Top Level Player, page 24
“Relax. By now he’s respawned or plotting his escape. I doubt he’s got the money to pay the fun tax, so let’s hope he’s plotting his escape, because if not he’s in for one to three weeks of tutorial before he’s back in action. A good eight hours of recertification before he even gets permission to contact people outside Tutorial Lobby. Unless he can figure a way to earn big bucks fast, at least. But we’re stuck here with no ship and no fast-travel. So what have you got that’s worse than that?”
“This,” she said, pulling the card from Miss Nu’s office out of her pocket.
He took it from her, or tried to. It vanished from his grip and reappeared in hers.
“That’s a pretty good trick,” he said.
“It isn’t a trick,” Laurel snapped. “This is an admin access card. A personally assigned admin access card.”
“How did you get one?”
“I didn’t get one. Look at the name.”
He squinted at the card. “Miss Nu. That’s the lady who got us our appointment here, isn’t it?”
“It is. It is also the person who made sure the mods had a steady supply of diet raspberry iced tea. My favorite drink. And every time anyone talked about the identity theft or anything to do with my account, there was always mention of a manual adjustment put in to allow my specific identity to exist in two places at once. This is why.”
“There’s another you?”
“Yes! We already knew there was another me, because of the identity theft. But the timing doesn’t work. But what do I know? Is there time travel here?”
“There isn’t supposed to be!” Laurel said in exasperation. “But there’s not supposed to be two of the same person, and there isn’t supposed to be a way to infiltrate the admins. Rules are starting to fall like dominoes! It’s all madness!”
Leet gave Laurel a quick glance. “Seems like we broke your PDA.”
“You know what really burns me? I bet Miss Nu is short for NuJazz. I bet the person who is screwing up my afterlife is doing it with a music genre pun on my nickname.”
“Did you tell the admins?” Leet asked.
“Of course I didn’t tell the admins! What am I going to tell them? I figured out who the rogue admin is and it’s me? Somehow I don’t see that making things any better for anyone. They’d lock me up and the real one would still be running around, most likely with Didi.”
“So what are we going to do?” Leet asked.
Jazz rubbed her face.
“I don’t know. But when I don’t know what to do, it usually means we don’t have enough information.” She turned to the damaged ship and pulled the wrench out of her pocket. “So let’s see what we can learn.”
Twenty-five minutes later, enough wires had been reconnected for the ship’s computer to activate.
“You think you’re going to be able to get this thing back in the air?”
“No chance,” Jazz said. “Would you know how to fly it if we did?”
“Look, attribute points only spread so thin. I skipped the vehicular ones besides skateboard/snowboard. I do have some points from the last level up. I just don’t know if I’ll have enough.”
“Well, let’s hope skills in life carry over to The After-Image, because I know my way around a computer.”
She clacked at the keyboard.
“There’s a lot of damage,” she said. “But if this ship belongs to the mods, it’s got to have cameras and stuff. … Here.”
She found a video archive and accessed the last file. The view from the ship’s camera was less than ideal. LP had been leaning on the front of the ship, waiting for his turn to ride the capsule down. Thus, he was obscuring the bulk of the shot. When the sound of the approaching capsule signaled the moment had come, he stood, clearing the view. He’d barely made it three steps toward the capsule when the door opened and a pinstripe-suited gangster emerged.
Tony Louse raised his massive pistol and fired twice. One scattered Doodad to pixels. A second did the same to LP.
“He’s got the eighty-eight back,” Leet said.
Jazz nodded slowly.
“That means—” he continued.
She shushed him.
Louse stood over the spot where LP had fallen.
“You had that comin’ to you for a long time.”
He blew on the pistol and slipped it back into his jacket.
“And this coat just don’t hang right without a decent gun in it.”
“I can’t wait to knock a tooth out of that guy,” Leet seethed.
Louse reached into the jacket pocket on the opposite side and turned away. After an awkward motion, a phone booth traced itself into existence and he picked up the receiver.
“Klondike Five, six-six-six-eight,” he said. “… Yeah? Yeah, the pilot’s dead. Put a hole through him. You want I should wait around and kill the rest of them? … You leave ‘em alive and they’ll keep bein’ a pain. … Fine. Fine. I’ll get down there.”
He hung up the phone.
“The one place there’s never going to be any action worth running and that’s where she sends Tony Louse.” He shook his head. “It’s a good thing she’s loaded, because this is a waste of talent.”
He took a step toward the capsule, then stopped and turned. He drew his pistol and raised it again. He pulled the trigger and the video archive abruptly ended.
“How much you want to bet the person he was talking to was Miss Nu?”
Leet paused.
“… A nickel. I bet you a nickel,” Leet said. “You still got those nickels Didi stole from Louse?”
“Of course.” She fished one out. “Why?”
“You never had to make it through the recertification process. It’s like the Tutorial Lobby experience you went through on steroids. One of the things you learn about is—”
Laurel burst between the two of them.
“After-Image International is aware that player-to-player communication is not necessarily a key part of every player’s intended play style. To obviate the necessity of a mobile communicator, consumable message tokens are available for secure, one-time communication to authorized recipients,” Laurel said, gushing the words with the enthusiasm of someone desperate for something familiar to latch onto.
