Gamers - Amazon (6 page)

Stepping off the ad-ridden sidewalk onto the FunCar lot made her think. The FunCars shimmered as they changed colors, making the lot look like a technicolor dance floor.

The only other person getting into a FunCar at this time of the morning could barely be seen above the cars. Gabby took the nearest, hitting the warmers as soon as the bubble closed.

"Eastoria," she told the FunCar.

She could have sent it through her neural actuator, but the silence unnerved her.

The vehicle lurched forward and veered off the main road not long after it left town. The road she was on would wind toward the mountains to the east. She had only vaguely heard of Eastoria.

After checking a map to see it would be a few hours until she arrived, Gabby called up Monkey Island. A strange flat screen appeared with the title "Monkey Island" across the top, a big cartoonish skull in the middle and a cast of cheesy pirate-themed people along the bottom.

Gabby groaned. No one used pirates as their game theme anymore.

She poked her hand through the floating screen, remembering that people used to view content on boxes. It was so retro.

She wasn't familiar with Monkey Island, but she knew games. Gabby activated it and worked through the game play. It required her to touch parts of the screen to interact with people and objects. Her character, the moronically named Guybrush Threepwood, wanted to be a pirate.

Gabby couldn't figure out what the game was supposed to be teaching her. She might have well been randomly touching the screen to play it: chasing gulls away to steal fish, buying a shovel, and acquiring breath mints.

Then she remembered that games, back in the early previous century, weren't made for learning. They were designed as amusements to waste time.

Gabby wondered if she'd made a mistake agreeing to meet the Frags. For all she knew, they could be major weirdos. Though, Michael had been nice to look at. He couldn't be all that bad and he'd been in the Black Gate before.

She considered exiting the game and heading back home. She could really use the day to grind her LifeScore and maybe she could get the LGIE to overlook her indiscretions for information about the Frags.

She hadn't touched the game screen in a little while, her hand hovering as she was lost in thought, and the screen moved on its own.

The foppish main character, Guybrush, turned to her and tapped his foot.

To her surprise, Guybrush spoke, and not in the voice she imagined in her head, but in a whiny sarcastic one: "Not having second thoughts are you?"

Gabby recoiled away from the screen and into her plush chair.

"No." She paused. "Michael?" As soon as she asked she knew it wasn't him, but it was the only Frag name she knew.

"Nah. He's busy sleeping off a long night with Celia," said Guybrush.

Jealousy stirred her heart, but she couldn't figure out why. She barely knew the boy and their kiss had only been a ruse to hide from the pale Coder. Gabby tentatively touched her lips with her fingers.

The character Guybrush was standing with his arms crossed, staring at her impatiently.

"You there?"

Gabby nodded.

"Good. Now if you still want to meet us, rub this lamp--" He held out a genie lamp. "--three times."

She shook her head. "Why would I have to do something lame like that? Why can't I just tell you I'm ready to go?"

Guybrush shrugged. "Them's the rules. Just be glad we didn't use Leisure Suit Larry like I wanted to."

"Okay, fine."

A horrible grin appeared on Guybrush's face and the cartoonish character stuck the genie lamp into his pants. Guybrush now sported an obscene bulge.

"Hey! Wait a second," she said.

Guybrush had a deep frown on his face and wasn't moving. He seemed to have reverted to his previous game state. Though when she looked closely she thought the eyes moved slightly.

"This is getting too weird," Gabby said.

She closed her eyes, reached out, and rubbed the front of Guybrush's pants three times. With the job complete, she opened her eyes back up to see Guybrush had a huge smile.

When she opened her mouth to complain, the FunCar lurched to a stop, throwing her into the bubble screen. A knot formed where she had hit the see-through bubble. Gabby pushed herself back into her seat dizzily and rubbed her neck.

The FunCar had completely shutdown. No lights were visible and when she tried to push the bubble open, it stayed closed. They were supposed to open in case of emergency.

