Gamers - Amazon (23 page)

Gabby knew that Unthar had moved on to Special Forces since she'd heard him during the raid.

"What about the others?" asked Gabby, thinking about Zaela.

"If they made the cut off, they moved onto University," said Mr. Johnson. "If they died during the raid or didn't have enough points, they didn't."

His plain tone emphasized the implied threat of what happened to the losers. Gabby guessed since they were pretty much done with LifeGame, the high school version anyway, that he didn't care so much to keep pretenses up.

"Can we see who made it and who didn't?" Gabby asked, fearing the answer.

Mr. Johnson's eyes flashed with a crimson brilliance that hinted secrets. "Not yet. First, I have an offer."

The three girls shared glances. If they had been alone, Gabby would have expected for him to bring up the Frags. Her stomach tensed in anticipation. Even Administrator Bracket leaned forward with curiosity.

"As winners of the Asphyxia raid in dramatic fashion--" Mr. Johnson smiled at Gabby. "--and top LifeScores, I am pleased to offer, as a representative of the LifeGame Integrity Engineers, the three of you, Gabriella DeCorte, Avony Stone, and Song Ling, a job with the LGIE, effective immediately."

Avony's face lit up, while Gabby tried to will hers to do the same. Mouse looked confused, maybe she hadn't heard of the LGIE before. Mr. Johnson studied her as she and Avony reacted, squealing and hugging.

When Avony hugged Gabby, she felt her hot breath in her ear, and the whisper of "Zaela." Avony scrunched her face again at Gabby, but she couldn't read the quick glance before they were apart again under the watchful gaze of Mr. Johnson.

Gabby wasn't sure if Avony was telling her to ask about Zaela or that she knew something about her friend.

Before she could ask, Avony paused and tilted her head, asking: "What do you mean by effective immediately? Wouldn't we go onto University first?"

The Coder grinned a deviant grin, winking at Avony. "She's a clever one. No, you won't go to University. The situation with Southland has become dire and we need the talents of girls like yourselves. We'll send you to a crash course and then put you to work."

Before anyone else could speak up, Gabby asked, "What about Zaela?"

Mr. Johnson offered a bored look. "What about her?"

"She won the raid along with us. Why isn't she here? She was still alive at the end." Gabby glanced at Avony to see if that's what she'd meant, but Avony had her lips pursed together as if she were straining to say something.

"Zaela? Oh, no. She lost," he said. "Your team won the raid, not hers, and she didn't earn enough points to make the cut off. She's headed to an appropriate place for her kind as we speak."

Gabby's face grew flush with anger. "If you want me to join the LGIE, then you have to let her into University."

She crossed her arms, determined to make a stand, but the pale Coder with the red eyes laughed at her.

"That deal? You already passed on that deal," he said. "The new deal is simpler anyway. You either join the LGIE or you don't."

"Zaela completed the raid with us. Even if she wasn't our teammate, she should get the points," said Gabby.

Before Mr. Johnson could refute her, Administrator Bracket cut in. "Cooperating teams should share in the points, Mr. Johnson. Every raid I've ever administered at Neversoft High has been that way."

"Things change, Bracket," said Mr. Johnson. "And it's too late, anyway."

The two men squared off with Bracket as a former marine, out-sizing the smaller Mr. Johnson, though the latter did not want for menace with his beady red eyes.

While the two men stared each other down, the black speck landed on her shoulder. Gabby recognized it as one of Celia's robotic sensor bugs. It waved a wing at her, so she winked at it.

Avony appeared to be ready to burst. She kept checking with the two men, half-opening her mouth, casting her gaze around with indecision.

Gabby tilted her head, mouthing the word, "What?"

Then Avony shocked her with what she did next. She closed her eyes and said, "They're loading Zaela and the others into a covered truck down at the FunCar lot."

Mr. Johnson's eyes grew wide and he turned on Avony with murder in his eyes. Before he could move again, Gabby dove to the edge of the tent and crawled under.

As the Coder lunged to stop her, she thought she saw Administrator Bracket step into his way, knocking him to the ground.

