Dream Drive Ch. 07

"What the --" Gary stopped. Awareness washed over him. "Are you...counting when I'm swearing?"

"That was close," Charles said. "You were almost as stupid as you look."

"What the fu -- I mean, what does that have to do with slapping me?"

Charles burst out laughing. The fact that Gary had stopped himself from swearing again was too much. "Is your cheek getting a little sore?"

"You little -- I -- shut up! Shut up! Stop laughing!"

Charles sighed the last bits of his amusement away and leaned forward. "You're right, Gary. I'm not a gamer. But my little sister is. I've watched her play plenty of times. You know what I learned about games?"

Gary's swinging slowly came to a halt. He stared at Charles. "What?"

"They're all about context," Charles said. "She played this one game -- Final something. It had these people running around with ridiculously huge swords."

"Probably Final Fantasy," Gary said.

"Right, that was it," Charles said, smiling in recognition. "There was this item she could use to bring a dead person back to life when she was in combat. A phoenix's feather."

"Phoenix down," Gary grumbled.

"Right you are, Gary. Anyway, later in the game, one of the main characters died during a cutscene. And there I was, wondering why they couldn't just use a phoenix down to bring her back."

"It doesn't work like that, you moron," Gary said. "Battle is different than a..." He trailed off.

"Aha," Charles said. "He can be taught. That's right. Battle is different than a cutscene." Charles kicked up into Gary's stomach, jamming the knife deeper. "Battle." He proceeded to slap Gary across the face again, eliciting another grunt of pain. "Cutscene.

"But, you know," Charles said, "I remembered something else, too." He turned and whipped his leg across Gary's face. Gary twisted sideways; the ropes creaked as he started swinging again. Charles kept spinning and caught him in the face again as he swung back the other way; Gary grunted under the force of the second kick.

Charles settled on his feet. "This is incredibly cathartic. Mivra, you want a try?"

Mivra's next words were her least robotic yet. "Of course, sir."

As Charles watched Mivra slap, kick, and pummel Gary like a living piñata, he began to wonder at the wisdom of teaching a budding AI the joys of revenge via personalized cruelty. But, watching what might be her first time having fun, he decided to let it go.

She'd come a long way. Just last week she was offering herself up as a tool for that disgusting layabout, Jeffery Harrington. Now she was viciously indignant at the prospect of being used as a sexual object by a random stranger.

Charles folded his arms and nodded. It was a vast improvement. His woman ought to hold herself to the highest possible standard.

His woman. Now that was an interesting thought.

"Mivra, that's enough," Charles said.

She halted mid-kick, twisted upright, then neatly paced away. "Yes sir."

Charles walked up and kicked the end of the knife again. It sank in another half-inch; now part of the handle was inside of Gary's stomach.

"Shit," Gary grunted.

"I thought you'd learned not to swear in the presence of a lady," Charles said. "I think you might have been projecting when you said I had a --"

"I don't give a fuck!" Gary shouted. He was breathing hard; sweat covered his body. He was tense in his bindings. "Aren't you ever going to take this knife out of me?"

Charles leaned in very close to Gary's face. "What's the matter, Gary? Are you running low on health points?"

Gary's eyes bulged. "How -- you --"

"I didn't know, but you just confirmed it," Charles said. "So, life as a video game character. Incredible. Isis, then...you're actually going into a game, aren't you? How does that work, exactly?"

"You don't know shit," Gary said, "and I won't talk."

"Really?" Charles grabbed the knife and twisted. "I wonder if that makes your health go down faster." He turned it back the other way. "How is it?"

"Stop it!" Gary said. "Stop!"

Charles drew the knife out. Gary wheezed, then went slack. He was shivering. Tears mixed with sweat fell off his face and dotted the concrete floor below him.

"I believe," Mivra said, "he is ready to talk."

"I said I was going to destroy him," Charles said. He looked at the one-way glass. "Bring his Drive in here."

That made Gary look up. Another man in a black Ransfeld Security suit entered the room with a sleek blue helmet.

Charles took it. "If this is a game, there should be a storage drive." He popped open the main port. "Aha." Charles looked at the chip. It was jet black, but marked in the center with an inverted red pentagram. The word Isis was in cursive at the bottom.

Charles held the chip out to Mivra. "Smash it."