Frustrated, Gabby looked outside to see where she was stuck. The vehicle sat on a lonely stretch of road on the floor of a wide valley. The sun had begun to peak over the mountains and long shadows flooded the field to her right.

A gentle breeze tickled the tips of the grasses surrounding the road. A lone hawk gently floated in the breeze above a grove of trees.

The surroundings reminded Gabby of a time when she was barely older than a tot, playing colorful counting games that floated in mid-air. Her father had taken them on a picnic, which even now seemed such a foreign word.

They had turned their systems off and spent the time running in the grass and falling down, into piles of giggling laughter. It was one of Gabby's fondest memories.

She was getting used to the quiet ambiance when the FunCar powered back up. But instead of a loading screen with the game options, the bubble stayed blank.

The car accelerated and she was pushed into the chair. Accustomed to the normal motions of a FunCar, she could immediately tell that the vehicle was exceeding the normal speeds.

The road ahead split: the main winding along the foothills toward the town of Eastoria; the other, a narrow blacktop with crumbling sides heading straight into the mountains.

The FunCar banked hard onto the blacktop. Gabby had to keep her arms out to steady herself, but there were no handholds in the interior. The vehicles were programmed not to hit each other, so there was no need for constraints. The Frags seemed to have disabled the safety features.

She didn't like the way it leaned around the corners, making her feel like it was going to tip. Going downhill bothered her most because she slid out of the chair. She tried wedging her feet against the bubble, but that just made her feel like she was falling out altogether.

When a full projection version of Guybrush appeared next to her, minus the genie lamp in his pants, Gabby threw herself against the side.

"Sorry to startle you," said Guybrush, but he didn't sound sorry.

"How much longer do I have to ride like this?" she asked.

Guybrush grinned. "Not long at all, in fact."

She didn't like slant of his grin. A steering wheel appeared in the space above her knees.

"We don't have the next portion of the trip programmed very well. So you're going to have to pilot it," Guybrush explained.

"Me?" said Gabby. "I've never driven a FunCar before. Nobody drives them."

Guybrush shrugged. "We do all the time. Quite fun, in fact."

"Why can't you drive it for me by projection?"

"We're busy making sure you can't be tracked," he explained. "And remote driving just points a big sign to you."

"Alright," she said, regretting she'd agreed to come. "Tell me where I'm going."

Gabby grabbed the wheel, feeling the leather beneath her fingertips.

Guybrush clapped his hands together. "Keep following this road. Take the next three rights and then when you get to the split, take the one with the yellow sign, not the white one. They both get you to us, but the bridge got washed out on the white one a few months ago."

"Three rights and a yellow. Got it," she said.

"Good. I'll be leaving--"

"Wait." She interrupted. "What's your name?"

Guybrush paused. "Milton."

She was about to ask him what kind of name was Milton, when the road turned sharply and she was forced to bank hard. Without a restraint she slid into the wall, but at least the steering wheel moved with her.

Guybrush/Milton disappeared and Gabby was left to pilot the FunCar alone, which was fine because keeping on the road was taking all her focus. She'd played driving games before, but there was more educational content and less knuckle-tightening adrenaline.

The sun, now completely over the tops of the mountains, blinded her so she was forced to drive with one hand blocking the sun. The road led deeper into the foothills. Each time it curved away, the right turn appeared.

Beads of sweat had formed on her forehead, a consequence of the sunlight through the bubble and the intense focus she had to maintain. At times, the road hugged a cliff with no barrier between her and a long drop.

When she'd taken the last right turn, Gabby kept watch for the split. Her current direction led her into a broad valley. The trees, higher elevation than her town, had already turned brown. Swirls of dead leaves often whisked across the road as she passed.

The trees had enough leaves that she didn't have to hold her arm up to block the sunlight. But when she made a hard right around a deep bend, she was pointed straight into the sun.

Squinting and trying to see ahead through her fingers, she blew past two signs and her split. The signs had both looked white, reflected in the blinding sunlight.

