Nova Project #1 (10 page)

“Everyone on this side!” he shouts. Nick is with him. Leah and Grace hear him, process his words in time to leap the swelling gap. Josh drops the light car he's overturned, fear darkening his eyes from storm cloud gray to hurricane black. A hungry wind swallows his curse.

“Cache!” Leah shouts. “Boots!”

Miguel can see every feature of her face, but he knows that in the real world she is wearing a visor that displays their armory, her feed, a clock, anything else she's set it to show. The boots appear in her hand, summoned in a rendering of pixels from their database of items. The line between digital and real blurs to irrelevance. She throws them across the gap. “Put them on!”

“They're too small!”

“Would you rather die in comfortable ones? Come on!”

It's cruelly funny, watching him run in them, wincing with every step, but Miguel doesn't laugh. The gap is far too wide to jump now, but it's small enough—just—for Josh to hit the wall nearest them about thirty feet down. Nick anchors Miguel as he peers over the edge, watches the suction come to life and Josh limp, grimacing with the effort of holding his body level, up the sheer surface and away from the fathomless black below.

He and Nick help Josh the last few feet, as soon as they can reach his outstretched hands. The moment he steps over the lip, the ground shakes harder. Windows fall from above, hitting the ground around them and throwing up hailstones of jagged glass. One slices Miguel's cheek, hot blood sliding fast over sweat-slicked skin.

It tastes real.

The air grows warmer. You look down.

“Where the hell have you been?” Miguel screams at the Storyteller. But he obeys, so do all the others. The hollow chasm isn't hollow anymore. Flames lick up both sides of the fissure, and in the middle, running all the way down the long street, all the way through the city, is a path.

“You've got to be kidding me!” yells Grace.

“It's not! You haven't reached Nineteen yet!” Miguel answers. But it's not exactly the same. “How the fuck are we supposed to get down there?”

He can't think. It's too loud. The roar of flame and the breaking glass and the wind. Metal in the throes of torture, screaming.

A damaged world. One he's supposed to save.

“Did we find any parachutes?” Nick screams.

“No!”

The map. Miguel blinks, opens the image across his visor, blocking out the reality in front of him. He inspects every line, turns his back on the flaming road. “In here!” he shouts,
running to the building behind him, its rows of empty window frames grinning toothlessly into the night.

This time the door opens at a touch. Four pairs of thudding feet follow him. Down. They need to go down as far as they can, but he's sure as hell not getting on a tile while the world is threatening to split in two.

The cracks around the stairwell door glow faintly. The stairs behind it descend much, much deeper than any ordinary building would need them to. They passed the
basement
two minutes ago, but there's no way out, not yet, unless they go back the way they came. Which is so not a choice it's not even worth thinking about.

Miguel's chest screams like the twisted steel. He pays it about as much attention. Noted. Move on. Keep going.

Finally a door. The heat hits him first, a blast furnace of hellfire.

“Anyone have any heatproof gloves?” Nick asks over the noise.

“I found some! Cache! Gloves!” says Josh, eager for redemption. They appear in his hands, are on them an instant later, and he reaches for the searing handle.

“Stay away from the flames if you can,” Miguel orders. “Remember, if we get burned in here, I think we have to heal naturally.”

They have to go single file, and even then they have to be
careful. Blinding fire stretches on each side of the path as far as he can see, which isn't actually that far, his vision stained orange and red. And he has to go first.

Amid the flames he grins. His team. His glory. And he's done this before.

As in Nineteen, the path is tolerable if he isn't stupid about it. Not cool, but the heat washes past him on each side and dissipates. His face and hands are fine as long as he doesn't get too close. His clothing is still in one piece. It's a devil, but one he knows.

No one talks as they walk the path, too focused on staying in line, away from the fire. Miguel watches the clock in his visor because of the many things he's learned in Chimera, one is that it is always, always smart to know how long something takes. He makes a bet with himself, is gratified when he wins, the obvious save point beckoning as the end of the chasm comes into view. He steps out of the flames onto a shelf of rock, panting, relieved, and waits for the others to join him.

“We can stop now and pick up tomorrow, or we can keep going,” he says. High overhead, a pinprick in the sky, the moon shines from behind a distorted, scowling cloud. “There'll be a boss waiting for us in the morning.”

“Keep going,” says Nick. The others nod.

Miguel punches the save point. If something happens now, at least they'll never have to cross through the fire again. Not
this
fire anyway.

Beside the save point, a grate, just large enough for a person to fit through, is set into the wall.

