Axillon99 Page 3

  She took the cloth and dabbed at her face. “Thanks. And that’s exactly what’s wrong with people.”

  “Huh?” Blake blinked.

  “Exactly. You have no clue who he is or why his winning is so fucked up.”

  “Language!” yelled Hal from the back room.

  She sighed to herself before raising her voice to shout, “Sorry.”

  Blake shrugged. “I don’t follow politics.”

  “Steyr’s got so much baggage he had to run as an independent. Neither party would take him.” Dakota started ticking points off on her fingers. “Three divorces and one dead wife under suspicious circumstances. He’s been involved in two fatal car accidents while drunk and walked away without any charges. Bribery, corruption… everyone knows he’s basically a paid employee of the medical insurance industry. And there’s been like sixteen men who’ve accused him of sexual misconduct with them when they were underage. The worst is a report he’d been found in a hotel room with a minor boy.”

  Blake’s mouth hung open. “That can’t all be true. He’d never have won the election if there’s any evidence.”

  “No shit,” muttered Dakota.

  The back door popped open enough for Hal to stick his head out. “Language.” His serious stare turned into a smile. “Please. At least while you’re on the clock.”

  “Wow, Hal. You’ve got good ears.” Dakota raised both eyebrows.

  A disheveled man in an olive-drab coat stumbled in and approached the counter. Long, scraggly black hair with streaks of grey hung well past his shoulders, and an air of mildew awfulness surrounded him.

  Dakota took a deep breath before stepping closer, trying to hold her good air as much as possible. “Morning. What can I get started for you?”

  The man began to smile at her, but his expression shifted to distress. A second later, he let out a long, sonorous belch that fluttered her hair. Whiskey fumes bleached her cheeks.

  She barely managed to suppress the urge to gag. Shoot me now. Alas, Flicker didn’t exist in real life to make her vanish out of this guy’s sight and go hide somewhere. Still, she flexed her brain the same way she did to trigger the ability in the game.

  Nothing happened.

  “Uhh.” The man wiped his face on his sleeve. “Real sorry about that. Snuck up on me. Lemme get a large coffee and one of them egg sandwiches.” He set a twenty-dollar-bill on the counter.

  “No problem.” She smiled at him.

  “That ’lection’s so damn rigged,” muttered the odorous man. “No way that guy should’ve even gotten six percent of the vote.”

  Dakota filled a cup with dark roast from the samovar. “Yeah, seriously. See, Blake, everyone knows what a b… awful person Steyr is.”

  “Thank you,” said Hal from the back room.

  She tossed a simple egg-on-a-muffin in the convection oven and hit the button. While it heated, she rang the guy up and gave him a ten-dollar-bill back as change. At a ping, she ran to the oven, boxed the sandwich, and dropped it in a bag along with three ham sandwiches from yesterday, too old to sell anymore but still perfectly safe to eat.

  “Here you are. Have a nice day.”

  The man noticed the charity and saluted her with the bag. “You too, thanks.”

  Dakota melted into a lean on the counter and yawned. Yeah. I’ll have a nice day as soon as I get home.

  The Prize

  3

  A few minutes past noon, the soft ping of the door chime snapped Dakota out of a standing nap. Before panic at being caught sleeping by a customer could stop her heart, the blurry form of an approaching dark-skinned man resolved into her more-or-less boyfriend, Eric Frost. He often joined her at the café for lunch since it only cost him a few blocks’ walk. Today, he sported a particularly large grin.

  Although he worked as a rank-and-file tech support phone agent for Ulticomm (a mobile provider), he usually wore a shirt and tie. She didn’t mind his ‘dress for the job you want’ mentality, since it didn’t involve her ass suffering uncomfortable dress clothes. Plus, she couldn’t argue that he cleaned up rather well. The fragrance of fast food followed him, likely from the white bag in his hand.

  “Hey you.” She leaned over the counter and hooked a finger amid the buttons of his shirt, pulling him close enough for a quick kiss. “Lunch time already?”

