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Chapter Twenty-Two

1-9: ET pwn Home

INVENTORY:

* MEDICINE

* COIN

* TROPHY 1

* MYSTERIOUS SCROLL

* WOODEN SWORD

“There’s got to be something here,” Molly says. “A hint. Something.” ET tries to get leverage on a gravestone to push it aside, but it doesn’t budge.

Max inspects the surface for hidden cracks. “We need another bomb,” he says. “Maybe I could blow open Turing’s tombstone to reveal a hidden passageway.”

“No,” Molly says. “No self-respecting game designer would make deliberately desecrating Alan Turing’s grave part of the mission.”

“I’d bet most players don’t even know who Alan Turing is,” ET counters.

“It doesn’t matter what most players think,” Molly says. “All that matters here is what one person thinks—the person who designed this part of the game.”

Max can’t come up with a good counter to that argument. “Okay, okay. What about the crossbones engraving? Why are they under an apple instead of a skull?”

“Alan Turing died by poison apple,” Molly says.

“Really?” Max says.

“Crossbones,” ET muses. “Well, there is the boneyard.”

“What?!” say Max and Molly at the same time.

Max moves aggressively into ET’s personal space. His voice is low. “You knew about a place called the boneyard, and brought us here first?”

“You...you distinctly said graveyard. Excuse me for being an preeminent listener.”

Max deflates. “Fine. Let’s go. Which way to the boneyard?”

“It’s at the far western reaches,” ET says.

“That sounds…far,” Molly notes with her typical deadpan accuracy.

“Then the sooner we get going, the sooner we’ll get there,” Max says.

They descend through the Veil and battle through the desert, back the way they came. At the forest, they change tack and proceed through a golden plain, flush with a barley approximation tat obscures the view of surrounding landscape.

Max spots the predator before anyone else does. It’s a golden-brown knot the size of a fist, barely visible above the grain heads. It tracks alongside them, moving forward in stealthy bursts. Through a small gap, Max sees a bit more—segmented modules ending in a jointed tail, the upper node terminating with a sharp stinger the size of a steak knife.

Max freezes.

“Scorpires,” ET says. “Very dangerous. One nick and they’ll keep handing out damage until you find a healer. Assuming you’re able to make it to a healer.”

“What do we do?” Molly asks.

“Don’t get stung,” ET says.

“Molly, do you see something we’re not?,” Max says.

Before she can answer, the stinger twitches and bounds across the grain tops directly toward Max. With the grace of an ox, he lunges out of the way, swinging his sword against the raised tail.

The sword bounces off without leaving a mark. His hands ache. Was that an electrical shock?

“Also, don’t bother attacking them with weapons of your quality,” ET says.

“Gee thanks,” Max says.

Max spots a second stinger camouflaged among the grain heads. Once he spots it, it’s easier to pick out the third one. Then the fourth and fifth. “It’s a trap!”

Molly pulls away from the group, doing her own thing again. “We don’t have time for this. Here!” There’s a rocky outcropping just to their left, away from the Scorpire swarm. The monsters come up to the edge of the grassy area, but no farther. Max catches a glimpse of their mighty front claws, peeking out from the gaps between stalks.

“How much farther is the boneyard?” Max asks.

“It’s right there,” Molly says, pointing at a distant smear of pixels on the horizon, on the far side of the vast swampy wetland.

“How can you even see that?” ET asks, with what sounds like genuine admiration.

“She just knows things sometimes,” Max says. “Once you get over how annoying it is, you start to appreciate how useful it is.”

Molly chucks Max on the shoulder.

“Ow! If I had pain receptors in my rig, that would’ve really hurt!” Max makes a show of rubbing his shoulder while he scans the land ahead of them. From the grassland to the swamp is maybe a hundred paces. “Well, if Molly says so, I trust her. Let’s make a run for it.”

“We need a bigger caravan,” ET says. “It’s too dangerous to cross the Everett swamp, just the three of us. We need to get more help.”

“Two things,” Molly says, ticking off with her fingers. Max has never seen her this agitated before. “One, there isn’t anyone else to ask. Two, even if there was somebody available to help—and there isn’t—no time. Every minute we spend here is another minute Hemera gets ahead of us.”

“Hermera, you say?” ET asks. “You know her?”

“Yeah, we’ve run into her a few times,” Max admits.

“And you’re trying to do something that will annoy, harass, deprive, thwart, or otherwise euchre Hemera?”

“Yes,” Molly says.

“Euchre?” Max asks.

“Well, why didn’t you say so to begin with?” ET says. “But if you’ve got any extra armor, or leather, or fabric…anything, wrap up your legs. More’s the better.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Molly says.

“I don’t like it either, but we’ve got no choice,” Max says. “Ready?”

