a nightmare in which I kept dying in different ways—either I’d get blown up, or crushed, or shot. And every time the murderer was a different person whom I’d never seen before: A man with sideburns, a tight white T-shirt and strange brass knuckles that resembled three long claws. A young girl in black skintight clothes that resembled latex, who moved so fluidly that the murder would begin to resemble a dance. A weird looking guy in green clothes with the emblem of a lantern on it…It was quite a night. The only good thing was that the night had ended and the day during which I was to test out my new ship had finally come. If she was half as a good as her description made it seem, then I’d be sure to donate some money to the game’s admins—presents like that deserved recognition.

“What’s new?” I asked Stan as I sat down to breakfast. My chief deputy found the wherewithal to provide me with everything I needed, even in this new, strange apartment—as though trying to soften my time in house arrest.

“Repair work on your old home is underway. All the debris was hauled away overnight. Today the contractor will begin to reframe the walls. You have received a message from the police, notifying you that your reward will be awarded to you upon your release from house arrest.
Galactogon
’s game servers are offline today due to a major update. I have finished deciphering the text on the command key…”

“Stop!” I interrupted Stan’s report, despite the fact that the deciphered text was very important and was a priority matter for me. “What update? Why didn’t I hear about this earlier?”

“Everyone has just found out,” explained my smart home. “A global update has been rumored for a long time—to the point that most players have begun to ignore such rumors. The developers have maintained their silence until today. Basically, no one was ready for a patch of this magnitude. Also, I would like to point out that the information you initially requested about
Galactogon
asked for important game mechanics, the history of races, ship piloting, game economics and a search for coordinates based on several images. At no point did you ask about the probable future condition of the game or its forthcoming updates. As a result, I decided that this information was not pertinent and omitted it from my reports.”

“Hmm…” I replied expressively to Stan’s explanation and shoveled the next load of pancakes into my mouth. An unannounced patch is a pretty curious thing. Many companies, even the one that ran
Runlustia
, used this tactic—after all, most of the testing was done not by the players but by QC programs. And yet, I found it strange that no one had leaked that this was going to happen. It’s basically impossible to keep such information secret until the last moment—unless of course,
Galactogon
’s IT security was impeccable. “Alright, put together an outline of the changelog and find me an exhaustive description of any changes to piloting mechanics. They have published something like that, haven’t they?”

“Yes, the new information should be posted on the official site. Displaying it now.” A projected screen popped up in front of me and began to fill with neat lines of text. My eyebrows rose higher and higher as each new sentence entered my gray matter. It was as if the new information was too much for my head and had inflated my brain up against my skull. I could see now why they had shut down
Galactogon
for an entire day—a typical patch could easily be applied within an hour, without the servers even going offline. But the game designers had cooked up a colossal adjustment to the game’s mechanics, including the additions of entirely new pawns.

And so!

Galactogon
now had several new types of vessels—among which there was still no mention of my new spherical klamir. Players now had access to the following ships, in ascending order of power: interceptor, scout, shuttle, transport, blocker, monitor, corvette, frigate, albenda and cruiser. The albenda—a monster housing fifty players—was basically no different from an un-upgraded cruiser. But the new updated cruiser…Well, I couldn’t even imagine how anyone could take one on anymore. There was also the harvester, but players couldn’t control it, so that tub was not included in the list.

Since the basic flight mechanics hadn’t changed, this expansion to the game’s fleet, was just about the only thing of interest to captains—and still it was but a drop in the bucket of what the developers were now introducing to
Galactogon
. The patch was directed above all at the engineering side of the game. Engineers now became incredibly useful, desirable and, well, basically indispensable to any ship. Thus this patch would be a godsend to any players who’d chosen this career, as they would now be the masters of repair and upgrades. They could tinker with the engines, weapons, armor, fuselage—if you wanted to improve anything, an engineer was what you needed. In addition to all that, they could now create individual robots—including gigantic robo-titans. It seemed like someone on the dev team had gotten tired of the marines lording it over all the planet-bound plebs and decided to buff another class for the sake of variety. All you had to do now was obtain one of these titans and learn how to control it—no amount of marines would be scary after that.

What I couldn’t help but be happy about was a new macro-mechanic called the cosmic raid—once a week, a humongous asteroid would come flying at a random, Confederate planet. The players would have to all get together and destroy this boulder. On one’s own, even with
Alexandria
, you couldn’t deal with a monster like that—you wouldn’t have the time and weapons. So uniting with other players was now mandatory. Naturally, this meant new missions and rewards, new opportunities for building Rapport and new factions, new planets, new trade routes, new mechanics, new, new, new…

Since most of
Galactogon
’s competitors had shut down, swelling the games userbase, the developers decided they had to make some concessions and simplified the game somewhat: At last, there would be a list of missions. Until now, it was up to the players to decide whether they had received an actual mission or not—and only a rare notification every once in a while would assure us poor bastards that we were indeed on the right path. The patch introduced a journal which would list the mission that a local had given to the player, as well as the current missions’ progress. On one hand, I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t done that earlier—on the other, it was nice to see that someone was listening and thinking about the game’s future.

