The LAPD had finally arrived, and pandemonium erupted for a while as it turned into a three way pitched battle. By now, the vampires had taken wing and began swooping down on the hapless police officers who just screamed in disbelief.
A few of the braver cops continued to take some pot shots at us, but their overall enthusiasm for taking out gangland members seemed to dissipate after the first few were hacked to pieces by foul smelling demon spawn wielding their skull topped axes. Sid and Willy laid off a few more rounds at the trolls, but then just gave up, laughing.
I didn’t have long to live and I could feel the lifeblood ebbing away from this body. I propped myself up on the hood and leaned against the bullet–ridden windshield of the GTO. Martin had already died some time ago.
“Dude, that was actually pretty cool!” I admitted to the lead Comment Troll, taking the offered smoke from him to have a drag.
He was sitting up on the car with me. Most of his bloody forehead had been shorn away by my bullet, showing white bone underneath, but he was in a jolly mood.
“That gameworld audience went through the friggin’ roof,” he agreed. “There are already thousands of copycats going on.”
As he said this, an LAPD officer came running out of the bushes, disheveled and bloody but intact, running up to me.
“Mother of God, please help me, please,” he whimpered, his hands pressed together in a prayer position.
I just raised my eyebrows and shrugged, giving the smoke back to the troll. The officer looked at the two of us and began backing away, shaking his head and making small pathetic noises. At that moment a large, muscular troll burst through the same bushes the cop had come through.
“Ah ha!” the new troll announced. “There you are!”
He pounced on the officer, who managed to back away a step or two, holding his hands up defensively.
The troll began methodically hacking away at the officer with his axe. I had to close one eye as bodily fluids spurted and splattered onto me amid blood curdling screams. I looked at the troll leader, shaking my head with eyebrows raised.
He smiled back at me and nodded.
“Ah, Fred, Fred!” said the troll leader, raising one stumpy green arm.
Dripping in blood, Fred looked up from his whimpering prey. “Yeah?”
“Could you give it a rest, Fred?”
Fred pouted and frowned, and then sighed.
“Fine.”
Grumbling under his breath, he stuck the point of his axe through the police officer’s skull. This ended all the commotion. The troll skulked off.
My vision was swimming.
“Sid? You ready to go?”
True to his assessment, Sid had bled out slowly and hadn’t gotten another scratch. Sitting atop a pile of stinking corpses, he was now chatting up a female troll over near our Mustang.
“Yep!” he waved back, and picked up his gun and stuck it in his mouth.
“Cool.”
I picked up my .357, looked at the head troll and said, “Let’s do this again sometime.”
With a smile I opened my mouth and stuck in the barrel of my gun. Tasting the sharp tang of metal and gunpowder, I pulled the trigger. The last thing I felt was the curious sensation of my head exploding backwards into space and suddenly, I was floating in blackness.
Dead. At least in that universe.
It was a funny thing. We could now die a hundred, a thousand, a million times out in the synthetic worlds we traveled through—we just couldn’t die in our identity world. It was just that one place out of millions where we couldn’t die, it was a solution set approaching zero.
With all the flittering between worlds and bodies, stimswitching with friends, people borrowing your body and your body being driven around by your proxxi, you’d think it would get confusing to figure out where or when you were or how to get back into your own body, and it could be disorienting. That was why a basic feature of pssi, hardwired at the deepest level, was what we affectionately called the Uncle Button—when you gave up and wanted back into your own body, you punched it. You just had to remember that it was there.
I sighed as I floated in the dimensionless black space and performed the well worn ritual: look down to where your chest should be, reach into your chest, punch it, and whammo, I felt myself falling backwards.
Now I was jogging through trees near the eastern inlet. Sunlight was streaming down through the green canopy above.
“Taking me for a jog?”
“Uh huh, you asked me to, remember?” replied my proxxi, Robert, just a voice in my head. “Did you read the latest storm warnings?”
“No…” I replied, disinterested. I knew they were having a hard time steering out of the way of Hurricane Newton and it looked like we might have to battle through the edges of the storm, but what did I care. I’d just be off in the gameworlds anyway.
“Well it’s gotten a lot worse,” Robert explained, “you’d better not get too dug into the gameworlds this afternoon, and stay off the pharmacologicals.”
“In case of what?” I asked, surprised. It was rare Robert would ever ask me to do something.
“Just in case.”
I shrugged.
“Do you want to transition control to you?” he asked, apparently satisfied.
“Naw,” I replied, “just take us home, just in case like you said. I’m going for another gameworld session with Martin.” I felt bad now for yelling at him.
“That’s probably a good idea,” replied my proxxi.
For the rest of the day we opted to go old school and return to Mongol battle. We all met up afterwards at a tiki–bar on the beach for some beers. It was well past nightfall, and the place was packed with tourists.
Martin loved the Mongolian battle worlds. He was still hopped up from the fight and was jumping around in the sand, howling away as he aped Bruce Lee style karate moves. Sid, Vicious, Robert and I watched him with amusement.
“Bob, that was awesome, you ducking and diving like that, it was like, superhuman!”
I’d had Sid remap my tactile water-sense for Mongol battle so that I could feel arrows coming at me like eddy currents through my skin. The incoming projectiles had become a part of my body, and as I quickened, I was able to duck and weave away with blinding speed, roaring through the battle as I hacked away at the Tatar scum.
“Yes, it was superhuman. That is perfectly accurate, we have superhuman abilities. We are in fact supermen. At least until the rest of humanity plugs into pssi, at which point…”
I paused to take a swig of my beer.
“We will just be, well, just men again.”
I shrugged and smiled. I could see that Martin wasn’t troubled by existential angst anymore. It was nice to be nice to him for once.
Sid smiled. He liked it when I was nice to Martin. He leaned over and whispered under his breath, “You’re going to talk to him, right? For you, you understand?”
I rolled my eyes but nodded.
“Yeah, yeah, you don’t give up do you?”
The surf had been pounding noisily as we all sat there, but a truly gargantuan wave suddenly thundered in, literally shaking the party lanterns hanging off the tiki–bar. Everyone turned to look out into the blackness. Those were some monster storms brewing out there.
Just then, a system of pssi alert channels began to activate.
