Top Level Player, page 17
“Bingo!” she said. “The trunk was empty, so this is sort of the last chance to find something good.”
“That’s weird that the trunk was empty. You’d think a guy like Louse would carry all sorts of guns and ammo.”
“The trunk was empty because that’s where I was going to end up. Trust me, I’ve got experience in this stuff.” She pulled the contents of the glove compartment onto her lap. “Let’s see… Looks like seventy-eight rounds for that gun of his. About three hundred unpaid parking tickets. Cigarettes. A handful of nickels. Say… What’s this?”
She revealed a small black book and flipped it open.
“The Ones, items to be acquired,” she read. “The Damsel. Well, gosh, so lovely to be first on the list. What else… The Matrix of Leadership. The Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. The Maltese Falcon. Marcellus Wallace’s soul, the golden fiddle, the golden apple…”
Didi dumped everything but the parking tickets into her bag, then flipped through the pages of the book.
“This is a pretty comprehensive list of The Ones, the quintessential, unique items,” she said. “Seems like someone had Louse trying to collect these things. There are some eraser marks. I guess he collected a few already.”
She flipped through the pages of the book and a credit-card sized badge fell out.
“Oh! What have we here?” she said.
The badge was small and plastic, with a hole for a clip. The back had places for a name and role to be filled in, but they’d been left blank. A logo emblazoned the front of the card. It looked vaguely like a state seal, though instead of something like an eagle, it had a worm.
“Ever seen anything like that before?” Jazz asked.
“Can’t say I have.”
“Laurel, what do you think?”
The fairy buzzed down and plucked it from Didi’s hand.
“It is an access card, used for opening security doors and other forms of access control. It has a blank assignment field, and the security it is meant to disable is unknown,” she said.
“Do you recognize the seal?”
“I do not recognize the seal.*”
“What’s the asterisk, Laurel,” Jazz said flatly.
“Due to intervening data privacy considerations I am forbidden from recognizing the seal.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.*”
Jazz palmed her face. “Never mind. Is there any indication of any individuals who hired him in the book, Didi?”
“No…” She smiled. “But for most of the items, there’s a last known location. Tell you what… I’m thinking I might have a plan for what to do next…”
“I’m telling you, it’s perfect!” Didi said excitedly.
The drop box was just inside the city limits of a hub called Pleasant-Ville. After dropping the Roland in the box and instantly receiving the payment and enough XP to pop LP to level 18, Jazz had been carefully counting out each person’s share while Didi pitched her idea.
“We’ve got the list of The Ones that Louse was after. Half of these things have been missing since shortly after they were first discovered, and the other half have never been found. I don’t know who made this list, but it led them to me, and I was under the impression that no one knew what I really was. So someone very much in the know made this list. And Louse doesn’t work out of the kindness of his heart. So that means they’ve got money, too.”
“Yeah, it’s the Top Level Players,” Leet said. “We knew that already.”
“But we don’t know who exactly they are. So here’s what I propose. We beat him to the stuff on the list. Worst case, we make a lot of money. Best case, we find out who’s been pulling the strings, trade the goods in exchange for not being bothered anymore, and we make a lot of money.”
“I like it!” Leet said.
“I don’t like it,” LP said. “It’s not like those things are sitting out in the open waiting to be collected.”
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained, LP,” Leet said.
He held up a finger. “Untrue. I have been making a tidy little living ferrying people around the various hubs. It’s been a nice, safe, reliable income.”
“LP, I’ve been in the car with you. The way you drive is neither nice nor safe,” Jazz said.
“It’s a damn sight safer than trying to acquire mysterious artifacts being sought by a shadowy figure who has employed a notorious gangster to fetch them,” LP said.
“I’m not terribly fond of the plan either, but having stolen his car and repeatedly made a fool of him, I’d say we’re going to need something to use as leverage when Louse inevitably tracks us down again,” Jazz said.