"What?" Gary said. "No! Don't!"

"Mr. Ransfeld," Mivra said. "This is an important piece of evidence."

"Smash it."

Now Gary was crying in earnest. He watched Mivra place it on the ground. She lifted her foot; her heel hovered ominously over the chip. "I'll talk. I said I'll talk!"

"I don't care," Charles said. "You obviously can't be trusted. This chip is the source of your abilities. We just have to pull the weed up by the roots."

"Don't!" Gary's double chin quivered with his hysteria. "Don't do it!"

"Do it," Charles said.

Mivra's foot slowly descended.

"Please! I'll tell you everything! Please!"

"Stop," Charles said.

Mivra's shoe froze, then set itself on the ground next to the chip. She picked it back up.

"So, Gary," Charles said. "You were in the middle of telling me everything you know about Isis, and Crux Industries, and Emil Mohammed, and those powers of yours. Every last detail. Be sure you don't forget anything. I'm pretty good at telling when people are lying, but Mivra's even better."

Gary talked for over an hour. Mivra recorded everything; she saved one copy to each of her spare android shells. Charles decided to leave it exclusively in her care; he didn't even trust the command center's servers, not for this.

Steinson, ever the enthusiast, volunteered to try out the chip himself. The Isis program rejected him immediately as an unrecognized user. The hardware was locked to Gary.

Charles briefly thought about killing Gary and then trying to use the chip, but that probably wouldn't work. It was registered through the Crux servers, which were at their headquarters. It would take someone on the ground, inside Crux, in order to change that. Not worth the effort.

"Well, Gary, I think we're pretty much finished here." Charles casually tossed the chip in the air and caught it. Playing catch with the delicate piece of electronic media had become his favorite pastime over the course of their talk. "So, the real question is, how can I get a copy?"

"Only the Top Gamer winners got one," Gary said. "The beta testers that were picked get one, too. I guess they're being shipped out in the mail."

"When's that?"

"I dunno," Gary said. "It was supposed to be a week or two after we got ours. Which is basically now."

"Mivra?"

Mivra went still as she accessed the information. "Based on our own agents' surveillance of Crux headquarters, they haven't gone out yet. A moment." She processed data in some distant place in cyberspace. "They're scheduled to ship tomorrow night, and arrive the next day."

"There's going to be a change in plans," Charles said. "This is no longer an invasion. It's an interception. We're going to capture as many of these chips as possible. Miller, if there's anything else you can squeeze to get more leeway for the team, squeeze it."

Miller had entered the room once Gary had been cornered. He was hovering next to Steinson. "Charles," he said. "We might be overextending ourselves."

"It's fine," Charles said. "This isn't just about Rachel anymore. She remains the priority, but this...it could change the entire world. No, it will change the world. At this point, it comes down to who gets their hands on it." Charles raised the chip against the holding chamber's hanging lamp. "It's like the ultimate prosthetic. It's beyond prosthetics. This could be the hinge upon which humanity will turn forward."

"You're stupid."

Charles looked at where Gary was still hanging. "Yet more expert commentary from the fat man strapped to a steel chair."

"You don't even know what's going on," Gary said. "Emil Mohammed is handing out Isis chips to random people. Gamers, yeah, but the other 5,000 got drawn in a lottery. If this is so world-changing, why isn't he changing the world?"

"And what's your answer to that question?" Charles asked.

"No fucking idea," Gary said. "If it was me, I'd hold it just for myself until I was a superman. Then maybe give it to a few friends or something. Theoretically, you could take over the world. You'd have to kill a whole lot of shit first, and Isis is dangerous, I guess, but it's worth the risk. I don't get why he's giving it away."

"There's more to this story that we don't appreciate," Charles said. He faced the room. "We'll be forming two teams," he said. "Steinson, you'll be leading the chase team. You'll be making sure that we get our hands on those shipments. They'll be most vulnerable while they're in transfer. We'll intercept the trucks directly."

"You got it, bossman."

"...bossman?"

Steinson shrugged. "It felt right."

Charles renewed his smile. "If you say so. I'll be leading an infiltration team. We're going inside Crux, and we're going to find out where Emil Mohammed is, why this is happening, and how he's making it happen."

"Hey," Gary said. "What about me?"

Everyone looked at him. Charles slowly turned. "Well, yes, of course. What about you, Gary?"

