The NextWorld 02: Spawn Point (5 page)

She can sympathize and empathize and experience what's going on inside of herself and other people. She's getting in touch with emotions she doesn't recognize, because it's the first time she's ever felt them. She may have learned what it means to be human, but only on an intellectual level from whatever books were available in the game's library. Now she's experiencing it first hand.

She's looking at me like she wants my help. She wants me to explain to her what it all means. The happiness and the sadness and the anxiety and the excitement. But the only thing I've ever felt is love.

“Arkade,” she says my name as she reaches out and touches my hand. “There's something else you need to know.”

“What is it?”

She glances back at the civilians, but they're focused on their code books, not our conversation. When she speaks, she's unable to look at me.

“It took them a long time to change the code. They had to be careful. Changing code is dangerous. If they made a mistake...”

I wait with a blank face, oblivious to what she's about to say. I can hear the struggle in her voice, something internal, like she's unable to speak.

“How long did it take? How long was I in the loop?”

She grabs both my hands, but she still isn't looking at me. She can't. She squeezes, letting me know she's there with me. Letting me know she's strong, so I can be weak.

“You were dead for two years.”

The labyrinth is silent other than the constant scribbling of the quill pens that the civilians are using to correct the code in their books. They are still finding errors caused by the change in my spawn point.

Cyren stands next to me, her body cold and defeated. I place my arm around her, trying to comfort her, to let her know she's safe again, but her mind is elsewhere. In another time. Another place.

I know I should be more concerned with the years I've lost in my life, all the changes that have happened in my absence, but my mind keeps coming back to one thing.

“How many?” I ask.

Cyren looks at me, waiting for more.

“How many died while I was gone?”

She lowers her head, facing the fear of answering the question with a bashful hesitancy.

“Nine thousand, three hundred and eighty-seven.”

I stumble backward, as if the truth shoved me away from her. My fists clench.

“The Level Zeros?”

She bites her lip, trying a different pain. “Including me, there are twenty-seven of us left.”

I feel distant from the truth, like the number is so unreal that I'm unsure of its meaning. I should have been there. I vow right then to never let another NPC fall. It's a foolish, naive promise, one I know that's impossible for me to keep, yet it's all I have. It's all I can offer. The past is gone, written in code, but the future scrolls ahead of me. I have to be in control of something.

There's a tapping above us that breaks the silence.

“Rain,” Cyren says when she sees my confusion.

I look up at the stonework of the ceiling. Above that are the grains of sand that cover the desert zone. Above that are the clouds in the sky that cover all of DangerWar 2.

I've never seen a real sky before. My dad always promised to take me on a tour of the upper levels of our tower, but we never found the time. Work and school and the growing distance between us got in the way. It doesn't matter. I doubt it's as beautiful as a virtual sky, even during a storm. In this world, everything is meticulously crafted, shaped, and reworked until every last detail is exactly what the designer pictured in their imagination. This is better than the “real world.”

But the real world is still there.

I sit down on the stone bench along one wall and open my message screen. The most recent attempts to contact me are from my father. It surprises me. Even if someone within the government alerted him that I fell into the log-out loop, that I was trapped in a coma state, I can't imagine him caring. It would be no different than me being “trapped” inside the game. It changes nothing for him. In the real world I'm a body. A hunk of flesh lying in an E-Womb.

I try to push away the painful thoughts and mindlessly scroll through the endless list of message requests. I smile as I realize ninety percent of them are from Xen and Raev. Of course they are. I choose “Delete All” and select “New Connection.”

It takes a few seconds before the screen opens in front of me, but instead of Xen's smiling face, the image on the screen wobbles for a second before dissolving into monochromatic static. Ones and Zeros scroll down the screen, separated by black and white pixels. I swipe at it, but my gestures aren't activating any commands.

The civilians all scream at the same time, “Turn it off!”

I keep swiping my hands at the screen, but it retracts from my grasp and explodes into a cloud of digital noise.

