Sinner's Run

Noah had never been skydiving before in his life. Normal, outdoor activities were far from his usual thing, much less extreme things like jumping out of airborne vehicles and falling several thousand feet to the ground.

But, here he was.

The wind whipped past him, the chill stabbing into his cheeks as he flailed his arms. The helmeted man who had hit the drop was far more composed, keeping his arms locked tight to his side and his legs together. Strangely, the pair of them seemed to be falling at the exact same rate, despite the single rational synapse in Noah's brain squeaking

hey, with my limbs spread out like this, I should be creating more of a surface for wind resistance to act against and slowing the plummet to my death. Why am I not falling to my death slower?

"Stop freaking out!" his faceless companion barked at him. "We need to move when we hit the ground. I've watched enough of these to know that they always stash good shit in Maritime."

The mention of the game locale cut through the panic. Noah blinked and focused on the ground, which was looming larger and larger with each terrified passing heartbeat. Below them were the long docks of the harbor, along with the two big warehouses. Each wall of the warehouses had at least one door that could be used to get inside, as well as a hatch on the roof that could be opened to get right onto the upper levels. At the moment, they were falling towards the roof hatch.

"Here we go!" his companion said. Noah felt his legs pivot into a landing position of their own accord, realizing that there were afterburners firing down parallel to his back to slow their fall.

Then his feet thudded on the metal roof, gravity reasserting itself on his body. Noah stumbled forward a few steps, pinwheeling his arms to keep from careening off the roof with his momentum. "Woah woah woah!" he yelped, coming to a stop a foot from the edge. He pivoted forward, flailing his arms and almost pitching over the edge of the roof. He saw another two pairs of armored figures run through the doors below as he leaned backwards onto two feet.

His heart thundered in his ears as he looked out over the expansive area around Maritime. It was at the bottom of a small basin, lower in elevation than the rest of the map. Rocky spires jutted up around the harbor, concealing the narrow pathways to other areas of the map. In the distance, Noah saw more people diving out of the sky to land in other places. High above him, the dropship was already lost to view, a smoke contrail in the sky the only indication it had ever been there.

A loud bang from below him made him yelp, his entire body flinching. A moment later, more bangs sounded, and he realized it was gunfire, the sounds exactly like the ones in the game. The bang was a Heartseeker rifle, the rapid-fire clatter an N-33 pistol and the N-99 submachine gun. Another, even louder bang sounded - the Hacksaw shotgun, a short, stubby double barrel that did disgusting damage at close range and chip damage any further out.

"Hey, you in here?" a voice sounded in his ear.

Noah blinked, reaching up to his ear and finding a small, circular device screwed in. "Hello?"

"Don't hello me!" the voice of the helmeted man said. "Get your ass in here and help, there's three teams in here!"

"O-okay!" Noah turned and hurried towards the open hatch.

This is one hell of a dream,

he thought.

A little too vivid. Was that lunchmeat I made the sandwich with bad? Yikes.

Still, might as well go along for the ride.

Noah dropped down into the hatch. He landed on the catwalk that overlooked the warehouse floor. It was chaos down below already, as the armored figures fell upon whatever guns and ammo they could find and tried to get the early upper hand. One was already down, crawling towards his teammate as said teammate tried repeatedly to shoot an attacker in the face with the Hacksaw. Noah spotted his partner emptying an N-33 clip into a standing opponent, forcing him to his hands and knees. He moved down the catwalk, and as he did, his boot hit something that clattered away down the grilled walkway. Noah picked it up to discover it was an N-10 - the weakest damage weapon in the entire game. It was a semi-automatic pistol with an eight round clip that dealt a paltry ten damage a shot. It's entire purpose was to be used to survive the early game until you found something better. That was it.

As he held the gun for a moment, a square flickered to life in the corner of his vision. It showed the number 10 over the number 20.

The default ammo count for the pistol,

he thought.

That's kinda cool.

"Hey, dumbass!" his partner yelled from down below. "Help me!"

Noah shook his head. "Coming!"

Guess the lunchmeat decided to give me a dick for a teammate.

He hurried to the end of the catwalk and the ladder that was there. He dropped down the open hole in the catwalk, falling about ten feet to the floor. Strangely, the impact didn't hurt.