  “Already? The day is dragging. Feels like been stuck there for eight hours and it’s only twelve. CSI just dropped a nuclear warhead.”

  Blake twisted away from the drive-through window to gawk at him. “Say what? A nuke? The hell is CSI?”

  “Software company,” deadpanned Dakota. “Cognition Studios.”

  “How did they get their hands on a nuke?” asked Blake.

  I’m losing my ability to differentiate between naïve and stupid. Dakota rubbed the bridge of her nose.

  “Damn, man. You need to drink some o’ this coffee y’all’s sellin’. Metaphorical nuke.” Eric winked at Dakota before pulling out of his lean and standing straight. “They sent out a major announcement this morning. Surprised you aren’t going crazy.”

  “Didn’t even look at the computer when I woke up.” She scratched at the side of her head. “You know exactly why I had a rough morning. And how are you so awake?”

  “Yeah, but keepin’ on going was your idea,” said Eric.

  Blake’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Video game, Blake. I stayed up too late.” She sighed. “Peach tea?”

  Eric nodded, practically bouncing like an over-excited boy while she rang him up for a large iced peach tea, then mixed it from the boxed concentrate. Hal didn’t usually let his employees do transactions for friends and family, but that rule tended to apply more to the teenage staff than Dakota.

  “Takin’ my lunch, ’kay?” She glanced back at Blake, who nodded. After using the register terminal to clock out, she grabbed a turkey wrap from the cooler and joined Eric at a table. “So, what’s this big news?”

  He set his food down, but didn’t move to open it. “CSI released the Neurona 4 helmets early. Already ordered you one.”

  She stirred a straw around her tea, smiling. “Awesome. That’s really sweet of you, but I wouldn’t call it apocalyptic news.”

  Eric pulled open his bag and took out a carton bearing a chicken sandwich. “Nah, the helmet’s not the big news. To celebrate the release of the Neurona 4, they’re doing a promotion type contest with a big ass prize.”

  Dakota paused, millimeters from sinking her teeth into the turkey wrap. “What, like a million bucks?” She bit down.

  “Ten,” said Eric.

  She gasped in a flake of lettuce and started choking. Eric froze, poised to leap out of the chair for a few seconds until it became clear she had herself under control. Dakota buried her face in a napkin and coughed. Eyes watering, she peered at him. “Ten million dollars?”

  Blake dropped something metal behind the counter.

  “Yeah. You okay, babe?” He picked up his sandwich.

  “Fine. Just wasn’t ready for that. I’m zero for two in alternative breathing today.”

  Eric hastily chewed his first mouthful. “Alternative breathing?”

  She smirked. “Yeah. Tried to breathe coffee earlier. Worked about as well as this.”

  “So, yeah… CSI put a mission chain in the game. First person or crew to complete it wins,” said Eric.

  “Shit. For ten million bucks, maybe I ought to try playing video games,” said Blake.

  “Language, please!” yelled Hal from the back room.

  Blake ducked.

  Dakota mulled the idea over a few bites of her lunch. “It’s just a BS marketing gimmick you know. Either they’ve already picked who the ‘winner’ will be, and it’s like an actor or something, or the missions will be so damn hard no one will ever win the prize.”

  “Yeah. I figure it’s gonna be a pain in the ass.” A huge grin spread across Eric’s face. “But we have an advantage other crews don’t.”

  Her right
eyebrow inched upward.

  Eric winked. “You.”

  Dakota rolled her eyes. “Fawkes isn’t that über you know. Most of my gear is blue, and my weapon’s a POS. So I put more points in the data infiltration tree than like eighty-five percent of the players, but that’s not going to make a difference.”

  “Nah, girl. I mean you.”

  She hunched down over the table, leaning closer while whispering, “I am not going to hack into CSI. I’m pretty sure if they’ve made this quest impossible, if anyone completes it, they’re going to triple check every log. Not sure about you, but I am allergic to prison.”

  “Yeah, you and me both.” Eric shook his head. “That ain’t what I’m sayin’. I mean you see things like no one else I ever met sees things.”