The frigid air from outside the tent shocked her. The temperature had dropped considerably since when she started the raid.

A FunCar screeched around the corner and burst over the sidewalk, gunning for her. The Frags had come to help her free Zaela and escape into the mountains.

Gabby ran toward the vehicle and as it slowed, the door whipped open. She dove in and was immediately tackled from behind. Gabby thought it was Mr. Johnson, until she realized the frame was too small.

The door closed, sealing them into the warm interior, and Gabby scrambled to her seat. Mouse was seated next to her, looking confused.

As the FunCar sped by the tent, the pale Coder burst out of the flap, raging at them with his fists.

"What are you doing, Song?" Gabby asked.

"I don't know," she said timidly. "I just wanted to help."

Gabby gently pushed on Mouse's shoulder. "You have to get out, I'm going to the FunCar lot to save Zaela and the others. You don't want to get mixed up in this."

Mouse tried the emergency handle. "It's not operating. And I'm not sure I could jump out at these speeds."

The FunCar sped through town, leaning into turns, traveling at speeds much higher than the other vehicles on the road.

"And we're not headed to the FunCar lot," said Mouse.

Gabby realized it as soon as she'd said it. The FunCar was heading out of town and not into it.

A balding pixilated man in white leisure suit appeared between the two girls.

"Larry to the rescue!" said the familiar voice.

Then he noticed two girls in the FunCar. "Whoa. Who are you?"

"No time for jokes, Milton. Why are we headed out of town?" Gabby asked.

He screwed his face into a comic grin. "Why wouldn't we take you out?"

"We have to save Zaela and the others. They're loading them right now!" she said.

Milton's cartoon man shook his head. "No way. Armed guards there. It'd be a death trap."

Gabby slammed her hands on the dash, the impact ringing up her arms. "Dammit. I didn't come to be rescued. I wanted to rescue Zaela!"

She threw her hand through the balding cartoon man. "And get rid of this avatar. Now's not the time for your stupid games."

"Sorry," he said, and the real Milton, in projection form, appeared.

"Milton, you've got to turn this FunCar around," she said, her face burning hot. Mouse watched her with sad worried eyes.

He shrugged. "I can't. We programmed it for auto-pilot to bring you to our location. All controls are on board so they can't be hijacked by the Coders."

Milton nodded to Mouse. "And now we have to cut the line on your friend's connection so they can't follow your car. Already bad enough we have to run interference while you escape."

"Can't you at least undo the car locks so she can jump out at a soft curve or something?" asked Gabby.

Milton shook his head. "Nada. You're traveling at too high of speeds. Plus, at this point, I don't think it's safe for her to go back. They'd probably put her in the truck with Zaela and the others." He paused. "The good thing is, we were able to get one of Celia's bugs stashed with Zaela, so we'll be able to figure out where they're sending the losers, maybe even know for sure by the time you reach us."

Milton paled at his own words. "Sorry, poor choice of words." He looked back over his shoulder, obviously something back with the other Frags and said, "I have to go. They're making headway on your link and I need to help."

His projection disappeared before she could say goodbye.

"Where am I going?" asked Mouse in the smallest of voices in the silence that remained.

Gabby held Mouse by the shoulders, wanting to hug her and explain what was going on, but even she didn't know.

So Gabby looked outside, to the occasional house and street signs flying by, as their FunCar sped through town. She thought about Zaela, who was in the back of the truck by now, probably trapped in that same space Gabby had been when she'd died at the end of the raid, wondering what was happening, scared and alone.

She thought about Avony, her archenemy turned friend who would probably get in trouble for what she had said, and Administrator Bracket, who had helped her escape.

She thought about Dario and her parents and the other kids at school, the ones younger not at her rank, people she wasn't going to see again. Ever.

She could tell Mouse that she would get back eventually. They could turn themselves in and everything would be forgiven. That it was all a game and all they had to do was yell, "Olly olly oxen free," like they had when they were playing simple hide and seek games, and they could come out of hiding with no penalty.