According to the number that Stan displayed in his outline, there was about twenty-two new additions to the game, starting from the new ships and ending with new skins for the ships, so I didn’t delve too closely into the whole list. And yet, all of this was eclipsed by the patch’s main addition—for the first time in the game’s history, a common foe had appeared! An aggressive race from another universe had launched an invasion of
Galactogon
—threatening all twelve empires at once. In order to provide the players with an incentive to participate in the defense of their galaxy, the invaders had by some miracle managed to kidnap a representative from each empire’s ruling dynasty. Even the Anorxian Empire—an empire of robots ruled by a CPU—had one such weak link in its hierarchy. Twelve princes and princesses had gathered at a symposium for how to defend their universe—and that’s where they were all kidnapped. It was a pretty story, but the point was simple—the designers wanted the players to drop everything and go save those hostages, committing themselves to war with this new enemy…

“Master, someone has come to see you,” said Stan, tearing me away from my study of the manuals. I glanced at my watch and my eyebrows, already exhausted from all their recent jumping, tried to take off one more time. I had been sitting in front of my screen for six hours. There had been so much new information to read and process and it was so interesting that I hadn’t even noticed the day go by.

“Am I allowed to receive guests?” I asked puzzled, understanding very well that Stan was not exactly the right person to ask.

“No, but the visitor has full law enforcement clearance. However, I am not authorized to open the door. You will have to do it yourself, Master. The visitor has provided you with the option of choosing.”

“I’ll open it,” I replied, getting up. Taking into account that I was under close guard—and that Stan had not noticed anything out of the ordinary—there was no threat to me. My mind could benefit from going outside and talking to a living person, considering that I’d been locked away behind four walls like some criminal.

But I was mistaken in thinking so. No sooner had I opened the door and seen who had come to visit me than my good mood evaporated like a puddle of ether. It was too bad and I regretted it and couldn’t do anything about it…

“Good day, Alexis,” said my guest, the old man whom I had already had the pleasure of meeting by vidphone. And who, basically, was the reason for my confinement. “May I come in? We need to have a chat.”

“Please do,” I stepped aside, not comprehending at all why he’d even asked for permission. Given his rank, if this geezer had wanted to chat with me in person, he could’ve just as easily ordered me hogtied, placed in a flyer and brought to him. “Would you like some tea or coffee?”

“Water, if I may,” replied my guest, taking a seat. Stan instantly cooked up a glass of water, while I took a seat across from the old man and began to nervously wait for him to start the conversation. Waiting I could do—my gaming career had taught me that well.

“I have two piece of news for you,” the old man got to it, still without having officially introduced himself. Perhaps he had assumed that I would know his name. “The first is that we still have not managed to establish who is eliminating the contestants. The prize money is large enough to justify murdering all other competitors. According to the terms of the agreement, the search would still be on even if only one contestant remained. Consequently, you are still one of our suspects and are prohibited to leave these premises. That’s number one.”

The old man fell silent, returning to his glass of water and giving me the chance to process this news, which, of course, wasn’t really news to me at all. If I wasn’t still under suspicion, then I wouldn’t have been sitting in a cage like a hamster—so all I could do now was to stay sitting there and await the second piece of news. It wasn’t likely that a person of this caliber would decide to visit me in person in order to tell me that I was still in time out.

“I like your composure,” smiled the old man, scooting the glass aside. “No unnecessary emotions, no yelling, no demanding I respect your rights. You’re not even interested in who I am—as if you already know.”

“Yelling, as I understand it, would be pointless. You’re still not going to release me. My rights have been limited by the court’s decision—I’ve already received the judgment text. As for who you are…Why would I care? The only thing I wouldn’t mind knowing is your name—since, it’d be nice to know how to address you. I don’t imagine you’d like me to call you ‘old man’ or ‘grandpa,’” I replied, holding my voice in check. I could not afford to let any implication or irony or some other emotion sneak into it—I had to simply assert facts at the moment. I didn’t much feel like letting someone see that I was uncomfortable.

“Colonel Walters,” smiled the guest. “You can call me by that name. Well, well. In that case, let’s get to the second bit of news. Tell me, are you familiar with our government’s children’s policy?”

“Excuse me, I didn’t quite hear you right,” I asked shocked, discarding my neutral demeanor. “What children?”

“Just, you know, children. Kids, tykes, toddlers. Smalls who scurry about and try to crawl into various nooks and crannies and make a big stink about eating their veggies. You know—children.”

“I’m sorry but I can’t say I know much about them,” I replied, trying to regain my composure and squelch my emotions. What did kids and government policy have anything to do with anything?

“That’s what I figured. In that case, if you indulge me, I’d like to read you a short lecture. As you are aware, in recent years the national birthrate has been plummeting in relation to the mortality rate. As a result, the government has taken a close interest in any and all pregnancies and even begun to take them under its oversight…”

Col. Walters went on detailing what I already knew, by and large. Following the mass automation of human labor by robots and machines, our planet experienced a demographic boom—the rapid economic growth spurring a growth in family size. It became normal for a family to have three or four children. However, this did not last for a long time—that is, it lasted until the invention of somatic immersion and video games that could exploit that technology. Despite the fact that the elites own and control these games (
Galactogon
is no exception), it was simply impossible to overlook the drastic drop in the birthrate. In a mere twenty years, the population’s desire to have three or four children gave way to an utter refusal to have children whatsoever. I could say for myself that I simply couldn’t even imagine living with a little monster who would dash around my home, make a mess all over the place, yank the cables out of my gaming capsule and demand I spend time with it.