“Watch this,” Leet said.
He gave himself some room. He held up the nickel and pushed it into a non-existent coin slot. The very same phone booth came together around him.
“What was the number?”
Jazz charged past him and picked up the receiver.
“Klondike Five-6668,” she said.
The phone rang twice. Leet shoved his head close to Jazz’s to listen in. Laurel plopped down on her head and leaned low. Someone answered.
“I’d have been disappointed if I didn’t hear from you eventually,” came a voice on the other end.
It wasn’t her voice. Not precisely. But there was something so familiar about it, the sound tingled her spine.
“Who are you…” Jazz hissed.
“Oh, you know the who. You just don’t know the when or the how. Information like that is expensive. And unfortunately for you, I’m quite satisfied with my acquisitions already.”
“Where is Didi!?” Leet shouted.
“She’s with me. In Bare Metal. And thanks to the lockdown of the admin facility, there is no longer any way for you or anyone else to get here. I do hope you took my ID card with you. Because that will guarantee that when the admins and mods figure out who to blame, they’ll be coming after you. Don’t worry. I couldn’t be sure you’d be nearby when they figured out they had a bad apple to root out, so I tied some knots. You have a few hours. I would use them to put some distance between yourself and the admins. … If I were you…”
She released a smoky laugh.
“You served your purpose, Jasmine. Goodbye.”
She hung up. The phone booth vanished.
“Wow… So, who is that? An evil twin?” Leet said.
Jazz clenched her fists and gritted her teeth. “I already have an evil twin. This one’s at minimum an evil triplet.”
Leet nodded. “You know, I was really hoping when the first big scheme came around, I’d be the protagonist, but I’m pretty sure the one with the most evil copies is the hero.”
“It doesn’t matter who the hero is. The important thing is, there’s a job to do and someone’s got to do it.” She looked to the ship. “We don’t have the tools, materials, or skill to get this thing airborne, and there’s six hundred miles of proving grounds between us and the next place where we might be able to find help. Can we call for help?”
Laurel shook her head. “No! In order to prevent any potential mishaps within the proving grounds from disturbing the players, and to decrease the likelihood of information leaking from the administration, After-Image limits communication within the proving grounds and to direct, limited pool communications like the one you just used to contact the mysterious Miss Nu, or party/partner level communications.”
“So the only people we would be able to call are Didi and LP, neither of whom are currently of any help to us,” Leet said.
“Correct.”
Jazz sighed and squinted across the white, cracked ground toward the closest of dozens of little pockets of distinct landscape. “Let’s hope there’s something there we can use.”
“Ha-ha! We’re going to be messing with unstable prototypes! This is going to be sweet!”
“Laurel, while we’re walking, tell me about Bare Metal and the proving grounds. Every word you have on them.”
She squealed. “I would be ever so happy to! When The After-Image was founded, there was the necessity to test new mechanisms in an isolated way. Paperwork was filed to create a dedicated simulation area based on the development environment. This was called ‘The Proving Grounds,’ though the very first piece of paperwork spelled ‘proving’ with two Os. On the first day of its operation…”
Chapter 14
For six long hours, Jazz and Leet walked toward the hazy tuft of detail in the distance. Until the last few minutes, it didn’t seem as though it was getting any closer. Now the sudden “resolution boost” had kicked in and they could see that they looked like they were heading toward something that looked oddly like an old movie lot. It was a stunningly detailed city street, something that looked like it dated back to the late 1970s. But the city itself had no depth. Facades lined the street, but they were no deeper than the single layer of bricks and cinder blocks it took to build them.
Through all of that time, Leet had been lingering a dozen or paces behind. Napster had drifted along with him, playing an eclectic mix of tunes while Laurel continued her astoundingly detailed report on Bare Metal.
“The final security measure came in the specific location. It is located on the other side of the interface, which is itself on the other side of the bedrock of the simulation. This bedrock has no defined depth, as the same spatial distortion that makes ‘hammerspace’ interiors and equipment possible makes the volume of the bedrock effectively without limit. This makes the Interface Portal the only means of access,” Laurel said.
For the first time in six hours, there was silence.
“That’s all you’ve got?” Jazz said.
“That is all there is. And may I say, that was the most deeply fulfilling moment of my entire existence,” Laurel said.
“It doesn’t count as a moment if it takes six hours,” Leet called.
“I hope it was helpful to you,” Laurel said, ignoring the jab.
“I’m afraid it doesn’t. Interesting and valuable though it was to learn the specifics, that basically boiled down to ‘we can’t get to Didi without the help of the admins.”
She stepped from the dusty white ground to the simulated street of the strange facade.
“Maybe there’s a car or something we can use here,” Jazz said. “It looks like a pretty accurate city, and even a movie set would probably include a car.”
They paced up what a street sign proclaimed Nielsen Boulevard, checking side streets.
“Hey! A bicycle,” Leet said. “That’s better than nothing!”
He trotted up to a pristine bike chained to a parking meter. While he fought with it, Jazz turned down the opposite side street.
