With all the happenings of the past several weeks, Vivian would not have found it strange if her fingers combusted with the speed and ferocity of her keystrokes. The rate at which she typed would have caused a Computer 101 class to reel back in shock and awe. She had known walking into the server room that what awaited her would push her abilities. But she hadn't expected them to be pushed
this
far.
She took a moment to take her fingers off the keyboard, curling them inward and wincing at the pops from her knuckles. On the monitor in front of her, some of the painstakingly entered code on the screen vanished. She cursed and bent back to the keys. Stopping was out of the question with Noah's safety on the line.
"Are you going to tell me what the heck you're doing here?" Brian asked, leaning over her shoulder.
"If I told you you wouldn't believe me." Vivian wiped sweat from her forehead and kept going. "Or you would drag me out of here by my hair, one of the two."
"That doesn't exactly inspire confidence."
"Then draw confidence from our working relationship." Vivian desperately wanted him to stop talking, but didn't want to risk snapping at him to shut up. Being mean wasn't going to help solve the problem. "I need to focus, and it helps if I know you have my back."
She could almost see Brian's resigned expression, the kind he got when the quality control team told him there was a bug that wouldn't be fixed by the time a patch went live. He sighed. "Fine."
Vivian bent further towards the screen. She was used to working with static code, and the ability to go back up the screen and correct her mistakes. It had started that way, with her opening up a command line into the in-house build stored on the servers. She'd spotted the strange spaghetti code almost immediately, and had attacked it with all her abilities. Noah had been easy to find, referred to simply by name. It had been a simple matter to extricate him and drop him back into the map, resetting the game and giving him a load of equipment.
Now however, the window in which she was working was actively fighting back against her. The code she was entering changed as the lines went up the screen, entire lines being deleted or rearranged. Her cursor bounced around the window, making it so she had to constantly hit the hotkeys to bring it back to the end. She bared her teeth at the screen. She would not be beaten by a bunch of ones and zeroes.
Brian looked over her shoulder. Vivian could feel his demeanor shift as he looked between the keys and what was happening on the screen. "Okay, this
has
to be a virus."
"It may very well be," Vivian said, her gaze flitting up to the changes being wrought on the already-entered code and trying to compensate. "But I can beat it."
"Can I help?"
"I don't..." A thought occurred to her, a quick flash of inspiration among the flood of coding logic in her mind. "You can actually. Get another keyboard and monitor and hook it up to the tower I'm working on."
It took Brian only a moment to grab the equipment from outside and bring it into the server room. He hooked up the keyboard and monitor to the extra HDMI and USB ports in the desktop tower, and Vivian felt a surge of panic as her own screen flickered. The CPU in the tower managed to accommodate the other monitor. "Now what?" Brian asked.
"Wait one second." Vivian opened another command window and worked some magic. She took the instance of the game running and fed it through to the other monitor in spectator mode. "Turn that towards me, I need to see what's happening."
Brian looked at the screen as he angled it towards Vivian. His eyes narrowed. "What's happening here? Who the heck is that running around?"
Vivian took a breath as she tabbed back to the first command window and kept fighting. Null or Colleen had managed to undo ten minutes of work in a minute, and she had to make up for lost time. "That's Noah Welkin. He vanished from his home over a month ago and reappeared in the game. I've been trying to get him out for weeks now, and right now some sentient characters that were cut from the game that still lurk in the game's code are trying to erase him from existence. I am attempting to help him from the outside and keep myself from being locked out."
The only sound in the server room for a long time was the click of the keys under her fingers. Finally, Brian said, "Oh, is
that
all?"
Vivian inclined her head. "I'm also attempting to bugfix several characters in the space of minutes where it takes the character team weeks to do it."
"To do what?"
She looked to the other monitor, at Noah hurrying over an incline into a valley below all alone. "To get him his friends back."
Without anyone else around him, the Run felt desolate and lonely.
There was no music, no distant gunfire, not even the wind blowing across the landscape in front of him. No boots rustled grass in front of him, no rocks crunched behind him as a partner or teammate followed. It was just him and the map. But even that was more barren and desolate than it had ever been, with the absence of any kind of lootable gear on the map. Noah had cracked open a few of the supply containers scattered across the map and found nothing in them.
To his surprise, he wasn't nervous. Fear had fled his mind at this point. There was only what he had to do: survive. He didn't know what Colleen and the Administrator would throw at him, only that it would be a rough time. What would their strategy be? They seemed to have a level of control over the world of the game that nobody else did.
As if to prove his point, everything grew dark all of a sudden. Noah looked up to see that the sun had winked out to be replaced with what looked like an approximation of a moon, but lacking all the essential details like the craters. Moonlight shafted down, casting the whole map in front of him in a silvery glow. Lights flickered on outside the buildings. He hadn't even known this was a possible look for the map. Maybe it was something in the works that the Administrator had access to based on them being on the Mechantix server.
Noah hiked the Adjutant further up his chest. He had no idea how this would change the way the game was played. Then again, it was hardly a game any more. With no allies at his side, things were realer now than they'd ever been.
It also seemed as though the Zone wasn't in play. He'd been moving for a solid fifteen minutes by his estimate, and had yet to hear the sirens signalling the closure. It all might very well come down to if Colleen saw him first or if he saw Colleen first. Even in the latter case, with his average aim, victory wasn't assured. And who knew what other tricks his digital adversaries could pull out of the bag.
In a way, Noah felt like it was an almost fitting situation that he found himself in. Nothing in his life prior to the Run had been a sure thing. He'd spent so much time on his own, away from others and a world that he wanted little to do with. Interaction face to face had scared him, but he had cultivated a group of friends in an online space. There wasn't anything wrong with doing that, but he had done it at the expense of most of his relationships with the people close to him in real life. He'd thought that Colleen might have been a step in the right direction. But look at how that had turned out.
Some sixth sense made him turn his head to the right as he reached the top of a hillock. A flash came from the trees - light winking off a scope. Noah threw himself flat as the round screamed over his head. He rolled back down the hill out of the line of fire.
As he came to a stop, his earpiece crackled. "Maybe I underestimated you," Colleen's voice purred. "Or maybe you've just gotten good."
"A little of column A, a little of column B?" Noah said, creeping back up the slope to see if he could spot her in the distance.
"Don't push your luck." Colleen's voice had its edge back. "No matter how good you are, I'm better. You're an outsider, an interloper. I've been here since the beginning."
Noah put two and two together quickly and realized Colleen was a cut character from the earlier cycles of the game's life. "If you're so good, then how come you didn't make the cut?"
"I don't know," Colleen answered. From the way her voice hitched in a steady rhythm, it sounded like she was moving. "But I intend to find the person who trapped me in digital Purgatory and make them answer for it."
I need to keep her talking,
Noah thought, cutting back down the slope and circling around towards the north.
The more she blabs the less focused she'll be on me.
"So what's the point of all this?" he asked. "Why me? What was the purpose of bringing me here?"
"We needed a warm body." Colleen's breathing was even now, which meant she'd either stopped completely or was moving slowly. "Anyone would do, really. I was in the bar that night to find someone."
"So I'm just unlucky."
"Pretty much. Though really, you're hardly the worst candidate. For Null and myself to manifest in the real world, we need a human spirit. What better one to take than one who's barely making use of the gift he was given?"
Noah paused. "Gift?"
"The gift of life." Colleen's voice was hard. "You were born flesh and blood, we were born of ones and zeroes. Yet you've squandered it, wasting your life in a tedious day to day cycle while we are trapped here in a space beholden to the whims of beings we have no connection to."