“Something besides me, ideally,” Didi said.
“An absolutely unique item worth a pile of money fits the bill,” Jazz said.
“I don’t know…” LP said.
“Come on, man! You can’t break up the team.”
“I’m the Murdock, right? What if I go back to Tutorial Lobby and you just come and ‘break me out of the mental hospital’ when you need a ride somewhere.”
“That’s no fun,” Leet said. “Come on. There must be something you want. Because you get a couple unique items to sell and there’s not much you won’t be able to afford even if we split it four ways.”
LP paused, his expression suddenly distant.
“That’s the face of a man with a price,” Leet said.
“The Turbokat,” LP said.
“What?” Leet said.
“The Turbokat? From Swat Kats?”
“Is that a movie?”
“It’s a Saturday morning cartoon! With the coolest fighter jet ever conceived of in any media. And I want it back.”
“You want it back? You had it?”
“Yeah. Back when I was a streamer. It’s basically the only thing I miss.”
“Well, you can get it, if you do this!”
“No,” LP said. “Not good enough.”
“Okay, now about this. Will you do it because I’m asking you to?” Jazz said. “I’m really green and I don’t think I can do it without help, and Didi’s going to need help, too. Leet seems to know a thing or two, but we’ve made it this far as a quartet and I’m starting to think we won’t make it to the end unless we stick together.”
“Fine,” LP said.
“Yes! Keeping the crew together! Let me see that list. I want to see what’s worth getting.” Leet said.
Didi handed it over.
“Regardless of where we’re going, we should probably get a better repair job for the Warthog,” LP said. “We have reached the limits of my repair capabilities and it’s still got a squeak and shimmy. Pleasant-Ville has got to have a repair shop. And this is the perfect place to sell Louse’s car.”
“What is Pleasant-Ville anyway?” Jazz said.
“It’s the imaginary version of the 1950s that every conservative since the 1950s insisted had existed,” Leet said. “You could look for years and not find a more boring, bland, and gray place.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jazz said, glancing at the hub. “I could use a little boring.”
“Not this kind,” Leet said. “If you want to recover, I know a place. We can hit it after. But they’ve got good milkshakes here, so I’ll tag along.”
“Um…” LP said. “I don’t want to be ‘that guy,’ but Didi’s got all of the stuff from Louse’s car, right?”
“Yeah. She found it,” Jazz said.
“Right, but… she’s Didi. And that means there’s a better than average chance someone’s going to kidnap her.”
“So we should spread the stuff out. Yeah, I get it. That’s good thinking,” Didi said.
She reached into her bag and dealt out the goodies like a poker player, spreading anything with duplicates among everyone and assigning the rest at random. When she was through, it was time to head out. Jazz hopped back behind the wheel of the Town Car. Didi and Leet joined her. LP went off to find a repair place while Jazz guided the car through the outskirts and into the heart of the hub.
Leet wasn’t kidding about the blandness. At first, she assumed the endless rows of perfectly identical homes had been some sort of visual shortcut to avoid wasting too many resources to render a distant city, but it was accurate. Every house was a split-level with a two-car garage. Every lawn was perfectly manicured and emerald green. Some had the positively extravagant addition of a rosebush or—scandalous—a pink flamingo. The colors ranged from white all the way to slightly off-white. After being subjected to a pair of hubs that should have had a seizure warning before them, this place may as well have been made of cardboard.
Of course, this was The After-Image, and thus it wasn’t entirely immune to the overarching themes.
“Oh! There’s another one!” Leet said. “That makes a baker’s dozen of Edward Scissorhandses.”
“It’s almost refreshing to see them,” Jazz said. “The rest of this place is…”
“White bread?” Leet said.
“White bread is at least fluffy and soft. This is a picture of white bread,” Jazz said. “This is the illustration of white bread on the packaging. The one that does more to brag about its cellophane wrapper than the bread itself.”
“It’s this or NEMNUT,” Leet said.