“What's happening?” I ask as panic tries to collapse my chest.

“The firewall is down!”

I stand up, but I don't know what to do.

“How did that happen?”

The civilians are flipping through pages, scanning each line of code at lightning fast speeds.

“The spawn point. It forced the firewall to shut down so that it could slip you back into the game.”

I look over to Cyren. She appears frozen next to me, her body unable to react to the news.

“What was the firewall protecting us from?” I ask her, reaching out and touching her arm. “What else got through?”

As soon as I touch her, she jerks, catching up to the present. She leaps to her feet and rushes to the door, throwing it open and running down the halls of the underground labyrinth as fast as she can. I follow her, but by the time I catch up to her, she's outside the hidden entrance to the labyrinth, standing in the cold sand of the desert night, helplessly staring upward.

“What are you doing?” I yell over the pounding rain and howling winds. “We shouldn't be outside. The monsters could-”

The rain comes to a sudden stop. The clouds twitch, turning from a gray mist to flashing, monochromatic static.

“What is happening?” I ask.

Cyren is silent as we watch the static spread out. Black and white pixels flash on and off randomly, like the entire game is glitching. I glance at Cyren's face. The hyper strobe effect of the sky is bouncing off her porcelain skin. Her contemplation is stoic as she peers upward, but there's a look in her eyes that I can't quite place. It's like she's struggling against another emotion, fighting against an overwhelming feeling that's threatening to knock her over. But she remains resilient.

“Cyren. What is that?”

She turns her shaking eyes toward me, the flashing lights of the static gleam from the tears forming on the surface. When her pupils have locked on to mine, she squeezes my hand and says, “It's a virus.”

From high above, echoing through the world, we hear a groaning noise that sounds like an aching hunger inside the stomach of a giant. The concussive blast of the sound sends out a wave of sand and throws us both to the ground. I cover my ears, trying to stop the noise from shattering my ear drums.

When I scramble to my feet, I can see the distortion of the sky bending outward, like something is pushing on it from the other side. The pixels and the binary code elongate as the sky stretches downward. It keeps growing until it reaches its maximum tension. The groaning stops and the distorted static hangs there, teasing me with a moment of peace. I believe, for half of a second, that it's over.

Then the sky shatters.

Each tiny pixel bursts out in a radius, sprinkling to the ground like the ash of war. In its wake, it leaves a hole where there are no clouds, there are no stars, there is only the blackness, the emptiness, the nothingness that surrounded me upon my death.

That scene, that image, freezes me in place. My feet weigh twenty times more than they should. My muscles weaken. I can't move. I can't speak. I can't do anything other than stare at the hole in the world.

Cyren is yelling something from behind me, but I'm not listening. Her hand sets on my shoulder, pulling me away from the moment, but nothing inside me acknowledges her existence. I'm lost in the face of oblivion.

“Arkade!” she screams my name, her voice powerful and desperate.

It shakes me. I'm able to turn, however slowly, and see the terror in her face.

“Run!” she yells, pulling on my arm.

Her words don't make sense.

“Run? From what?”

Time slows down. Her eyes raise from me to the sky. She pulls harder.

“From that!”

I turn and look over my shoulder even as her Level 100 strength rips me from my immobile fear. My feet stumble through the sand, trying to move sideways because I can't tear my eyes away from the sky.

From the blackness, the coiled body of a giant worm descends toward the world. Its wrinkled flesh unfolds as it stretches toward the ground. Its movement seems slow, but I soon realize it appears that way because of its size. The mouth of the beast opens and a thousand razor sharp teeth encircle the gaping maw, spinning around the circumference like an inverted buzz saw. Inside the mouth is an endless throat of nothingness, waiting to swallow anything. Everything.

Cyren's hand grips my wrist tighter. She's screaming, but the words are incoherent above the heartbeat that's throbbing in my ears. My feet move faster, trying to catch up to her. She's dragging me, I know it, but I still can't look away from the apocalyptic monster plummeting toward the desert.

