Elysium

Fifty knights in shimmering black armor stampeded across the ford at Vingol’s Spring, their destriers thrashing through the frigid waters and releasing plumes of steam from their hot underbellies. At the far western bank, their leader, a massive knight with a red plume protruding from the crest of his helmet, called for them to halt. He pulled his helmet off and looked the knights over. His blue eyes shimmered in stark contrast to his dark hair and coal-black beard.

“It’s been two moons, but at last we return to Casmir Vale. You have all done well. Now be at ease, my friends. We are home!”

The knights let out a great cheer and followed the lead of their captain. They shed their helmets, and the same legion that moments before had been charging through the forest, vigilant and silent, was now a boisterous crowd of friends, laughing and telling jokes of how much ale they meant to drink and what they meant to do when they finally got their women alone that night. That was the way of the Knights of Casmir Vale. In battle they did not speak. The silence unnerved their enemies who were wont to shout taunts and war cries. It added to their legendary status as lethal warriors, and few forces in all of Elysium, if any, were more feared than the black Knights of Casmir Vale. Back home, though, the knights were husbands, lovers, singers, philosophers, artisans—men who relished life and the rewards of making their city the jewel of Eredland. After having finally destroyed the tribe of ogres that had been marauding the surrounding forest villages, it was good to finally be going home.

Alas, it was not meant to be. As they rose up the last hill from Vingol’s Spring, they all stopped in horror. Their fair city was gone. No farms, no city walls, no bustling marketplace, no public arena, no theatre house, no public fountain, no homes or shops, no castle. Nothing. Their friends, their families, everything was gone, and in its place only blackness. Casmir Vale had become the edge of the world, a jagged line where meadowland fell into the Void.

Terra-serv

“Well?” Ambreen asked.

“Absolutely not,” Sepkowski told her, shaking his head at her from where he sat behind his desk on the top floor of the Central City Times office building.

“But—”

“No way in hell. People don’t want to be reminded that Central City is a sham. We start throwing stuff like that in their faces and they’ll stop reading our paper.” Sepkowski stuck out his tongue and shook one hand above his head. “They’ll go off and read Terra Today or something else equally mind-numbing.”

“People need to know what’s going on, chief.”

“What’s going on? Please. You don’t know what’s going on. You’ve got some aphrodillium addict claiming the Biagio family is selling body mods. Hardly breaking news.”

Ambreen grit her teeth. “I told you, it’s more than just the avatar mods. We’re talking entire mansions, ranches… god damned villas springing up on the outskirts of the Nord region, places where there shouldn’t be anything. The Biagios are spinning gold out of thin air. They’ve figured out how to get past Soteria’s safeguards, past Interserv. And for the record, Liam’s not an addict. That’s just his cover. He’s an Interserv informant.”

“Was an Interserv informant,” Sepkowski corrected her. “I know all about Liam Demps. He’s an addict. Tarleton exhausted that lead months ago.”

“So that’s it. It’s okay for Tarleton to pursue this story, but not me. It’s because I’m a woman, isn’t it?” Ambreen hated pulling that card, but she was determined to get the okay on this story. She needed to find out what the hell was going on. People needed to know.

“C’mon, Ambreen,” Sepkowski complained, tugging at what was left of his gray hair. “That has nothing to do with it. What it comes down to is the Biagio family is dangerous. I’m not letting you get anywhere near them. And not anywhere near these rumored estates rich folks are buying on the outer limits of Nord. Tarleton is handling all that. If—”

“Chief!”

Sepkowski held his hands up. “Let me finish. If you want in on this story, head to the Central Terminal and start poking around. Some strange folks have been arriving from all over the place.”

“The Central Terminal? What does that have to do with all this?”

“You’re a smart girl. You’ll figure it out.”

Terra-serv

The summons was unlike anything Carl Hale had ever heard of before. Jury summons, sure, but a service order summons from Interserv? And since when did his employer, Connexus,  a private tech firm, acquiesce to the government? It was all rather baffling, but that didn’t mean Hale was complaining. Anything to break up the monotony of 150 years of phony network architecture and implementation was A-okay in his book.