But all those things would be a lie. Just like everything else about her life. Like that the losers were given jobs and not stuffed into a truck and shipped off to nowhere. Like the world around them that wasn't true, only pixels on their eye-screens and phantoms on their sense-webs. Like that they had a future, if they just played games.

None of it was real.

As the FunCar left the town proper, with Mouse still locked onto her, still expecting an answer, Gabby asked Mouse to repeat the three tenets of LifeGame.

Mouse hesitated at first and then said them in the barest of whispers: "What can be gamed can be improved. Everything can be a game. Never look backwards because the past is a game that's already been decided."

When she was finished, Gabby nodded her head, opened her mouth, and said the only true thing that she could say to Mouse at that time.

"We're not going home."

###

Purchase the next book in the trilogy, Book Two:
FRAGS
on Amazon.

Sign up for a
newsletter
to know when the newest book is released!

EXCERPT from Book One of the DIGITAL SEA Trilogy, by Thomas K. Carpenter

Chapter One - The Ghost Assassin

He licked the nanoblade in a deliberate motion. It was the only way to get it clean. His muscles twitched, and with a light snap, the blade was sheathed and tucked into a vest pocket. He felt—quick as a nanoblade. Yes, that was it. He could feel it in his sinewy muscles.

He chose a tight fitting black outfit, admiring the way it clung, and brought out his muscular tone. Even though no one would see it, he smoothed the wrinkles. Instead, they would see an overly tanned businessman with graying hair too busy trading in his personal stock space to be bothered. The kind annoying enough no one wanted to stare at too long.

“
Mal’ak ha-mashhit
,” he whispered in Hebrew, though he was not one of them.

The hotel room was a tomb of luxurious marble covered in ancient tapestries. He could run the length of the room, do a double back handspring and have room to spare. Sharp light pierced through the clear panes of the stained glass illuminating the massive bed, which still sagged in the middle. Everything was real, except him.

Without a sign, he dropped to his knees and flipped off his connection to the Sea, scanning the room. If a rival could slip a counter-program into his system, then they could hide beneath the digital rendering, and he’d be forced to believe the illusion. Most likely to his demise.

The mesh of the net that draped over the world disappeared. The lack of change in his room was startling. Normally, such reality checks exposed a dirty, decaying world. On the streets, he liked to walk without the outer layer on, seeing the filth beneath—women missing most of their teeth, women that were really men, emaciated men hiding behind a fantasy life too scared to see the truth.

He finished his survey of the room, confident nothing lurked. The nature of his business forced him to be ever-vigilant. The outer layer rose back up surrounding him as efficiently as it had disappeared.

He stepped over the black high-heel Darycki shoe lying next to the bed, fingering the bulge in his vest. He sighed deeply. The job would be disappointing, unsatisfying in its simplicity. He felt like a sledgehammer, when a whisper would do the same job. The assassin cleaned the room, removing all traces of the night’s entertainment.

Footfalls echoed as he stalked down the hallway. He sent a note to the desk requiring his personal items, including the large chest, to be sent a hotel in Mumbai.

A few hundred meters from the hotel, as he walked down the steps to the Meijo line, he modified his personal information, the outmod, so that he would be seen as a middle-aged Japanese salaryman shuffling down the street with his head bowed down. The salaryman was just a cog. Not to be noticed. Instead of a confident gait, he broke his step into a shuffle where as before his face had exuded an annoyed ambivalence, now it was the blank stare of homogeneity.

He smiled under his digital mask, thinking of assassins of century’s past, smearing ash and ointments on their faces to disguise themselves. Now a thought changed appearances, and to see behind the mask, they had only to turn off the Digital Sea, but humanity was much too immersed to give up the illusion.

His trickery involved more than a change of appearances. Simple detective work could see a person changing from one to the next, but a digital version of the salaryman had been walking around the streets and living his life in Nagoya for a few weeks, virtually, until he walked down the steps and the assassin stepped into his persona as if he was inhabiting a ghost.

He fell into the wave of people flowing toward the open doors, and was swept inside, huddling against the side to avoid the press of people in the center. The busy train surprised him, since Nagoya, like most major cities, was on the decline. Fingertips explored chipped paint on the wall while the digital wall looked pristine.