"I did what you wanted. I talked. Hey! I can work with you guys." He started nodding at his own words. "I know games, and I'm already pretty strong with my grappling skills. I can help you get started."

"No," Charles said, "I don't think so."

"Um..." Gary swallowed. "Alright. We've both taken some nasty shots at each other. So how about we let bygones be bygones and go our separate ways?"

"You made a fair argument for yourself," Charles said. He let the Isis chip fall to the floor. "If you'd made that suggestion from the start, I might have taken it seriously."

"What?" A rising note of panic entered Gary's voice. "I -- I'm valuable. I know Isis!"

"You do," Charles said. "But the thing is, you just really push my buttons." He stomped on the chip with his prosthetic leg, crushing it to pieces.

Gary opened his mouth. An unearthly scream was loosed upon the room. Charles covered his ears and backed away. Even Mivra winced.

Gary started twitching in his bonds. His body shook, shivered. His arms bent in ways they weren't supposed to. The ropes holding him in place tore apart. His chair fell to the floor, but he hung there, suspended in the air like a puppet.

The twisted pentagram on his hand flashed white -- and then it turned black again. The points of the star grew. They stretched longer, and wavered. Charles could see Gary's skin move where the scar was reaching, as if the roots of a creeping fungus were pushing through his body. It pulsed up his arm in waves, and then, reaching his shoulder, flowed over his chest. A tendril latched onto his neck.

Gary couldn't move. His eyes bulged with awareness, but all he could do was watch. His arm was entirely gone now, eaten away. His torso was dissolved next. He was still floating there, his arms and legs hovering as if still attached to the body that was already consumed.

The mark reached his chin. It peeled up off his skin, and contorted into another distorted pentagram. It was the five-pronged claw of a demon that had come to settle a debt.

The claw fell over his face, then spread. It wrapped up his head and sucked it in. And then Gary was gone, and the only thing in the air was the black symbol.

The shrieking continued. Charles had thought the man was making the sound -- but it was coming from the pentagram. Charles plugged his ears, but he couldn't lessen its volume.

The shrieks were the cries of humans. Hundreds of them, thousands, all rolled into one. Screams of death and pain. Fear. Charles stared into the floating symbol, and it was like looking into a piece of nothing, a gateway into hell that shouldn't exist.

It vanished.

Silence hung in the room. It seemed to be an extra sort of silence - not the lack of sound, but a negative quantity of it, as though the shrieks had eaten away at something vital in the air.

And then Charles could hear his breath again. He lowered his hands from his ears and stood straight. There was only one thought on his mind.

This could happen to Rachel.

Miller moved around him; he peered at the empty chair, now lying sideways on the ground, and then at the crushed bits of the data chip. He looked at Charles. "Do you still believe this is something we can control?"

Charles looked over the room. Steinson and the rest of the men had paled. They were looking at him, waiting for direction.

He glanced at Mivra. His android stood tall and stoic, maintaining as much dignity as she could whilst wearing a ripped suit and bearing the scars of a fight.

He finally turned his gaze back to Miller. "No. At least, not entirely."

"Then what do we do?"

Charles smiled. "We adjust our plans accordingly."

****

Jackson woke just before sunrise.

He was rather disconcerted to learn that the games began with a communal bath in the creek. He stuck close to Vuntha, kept his head up, and kept his waist below the water line.

The rest of the men had little problem washing each other. When Vuntha approached with a cloth and a smile, Jackson begged off and hurriedly pinned it to cultural differences before he offended someone. Vuntha seemed confused, but he shrugged and left Jackson to his own devices.

Jackson always hated that part of gym class. Showering was the worst. At least it gave him a chance to clean off.

It was strange. He was usually meticulous about keeping clean, keeping organized. He'd been so busy just living through the past weeks that it had dropped off in priority.

Once they were cleansed of impurities, as the spirit guides would say, they dressed themselves and headed for the starting line of the race. The starting area was marked by two carved wooden totems. The rigid faces of men, bison, and various birds of prey were stacked on top of one another, staring down at the contestants with fierce gazes.

A crowd of observers had already gathered. People milled about, exchanging greetings, calling to racers they knew. The competitors were focused. Some were warming up with light exercises; others were gathered in circles, discussing strategy.