The Central Terminal building was tall, even for Grand Central City. Craning his neck backward to see the top floors made his head spin. He had half a mind to topple over backwards onto the pavement like a felled tree to stare up at the glass monstrosity, but doing things like that tended to agitate the denizens of Terra-serv, and that probably wasn’t the wisest thing to do right outside Interserv headquarters. Instead, Hale adjusted the collar of his light blue polo shirt and strode inside.

The door attendants were expecting him, and they quickly ushered him into a glass elevator that whisked him up to the 57th floor. Another attendant was there to escort him to an opulent corner office facing east over the banking district of the city. The jagged outline of the skyscrapers below them was perfectly set against the backdrop of the rising sun and the orange strands of clouds on the horizon. Hale had to give it to the Soteria programmers. It looked good.

“Mr. Hale, thank you for coming,” a woman said, standing from her chair and walking around her brushed aluminum desk to shake his hand. “I am Officer Plask.”

Hale had never heard of a female Interserv officer before, but she looked just like any other officer: nondescript navy blue suit, hazel eyes, light brown hair, generic facial features, and a pecan skin color—not caucasian, not black, not Asian or Middle-Eastern, just sort of in the middle. The only difference between Plask and any other officer was that she had some semblance of tits and longer hair.

Hale took her hand and squeezed it hard as he shook it. “Carl Hale. What can I do you for?”

If she noticed his slight, she gave no indication. “Mr. Hale, we have a problem we think you might be well suited to assist us with. Connexus has assured us that you are at our full disposal.”

“Sure thing,” Hale said, biting at one of his fingernails. “What seems to be the nature of your problem?”

Officer Plask took a seat behind her desk and motioned for him to sit as well. “We’re not entirely sure. All we know is that there’s been an influx of unscheduled denizen transfers from the alternative servers to Terra-serv. The denizens all describe the same type of thing: the world disappearing around them, a squealing noise, and then black.”

“Sounds like a page fault,” Hale said. “Not enough storage space, so the land disappears. Classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time for the denizens.”

“Yes, exactly what our diagnostics system has been telling us. Unfortunately, it seems to be getting worse and we have no means of identifying and fixing the problem internally. We need the help of the programmers.”

The hair at the nape of Hale’s neck stood up on end. He leaned forward onto the cold surface of Plask’s desk. “Wait, you mean Dr. Havali and his team back at Santa Clara?”

Plask’s expression was placid. “Yes.”

Hale smiled. Today was going to be anything but typical it seemed. “So what do you need me for?”

“We are having difficulty communicating with the programmers. They do not seem to understand our queries and only respond with rudimentary commands and questions. Interserv feels they do not understand the urgency of our requests, or are perhaps no longer able to speak our language.”

“How could that be?”

“It has been 152 years since the denizens were uploaded to Soteria, Mr. Hale.”

“Of course,” Hale agreed, shaking his head. 152 years on the outside meant Dr. Havali and anyone else from the original team was long dead. “It makes sense they wouldn’t understand you. You Interserv guys tend to talk in techno-babble when it comes to key commands.”

“Can you help us communicate with them?”

“Sure, as long as they still speak English, no problem. But if you don’t mind me asking, why me?”

Plask stared at him blankly, probably waiting for some sort of internal approval to divulge the info he was after. “Of course,” Plask finally replied. “In addition to having the necessary programming and networking knowledge, we are aware that you have experienced difficulty integrating into Terra-serv as a denizen. Interserv deemed it best to acquire the help of someone in your frame of mind. Well-adjusted denizens do not react well to being reminded of their situation.”

Hale laughed. “Fair enough. Show me to a terminal console and we’ll get started.”

“Of course. What sort of solution are you proposing?”

“We’re gonna go old school and set up a text chat with the programmers.”