"Finally," his partner grunted, leaning down and punching his downed opponent. The downed man grunted as he faded into motes of light. "Thought you were going to take forever to-"

Another player slid around the corner, toting a Hyperion rifle. He shot Noah's teammate in the back twice, dropping him with a strangled noise. He turned his attention to Noah and pulled the trigger. The bolt from the rifle hit Noah in the stomach.

And hurt. A lot.

The sudden shock of pain made Noah stagger backwards, clutching his abdomen with a hand. "What the-"

His attacker's finger pumped the trigger, but the gun made a beep and click. Out of ammo. With a frustrated noise the armored figure stowed the rifle away and moved towards Noah, cracking his knuckles.

"Hey hey..." Noah said, slowly moving backwards with a hand raise. "Hang on a-"

The punch hit him square on the jaw, the force of it sending Noah sliding back several feet. Pain as he'd never felt bloomed through his face, as if he'd been hit with a baseball bat and not a fist. Noah scrambled away, desperate to get away.

This shit hurts. Dreams don't hurt. Dream's aren't supposed to hurt!

As he ran, he moved behind a stack of crates to find the teammate of one of the downed players reviving his ally, going through the motion of grabbing a hypodermic needle off his belt and jamming it into the gut of the downed man. Noah stopped short as he came across the scene. As he did, the player doing the reviving stopped and grabbed the Hacksaw off his back. The twin barrels swung up, and Noah ducked.

The shot went over his head, and Noah heard the sound of the buckshot hitting his pursuer, who faded away into motes of light. At the same time, a large white crate appeared in the space he'd existed in a moment before. Noah spun around and ran back the way he'd come. as he heard the sound of the Hacksaw being reloaded.

Gotta get out of here,

his fight or flight instincts screamed at him.

Run, run as fast as you can!

"Hey, jackass, where are you going?" his partner yelled in his ear. "You better not leave me here! Hey!

Hey!"

A moment later there was the Hacksaw firing sound, the sound loud in his ear despite him being several hundred yards from the Maritime warehouses.

Noah kept running, hugging the edge of the cliff that marked the edge of the SInner's Run map. Far below him, deep blue water lapped at the bases of jagged rocks sticking out of the surf like the bayonets on the end of a couple of the guns. If getting shot with the Hyperion once had hurt that much, Noah didn't even want to begin to guess at how much a fall would hurt.

But why did it hurt? You were supposed to pinch yourself in dreams, and it wasn't supposed to hurt. Noah did so, squeezing as hard as he could with his thumb and forefinger. The back of his hand hurt as the skin snapped back into its normal position. This wasn't a dream - somehow. Either that or he was having one hell of a drug trip. Had Milo spiked his cold cuts with some kind of drug? What the hell was going on?

In a moment of clarity, Noah realized that he could feel everything going on around him. Wind blew in off the ocean, ruffling his hair and chilling the panic sweat on his arms, smelling like salt and brine. The sun warmed his face, a little heat haze rising off the ground. Far off in the distance, he heard gunfire and explosions. All five of his senses were on high alert, his brain in overdrive. Somehow, this was all too real.

A noise sounded in his ear, a low metallic ring like the kind tinnitus afflicts you with. A moment later, a voice spoke. "So. Bit of a rough start, eh?"

The voice was somewhere firmly on the line between masculine and feminine, yet didn't sound robotic or artificial at all. "Who is this?" Noah asked.

"Ah, my name's not the important right now," the voice said. "I think you have more pressing matters to attend to, don't you?"

Noah made a face. "What are you talking about?"

"Turn around."

Noah did, slowly. Behind him, he saw a pair of black-armored figures run out of the one of the doors of Maritime. He hissed and ducked down, but as he did his finger pressed down on the trigger of his N-10 pistol. A single round fired off into the air, the crack echoing all around the rocky area around him. "Shit!"

"I'd run if I were you," the voice said. "They'll have heard that."

Noah scrambled backwards, almost falling over himself in a mad dash to get down the hill and away from the other two players. He cut down the incline to the flat ground below and put every bit of strength he had into running. Noah was by no means out of shape, but his cardio left something to be desired. After only a minute his legs were burning and he desperately wanted to stop.