“Looks like it leads into an old sewer system? I've read about these,” says Leah. “Our feet might get wet.”

Wet feet are a lot more miserable than they sound, Miguel knows that from experience, but he'll deal. “What else were these used for?”

“Moving water and waste around.”

“Gross.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Have you ever noticed that?” Grace asks, stepping aside to let Josh and Miguel pull the grate free. It groans with halfhearted protest but doesn't take much strength. “A lot of Chimera is . . . old stuff. The way the world used to be. Weird for the crazy technology the game uses, isn't it?”

They're the most words he's heard Grace string together, and it's an interesting thought, one that's occurred to him before.

“We've seen the past, but not the future?” he suggests. “We know what history looks like, but stuff like this is new because we haven't actually seen it before?”

“I'm not sure that's it,” says Leah, stepping through the grate ahead of the others. Her next words echo. “It's that we do know the future. The world's going to end. What's the fun in playing a game about it?”

“Maybe,” says Miguel. “Yeah, fair point. Except . . . we are.”

C
himera headquarters is quiet. It's always quiet. He and Blake have had some disagreements about that in the past. Blake likes chaos, noise, but Lucius always wins those spats. Blake can find chaos outside Chimera's walls if he wishes. He's perfectly adept at creating it if he can't find any conveniently located uproar in which to delight.

The competition is going well thus far. No one has been egregiously injured, and no one will be. Lucius hopes. One of the competitors concerns him, but then, one of his competitors concerns Blake. Fair is fair.

Lucius likes fair.

Sometimes he wonders whether Chimera itself was a mistake, but he must remember that he and Blake are only tools. True, they'd come up with the idea in that delightful little café, but if it hadn't been Chimera, it would have been something else. Their superiors demand results.

Right now their superiors are
thrilled.
Or at least Lucius's are. Blake says the same, and Lucius believes him. He absolutely doesn't put lying past Blake, but Lucius knows him well enough by now to tell the difference.

He hopes.

It was simpler in the early days. There were fewer players, for one thing, and the timeline stretched so far ahead of them both that it wasn't worth thinking about. Time is elastic, and only at the very end does it snap. Truth be told—and he tells the truth whenever he can—he'd spent large swaths of time doing pretty much nothing because there wasn't much to do. All around him people got on with their lives while he watched.

Things are more complicated these days, which is to be expected, and is both exciting and slightly terrifying. This competition is the fruition of everything he and Blake have worked toward for so long. After this the game will change beyond recognition.

Status updates scroll past on the screen in front of him. Each team already has its own set of supporters and detractors, but the messages all say largely the same thing, with varying degrees of sarcasm.
Good luck.
It's too early for anything else. Thus far all the competitors seem to be obeying the rules about cheating and sharing information. He'd told Blake that would happen, though he doesn't discount the possibility that as the
game progresses, everyone will become more lax.

That's always the way; people desire to do the right thing until it becomes too difficult. Most of them don't
want
to cross the carefully drawn lines, and to Lucius's way of thinking, intent counts for a lot.

He and Blake have had many arguments about that, too, over the years. The way Blake sees it, how they get to the wrong place doesn't matter. Journey versus destination.

Well. They'll see who is right in the end.

Lucius turns his attention from the updates to much more mundane tasks. They've had to hire several hundred additional actual employees for the competition—neither he nor Blake can be everywhere at once, even if they wanted to be. The players need to be taken care of in their Cubes, fed, guarded, their sleeping quarters kept clean.

“What are you doing?” Blake asks from the doorway. It's been a long time since he caught Lucius by surprise.

“Paying our assistants. You weren't going to.”

Blake smiles. “I was going to
tell
them I had. Can't trust computers, you know. Things always get lost in the system.”

“Hence why I'm doing it.”

“You take away all my fun.”

“Not all of it.”

“I suppose.”

“How are your teams doing?” Blake asks. Lucius smiles.

“Well, but I'm sure you know that. Yours?”

“Same.”

“And are you certain the leader of Eighteen was a good choice?”

“He was the
perfect
choice, old friend. He is exactly what the competition needs, and his team is perfectly balanced, I saw to that. One of each type, and he fits ideally into the middle. I know you think I simply want the ones who will stop at nothing, the brutal ones, but he is much more interesting than that. Already he's making some very intriguing choices. Are you worried about his health or his skill?”

“Both,” Lucius admits honestly.

“His skill is well matched by your favorite.”