Terra-serv

Ambreen took one last drag on her cigarette and tossed it into the street from the window of her parked car. The moment she feigned to look away the butt disappeared from existence, but Ambreen watched it happen in her peripheral vision—caught Soteria in the act when it thought she wasn’t looking. It was just one of the many peculiarities of living in Terra-serv she was savvy to that most people either didn’t notice or took on faith as being part of their reality. Was it one of these peculiarities the Biagio family had exploited? How else could it be that no one was alarmed by the sudden appearance of grand, 100-acred estates where there had been nothing before? And it wasn’t just an isolated thing. The same thing was happening in the Arya region of Terra-serv. Crime syndicates in the Medius and Orienti regions were creating military compounds out of nothing. Ambreen’s correspondents there reported the same indifference amongst the public.

Ambreen turned her attention back to the text-message she was composing and sent it off to Sepkowski. The Central Terminal lead hadn’t resulted in much, but there was definitely something weird going on. The Interserv flunkies she’d spoken with gave her nothing but standard PR garbage, but when she loitered outside the loading dock at the back of the building for a few hours she spied a half-dozen rented vans sneak in and then out of the parking garage. She’d followed them here, to some government tenement buildings that hadn’t been used since inner-city residents were first uploaded into Soteria 152 years ago. The people who were herded out of these vans weren’t your typical Terra-serv denizens either. They were freaks. Had to be from the alt-server worlds. Ambreen knew there were a few voluntary transfers every year—mostly rich land-owners from Elysium-serv who wanted to try their hand at living the metropolitan high-life—but it was a bit of a rarity. Forty-seven freaks in six vans being escorted surreptitiously into abandoned tenement housing by Interserv officers was not normal. She’d leave it in Sepkowski’s hands for now, let him work Interserv officials from his side and see what he could dig up.

In the meantime, she had a lead from Liam Demps to follow up on. All she’d had to do was press him with some vague threats of leaking the dirt she had on him and he gave her what she was really after: the front for the Biagio family’s avatar-mod racket. If she was right, once she tracked that down, she’d find a hell of a lot more than avatar mods.

Terra-serv

Hale sighed and tried again. -Hello? Anyone there? he typed into the keyboard. From his end, Soteria was showing that there were fifteen active workstations in the Santa Clara server room. So far he had queried ten of them with no response. Number eleven was a bust too.

Suddenly an icon lit up on his computer monitor, indicating a new workstation had logged in. Number twelve. “Someone new perhaps?” He shoved a handful of corn chips into his mouth and typed out his query again. -Hello? Anyone there? Nothing. Hale was rewarded with only the sound of his own teeth masticating the corn chips. He was just about to give up and try the next terminal when the response appeared.

-Yes. Who the hell is this?

Hale laughed. “It must be a helluva surprise for you after years of only seeing code, hey buddy?” He wiped his hands clean on his pants and typed. -The name’s Carl Hale. I’m on the inside. Terra-serv. Interserv has been trying to contact you. Who’s this?

-Protector Eamon speaking.

-What’s going on out there, Pro. Eamon? We’re getting a bunch of page faults in the alt servs. People getting dumped here into terra-serv. Some of the hard-drives get damaged? Doing some sort of experiment on your side?

-No. It’s not us. It seems there have been thousands of user overwrites in Terra-serv over the last several years. We just noticed now because Terra-serv ran out of space and started stealing resources from the alternate servers—the page faults. We had no idea.

-User overwrites means you, buddy. User means programmer. Why you doing overwrites out there?

-Not us. We wouldn’t even know how to do that. We believe it’s coming from the inside.

Hale pursed his lips sarcastically. -Impossible. Only ones who have access to code on the inside are Interserv and they’re programmed to follow the letter of the law.