"Keep going," the voice urged. "Over the hill is Ion. It's a big-"

"Power plant looking building, yeah," Noah panted, angling his path to the side to avoid tripping over a large rock.

"Very good," the voice said. "Looks like you know more about the Run than I figured."

Noah crested the hill and hurried down the other side towards Ion. It was a larger area than Maritime, with a single large building packed with machinery that provided plenty of close-quarters combat in the early-game scramble. The supply bins outside weren't opened, meaning nobody had landed here. He made a beeline for one of the doors and burst through, shutting it behind him and pawing at it frantically.

"What are you doing?" the voice asked.

"Looking for a lock!" Noah said.

"None of the doors on the Run lock," the voice said, sounding bemused. "Otherwise the budget for replacing them would be even more absurdly high than it already is."

Noah punched the metal door, leaning on it and breathing deep to catch his breath. "Damn it, what the hell is going on?"

"You tell me, Prime."

His head snapped up. "What did you call me?"

"Well, technically, you're not a Prime yet. The winner or winners of this game will go on to become Primes, and compete for glory on the Run. The audience demands a contest that only the best of the best can provide, after all."

Noah stared out the glass pane of the door, watching to see if the two other players would run down the hill towards Ion. He forced himself to calm down and think for a second. The strange voice was speaking in broad terms about the game. The island known as Sinner's Run didn't exist in a vacuum. It was a location on a planet in the far reaches of the Milky Way where Primes competed for fame and glory before an audience watching all across the galaxy. In the earliest days of the game, the creators had put out some supplementary material detailing how the Primes were selected. In the game's universe, prospective Primes fought in preliminary matches on each day of competition before the main event matches with the actual Primes. The winners of those prelim matches joined the ranks of the Primes in the main events. However, this little bit had often been treated as some extraneous lore by the developers.

"This is a preliminary match?" Noah asked.

"Of course. For someone who knows the Run you seem surprisingly unappraised of the workings of the rest of our games."

"I'm not..." Noah said. "This isn't real. This

can't

be real."

"It's very real, I can assure you."

"No, it's

not!"

Noah shouted, spinning around to face the empty power plant. "Sinner's Run is a video game! It's not real!"

"I mean, we do have the augmented reality experience for home consoles," the voice said matter-of-factly. "But where you stand is the real deal. If you doubt that, continue to remain where you are for the next, oh, ten seconds."

"What happens in ten seconds?" Noah asked.

"Give me a moment." The voice didn't say anything for a moment. Then, he heard it again, not in his ear, but amplified from a loudspeaker hidden somewhere in the building. "The first round has ended. Zone closure in progress."

Noah's eye twitched. "Oh no." He turned and shoved the door open, running back outside. Out over the water to his left, he saw it - the neon purple wall beginning to close in on the island. "Not the goddamn Kool-Aid."

"I do not know what this Kool-Aid is," the voice said. "Sounds rather disgusting, honestly."

Noah stood transfixed as the wall began to close in. His brain refused to process the giant purple barrier looming larger in his vision with each passing second. At least until it enveloped him, and he felt a sensation in his body akin to what he assumed being shocked with a cattle prod would feel like. "Augh!"

"Better get moving," the voice said. "The ring's closing towards the canyon to your north. If you hurry, you'll be able to make it before the Zone shocks you to death."

The word 'death' penetrated deep into Noah's subconscious and put the fear of God into him. He turned and ran as fast as he could, mentally telling his legs to shut the fuck up as they screamed at him for putting them through so much. Vestiges of a track lesson from years ago asserted them in his mind - foot flat, pump arms, breath deep. All the while, the shocks from the Zone continued, but Noah found it eerily easy to compartmentalize the pain so long as he was still running. If he was still running he was still alive, which was good. Running would make the pain stop eventually.

He barely registered it as he ran out of the Zone, and the world stopped being covered in a purple haze and the cattle prod sensation vanished. Noah slowed to a jog, then a complete stop, leaning on a rocky outcropping at the edge of the shallow canyon that lead up the river to Dam.

"You have three minutes," the voice said. "It might be a good idea for you to find some armor. And a better gun. And some supplies." It paused for a moment. "Anything, really. You have next to no chance of winning a fight as your are right now."