Yes. Lucius is proud of him. He, too, is young, but he's seen examples of his dogged protectiveness and his blistering intelligence.

“Don't worry. The teams will be fine. I notice you edited my piece of code that allowed for actual death.”

“I left the injuries,” says Lucius, “and the penalties if one of a team makes a grievous error, but actual death
did
seem unfair. They
can
still shuffle off this mortal coil, but only if their minds convince them they've died. It won't be our fault.”

“Softy.”

“Perhaps. You know there's nothing I can do if the leader of Eighteen overexerts himself, if he damages himself too badly.”

“You mean there's nothing you
will
do. Good. I'll be downstairs if you need me.”

Were there any casual observers, it might seem strange to them that Blake had come upstairs simply to chat, but who else did they have to speak to? Lucius understands why humans have devoted so much energy to forms of communication, just so they can reach out for someone who understands.

Lucius presses a few keys that will ensure that all appropriate hospitals are well stocked. Small medical centers, set up in each Cube in the days before the competition began, can cope with minor ailments brought on by stress or obstacles, and he checks that these, too, are fully equipped.

The computers around him hum, joining the chorus that runs through the whole building, server upon server huffing with the effort of running Chimera's complicated interface. If any other gaming companies had still existed, like they used to, their owners would have given several essential organs each to get a glimpse of the proprietary software upon which Chimera is built. Lucius and Blake oppose each other on a great many things—almost everything, when it comes right down to it—but each admires the other for the brilliance that created Chimera.

And between them, inside the huge near-silent building they have made their home away from their respective homes, behind walls that shut out the rest of the dying world, a very, very different game is being played.

“A
re you all right?”

Miguel jumps. He didn't expect her, or anyone, but Leah stands in the doorway of his room, shoulder leaning slightly against the frame.

“Why wouldn't I be?”

She points to his face. Oh, that.

“It's nothing.”

“There's a doctor here, you should get it checked out.”

He's been through that before, the laser running over a split in his skin, his flesh, drawing the two sides together. The scars are faint, but he sees them every time he takes his shirt off.

“Nah. I'm good.”

She drops it. But she doesn't leave. “So, Miguel Anderson,” she says, stepping a few uninvited paces into the room, “who are you?”

“Excuse me?” She's close enough to smell, and she's
showered with something scented. He thinks of oranges and the tea his mother drinks, paper dissolving into steam. They'd hit a literal brick wall in the level and decided to sleep, try again in the morning. He's not the only one who didn't go straight to bed.

“I think you still think of us like a normal Chimera team. We exist, you know. We're actual people. Obviously you and Nick are friends, but maybe you should get to know the rest of us?”

“I've seen you play. Today and while we were practicing.”

“And that's all that matters?”

Kind of, yeah. He doesn't say it aloud, but her . . . disgusted? Hurt? . . . expression tells him she gets it anyway.

“Tough,” she says, standing taller. “If you expect us to follow and help you, you should know us. And we should know you.”

His suite has a small seating area; he goes to it without asking her to join him, knowing she will regardless. His bones ache along with his chest. They'd given up an hour into exploring the sewers, an hour they'll have to repeat in the morning.

He shrugs. “I'm an only child. My mom's a photographer. My dad's a chemist, works for a lab that synthesizes flavors.”

“I have four sisters,” she offers. “You can blame the population problem on my parents.”

He gives her the laugh she's looking for. They both know it
goes back a lot farther than that.

“Had you really reached Twenty before this all started?”

“Yep.”

“Nice. Then why just the finger? Or do you have other things I can't see?”

His stomach flips. Answer carefully. Keep your face blank. “Haven't earned anything else I've needed so far.”

“Ohhh,” she says, eyebrows raised. “So you're
that
good at Chimera? You don't need the help the rest of us do?”

“Something like that, sure.”

She shows off her own enhancements, he admires her patches of impervious skin, the scars behind her ears that hide sophisticated aural implants. She can sense vibrations for miles. Useful for detecting bosses in the game. Useful for quakes in the real world, admonitions from an angry planet. It's been a while since the last one. They say a big one is coming soon.

“Should I whisper?” he asks. She laughs.

“No, you're good. Do you think we can win?”

He
knows
they can. “We have as much chance as any other team,” he says, shrugging.

“Yeah.”

She looks good, curled on the couch. Toned and tough. He hasn't been alone with a girl since Anna, who is probably talking to Nick online right now. Thinking about that is a dumb idea.

“You should get some sleep. So should I.”

“Okay,” she says, rising. Watching her stretch is a dumb idea, too. “We're not done here.”