“I’m thinking there are at least a few intermediate steps between two thousand identical Ward Cleaver houses and a mile-tall skyscraper with a razor-sharp edge and a pagoda on top,” Jazz said.
“See, now I want to see a half-mile tall skyscraper with a suburban home on top,” Leet said. “Hey, at least no one here is likely to try to pull the Damsel in Distress routine on you. Right, Didi?”
“Yeah. Because a place like this couldn’t possibly have anything sinister lurking right below the surface,” Didi replied.
They wove their way through a sequence of matching streets until they got to the town center. Napster helpfully supplied the song “Mr. Sandman” as they circled around a pleasant, calm little park ringed by the assorted necessities of suburban life. There was the obligatory gas station with overeager attendants, a downright fabulous looking diner with a teal color scheme that put most of the rest of the town to shame, and bizarrely specific one-purpose shops like Johnson’s Vacuum Repair and Robert and Son’s Lawnmowers.
“So what do we do first?” Jazz asked.
“Sell the car,” Didi said. “I’m already having daydreams about what it’ll look like when Louse eventually tracks it down to reclaim it.”
One of the essential businesses, fortunately for them, was Loony Larry’s Discount Car Lot. Jazz pulled in and a man with a spiffy white suit and matching cowboy hat trotted up to the car. He leaned down to the driver’s side window, looked Jazz in the eye, then stood and trotted around the car. Another glance into the passenger side window and a brief glimpse at Didi sent him finally to the back window. He knocked on it. Leet rolled it down.
“How can I help you today, sir?” he said with a disingenuous smile.
“Oof,” Jazz said.
“Yeah, welcome to Pleasant-Ville,” Didi said.
Doodad was able to find a repair shop tucked away at the edge of a residential neighborhood. LP pulled it into the driveway. An elderly man in overalls moseyed out and gave a low whistle.
“You haven’t been taking this thing in for regular maintenance, have you, friend?” the mechanic said.
“No. But I think the main problem was I dropped it out of a Transformer from cruising altitude,” LP said.
“Oh, yeah. That’ll put a hitch in its giddy-up. You aren’t from around these parts, are you?”
“No, sir, I am not. But, if you’ll excuse the observation, the fact you don’t look like a Ken Doll in a cardigan with a pipe surgically attached to your lip indicates maybe you aren’t either.”
He laughed. “Right you are, son. So what’s the problem?”
“A couple rattles, a couple shimmies. And a lot of bodywork.”
“Start it up and let it idle for me, will you?”
LP did as he was told. The mechanic paced around it, listening to this and that, giving the odd piece of body work a knock.
“What are we looking at here? Early 2000s video game sci-fi? Looking at a 2001 Bungie?”
“It’s a 2012 343 Industries, actually.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. You’re going to get a knock like this in those 2012s. Yeah. Well, I can fix her, but it’ll cost you.”
“How much?”
He sucked his teeth. “Hammering out reactive armor is a pain. Buffing out the scratches in transparent aluminum… Call it 2000 PTs? 2015 and I’ll rotate the tires.”
“Do it,” LP said. “Could have been worse.”
“Pull her in and I’ll get started,” he said.
LP guided the vehicle into the garage and hopped out. The interior of the workshop roughly matched what one would expect from an era-appropriate fix-it shop, though a handful of the tools had a decidedly retro-futuristic look to them. An old rabbit ear-style TV sat on top of one of the tool chests. The standard WireFeedNews graphics on the CRT were incongruous, but not nearly as incongruous as a modern TV or holographic projection would have been in a place like this. He had to hand it to the dedication to the aesthetic.
“You been watching this?” the mechanic said. “The administrators are doing another learning upgrade.”
“Are they? It’s been a while?”
“Yeah, yeah. I guess it’s been three years since they tweaked the feedback to the Algorithm or whatever. You ask me, things are going fine. No need to rock the boat,” he said.
