Like mine, Brando's avatar looked just like him, at least facially… but the AllVerse had been pretty generous to him regarding his physique.
“Yeah… it’s Brandon!” he corrected me nonchalantly, but it wasn’t gonna stop me from calling him “Brando” if I felt like it, which was all the time. “I was wondering what had happened to you.”
“Oh, is he your friend?” Silas asked.
Semantics, and I didn’t really feel the need to describe to an NPC that I was beyond having friends. What I needed now were allies or people who knew what the heaven was going on. “I guess, yeah.”
Silas raised his front tentacles with excitement. “Friend Brando!”
Brandon glanced at Silas, then at my nautical boxers, then he just looked me in the eye. “Uh, Brandon, yeah. Boss… what happened to you?”
That’s a great question.
I gave him a winning smile. “I sincerely hoped you could answer that, given how much I pay you. What in the world is going on here, Brando? Is this part of the neural uplink tech? How do we get out of this martyr-flinging game?”
Brandon scratched the back of his head. “Yeah, none of us are quite sure what happened here. We think maybe it had something to do with a meteorite that entered Earth’s atmosphere around the time of the AllVerse launch.”
“Meteorite? What meteorite?” I frowned at him. “I never heard anything about this.”
“Right after you got into the pod and entered the game, we all got notifications on our phones that a nearby meteorite might cause temporary disruptions to some electronic systems,” he continued.
“So a meteorite caused this mess?”
Brando shrugged. “Maybe? According to some of the other Ascendant Games staff in here, there might be more going on. Either way, I can tell you this was not supposed to happen. This is not neural uplink-related. At first, I was, um, trying to find a way to exit. But, uh, I kinda started having fun, I guess? I always wanted to be a doctor when I was younger.”
Silas jabbed a tentacle at him. “That’s the spirit, Friend Brando. Chase your dream!”
In pure shock, I glanced around me, as if I were on some hidden-camera game show or just plain going insane. Both of which would be better than this. “Are you kidding me? Get. Me. Out. of. Here. Or you’ll need a doctor, Brando.”
Silas turned wide eyes to me. “Are we mad at him or happy for him? I’m lost now, mate… human behavior just boggles the mind.”
Brandon sighed. “Look, Mr. Shaw, my colleagues and I are trying. From what I understand, the AI is designed to keep the AllVerse active, so it might be more complicated than we think. What happened is not normal, I assure you. But there’s, uh, not much we can do about it right now.”
The anger boiling in my chest reached such an agonizing height that it somehow crossed to the other end of the spectrum, and I involuntarily laughed. It started slowly, then it grew faster and more manic.
It clearly unsettled Brandon, as it should.
Silas studied me and rubbed the part of his face that might’ve been his chin… or something. I don’t know. He’s a flipping octopus.
“That’s the kinda laugh that suggests a bloke’s about to do something rash. I’ve heard it before, and nothing good followed.”
Silas had hit the nail on the head.
I took a few deep breaths, pacing back and forth, as my mind-broken laughter finally subsided. Restraining myself from strangling morons was a near-daily occurrence, but Brandon had certainly earned a fair amount of goodwill over the years… at least for now.
“Okay, Brando, tell me this: Where do Players go when they die?” I asked. “Some don’t come back.”
Brandon grimaced. “I don’t know that either, Mr. Shaw. We have no way of knowing unless…”
“We die ourselves.” My anger shifted to dread. I remembered how it felt when the explosion had mortally wounded me, and I absently touched the spot in my gut where the shrapnel had taken root. “You don’t think…”
“I don’t know for sure.” Brandon shrugged. “Something’s not right with this whole thing, so I don’t recommend putting it to the test.”
“Seems pretty obvious to me, mate,” Silas said. “I know when I wake up in the morning, my first thought is usually, ‘Well, better not die today.’ And so far, it’s working. Try it.”
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“Look, I’m not giving up on figuring out what’s happening. A few others on the Ascendant Games team are in here, too, trying to do the same. But to get to other places and survive, we need to play the game.” Brandon gestured to my boxers and Silas. “As you’ve discovered. But while there’s fun to be had, I don’t intend to live in here forever.”
“Good. I knew I liked you, Brando.” I narrowed my eyes. “Is Nate in here?”
Silas blinked at me. “Who’s Nate? You say his name with such… seething anemone.”
“You mean… animosity?” Brandon asked.
“I know what I said.”
I sighed sharply through my nose.
“Well, I can’t say for sure, but his personal body pod was active when I logged in,” Brandon replied.
My jaw tensed. “Even though I fired his sorry asp and sent him packing. He must have done something, rigged this somehow. I’ve gotta find a way to get out. You said others on the team are here working on that?”
He lifted his WHIM and typed away on it. “Yeah. Before you go, here.”
My WHIM pinged with a friend request from Brandon.
| Mandible – Level 8 Player |
| Game/Class: Assassin’s Bleed |
| Accept? |
I accepted his request. “Mandible? Really?”
Brandon eyed my eldritch Karjok boxers. “I mean… are you really judging—”
I shot him a glare, and he got the message.
He held his hands up. “Just saying. We’re all kind of in the same boat here.”
“No, we’re not in the same motor-flapping boat as those husks out there. We’re not even in the same ocean.” I corrected. “And I’m never gonna call you Mandible.”
“Boats are a pointless human invention,” Silas asserted. “Why use a boat when you can just swim?”
We glanced at him, then back at each other.