“I didn't think so, but we have all summer.”

She smiles. “Fair enough. We're going to meet a boss tomorrow, right?”

“I think so. You know how it goes. Chimera ebbs and flows, gives and takes. We had to find the map. But then just got to wander around looking for stuff. Then the earthquake and the fire path, now we're just mooching around the sewers. Something's coming. So eat breakfast.”

“Ha. Will do. Good night, Miguel.”

“Night.”

His bed is softer here, thus harder to sleep in. He's always had this problem in strange beds, knowing he's going to wake up in unfamiliar surroundings and suffer a few seconds of ass-kicking disorientation before he remembers. It's worst in hospitals, but it's going to be weird here, too. He tosses and turns, jolting into gasping consciousness several times when he dreams of a bed surrounded by flames, and wakes as sweaty as if they were really there.

There's no daylight here, nothing to regulate any of them except eagerness to keep going. He meets up with the others outside the gaming room a few minutes after seven, a wolfed breakfast sitting heavy in his belly.

“Ready?” he asks, bumping Nick's fist with his own. The dreams made him grumpy, and now he just wants to shoot something.

“Yo,” says Josh. Grace is silent but moves toward the door. Leah nods.

Through the cache, through the overworld. They don't exactly have to retrace their steps through the sewers, they've established some of the dead ends, but they still wind up crisscrossing routes that look the same as the night before. “Status update: this is a pain in the ass,” says Miguel. His earpiece bleeps. He's grateful they have a chance to warm up before running to or from something, but running at least feels like progress, and beneath his clothes, his skin itches against the sensor strips. Other teams might be so far ahead of them, it's difficult to tell. They're updating from different cities, different landscapes. Some may be too busy playing to update at all. He'd put money on some of them having played through the night, though there's only so long they'll be able to sustain that.

“What are we doing? This whole thing feels like one massive detour.”

Water drips down the slimy walls and splashes under his feet as he paces.

They're all looking at him.

“Let's split up. Update if anyone finds anything, then stay
where you are. Find a hiding place if you have to, and the rest of us will come to you.”

He picks a direction at random, turning his back on the others and walking down the tunnel. Soon his echoing footsteps are the only ones he can hear, and a strange feeling steals over him. Maybe the others are feeling it, too. He'll ask Nick later.

Never in his life has Miguel been inside Chimera truly and utterly alone. Not even an assemblage of pixels is gathered behind him, waiting for an order.

And the Storyteller is silent. She hasn't turned up once today, which means he's on the right path, totally on the wrong one, or she doesn't feel like stating the obvious.

The tunnel surrounds him, curved, echoing walls and damp, grimy floor. There is no sound except for the water.

But there is light. A light. There, at what looks like the end, though perspective is shit here. He moves toward it, one hand on his holster. It's one light, not two, which suggests it's
probably
not the eyes of a monster, but he's not going to wager his life on that.

And whatever it is, it wasn't there last night. He went down this tunnel with the others, not to the end but close enough that he would've seen it.

“Clever, Gamerunners,” he says. They don't answer any more than the Storyteller ever does.

“Have you guys found your keypads?” he asks, voice picked up by the microphone on the visor his real-world body is wearing. Keypads that weren't there last night, that have only appeared once Miguel made the decision to separate.

“Yes.” Nick's answer is loud in Miguel's ear.

“Yes.”

“Almost there, I can see it.”

“Yeah.”

“There now.”

Okay. They either need to press something at the same time or in some kind of order. He has no clue. “Any ideas?”

“Oldest to youngest?” Leah asks.

“Or the reverse?” That was Grace.

“Too simple,” says Nick. “Expertise?”

“We're not all on different levels,” says Miguel. “Josh and Grace both are on Fourteen. How do we decide which of them goes first?”

“Screw it,” says Leah. “One, two, three . . . go.”

He should be pissed at her, he's the leader, but at least it's
a
decision. He hits the keypad, and the floor beneath him drops away.

He doesn't have time to prepare, fill his lungs. Choking, he falls, lands on something soft enough to cushion, hard enough to hurt. Grass? No. He opens his eyes and tests the surface with his hands.
A slightly padded, lightly sprung floor, not unlike the floor on which his real body is standing—actually lying—in the gaming room. Inside, Chimera, though, it means there's something on the wall he needs, the wall of an otherwise empty room.

You are in a room alone. Your teammates are nearby, but you cannot get to them until you find the exit, which you must locate without help. Inside this puzzle, your communication systems are inoperable.

