Top Level Player, page 30
“This is about resurrection?” Jazz said.
“Oh, Jasmine. Was my thinking ever so small? If the world of our birth is a simulation, then something must be running it. And perhaps that world is a simulation as well. I don’t want to go up one rung. I want to climb the whole ladder, ascending to something akin to godhood for each world I leave behind. I want to reach the top level.”
“Top Level Player!” Leet said.
“Yes. Congratulations,” Nu said.
“But why bring me here?” Jazz said.
“I ran the numbers,” Nu said simply. “I watched the behavior of the Algorithm over several update cycles and I knew that there was a point of diminishing returns on Quintessentials alone. EPCs packed a far greater impact, but even they wouldn’t be able to push the Algorithm past the confidence interval necessary to manifest the converter. I needed the tropes themselves. I needed the elements of a story to play out at the right moment, in the right place. And the only way to assure that was to take the role of the villain. The villain controls the story until its final moments. The villain guides the path. So I became the villain. But a villain is nothing without a hero. I needed a hero equal to me. One that would organically come into conflict with me. One that the Algorithm wouldn’t be able to resist throwing at me. One that could pose a credible challenge. And as in all things, if you want a job done right…”
“You need to do it yourself…” Jazz said.
“But that is all over now. By my calculations, this little clichéd bit of tripe has put me well past the confidence interval necessary to ensure, once the upgrade cycle ticks, that I shall have created a new Quintessential. The Quintessential of Quintessentials. The meta-quintessential. The Sextessential.”
“Lewd,” Leet said.
“Don’t be a child,” Nu said.
“It sounds to me like you’re looking to tease a very new behavior out of an established system,” Jazz said, frantically tapping through the available data and functions on the server interface that didn’t require a log in. “Interfacing with an incompatible system without an established protocol. That’s a good way to cause a crash.”
“Oh, certainly. There is not just a risk of crash, there is the certainty of it. Between the processing power necessary and the errors likely to be kicked up in the aftermath, there is sure to be a catastrophic system failure, and more than likely severe data corruption. Some data may be unrecoverable, but that will hardly be my concern once I’m gone.”
“Those are people you’re talking about,” LP barked over the open call on Jazz’s phone.
“They are the simulations of a simulation at best. They are two steps removed from people. Again, hardly my concern.”
Jazz tapped madly at the keyboard. Everything she tried to access prompted her for credentials. She knew Nu’s username from the card, but not the password, and too many failed attempts would keep anyone from getting in for a while. She tried the same code from the hatch.
Access Denied.
“Oh, come on now,” Nu mocked. “I picked a code you’d know because I needed you here for this little performance. I’m on a secure password, and I’m quite familiar with the sort of things you might guess, so don’t waste your time.”
Jazz glanced up at the counterpart to the screen in the hallway.
“There isn’t much time left to waste. I’ve got to do something.”
“Guys… I have an idea…” LP said, his tone grave.
LP had been in an intersection when the doors locked, so he was left in a square cage of sorts. Barred doors surrounded him, without so much as a set of controls or knobs for him to fight with. He grabbed hold of the bars and started to climb.
“Oh, really now? Do you think you’ll be able to climb over?” Nu said. “They go all the way to the ceiling.”
“I’m not the villain, I don’t have to monologue about my plan. But, guys, I’m going to get a message to the outside. What should I tell folks?”
“You need to tell the admins to find a way to stop the upgrade,” Jazz said.
“Easy enough.”
“What do you think you’ll do? Climb high enough to get a cell reception?” Nu said. “You’re in Bare Metal. You won’t be able to get a call out until you clear the bedrock.”
LP climbed higher still.
“You can’t honestly think you’ll be able to tap into a hard line, do you?”
“Keep guessing, you’re way off.”
“Then how would you… Oh… Oh, I see,” Nu said. “You are planning to kill yourself with falling damage. You are planning to respawn as a means of escape. Clever. But I can’t allow it.”
“I’d like to see you stop me.”
“Athena? Run contingency script alpha.”
“Running it now,” said her PDA.
Whatever Nu activated, it was significant that he could hear multiple nodes straining to process it. When it was through, he heard Doodad chatter desperately and Laurel’s voice erupted from the phone.
“Danger, Danger! Local Server Mode Change! Hardcore Mode is active! Permadeath is active!” she shrieked.
“There. By all means. Kill yourself. It will solve you as a problem for me.”
Nu watched with a look of grim satisfaction as the timer on her display counted down and LP reluctantly slid down to the ground on her viewer. Leet squirmed, still in the grip of Louse and still with the gun in his face.
“When can I pull the trigger, boss?” he said.
“As soon as the timer hits zero,” she said, almost dismissively.
“Listen, Louse,” Leet said. “Were you paying attention to what this lady is doing?”
“She’s paying me. That’s all I need to hear.”
“She pulled the plug on respawn, permadeath is active here.”
“What’s the matter, afraid that once I put a hole through you, you’ll be gone for good?”