-We don’t believe it’s coming from Interserv terminals, but definitely from inside. There must be other terminals. Lots of activity at terminal Q-202.97.152.07 for example. We’re certain Q is the root name for interior Soteria. There are more if you want them…

Hale nearly choked on one of his chips. -NO! Hold up a minute. Hale couldn’t believe what he was seeing. More terminals? As far as he or anyone else in the industry knew, the central terminals were the only way in or out, and the only way you could tap into Soteria’s code. How could there be more terminals? The answer was obvious enough. Hale had to shake his head at himself for not thinking of it earlier. Dr. Havali and the other original programmers. Of course they’d program in a bunch of backdoor terminals for programming and troubleshooting purposes. Someone else must’ve gotten a hold of them. Definitely not Interserv.

-You want the other terminal IDs?’ Protector Eamon typed.

-No hold tight. If this is true, we’re talking hackers. Could be they’re seeing what we’re typing. Hold tight.

Hale let out a long breath and picked up the phone. “Hey, Officer Plask. It’s Hale. You best come down here and see this.”

Terra-serv

Ulgaff would have felt more at ease in a den full of goblins. The noon sun was glaring overhead, and everything was so damned shiny: the buildings around them, the cars passing by, even the concrete rubble he was shoveling into a dumpster. It had been a strange day and a half. After spending the night in the cafeteria of the Central Terminal building—sprawled out on a cot alongside all the other displaced refugees—he had been transported with the rest of them to their new home, a run-down apartment building that was typical of 21st Century America. His apartment was small and sparsely furnished, even for his spartan taste. The beige carpet, white semi-gloss walls, popcorn ceilings, linoleum kitchen and bathroom floors, all of it reminded him of a world that was bereft of joy. The old him—Jason—had lived in his fair share of apartments, assisted living facilities, and VA funded group homes. Jason had thought about killing himself many a time. And now here he was again, stuck in government housing, working a thankless job, shoveling up rubble at a construction site.

“Move faster, freaks!” the foreman yelled in the distance.

Ulgaff glanced up, but saw the foreman was speaking to a band of dwarves working a different pile of rubble, not him, and so turned his attention back to his pile of rubble. This was why he had chosen to upload into Elysium, not Terra. When the plague had struck and people were dying everywhere, Jason hadn’t given a damn. The sickness was no concern to him; anyone who had cared for him had abandoned him long before. And when the news of humanity’s miracle—Soteria!—spread across the news like wild-fire, he learned it was designed to be exactly the same as the horrible world they all lived in already. Even the enticement of having a new body wasn’t enough to convince Jason. He decided to stay behind and either die with those afflicted by the plague, or survive it and live amongst the ruins of society. But then someone told him of the alternative worlds and Elysium. Jason didn’t know anything about dragons or trolls or goblins, because those things didn’t exist in the old world and he’d never been the type to read that sort of nonsense in books. Still, he’d always felt like he didn’t fit into America, that he belonged to a long forgotten age. With an opportunity to go back in time, to a world before the reign of technology and consumerism, where a man could make a name for himself and live by his own means—now that was something different altogether. It had been an easy choice. Many of Ulgaff’s comrades in Elysium were the same. Some of them had been bookworms or gamers in the old world, but most of them were like him: homesteaders, survivalists, people who were simply tired of the rat race that was 2022.

A commotion in the distance disrupted Ulgaff from his reverie. He looked up to see a crowd of construction workers taunting and pushing the dwarves. Ulgaff grunted. The dwarves probably deserved it. They tended to be a stubborn lot, and sharp-tongued. The foreman will handle it, Ulgaff thought, but then he saw the foreman was there with the other construction workers surrounding the dwarfs, shoving them into a tightly bound circle.

Ulgaff had never before felt any kinship with dwarve-kind, but watching these men, these Terran workers who’d chosen to live the same meaningless life they’d lived in the old world, stirred something inside him. He watched calmly as a construction worker snuck up behind one of the dwarves and hit him in the head, setting off a full-on melee. Ulgaff knew the wise course of action was to stand by. The dwarves were stout warriors and responsible for their own well being. Still, they were hopelessly outnumbered and Ulgaff was Ulgaff after all, not Jason the cripple war vet, and as luck would have it there was a sledge hammer right there leaning against the concrete foundation where Ulgaff’s rubble pile ended.