ET picks up a loose chunk of rock and throws it in the opposite direction. Immediately, the scorpries converge on it. “Now or ne’er,” he says.

The three of them bound off the rock and stride through the tall grass. The scorpires don’t take long to catch on to the ruse. Max doesn’t stop to look back, but the sound of crunching stalks behind him gets closer until it sounds like they’re right on top of him. The water is too far away. He’ll never make it…

Max’s foot tangles on something, and down he tumbles. His closest pursuer crashes into him, a painful thwack against his ribs that sends the beast wildly rolling over and past him. It splashes into water and shrieks with a ghastly bellow. Avoiding the flailing limbs, Max pitches himself sideways, just enough to avoid the lash of another oncoming scorpire. The rest are coming at him too fast for him to find his feet.

The next monster rushes for him, deadly tail taking precise aim at his throat. Max scrambles, but his hands, slick with glistening sweat, can’t get traction. He braces for impact. A wire hook snags the plunging stinger and twists it with an awful crunch. Molly. Her good hand finds one of Max’s, and help him up, sheer momentum pulling him ahead.

The entering-water mechanic is clumsy, with a hissy splash and abrupt drop of the eyeline to a few inches above the water. The swarm of scorpires stops at water’s edge, angrily hissing. Max allows himself to breathe again.

From there on, walking precipitates a juicy squishing noise and motion-sickness-inducing bob from side to side. Forward walking speed varies depending on unseen variances in the underwater landscape, which only makes the movement feel more jarring.

Minutes into the trek, Max begins to wonder what all the hassle was about wrapping up his legs. Then he realizes. “Something just bumped me! I can’t see into the water.”

“You can’t see them. Many have tried,” ET says. “And that wasn’t a bump. That was a bite. Some say the piranhas are completely invisible, which, living in black water would be technically true.”

“Piranhas! You didn’t say anything about piranhas!” Max screams.

Another nip at Max’s leg, this one hard enough break his stride. Blood red pixels mingle in the dark water. A life meter materializes at the bottom of Max’s field of vision, a row of hearts, the rightmost one no longer red. And there’s still a long way through the bog. Unlike the terror on land, this happens slowly enough for him to really contemplate his fate. He can’t shake the vision of his avatar descending into the black filth, never to be seen again. And back in the real world, Hemera seizing control of the refugee camp, razing it to the ground, just because she felt like it, and because nobody else was strong enough to stop her.

“I’m not going to make it,” Max says.

“Max!” Molly says. “How dare you? You are going to make it. And if you so much as think like that again, I’m going to kick you in the pants so hard you won’t sit for a week.”

The force of Molly’s words hits Max harder than her foot would have. In the years he’s known her, he’s never witnessed anything quite like it. The difference this time was how much she cared about the outcome.

Max feels another sharp jolt at the same spot the piranhas have been working on. He pulls out his sword and thrusts the point into the water, just missing his leg. Judging by the feel, he made solid contact. He hefts the sword out of the water, and there’s nothing on it. Or is there? It’s unbalanced and heavy…

“Well, ET, I believe you may have been right. We’ve got invisible fish here. They’re not too bright, and the wooden sword can take them out.”

With more pauses to drive away the fish, the party at length finishes crossing the bog. Max steps on to dry land and immediately collapses to his knees and kisses the ground.

Their arrival at the boneyard is marked by a gigantic femur, at least twice the length of a human’s, driven into the ground like a tent peg. They had arrived.

The boneyard consists of an immaculately groomed field of emerald grass surrounding a single tombstone. The edges run up against the unpassable rocky ledge that marks the edge of the game universe. Other than a scattering of dead trees, there’s not much to it.

Max steps up to read the inscription, but it’s a pixelated mess. No matter how close he gets, the pixels don’t resolve into letters. He brushes encrusted dirt off, and at the moment he makes contact with the stone, it flashes, rapid flickers between gray and white, then a spectral figure pours itself upward into material form.

Max jumps back. “Is that a ghost?”

“No such thing as ghosts,” ET says. “It’s a Shade, and they get cranky when you wake them up. I suggest keeping your distance.”

Molly’s hand goes to her sword, but ET stops her. “It’s not worth it.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Max says. As he says this, a blurry light gathers around his feet. Not his feet, but in the lower reaches of what he can see. It moves with him when he turns his head. It’s the HUD, though the VR visor confuses his eyes in a way that prevents him from reading it.