“Yeah! But she also said she might crash this whole sucker when she activates her toy,” he said. “What do you think happens to the rest of us when she crashes things with permadeath active?”
Louse’s grin started to sag. He turned.
“Hey, boss… That money ain’t gonna do me any good if I’m gone,” he said.
Nu sighed and looked at him. “I was really hoping you were thick enough to have overlooked that fact for just a few moments longer. Fortunately, I had contingencies.”
She held her hand out and a small, unassuming, high tech weapon clicked into her hand from a mechanism up her sleeve, barely larger than a particularly noisy cricket. Before Louse could react, she pulled the trigger and blasted him against the wall where he bounced into the shadows of the servers.
“Oh, you’ve done it now,” Leet said, waggling his sword. “You went and shot your own henchman. Now it’s just you and me.”
“I said contingencies. Plural. Athena?”
“Reinforcements inbound,” the fairy said.
The air below the curling mass of light spewing from the servers shimmered. A lanky ninja with a purple cowl over his head emblazoned with a footprint insignia on the forehead stepped out of the light. Then another. Then another. One by one at least fifty representatives of the Foot Clan emerged and drew assorted weapons. Leet took a step back and took a breath.
“Well… At least I’ve got the right weapons for it.”
“Remember,” Nu said as the ninjas began to fan out. “Keep him alive until the timer reaches zero.”
Nu’s image grinned in self-satisfaction on the screens as the sound of clashing swords and thumping staffs rang out over the PA. Jazz tapped in a password attempt and was rejected.
“You’ve got to do something,” LP said, slamming at the doors of his own prison. “Leet’s not exactly the best fighter, and respawn is turned off!”
“Let me think. Let me think,” she said quickly. “She says she wouldn’t pick a password that I would pick. But she’s a gloating, super villainous caricature. She’d pick something to taunt me. She’d pick a stupid password.”
Jazz tapped in PASSWORD and was rejected.
“Time’s running out.”
“Wait, wait… She’d pick a stupid password that would be a reference that I’d get if I had been here as long as she was… LP, quick, what’s a pop culture cliché password?”
“Uh, uh, Open Sesame?”
“No good, two words.”
“Joshua? Oh! Or 12345?”
“No. I can feel it in my bones. There’s a precise Venn diagram of obscure, obnoxious, and petty that I would do if I was her.”
“God? I think that was in Hackers.”
“Too short.”
“Swordfish?”
On the video feed, Nu’s eyes darted aside. Jazz grinned.
“I never was very good at poker,” she said.
She punched in the password, with a triumphant chime, was granted access. Or, at least, she got past the login. As soon as she started trying to access things like door locks, she found that each one had been separately secured.
“What kind of a fool do you take me for? That I would gamble victory over the admittedly enticing opportunity to dupe you with the obvious solution?” Nu said.
Jazz ignored her and explored the options available. Manual locks, with dozens of individual passwords, took time and effort, and the time codes on each edit were just minutes before they arrived. It had to have been done hastily. And thus she would have prioritized. Yes, the doors to the nodes were completely secured. But some of the log files were still accessible, and more information was always better. She could see that fifty NPCs had fast-traveled from an unlisted location in the complex to another unlisted location in the complex. It didn’t tell her where the node was, but it told her that fast-travel was active within Bare Metal even if it was inactive elsewhere. She just needed a way to locate where Nu and Leet were and she might be able to get to them. But the map was blocked out, and every other reading accessible in the control panel was dominated by the servers. Even with dozens of people doing battle, there wasn’t enough power to make any one node stand out from any other beyond the noise of a signal.
She heard a pained grunt from Leet over the video. Her hands trembled as she continued her search. One by one, she found things Nu had neglected to secure, but most of them were worthless to her. There was the list of system resources that were duplicated for redundancy and how many of each there were. She found the locks on the roof hatches, which had to be separate for the whole stupid trap to spring to begin with. There was a configurable value for the perimeter of sensitivity that kept the interface’s “conjure whatever you can think of” from happening nearby, but couldn’t actually affect the facility itself.
Nu was perpetually two steps ahead of her.
Leet had not been doing well. Despite the fact the Foot Clan had been pulling their punches and giving him the time-honored ninja courtesy of fighting him one at a time, he’d barely held his own, and was starting to run short of hit points. Until now, he’d embraced the possibility that, in the face of insurmountable odds, he’d be filled with the righteous fury that had fueled so many heroic wins. But it was clear that particular event wasn’t in the cards. He leaped to one of the dangling chains of Quintessentials and tugged madly at the little cage containing one of them, hoping to free it and use it in the battle.
“Those chains and cages are part of the facility, idiot,” Nu mocked from the ground. “They’re completely indestructible.”
“Everyone knows when the villain says something is indestructible, it just means there’s a secret weakness!” he shouted.
A throwing star sparked off the chain beneath him. He scrambled higher and swung from chain to chain. If he couldn’t steal one of Quintessentials, he could at least reach Didi. Foot soldiers were already scaling the chains he’d left behind as he scrambled up to the one practically mummifying Didi. A cursory effort to dislodge them wasn’t any more successful, but a quick tug at the gag on her mouth pulled it free.