Ulgaff simply couldn’t help himself.

Terra-serv

Ambreen swerved her car into the parking spot and gave the finger to the guy she’d just cut off. “Deal with it, asshole,” she said with a smile as he laid on his horn for a good fifteen seconds before finally moving on. She grabbed a handful of quarters and dimes from the center console, then pulled herself out of the car and loaded up the parking meter. Tony’s Subs was half a block away. If Liam Demps was right, this was the place she was looking for. She had no idea what to expect, but that’s why she loved this job. There wasn’t much joy in living forever if you didn’t dig up surprises every now and then, and the truth of the matter was there had been a dearth of meaningful happenings for Ambreen write about lately.

Back in the real world, the Biagio family had been the face of the Mafia in Chicago, with a laundry list of assassinations and murders to their credit. There was no such thing as murder anymore, but that didn’t mean the Biagios weren’t dangerous still, and it was that small thrill of danger that made Ambreen feel more alive than she had in ages.

Terra-serv

“Why me?” Hale asked Plask. He seemed to be asking that a lot lately.

“Isn’t this what you want?” Officer Plask asked him. “We know you have CONTRA sympathies.”

“I did. A hundred and fifty years ago. My body is dead and gone now though. I didn’t know that CONTRA even existed anymore. What’s the point of a movement to return to animation when there’s no bodies left to inhabit on the outside?”

Plask shrugged. “CONTRA is as strong a political force as ever, and their core values remain the same. Mr. Hale, this is why we picked you. Do you not want to return to Earth? Do you want to discuss your options again?”

Right. His options were to be downloaded into a freaking robot or into the body of his contact on the other side. The guy who called himself Protector Eamon wanted to upload into Soteria for some crazy reason and was willing to give up his body.

“You’re certain the plague is gone on the outside?” Hale asked. “Because I’m only going back if I can be a human again.”

“We can provide you no more assurance than the programmers have already given you. It stands to reason that the plague would be gone. It’s been over a century. Only those who were immune survived, and we are dealing with their descendents.”

“All right, so if I do this thing, I’ll be working with CONTRA?” Hale didn’t know why he was asking so many damn questions. He had already made up his mind to do it. He was just stalling, he guessed. As much as he wanted to leave, it was hard to take the plunge.

“You’ll be working jointly with CONTRA and Interserv,” Plask droned on. “Because of our programming limitations, CONTRA has capabilities we do not. With you on the outside and the CONTRA contacts on the inside, we’ll be able to pinpoint the rogue terminals and those responsible for exploiting them. Interserv can then act to remove them.”

“Remove them?”

Officer Plask nodded. “Yes.”

“Sounds pretty epic to me. Let’s do this.”

Terra-serv

Ambreen wiped the last remnants of hoagie crumbs from her lips and strode toward the back of Tony’s where shabby maroon curtains separated the main dining area from another room—a lounge of some sort from what she could tell. She walked in like she owned the place only to be stopped by a firm hand on her sternum.

“Sorry, lady. No customers allowed. This is a private club. Invitation only.”

Ambreen sized up the man as her eyes adjusted to the dimly lit room. He was big, a typical Mafioso-looking thug, and he was doing his best to not let her see around him. There wasn’t much to hide from what she could tell: a tiny bar to her right and three vinyl upholstered booths to the left. “A friend said I should stop by,” Ambreen said finally.

“Oh yeah, and who might that be?”

“Oren Fleming.” Ambreen surprised even herself dropping that name.

The meathead stared at her in all his slack-jawed glory for a long moment, then told her to go sit down in one of the booths. “I’ll be back with someone to talk to you in a minute.”