“Could be going better, right? It could always be going better. That’s the nice thing about living in a simulation. If something doesn’t work the way it should, you can tweak the formula.”
“Yeah, but that’s the thing that runs things. You don’t want to tweak the formula too much. Too many cooks and all that.”
“I’m sure they don’t do these things lightly. They’ve kept it running fine since the start. Some good people in the…”
LP trailed off. He squinted at the image on the screen. The scene was that of a press conference in front of the administration building. The layout was the traditional “trot out the people who actually do the work but don’t let them actually say anything” format. A row of technicians in clean-room gear, which often clashed with their wildly stylized avatar choices, silently looked on while a middle management-type droned on about the promise of the coming tweak. LP couldn’t care less about that. What caught his eye was the emblem that seemed to be peeking out of the chest pocket of one of the lab coats in the phalanx of techs.
“Doodad!” he said. “The WireFeed viewer! The good one!”
His tottering little PDA hopped out of the Warthog, startling the mechanic, and produced the requested item.
“You ought to warn a fella when you’ve got a critter hiding in the car. Why can’t folks agree upon a normal PDA? I got a nice little book I keep in my back pocket. No muss, no fuss.”
“Sometimes it’s nice to have a little bit of personality injected into your life,” LP said absentmindedly.
He brought up the newsfeed and rolled back to the clearest shot of the pocket. His eyes widened.
“How long is this going to take?” he said.
“Maybe twenty minutes. I work fast.”
“Do you have a loaner car?”
“You pay up front and I’ve got a loner car.”
“Doodad, pay the man. Where’s the car?”
Doodad produced 2015 PTs and scrabbled up onto LP’s back. The mechanic handed him a set of keys and pointed him to a rusted-out jalopy. LP hopped the side and started it up.
“Leet’s going to flip out about this,” he said as he pulled out into the street and puttered toward city center.
The sale had gone smoothly, all things considered, and had netted them another 15,000 PTs each. But the lack of friction hadn’t resulted in a lack of heat, as evidenced by Jazz’s reaction the moment they were seated in the diner to ‘celebrate’ their sale.
“How can people like that still exist?” Jazz raved.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Leet said.
“Of course you’d say it wasn’t so bad. The guy talked to you like you exist!” Jazz said.
“We got a good deal.”
“You got a good deal. We got called ‘honey pie,’ ‘honey lamb,, ‘honey baby,’ and ‘honey darling,’” Didi said.
“Don’t trust anyone who refers to women exclusively in terms of insect excretions,” Jazz said. “Seriously, this place started in 2025, right? How do you end up with a guy like that in a simulation like this?”
“Everyone has their idea of a perfect world. His doesn’t include women who buy or sell cars,” Leet said. “If it makes you feel better, there are hubs where the opposite is true.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Themyscira. They straight-up slaughter any dudes who show up.”
“That… doesn’t really make me feel better.”
“Okay, how about this? Pleasant-Ville is the…” He counted on his fingers. “Seventh place like this. The first one was Stepford.”
“What happened to it?”
“It’s called Themyscira now.”
Jazz snorted. A waitress arrived to set down their order.
“That’s a vanilla milkshake, a strawberry milkshake, a chocolate malted, and a cupcake for the fairy,” the waitress said. “Anything else?”
“No, this’ll be fine. Thank you so much,” Jazz said.
Laurel attacked her cupcake. Jazz took a sip of her malt. She shut her eyes.
“This is divine.”
“Yeah, they do them good here,” Leet said.
“And this has no caloric consequences?”
“All it does is top off your hit points,” Leet said.
“Why does anyone do anything but drink these?”
“Some people don’t.” He leaned back. “Tell you what, if this place wasn’t so boring, I could see swinging by once a week for the diner alone. But it’s no place for an aspiring star.”
“You know, I’ve been meaning to ask you. You seem like a bombastic attention seeker. Why are you not a streamer?”