  “That’s because my body is permeated with high octane caffeine from being in here all day. I’m starting to extend my consciousness into parallel dimensions.”

  He laughed. “Well, still. The others wanna try.”

  “You talked to them already?” She tilted her head.

  “Yeah. Group chat this morning at like 8:05 once the email went out. CSI sent a notice to every player, even to cancelled accounts.” Eric wiped his hands off on a paper napkin, which he tossed in the sandwich carton before closing it. “Tryin’ ta get people to come back.”

  “Sixty bucks a month is still more expensive than a lottery ticket.” She frowned.

  “Yeah, but the odds are much better. Besides…” He grasped her hand, tracing his thumb back and forth across her knuckles. “Even if we don’t come close to winning any money, we’re going to be playing the game anyway.”

  “True enough.” She stared deep into the chocolate brown of his eyes. Losing a night or two of gaming to spend some real world time with him didn’t strike her as a bad idea.

  She liked him quite a bit for a guy she met through the game a little more than a year ago. They’d progressed from ‘grouping for a mission’ to crewmates to real life friends―when he mentioned he lived in Manhattan too, she insisted on meeting him―and wound up somewhere between friends with benefits and a ‘thing.’ Boyfriend/girlfriend implied hopes of a future more concrete than either of them planned on, but she wasn’t sure anymore.

  “I’m thinkin’ about you and me wearing those new Neurona 4 helmets.”

  She grinned.

  “And nothing else.” Eric winked.

  Blake, again, dropped something.

  She cracked up laughing. “I dunno. That’s a little too vulnerable. Bad enough we can’t move.”

  “The ’Four has a proximity sensor. You can set it to let go of your brain if something gets too close.”

  “Huh… how ’bout that?” She shrugged. “Handy, but I’m still going to leave the door locked when we’re off saving the galaxy.”

  “Which galaxy?”

  She shrugged. “Pick one. Just not the one the Blix are from. Everything there is too damn small.”

  Eric chuckled. “Yeah. So, you ready to get started tonight or you gonna crash as soon as you get home?”

  “Well, I was kinda thinking we might do something together, but I suppose I can’t say no to that look on your face. You’re like a little boy about to get a new expensive toy.”

  “Ten million.” He crumpled up his bag. “Damn. Almost outta time.”

  She figured she’d give it a couple days, maybe a week. Once the realization seeped into his brain that they wouldn’t log in and find the prize money in the first two hours―and once the larger realization among the player community that the prize sat out of reach hit home―she’d insist on some real life fun instead of gaming for a good long time.

  Like, probably three days in a row.

  Dead Anarchist

  4

  The world boasted several great monuments to Chinese culture: the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terracotta Army… and Dakota’s computer desk. Towers of stacked take-out cartons flanked her thirty-two inch monitor, well on their way to touching the ceiling in another few orders. A two-inch thick layer of sauce packets coated the desk, as well as upwards of a hundred plastic forks she’d never used. Empty containers that once held wonton soup snaked like a serpent up from behind the monitor in a tower that verged on toppling.

  Alas, tonight wound up on the cheap end: instant ramen. The Wednesday-to-Friday stretch every other week toward the end of a pay period always got lean. Wearing as close to Eric’s suggestion as she felt comfortable with (a large T-shirt, fuzzy socks, and nothing else), she reclined in her computer chair, munching on freeze-dried noodles and shrimp-flavored salt.

  The fatigue that had dogged her all day evaporated at 3:30 p.m., as soon as her shift ended and she had free time to throw at Axillon99. For a two-year-old game, it still monopolized her attention. It might’ve even had something to do with why she still worked as a barista instead of chasing down a real developer’s job. Time spent hunting for employment meant time not in the game world.

  Technology had its disadvantages though. The Neurona series helmets had been mainstream for about ten years. As a kid, she’d grown up playing standard video games using a monitor, and didn’t get her hands on a helmet until she’d turned eighteen and bought one with her own money. Her parents still believed the helmets belonged to an elaborate scheme by the CIA or the NSA to read minds.