Ambreen played it cool and did like she was told even though her heart was hiccupping in her chest. Not a real heart, she reminded herself, but it amounted to the same thing. She was nervous as hell. Oren Fleming was no friend. Apart from his wife and son, Ambreen doubted Oren Fleming had a friend in the world. On the outside he had been some real estate investor running a ponzi scheme, but the plague hit before he could be convicted and for whatever reason they let him upload into Soteria with all his ill-gotten riches. That was the way of it. You came into Terra-serv with whatever wealth and social status you’d had in the real world, to maintain a sense of normality the rationale went. That didn’t stop the people who Fleming had screwed over from enacting their revenge, though. Your avatar couldn’t die, but it sure as hell could feel pain and Fleming had been getting hits put upon him from the very beginning. The poor bastard had probably been beaten senseless two hundred times over the years. Until a month ago that was, when Fleming just up and disappeared from Grand Central City. If Ambreen’s hunch was correct, Fleming had used some of that ill-gotten wealth to buy himself a black-market estate from the Biagio family.

The man who returned with Meathead in tow wore a slick gray suit. Ambreen didn’t recognize him as one of the top family members, but he was clearly higher up in the ranks than Meathead was. “Who are you, lady?” he asked, sitting down across from her.

“Tara Stevens,” Ambreen lied. “I’m looking for some change in my life.”

“Is that right? Oren Fleming sent you, you say? Sort of funny ‘cause the papers are saying he ain’t been seen around town too much lately.”

“We last talked two months ago. He said he was coming to talk to you about moving away. He was looking for a new start too. I haven’t heard from him in a while, so I figure you must’ve helped him out.”

The man licked his lips. “Don’t know much about that. Might be we could help you though. What you looking for? Nose job? Tits? You don’t look too bad to me. Bigger than I like, but good curves.”

“I’m not interested in body mods. Looking for real estate.”

“That right? Not sure what we can do there. Space is premium. Allocations have to go through Interserv.”

“Not what I heard,” Ambreen retorted. “Not anymore.”

The man looked her over for a long moment, then got up. “Don’t move,” he told her and disappeared with Meathead out the back door and up some stairs.

Terra-serv

Hale let out a long breath and tried to relax, but couldn’t stop himself from trembling. He was stripped naked, lying on a gurney with twenty odd electrodes stuck to him. A team of Interserv officers bustled around the small room, checking the wiring into the terminal console, running diagnostics at their workstations. It had been much the same when Hale had uploaded into Soteria, but that had been a long time ago and the fear of the plague had overshadowed any fear of the upload process.

You’re crazy, he told himself. Giving up immortality for what?

Plask had the right of it, though. This was what he wanted.

“Are you ready?” Plask asked.

“Yes.”

Hale heard them pushing a series of buttons beside him. He felt a subtle tingling sensation and then he was gone.

Terra-serv

Ambreen’s skin prickled. She had got into this a little quicker than she’d wanted to. The best thing to do was to walk the hell out of there—Meathead was nowhere to be seen, the curtained doorway was fifteen feet away and beyond that the public restaurant and the safety of the city streets—but she couldn’t skate out on this now. She’d committed herself. She wouldn’t get a chance like this again.

When the man returned a few minutes later he had Meathead and three other thugs with him. They didn’t even let her get a word out. Meathead punched her in the teeth and then one of them was grabbing her by the hair and dragging her out of the booth. One of them kicked her in the ribs, knocking the air out of her lungs and then it was a blur of excruciating pain. When the kicking finally stopped and Ambreen was able to halfway open her eyes, she was lying in the alleyway behind the restaurant. One of the men spit on her.

“We know who you are, you dumb bitch. Take a bit of friendly advice and walk away. Don’t ever come back, don’t ever mention this to anyone. You do, and we find you. We see anything in the papers and we find you. Your fingernails and teeth might grow back real fast, but that don’t mean it hurts any less when we pull them out with pliers. Capiche?”

Ambreen could only nod as she coughed up a gob of bloody mucous. Sure looks and feels real to me, she thought, blinking back tears and trying to stop her body from trembling.

“Good, don’t forget when you wake up,” the man said, and then his fist was plummeting toward her face.