“Gah!” she yelped.
An old fashioned shoeshine stand was waiting for her on this new street. Three chairs, elevated from the street by a platform and situated before two stirrups put her in mind of a rather quaint display in the lobby of a convention center she’d once visited. The quaintness was simultaneously enhanced and shattered by the presence of an old fashioned shoeshine man. After hours of walking through a sprawling nothingness, seeing a person simply sitting there as though it was the most normal thing in the world was genuinely jarring.
He was an indeterminate age, certainly on the far side of forty and with a rather unfortunate turtley quality to his neck and face. His outfit was more newsboy than shoeshine boy, but despite his age, he lit up with a youthful enthusiasm at the sight of Jazz.
“Hey there, ma’am! Good to see you. Those boots are looking a little dull. Care for a touch up?”
“Who are you?” Jazz said warily.
“Johnny,” he said.
Laurel buzzed over his head. She attempted to summon a name and level, but produced an increasingly familiar pathetic puff of glitter.
“No name, no level,” Laurel darted down. “People like you are robbing me of yet another useful function!”
“Sorry, ma’am. But, like I said, the name’s Johnny.”
“Johnny who?” she said.
“Johnny the Shoeshine Boy. One PT for a shine. What do you say?”
Jazz glanced between him and his shoeshine stand. Unusual though this whole situation was she’d still been walking for six hours. The simulation hadn’t seen fit to make her particularly sore or tired, but her brain was still running on the old rules, and it told her that a nice seat after a long walk was very desirable.
“Fine,” she said.
She dropped a PT into the can sitting on the platform and climbed up. He snapped a cloth and went to work.
“So, what brings you out here?”
“I was unwillingly resurrected in a digital nightmare and in trying to find out why it happened I ended up getting a friend killed and another friend kidnapped by a scheming woman who may or may not be me.”
“Oh, yeah. That’ll happen.”
“Will it?” Jazz said.
“Sure, sure. Of course, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Jazz paused. This entire exchange was beginning to take on a familiar shape. She looked at Johnny, who made eye contact, then glanced pointedly at the can with her token sitting in it.
“Whoa!” Leet said, rolling up on the bicycle, which upon closer inspection was a candy apple red pile of goodies and addons that could only have been owned by Pee-Wee Herman. “Who’s this guy?”
“I think I’m about to find out.” Jazz dropped twenty PTs into the can. “Who and what are you?”
As he industriously buffed her boots, he spoke plainly and simply.
“I’m what you’d call an EPC. Emergent Player Character. In my case, we’re dealing with an anthropomorphic archetype or trope. Specifically, the man-on-the-street informant type.”
“How come I found a bike and you found an oracle?” Leet said.
“You’ll have to wait your turn,” Johnny said.
“What sort of information can you give me?” Jazz said.
“Depends on what sort of information you need,” he said.
“How do I defeat Miss Nu?” she said.
“Can’t give you that. I’m more of a stepping stone than a vaulting pole. I’ll give you a clue to get you past the impassible, but the finish line is always up to you.”
“Fine. How do I get to Miss Nu so I can get Didi back?”
He glanced at the can again. She dropped another twenty.
“You already know you can’t get through the bedrock. And you already know you can’t go around it. That just leaves the one option.”
“It seems to me that leaves no options,” Jazz said. “Hence the question.”
“You’ve got to skip the bedrock entirely.”
“You mean, like, with fast-travel? None of us have ever been to Bare Metal.”
“Also, fast-travel is disabled,” Jazz said.
“Also, fast-travel is always disabled between Bare Metal and the outside for security reasons,” Laurel said.
“There’s other ways to skip a mass of solid rock.”
“Like what?” Jazz said.
He silently dosed his cloth with some polish and started working on the other boot.
“This is a very expensive shoeshine,” Jazz said, plunking down another few tokens.
“Have you still got that copy of Louse’s little black book?” Johnny asked.
“I’ve got the original,” she said, pulling it out of her pocket.
“You notice some of those on there aren’t crossed off, but they’re not with the rest?” he said.
“Sure.”
“Seems to me, some of those might be on there not because she needed them, but because she wanted to make sure no one else had them.”
She flipped through the pages.
“Flux capacitor? Is time travel a thing here?” Jazz said.
“Time travel is not a thing here,” Laurel said. “As previously established.”
“Excalibur, that wouldn’t be it… What’s the Oscillation Overthruster?”
“Oh! Man! That’s the thing from… what was it… Buckaroo Banzai! It’s the thing from the car that makes it go through a mountain! We got one of those? That’s one of the ones?”
“Evidently,” Jazz said. “But is it really an iconic enough object to be a Quintessential?”
“You mean a One Thing,” Leet said.
“I’m not going to call them that,” Jazz rumbled.
“It isn’t a matter of popularity,” Johnny said. “It is a matter of enthusiasm and singularity. This place is run by an algorithm. Reducing things to their most concise representation is how it learns. If something is a peerless stand-in for a concept, no matter how abstract or small, then it can become a Quintessential if there’s even one person who has a genuine, burning obsession over it.”