Oh, excellent. He's happy to do this alone, but who knows what stupid decisions the others are making without him? Nick's the only one he has any faith in. Miguel's in charge, so what are the Gamerunners playing at, taking away his ability to lead his team?

Oh, well. His laugh bounces off the walls. If they were with him, he'd have to resist the urge. He isn't supposed to do this. He can picture the same expression on every one of dozens of faces, young and old, the doctors he's seen over his lifetime, all warning him not to.

But he can't stop himself, not for a million in-game credits and a save point every thirty seconds.

The floor bounces under him. A running start and he is flying, tumbling over and over in the air before landing not quite right, soles of his feet burning as if pierced by hot knives.

He does it again.

And again.

The others might be waiting for him, but they can wait. Leader privileges. Only when his chest starts to hurt past
comfortable
—for a given value of
comfortable
—does he stop. Time to find the way out.

Leah probably has it easy, wherever she is. Won't even need the floor, she can just inspect every inch of wall by walking over it in her new boots. Miguel has to do it the old-fashioned way, jumping at likely spots and hammering with his fist. The tile, when it pops free, whacks him in the shoulder. Its somersaults aren't as good as Miguel's; he gives it a six out of ten for form, then climbs into the air duct.

This is . . . not good. Nobody knows about his dislike of enclosed spaces, not even Nick and Anna, who know pretty much everything else about him.
Claustrophobia
isn't the right word. If it had been, he could've had it dealt with years ago. One electrified probe later and boom, no fear.

But they don't know where all fears lurk inside a mass of neurons. Some are well hidden. Fear of being trapped—even in a wide open space under an infinite sky—is well hidden.

He can do this. He'll be out again soon. Voices, faint and muffled for sure, but voices, get louder as he crawls through a space an inch wider than he is. Elbows bruised, he pulls himself closer.

These are not his friends, his team.

So close, his face an inch from the outlet grate, he can see the room but not the people in it. He doesn't need to. He can hear them well enough.

“You're right,” says his mother, clanking something. A dish maybe. A mug of her synthmint tea. “There isn't anything we can do about it now, but I'm not arguing.”

“Don't get me wrong,” says his father, “he's a good boy. It's just that we haven't been able to do any of the things we planned. It's always been this doctor, that doctor. Doctors who didn't catch the thing before he was born, doctors who can't fix it now.”

“Remember all the dreams we had? Travel, you taking time to write a book . . .”

“Now look.” His father gestures around. “We just have this.”

Miguel's vision blurs, scattering the various input sectors on his visor to raindrops of light.

Is the rest of his team facing everything they fear, or is he the lucky winner?

It can't really be them. They'd never say that.

Would they?

No. Not out loud. But maybe they thought it sometimes.

The walls squeeze tighter.

The grate falls at his shove, doesn't bounce this time. When
Miguel drops into the room, it's empty.

He has always been alone. Even his closest friends, his family, don't understand what it's like to be him, though he doesn't blame them for that. He doesn't always understand what it's like to be him either. He tries his best not to think about it, to immerse himself in Chimera and hope that if he's in an empty room when his heart craps out, someone will find him.

He checks his pulse with his biomech. Whatever. He's okay. What's next.

Cockroaches. He should have guessed. Gross. But it's not difficult physically to cross the room, it's only impossible to do without the sickening crunch-splat under every footstep. Killing them, he's fine with, he just doesn't know why something so small has to be so disgustingly loud.

He must be done because there's nothing else he can think of. Being trapped, his parents wishing he'd never been born, cockroaches. That's the list.

He opens the door and steps into an operating room. Nurses move around. A doctor stands next to the table. Only her eyes are visible above the mask, and they're familiar but unidentifiable.

Cold sweat beads across his chest, over the back of his neck. “So you know what I'm afraid of,” he mutters. The Storyteller isn't listening, never listens. “So what? This isn't
Chimera. Where's the game? What am I doing here?”

“Life is a game,” says the doctor. Dr. Spencer.

“Are you real?” he asks her. She wavers, flickers, pixelating in the air.

“Nothing is real.”

The nurses fade away with her, and he is alone again.

Too bad he can't do surgery on himself. All the equipment is here. Along one wall, a glass-fronted cabinet displays its temptations in beautiful, temperature-controlled sterility. Hearts, lungs, eyes, kidneys, all jacked into a central hub and glowing with function lights. He could turn himself into a proper cyborg in here, but not with only one pair of hands.