“As I was saying. None of these losers are anything like me,” I boasted. “In the real world, I’m a millionaire, soon to be a billionaire, and I own this sad fake little world where these idiot gamers attempt to live out their pathetic dreams.”
Brandon’s eyes hardened. “My son… plays games. He’s in here, too.”
“Oh, I see.” My eyes widened as shock seized my chest. “So are you a bad father, or…?”
He set his jaw and entered a message on his WHIM, then an alert pinged on mine.
BRANDON: Okay, now we can message each other no matter where we are in the AllVerse and keep each other updated on discovering a way out. You can see my real name in the chat now that we’re friends.
I nodded, even as I changed his name to “Brando” in the messaging interface. “Good.”
Brandon looked at me for a moment. “You know, sir, my son—”
“I’m feelin’ better than ever!” bellowed the sergeant from Hall of Duty. He strode up to us, looking refreshed. He’d even grown his missing left arm back. “You boys worked harder than a one-legged man at an asp-kicking contest. C’mon, squad. Let’s roll out.”
On cue, the entire squad dove out of their beds into handsprings and acrobatic maneuvers, then left the hospital and parkoured up the buildings toward the battlefield.
So much for my follow-up fare.
I sighed. “Well… that was—”
“Sick!” Silas roared, then slingshotted himself off my shoulder and attempted the octopus version of parkour, only to tip over a potted plant, squish against the window, and slide down in a pitiful display. “Nnng… can confirm… that’s a lot harder than it looks… and I’ve got eight legs, so mad respect to them.”
As he squeegeed down the window, he left a slimy trail behind.
“Yeah, anyone who gets treated here gets parkour assassin abilities for a while,” Brandon explained.
I just shook my head. “Of course they do.”
My ocean-dwelling companion clambered and squelched his way back onto my magnificent deltoid. “More importantly, they didn’t need your services, so you’re out of a job.”
“Yeah, thanks, pal. I got that part.” I refocused on Brandon again. “Mmkay. I gotta get going. Do you know where any of the other tech squad are? I’ll look for them.”
He checked his WHIM. “Well, we all materialized behind the scenes but had to split up. Laura and Shawn are MIA at the moment. Dirk and Stecker are in the Maintenance Simulator, last they checked in…”
“Maintenance Simulator?” I winced. “That’s seriously a game-type here?”
“Oh, yeah. There are all sorts of simulators here in the AllVerse. We programmed them in to give folks easier access to vocational training.”
“That is…” I found myself reconsidering a lot of the things I’d believed about this place and the people using it, but only briefly. “Whatever. Why are they in that one?”
“They reasoned it might have answers to the… phenomenon we’re all experiencing. But…” Brandon hesitated. “Sydney hasn’t messaged in the last hour, so I don’t know where she is.”
I furrowed my brow. “That really hot coder is in here?”
“Oi, is she on fire?” Silas asked. “Literally a blazing inferno? Or just hyperthermic?”
Brandon sighed. “Yes, Sydney is here. She’s our lead coder, crazy smart. She had some ideas on how to fix this.”
Revisiting her real-life curves provided a moment of catharsis amid this virtual-fantasy-gone-wrong. My eyes snapped open with a sudden realization, a question Brandon would have the answer to. He’d better, or I’d be cutting his salary.
“Hey, what’s the deal with Players stealing classes and items? How is that possible?”
He furrowed his brow. “It’s… not. We scrapped that idea long ago.”
“And rightfully so,” Silas said. “Stealing is against the Karjok Code. In most cases, anyway.”
Brandon’s stare became vaguely sad and vacant, like a 33-year-old cat mom. “I remember, because man… gamers can be really mean. They wrote some unkind emails about it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted. “But I met some chick who can steal classes.”
He squinted at me. “I—I don’t know how that’s possible. They must have modded the game somehow, or they hacked the properties of their avatar. But I’m just a body pod and neural link tech, not a coder. If someone got early access, they might’ve been able to mod it, but we built in a suite of countermeasures against that. So no one’s supposed to be able to.”
“Well, this chick definitely can.” I sighed and tipped my head back. “As much as I’m loving this convo, we’ve got work to do.”
“The Maintenance Sim pops up in many different places, sectors, but they were at the water treatment plant last time Dirk checked in. They said they wanted to check one of the manufacturing plants and the sand mine, so I don’t know if they’re still there.”
“Then that’s where I’m heading. You…” I looked him up and down. “Do something more useful than playing assassin doctor, mmkay, Brando?”
He took a deep breath before answering, “Yes, sir.”
As Silas and I left the Assassin’s Bleed hospital behind, I checked my map. Guess I’d have to do something I really didn’t want to do.
The mere thought of it filled me with dread and angst, but I didn’t have a choice, so I raised my WHIM to ask Lucretia a question.
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break--Royal Road. They call us the Critical Hitters.
In the desolate desert of the North American Sector, the government harvests the Soul Energy of siblings Eos and Maxima in secret.
When their powers attract the attention of a dangerous criminal organization, their routine lives are shattered. Eos and Maxima must search for freedom and the truth about their past as hostile forces close in.
The answers they seek lie behind one word—!
Occam's Favor
A grizzled ex-mech pilot is drawn back into the Everwar, a decades-long conflict raging across Jupiter’s moonscape.
This time he refuses to fight alone, bringing a crew of misfits and a mech powerful enough to rewrite the war itself.
is a can't-miss power-scaling mech series. Read it now!
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Dungeon Crawler Carl Audio Immersion Tunnel for Soundbooth Theater, and he's the lead writer for the Dungeon Crawler Carl Role Playing Game.
