Chapter 8: And the Knives Flew
I WAS PULLED out of my capsule at twenty past six. First I quenched my throat-burning thirst, then ate a protein bar. Then another.
Then I spent ten minutes recovering, hooked up to the Home Doctor. The medical AI calmed my skyrocketing pulse, lowered my intracranial pressure, injected me with sedatives. My friends waited patiently the whole time, asking no questions. I started to feel a lot better and we moved to the lounge. Hung made eveiyone coffee and a couple of pizzas. The discussion began. First, the boys told me their perspective.
Grey-haired Hairo crossed his arms on his broad chest and paced the lounge with measured steps. Ed did most of the talking, with Malik adding colorful comments here and there. Hung listened along with me as if every’ word was news to him.
As it turned out, yesterday, Scyth logged off. After midnight, while the boys continued to explore Holdest, the miners wrote to the clan chat—apparently, crowds of cave people had filled up the fort. Based on a sharp leap in his stats, Ed realized that more adepts had arrived for the Sleepers.
They’re so ugly, Gyula’s daughter Eniko said of the ragged sewer troggs that Patrick O’Grady brought in. They really did look like cave people, with unnaturally long arms that reached to the ground, but according to game lore, they were closer to the titans. They had great stamina, strength, high resistance to enemy magic and pathetically low intellect.
The boys jumped to Kharinza, where they found the first priest watching on happily as the troggs met Behemoth. Not only were the troggs there, but so were the kobolds and the cultists of Morena. The fort looked as packed as Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
Patrick told the others where he and I had parted ways, but couldn’t tell them where Scyth had gone; and hadn’t he been planning to play until morning? The boys began to suspect the worst: that I’d fallen foul of the Alliance of Preventers and the High Priest of Nergal at the Ravager, and died. Permanently died—eliminated as a Threat.
“My heart was in my throat,” Ed recalled. “I thought for sure that was it, you were a goner.
They decided to test their horrible theory. The boys logged out of Dis and tried to contact me. Without success, obviously, since I was still in my capsule. They decided that meant I’d gone to sleep, but when they watched the news and the videos of what happened during the battle with the Ravager Harnathea, they got worried again.
My disappearance didn’t seem odd to the enemy; I must have died and respawned in my camp. But my friends knew that I hadn’t turned up in the fort! They spent all night on Kharinza, periodically logging out to check the news, which just kept yammering on about the vulnerabilities of the Threat, killed, as it seemed, by the High Priest of Nergal.
“We barely slept,” Hung admitted. “Couldn’t stop wondering what happened to you. We were worried.”
“I got in touch with some old contacts,” Hairo added. “They confirmed that nobody had left your house. We could only hope that you were just sleeping and you forgot to put your comm on. The police reviewed your physiological stats: everything was mostly normal, but your brain activity was anomalously elevated. Nothing out of the ordinary—it happens in capsules. But you were offline!”
From around lunch, they started calling me non-stop. After a while with no answer, they came to find me. Hairo picked up the boys in his flyer, and once they arrived and couldn’t wake me up with the door chime, they started looking for my parents to unlock the apartment. The boys knew that my folks were at a resort, but I hadn’t told them which, and our security officer had to get some acquaintances involved. It turned out the Sheppard couple had flown to the Moon. After Hairo learned that, it was only a matter of time to find out which hotel they were staying in. After receiving a quick run-down of the situation, my father gave Edward Rodriguez access. Within mere minutes, my friends were pulling me from my pod.
The details of life in the Nether were disappearing from my memory like a fading nightmare, but the key points stayed in my head. It was all like something that had happened five years ago; you remember the broad strokes, but you can’t reconstruct the days. Just the moments that stood out the most. So I told my friends of my year in the Nether without much detail.
They listened to me carefully, but I knew it was hard to believe. Beta testers living in virtuality for ten thousand years, leveling up into the thousands, infinite deaths, incredible abilities…
“I can’t wrap my head around it…” Malik said. “A year in the Nether? How is that even possible? I mean… technically. You were in your capsule just over a day.”
“It’s possible/’ Hairo answered. “Back in the fifties, the army used to use deep immersion for training combat skills. A month of training meant years in virtual reality. Our brain isn’t adapted to process information at that speed, of course, but the experiments proved the method’s efficacy. When they ended immersion, the test subject felt as if they were waking up from a long sleep. They couldn’t remember the details, but on some deep level, the skills and reflexes stuck. I guess Snowstorm introduced that technology during the beta tests.”
“Doesn’t an experiment require special capsules?” Ed asked doubtfully.
“Maybe not. Maybe they planned to use that feature in the game. Time magic and that kind of thing…”
I knew the technology was already in use in Dis—that must be how Divine Revelation worked—but didn’t tell the others. After I told them everything that had happened, I realized I had a problem left unsolved. My character was still in beta Dis. How could we pull him out?
“Let’s try this. You go in for a minute, check