"Do you give everyone advice?" Noah managed, still trying to catch his breath. "Or am I special?"

The voice snickered. "You

are

special, actually."

"Huh?"

"I have a vested interest in anyone who simply

appears

among the preliminary match participants. Of sixty people that dropped into the Run this game, you are the only one that I know nothing about." Noah heard paper shuffling. "I have complete dossiers on every single man and woman that went on board that ship, save for you. You replaced somebody, took their place, and I cannot figure out how. It's quite the wonderful mystery."

"Don't suppose there's any way I can un-replace them?" Noah asked.

"Considering I have no idea where the gentleman you replaced went, and you already being down there in the thick of it, that's an unfortunate no, my young friend."

Noah sighed. "Figures."

"It actually doesn't interest me that much

how

you did it. A sinner is a sinner, a player is a player. What does interest me is what you could manage to do should you be the one to win this game. Tell me, what is it that you want the most?"

"To get out of whatever crazy fever dream this is," Noah said. "To get back home."

"A bit of a tall order, but we can make it work," the voice said. "But the only way we can start down that road is by you winning. Otherwise, my hands are tied."

Noah looked down at the dinky N-10 pistol in his hand. He made the reality of his situation abstract for a moment, and focused on what he would do if he were in this situation playing the game in his room rather than standing on Sinner's Run itself. Down a teammate, with no supplies and a weaksauce gun, the logical first step would be to find better equipment. Then, play around the Zone and stay out of sight as much as possible to avoid getting spotted and run down by a two-man team.

Feeling a little more sure now that he had some manner of plan, Noah pushed away from the rock and jogged to the north, cutting down the steep incline into the canyon. Below him were several shacks on the bank of the large, shallow river that cut through this part of the map. Noah opened the door to the first and made sure to shut it behind him so as not to give away that he had passed through, or might still be around.

Scattered inside the shack was an assortment of loot - a green armor piece, second on the strength scale behind violet and orange. The moment Noah touched it, it disappeared in a small flash before reappearing around his torso. Despite his expectations, it weighed nothing, and left him fully mobile. A green bar appeared in his vision, showing the strength of the armor.

Next to where the armor had been was a small box of healing Hypo needles. Noah touched them, and they disappeared. He made a face. "Uh..." Next to them was a grenade, which Noah gingerly grabbed hold of. As he did, the explosive vanished, and an indicator appeared in his vision showing that it had been added to his storage deck, the game's jargon for backpacks. "Well how the hell am I supposed to get it now?" he muttered.

"Since you snuck in, you missed the lecture about how the Deck-Tech works," the voice piped up in his ear.

Noah heard the capital letters and vaguely remembered seeing the term 'Deck-Tech' in early supplemental lore material for the game. "Can you give me a crash course?" he asked, moving to the next room in the shack.

"It's real simple, honestly," the voice said. "Your basic armor and the armor used by Primes has a small node built into it that allows for the conversion of objects into theoretical quantum energy. The node is linked through the armor to your brain waves, and will respond to you willing for something so long as that something is contained within the node's quantum containment compartment."

Noah watched a box of rounds disappear into motes of light. "Right. And in layman's terms?"

The voice sighed. "Look, ever heard of Schrodinger's cat?"

"Yes?"

"It's like that, except with bullets, grenades, and medical supplies. And linked to your brain so you can solve the conundrum with a thought if you want."

"Huh." Noah took hold of another set of healing Hypos. "Neat."

"You don't need to think about it all that much," the voice said. "Just remember how to use the system and you'll be fine. Also, you should get a move on, the Zone closes again in thirty seconds."

"Where should I go where I won't run into anyone?" Noah asked.

"Now

that

would be making things too easy."

"Oh, come on!"

"Ah ah ah." Noah could practically hear the wagging finger. "Play the game on your own from here. Tick tock!"

Noah scowled, moving out of the building and hurrying to the next. As he looted that one, he realized that he hadn't found a single new gun to replace the N-10. "Perfect," he muttered, reloading the little pistol.

A moment later, he nearly dropped it from shock. He'd never

held

a gun before in his life, much less fired one. How had he known how to reload the pistol so quickly and efficiently? The motion had been so smooth it had barely registered.