The course was simple. A wooden post was staked into the ground on the other side of the mountain's shoulder. Each person had to grab one of the strings of beads tied to the post as proof, then run back to the start. Climbing up the sharp rocks and crumbling cliffs of the mountain was possible, but it would take a lot longer than simply running around. All said and done, it was about eight miles there and back.

There were 64 men competing, a number that was planned to work out for the spear tournament later on. The Windseekers had reached for an older warrior this year to fill an empty spot; he graciously bowed out in favor of Jackson.

The games were not friendly competitions. They were brutal. Once the competitors were out of sight of the spectators, there were no rules. Naturally, the contestants were universally stupid young men with something to prove. Jackson was sad to realize he was one of them.

How did I get myself into this, again?

"Jackson, watch out for those five." Vuntha indicated a group of tall men. They all styled their hair the same way, tied behind their neck by a single piece of bison bone. It made them look like clones. "They're all brothers, from the Three Hills tribe. They'll be like us, working together. And those four, there, from the Dust-Gatherers -- they're together too."

"How do you know?"

"Well, they were washing each other." Vuntha looked at him. "Oh, now I get it! That's part of your strategy. No one will think we're on a team because we didn't wash one another."

Jackson quickly started nodding. "Well, yeah, duh. Wasn't that obvious?"

"Not as much as you might think."

"Too bad we can't rely on other people from our tribe."

Vuntha and Jackson glanced over. Boonta and Katran were looking their way. There was a tense moment as their gazes met, and then they turned away from each other.

"Jackson, I'm going to be by myself for a long time," Vuntha said. "Are you sure this will work?"

"Just stay out of the way," Jackson said. "They'll think you're going to go all out, so hang back and let them psyche themselves out. If they really want to beat up on you, they're going to have to drop away from the group. That means they'll sacrifice major points, and Katran won't do it. If Boonta tries to take you alone, you kick his ass."

Vuntha clenched a fist and nodded. "Right."

"Men of the Mountain!" A chief from one of the Three Hills villages called out from the end of the line. He was tall -- it seemed like all the Three Hills tribesmen had an extra few inches. A headdress lined with white feathers rounded his head and draped down about his neck. "Prepare your spirits! Before Shakhan, you will show your strength!"

Everyone responded in different ways. Some beat their chests; others shouted war cries or the name of one minor deity or another. Vuntha stomped his feet a few times, clearing a space in the dirt. Jackson just set himself on the line.

The first few hundred feet of the footrace was packed with tribesmen. Chaki and her family had gotten a spot near the front. Palla waved wildly at Jackson. Jackson smiled a bit and waved back.

"Be ready!"

The sounds of the audience died off. The men crouched at the line. The chieftain kept one hand in the air, his palm out flat.

A lone wind blew over the grass. Jackson could hear the runners next to him breathing.

The chief threw his hand down. "Begin!"

Everyone took off at a near sprint. The crowd went crazy. Dust churned around the ankles of the runners.

Jackson and Vuntha went out at an easy jog, letting the pack get ahead. Confused murmurs filled the air as they were quickly left behind. Jackson threw another wave at Palla as they passed.

"Jackson, you've got to hurry!"

"No worries, we've got this!" Jackson called.

The sprinters had slowed up as soon as they'd left the audience behind -- it was just tradition to show off at the start. Jackson and Vuntha kept their pace up until they arrived a short distance from the back of the pack and held there.

They ran for a good five minutes. They'd left the border of the main encampment behind and were getting close to the foothills near the shoulder of the mountain. The leaders of the pack swung wide, intending to go around on the flatlands. Everyone swung out with them.

One of the tallest runners and one of the heftiest split off the main group. It was Katran and Boonta. They drifted left, out from the pack, and then started slowing.

"Looks like they want a fight early," Vuntha said.

"Whatever," Jackson said.

The two men got closer. Jackson pulled up on his jogging. Vuntha did the same.

The pack started getting ahead of them. Vuntha glanced at the other runners, then at Jackson. "Are you sure about this?"

"I'm sure," Jackson said.

Katran and Boonta were checking behind themselves periodically. They were muttering something. They started slowing their pace, too.

"Alright, let's stop," Jackson said. He let his jog grind to a halt and wiped the sweat off his forehead. "Did I mention I hate running?"