“It’s no use,” Didi said. “Forget about me. Just focus on taking out Nu!”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been trying to do that. I’m overrun by robot ninjas and I guess there’s not enough of them for the conservation of ninjutsu to tip things in my favor.”
Another shuriken sparked off Didi’s chains.
“Then try something else! Try another trope!”
“Right…” he said. “Right! Another trope!”
He jumped from her chain to a clear one and slid down, then dashed to the far wall and turned.
“If this is ever going to work, it’s going to work now. Napster, hit it!”
The boombox screeched with fast forwarding its cassette, then thumped with synthesized drums, bass, and piano. Leet widened his stance and held his weapon ready as the song started to build. Little embers of energy started to flare and flash around him. Backup singers in the music began to harmonize. Leet smiled and raised the sword.
A blast of energy erupted from Nu’s gun. It splashed against Napster. Sparks spewed and the charred PDA fell to the ground.
“That’s quite enough of that,” Nu said. “Seconds left, no more playing stupid games. You’re beaten. Accept it.”
“Where have all the good men gone, and where are all the gods?”
The voice rang out, pristine and clear from above. It mourned the absence of white knights and fiery steeds. Nu looked up. Didi was singing, eyes shut and bound hands clenched in passion.
“What are you doing? It’s pointless,” Nu called, shouting over the heroic song.
Napster sparked and began blasting the music again.
“Someone get up there and shut her up!” Nu shouted.
Ninjas were already trying to transfer over to Didi’s chain. As she belted out a line about tossing and turning, dreaming of what she needed. The signboard started clacking.
Theme Music Power Up.
“No!” Nu shouted.
“I’ve got it! There’s a power boost, I see which node you’re in,” Jazz shouted across the speaker phone. “I see the fast-travel node!”
Leet and Didi harmonized as the song came to a peak.
“I need a hero!”
Light flashed and LP appeared in the center of the room, guns akimbo. As he and Leet started to clash with the Foot Clan again, Didi continued to sing.
“No, no, no! I will not allow it!” Nu shouted. “Athena! More reinforcements!”
“Summoning.”
Another flash of light and Jazz appeared. She blasted a shot with her rifle, taking down two ninjas, but three more popped in to replace them. As Didi sang her heart out, the team made scrap out of easily a dozen robotic ninjas. But the flow of fresh fodder was faster than they could take them down. As the song entered an instrumental lull, Nu gloated behind a wall of her goons.
“It’s a noble effort, but you’ve gone from one against fifty-one to three against a hundred and one. Barely an improvement.”
“Oh, you’re not the only one who has contingencies—plural. You forgot to lock out the redundancy parameters,” Jazz said.
“So? The only things that can be made redundant are system elements, and I’m in control of all of the system elements here.”
“Not all of them.” Jazz raised her phone. “Laurel, hit the button.”
“Ever so happy to!” Laurel peeped from the server room.
She slapped a key and there was a fresh flash of light above. A figure in a tattered pink gown drifted gently down, parasol deployed, and landed among the ninjas. It was Didi, looking a bit confused, particularly once she looked up to find that she was also dangling from a chain from the ceiling doing her best Bonnie Tyler impression.
“Let’s put that on turbo, Laurel,” Jazz said.
“Can do!”
The blinded but carefully positioned fairy started drumming the button. Dozens of duplicates of Didi started to rain down.
“That’s it, it beeped. That’s the max,” Laurel said.
The army of Didis drew their hammers, and the odds were suddenly very much even.
“Time for the damsels to cause some distress,” said Leet.
An army of Didis rolled their eyes in unison.
The signboard clicked.
Big Damn Heroes Moment
Hammers swung, nunchucks twirled, and robot ninjas burst into piles of parts and shredded cloth. Nu retreated to the far wall as the battle roiled around her.
“Faster! Faster! Get more of them in here!” she barked.
“There are population caps in enclosed areas,” Athena said. “I can’t raise it any higher!”
“Then unlock the door.”
“You triple-secured the lockdown procedure. It will take time to unlock the individual doors.”
Nu dodged a singing hammer.
“Then unlock everything! Open the doors and drag the output focus frame of the Algorithm with me.”
The doors flew open. The cages containing the Quintessentials popped open. The chains binding Didi popped open. As Napster fought to drown out the sounds of battle with triumphant call for a hero, Jazz rushed to the original Didi and helped her to her feet.
“Come on! After her!” Jazz said.
The crew shredded their way through the remaining foot between them and the door, and pursued Nu. She’d vanished into one of the stairwells.
Laurel poofed into being on Jazz’s shoulder.
“Did we win yet?” Laurel asked. “I still can’t see.”
Jazz lingered long enough to snatch something off the floor. Then she, Leet, and the Didis rushed up the stairs. As they got higher, more and more of the Didis vanished, too far from their origin point for the redundancy to work. By the time they reached the roof, they were down to just the original.