Right as the mouth of the worm reaches the ground, the tail breaks free from the hole in the sky, leaving the emptiness behind it. When the worm plunges into the desert floor, I'm expecting some immense quake, like a bomb that will shake the world, but there's no impact. It's as if the desert disappears as the rotating teeth devour it. The worm dives deep into the sand before curling back upward, leaving the absence of anything in its wake.

It's consuming.

Swallowing.

Deleting.

The terror in my body forces me to look away. I can't comprehend what I'm seeing. Logic is taking too long to process. I go primal. Fight or flight. I dig my boots into the sand, pushing myself away from the threat. Cyren doesn't need to drag me anymore. We're both running at full speed.

We cross over a large dune when my gamer brain kicks in. I swipe my hand in the air and open my inventory of magic items. My muscle memory helps me scroll to the exact spot in the alphabet for my Boots of Speed. I replace my Boots of Leaping in my magic item load-out, scoop up Cyren in my arms, and speed across the surface of the desert, leaving a cloud of sand in the wake of my dashing feet.

I can't help stealing a glance over my shoulder. There's a broken horizon, like an incomplete puzzle. The desert floor ends in jagged edges, revealing the obliteration of the worm's deletion. Voided areas of annihilation streak across the sky, crisscrossing trails of black left by the worm's flight through the game world. It continues, back and forth, systematically annihilating the entirety of the desert zone.

My constant push forward stretches our distance from the worm, but I don't let myself rest. When we reach the edge of the zone, I urge myself forward. My Boots of Speed burn into the pavement of the highway, toward the ruins of DangerWar City.

When the first exit sign appears, I realize I don't know where I'm going. I have no plan. I have no strategy. I yell before I know what I'm saying. I'm blubbering, my words tumbling out of my lips with a desperate speed.

“I don't know what to do! What do I do?”

“I'm contacting the remaining Level Zeros. They're collecting as many civilians as they can. We'll rendezvous with them in the city.”

“The city?” I don't understand how she could be directing us toward more danger. “What about the end game monsters?”

“The Level Zeros are back at Level 100 now that you're alive again. We should be able to handle any monster if we're all together.”

How is she staying so calm and collected? She's the one I'd expect to be out of control, overwhelmed with emotion. I'm supposed to be the logical one, yet here I am, shaking like I'm freezing to death.

She places her hands on my shoulders and squeezes. There's a gentleness mixed with a firm reassurance. It's calming and invigorating all at the same time. She leans in and places her mouth next to my ear again. I feel her breath as she whispers, “I love you.”

I was hoping for a game plan. I was hoping for a strategy. I was hoping for a clear set of instructions that I could follow to an ultimate goal. That's what I thought I needed. But she gives me three simple words and brings my mind back to where it belongs.

I dig my feet into the pavement and head to the right, turning off the highway and running down the off-ramp. When we turn on to the street that heads toward downtown, I twist my head and look back at the desert sky. It's almost completely gone. A few chunks of cloud still remain, but otherwise there is only blackness. We're too far away to see the worm. I'm thankful for that.

After I released the players from the game, the civilians went about cleaning up all the destruction that remained after the restrictions were removed from the monsters. The world looked livable again. But now, as we reach the main street of DangerWar City, I'm able to see the destruction that happened while I was dead.

The clouds that cover the sky only serve to add to the gray decay of the city. Beams of steel lay crooked and broken, like the skeletons of rotting corpses. No windows remain, only shattered glass. Signs for stores are no longer connected to their bases. Street lamps lay shattered across the pavement and vehicles lay overturned on the streets. The pavement is cracked from the impact of brute force, scratched by claws and talons, blackened by the scorch marks of magic and explosives. It looks like the apocalypse, but I know better.
The apocalypse
is still eating the desert.

I scan the skyline of demolished structures and see one building standing tall above the others, somewhat still intact. I nudge Cyren and point to it.

“We'll make our stand there.”