Max pulls the visor away from his face. The tiny room he’s encased in feels unreal compared to the vast game world he’s been submerged inside. Molly is there, still fully engrossed. A shrill beep sounds from the deck—“player one disengaged—rejoin or respawn in five seconds. Four. Three…”

A nice friendly warning about imminent failure of this whole mission. At least he can read the HUD again. It says: REMEMBER N W S W

Max snaps the visor back into place, and his mind swims while mediated reality reasserts. Then he’s back. “I know the way,” he says. “Follow me.”

At the north end of the boneyard, there’s a tidy path lined with tree stumps. It leads to another boneyard that looks identical to the one they just left.

“Did we just experience a glitch in the matrix?” Molly wonders out loud.

“There’s two ways out of the boneyard heading west. Max picks the one that, like the northern exit, features a tree stump.

This too leads to another exact copy of the boneyard.

“If one of us stayed behind, and the rest went through there, would we run into each other again?” ET asks.

“Don’t think about it too much,” Max says. He takes them south, then west again.

This time they find themselves in a peaceful grove, tightly hemmed in on three sides by thick forest. In the middle is a monument of gleaming granite, three stairs leading to a pedestal. On top of that, protruding from a reddish boulder the size of a barrel from the earlier platform game, is a cup with the inscription of a jeweled scarab. A trophy.

Max pulls on the trinket, but it doesn’t budge. He pulls harder, to no avail.

The stone underneath bears an inscription in a language for which Max can’t even identify from the script. Unlike the tombstones, these letters are visible.

“What language is that?” Molly asks. “I’ve seen that before.”

“Obviously one needs the secret in order to remove— Wait, you’ve seen that language before?”

“Yeah, you need—oh,” Molly says.

“What?” Max asks.

“I think that book we left behind is required to decode the inscription,” Molly says.

“The one that was covered with black goo?” Max says. His stomach churns. “This is so unfair!”

Throughout this exchange, ET keeps uncharacteristically quiet.

Max turns on him. “Why don’t you contribute something useful to our quest instead of just standing there like an idiot.”

ET’s expression slowly morphs from his usual dour face into a smile. “If you insist,” he says. He pulls his hands out from his pockets, and he’s holding a tiny bomb. The fuse spits a stream of sparks. Where did he get that? Worry later—Max dives for cover, throwing out an arm to pull Molly to safety.

There’s nothing to make them actually feel the concussion of the explosion, though Max’s health meter[ Health meter ref] drops by a third of its hearts. The controls are so sluggish to respond that Max isn’t sure if he can get up again.

But he can still see. ET pulls a book out from inventory. Not just any book, but the book, still dripping with the black goo. Tendrils of it drape from the book to his sleeve.

“ET! Get away from that thing before it eats you!” Max shouts, but ET either doesn’t hear, or doesn’t care. ET opens the book, carefully searching for the symbols inscribed on the rock, and begins translating incantations.

Max struggles to right his character, but the controls aren’t responding at all. He checks inventory. The trophy he’d collected is gone. When did he get pickpocketed?

“OK, fine,” he says, “I admit it. You are the greatest thief I’ve ever met. Maybe even the greatest the world has ever seen. You stole the book while making us think we left it behind. Bravo. Even now, thinking back, I don’t have the first clue even of when you pulled it off. You win. You’re the greatest. Now get away from that thing before you get us all killed.”

The Eigenthief (for it hardly seems right to Max to think of him any other way now) recites the translation with increased intensity, even as the black slime crawls across his face. In a loud voice, he calls out words from some forgotten language.

With a metallic grinding noise the jeweled scarab comes unstuck from the boulder and the Eigenthief tumbles backward off the platform, landing close to Max and Molly.

He stands tall. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited to get my hands on this,” he says. “How many newbies I’ve had to bear through insufferable small talk and inane questions. It finally paid off.”

“You’re working for Hemera!” Molly says, her voice filled with outrage.

“Work for Hemera?” The Eigenthief sputters. “I shudder to think.”

Max’s head reels. Does this mean the Eigenthief was or wasn’t an AI?

“I don’t expect we’ll meet again,” the Eigenthief says, just as the black slime covers his mouth, and another tendril extends from the top of his head, quickly covering his entire face in black, followed by the rest of him. The black bubble surges and roils, then pops, splashing into an oily slick on the ground.

All that’s left of The Eigenthief are his dropped items: a black cloak, and an unlit ivory torch. No trace of this trophy, nor the one Max had earlier collected. Max scoops the items into his inventory.

The black slime, not content to sit in a puddle, forms writhing pseudopods, the largest two zeroing in on Max and Molly.

Max grabs Molly by the hand and they flee into the forest. The black slime reaches the trees, which energizes it. The infection bounds from tree to tree, like a consuming fire, except that where the slime permeates the wood, it turns solid and glassy like ice. The only way out of the grove is back to the south, but the black ice outflanks them on both sides.

Then it closes around Max and Molly.

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