  At least a third of the games on the market continued to favor monitors. Either to cater to the slow adopters/suspicious types, or because the game didn’t lend itself to full immersion. No one would want to deep dive for something like solitaire or a real-time strategy sim. Using a Neurona helmet lifted the player out of the real world and hurled them bodily into another place. Some people couldn’t handle it, too freaked out by the realism in being shot at or attacked by monsters, and still preferred having the detachment of a physical screen in the way.

  Of course, liquid cavemen (as the screen-users had come to be known) couldn’t coexist in the same virtual reality as helmet jocks. The differences in reaction time and control ability proved too vast a barrier. Early games that attempted to mix interfaces wound up being woefully imbalanced, like a boxing match between a blind couch potato and a Special Forces soldier.

  So, rather than deal with the complaining, software developers went in two different directions, sandboxing the environments. Monitor people played in games with other monitor people, Neurona players with Neurona players.

  It had been quite a while since Dakota used her screen to do anything more than read email or research bosses/strategies for Axillon99. However, the one advantage the screen people had―being able to eat and play at the same time―she missed. So, she shoveled ramen into her mouth while sitting cross-legged on her chair and reading as much about Cognition Systems International’s promotion as she could find online.

  The email Eric mentioned had been sitting in her inbox since earlier that morning. It contained the same information as she could find anywhere else. A contest existed in the form of a quest/mission, and it started from a random loot drop. No one mentioned if that random drop could come from any hostile creature, a quest reward, or if the developers had made it a pain in the ass and limited it to raid bosses or starship combat.

  In a game as vast as Axillon99, merely finding the quest could take months.

  The playable area comprised something like thirteen billion potential planets, most of which came courtesy of random generation. Perhaps ten thousand or so static worlds existed, created by the designers with specific ties to the game lore or missions. The rest of the star systems existed as nothing more than a speck on a map until someone went there, at which point, the game generated everything in more detail. Once a player had visited a system once, triggering the generation routine, it would remain constant. Some people theorized that eighty-seven percent of the explorable space on the star map had yet to be ‘filled in.’

  While the game offered a variety of alien races, Dakota had stuck with a ‘plain’ human when she made Fawkes. As
luck would have it, her whole crew had the same idea. For her, the alien races were a little too alien in appearance. Especially the Blix. Who wanted to play as a fourteen-inch-tall little green man with a huge head? Most Blix that left their homeworld climbed into robotic mecha suits that brought them up to a little bigger than human sized, since the rest of the universe wasn’t kind to tiny people. Short girl problems had nothing on being a Blix out of their suit.

  Some players stayed solo, doing missions planetside for the whole time they played, hopping shuttles or teleportation portals to new worlds when they got bored. Other players opted to form crews, often of five people, and ran around space in a corvette-class ship. Options there included running cargo, hunting pirates, being a pirate, smuggling contraband, exploring, or taking random assignments from the ‘job board.’ Generally, the trader types tended to stay solo and work their way up to freighter class ships to make more money faster. The very idea of it bored Dakota to bits. A game this vast―not to mention explosive―and people spent their time being an interstellar FedEx driver?

  Then again, some places started accepting in-game money for real world purchases. The currency even had a real world abbreviation on the Exchange: AX. So maybe suffering the brain-liquefying boredom of being a star trucker had some merit to it.

  Dakota finished off her ramen and set the plastic bowl on the desk before tapping the controller button to load the Axillon99 client. While a progress bar crept across the screen, she relocated to her bed two steps away, stretched out, and snugged her Neurona 3 helmet on. A thin bundle of wires connected from the top of the helmet to the PlayStation 7 tower. She’d gotten an aftermarket cord lined with hot pink flexible LEDs that made it appear to be an energy cable. After snuggling into the comforter, she flipped the visor down and waited for the sync process to start.

  “Welcome to Axillon99,” said a pleasant female voice via speakers. “Neurona 3 interface initializing. Security option has been set to cortical imprint.”

  A faint tingle spread across her head as the system read her ‘brain fingerprint.’ Much easier than remembering a password―and impossible to fake.