She thought about stopping to turn around but the path had narrowed and turned to gravel. The center of the path held clumps of weeds, but the wheel paths had none. She hoped that meant they used this road, though Milton had said the white one had been usable a few months ago.

As she crested a ridge, the road seemingly dropped out beneath her. Her stomach flew up into her throat as the FunCar leaned downward.

What she saw at the bottom of the hill made her palms sweat. An old rusty bridge with the center chewed out lay across a rocky creek. Gabby quickly realized she had too much momentum to stop before the bridge, so she increased her speed.

The FunCar shook as it rattled down the gravel slope. About halfway down she realized she had no way to keep herself from being thrown around the interior, so she wedged one foot against the bubble while the other pounded the accelerator.

The washed-out bridge approached quickly and before she could close her eyes, she hit the curved portion. The rattling stopped as the wheels left the ground and she felt herself being pulled upward.

It seemed she was now level with the branches of the trees, and then, the FunCar hit the ground and it was all she could do to keep from veering into the trees.

She had taken her foot off the accelerator when she flew into the air, but she still had so much momentum that she careened down the pathway.

She hated that they had given her pseudo-physical controls for the FunCar. If she'd been able to use her neural actuator, then she could be slowing the vehicle down. But since her feet were now swimming wildly as she was tilted over, gripping the steering wheel and trying to adhere to the path, she had no way to stop.

Suddenly, the FunCar shot out of the trees into a wide gravel area. She was headed straight for an old barn. Two figures ran out of the entrance and were waving at her.

With so much speed she wasn't sure if she could stop in time, so she spun the wheel and slammed onto the brake.

The FunCar with its low center of gravity, spun like a top, kicking up dust and throwing her around the interior.

When it finally came to a stop, the outside was covered in a thin film of dust. Gabby could see the faded red wood of the barn only a few feet outside the bubble.

Gabby felt shaky and weak. She hadn't eaten since the morning and all the excitement had drained her. She clutched her backpack to her chest and waited for them to release her from the FunCar.

Chapter Eight

When the bubble opened, Gabby was confronted by a boy holding a strange contraption made of cobbled together wood and metal pieces. He had reddish-orange hair, freckles, and stood taller than the FunCar. He had to stoop to point the apparatus into the interior.

Gabby clutched her backpack defensively and dug her hands into the fabric to hide the shaking.

"Please don't point that at me," she said.

Michael appeared next to the red-headed behemoth and lifted the contraption with the back of his hand. "Drogan. She's a friend."

He cocked a half-smile, apologetic, and yet mischievous, and offered his hand so she could climb from the vehicle.

A familiar high voice cut through the morning air from somewhere behind her. "Drogan, you idiot. You shouldn't be pointing that thing at everyone who comes here. It's a useless hunk of metal anyway."

Milton, she assumed, was walking out from the trees, scowling at Drogan. He was pointy thin and had strange blotches on his face. Dangling from a cord around his neck was a wooden rod with teeth marks on it.

Drogan backed away, a pained expression on his face like a scolded five-year-old and wandered back toward the barn with his shoulders hunched. Gabby couldn't quite place what was different about the Frags, but something rattled her perception.

As she tried to figure it out, a swarm of bugs buzzed her head. They didn't fly as she expected, almost hovering around her as if they were watching. They flew off toward the barn before she could swat one.

Gabby realized she was still holding Michael's hand and let go. He shrugged and she turned away before she got caught in his crystalline eyes.

"I guess you Gamers can't listen to directions," sniped Milton. "Have to have everything painted on the world to understand."

Michael kicked a spray of gravel at Milton. "That's no way to treat a guest when she's risked so much to come out here."

"I wouldn't have had to risk so much if it weren't for you guys messing with my files," she said. "And I missed the fork when the sun shone in my eyes. Should have just told me to go left."

"She risked? Remember the files we pilfered from the LIE? They'd fall over themselves to forgive her if she got caught."

Milton sounded out of breath at each word, but she barely noticed as she was trying to figure out what he meant.