Nova Project #1 (12 page)

“I wonder what would've happened if I'd managed to get off a good shot. It's why I have these,” she says, pointing to the scars behind her ears. “I like to hear what's coming.” She's pale now, too, and Miguel can't reach to touch her across the table.

But he wants to.

“I was in a room full of snakes.”

“That's it?” Nick eyes Josh doubtfully.

“That's it.” Josh leans back in his chair, looking at all of them in turn, his expression a dare.

“This is dumb.” Grace folds her arms across her chest. “I'm not talking about it. Your turn, oh, esteemed leader.”

He opens his mouth to object, stops himself because
it makes sense. They have to learn to cooperate while accommodating one another's instincts, meaning he has to trust her choice even if he doesn't trust
her.

That's okay. He knows the game she's playing, and he can play it, too.

That doesn't make it easy; first, he needs to spot the line he has to walk. The major advantage of a life lived in carefully chosen status updates or alone in a Cube is not having to talk about yourself much. A scroll through his feed would show only Miguel: The Highlights, hardly any of the stuff he'd rather keep to himself.

“I'm an only child,” he begins, “and I worry my parents wanted someone . . . different. That I'm not enough for them, you know? There's an upgrade I want,” he says, feeling Nick's gaze and forging ahead, “and I think part of me feels like if I get it, I'll be who I always should've been. So I play Chimera all the time, trying to get far enough to earn it, even though the actual surgery part scares me to death.”

“Touching,” says Grace.

“Oh, shut up,” Leah snaps. Surprisingly Grace falls silent. Leah's good, depending on context. He needs to remember that. Stay on the right side of her.

“If Grace still refuses to talk, we're done here,” he says, standing, waiting for the rest to follow suit. “Overworld,” he says when they have, barely waiting for the violet globe to
come into focus before calling up the cache, the room changing around them again.

“Get whatever you can carry,” he says. It's a good chance to get Nick alone as he chooses from a range of guns. “Hey, man,” he says, “I didn't realize.”

“I know,” says Nick. “It's okay. She and I are good, we talked again last night once we were done playing.”

“Good.”

Nick lowers his voice. “Notice you left out some key details there. Not to mention letting Grace get away with not saying anything, and I'm positive Josh lied.”

“Me too. But I think this is the way it's supposed to happen. If I'm wrong, then maybe we don't win, and I have as much to lose as anyone, at least, if we don't. I'll tell them when I'm ready.”

“You'd better.”

“I said I will!”

“You guys okay over here?” Leah approaches, a rifle slung over her shoulder, grenades bulging in her pockets.

“Totally fine.” Miguel meets her eyes. She has nice ones. Nick moves away to inspect another shelf. “Are you?”

She smiles faintly. “Yeah. Thanks. I get what you're saying about the alignment thing, and it makes sense, but why is it such a big deal that we know about it?”

“Because the increased human element is what makes this Chimera different from the regular one. If who we are as
people doesn't matter, the competition would be one-on-one like normal play. Why they've done it, I'm not sure yet, but you were right, what you said in my room.” His face warms a degree, a display on his visor alerting him to the change. “We need to see each other as people. It's important.”

“You think any of the other teams have figured it out?”

He's checked his feed every few minutes, automatically, without thinking. He hasn't seen anything that indicates they have, but he's not planning on broadcasting it either. The people who need to know what he thinks were listening to him in that room, that much he is sure of.

“I don't know. Are you ready?”

“Ready.”

She's real. He could reach out and touch her and she'd feel warm, human. Behind her smooth forehead, shielded by an invisible visor, are feelings and thoughts of her own, not like the teammates he's used to. He could kiss her and she might kiss him back.

He knows for a fact that's not true of the digital versions. He was thirteen once.

“Let's go,” he says, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Back to the overworld. The new level glows. Leader privileges, Miguel reaches out to touch it. The air changes.

“Holy shit,” says Josh behind him.

“Well,” says Miguel, “this is how the game really begins.”

T
o the outside world, Lucius and Blake are seen as the owners, inventors, masterminds of Chimera, and that's true so far as it goes, which isn't nearly far enough.

They only chose the method.

Lucius's bosses had been demanding results. What was the point of all this glorious technology, they asked, if not put to good use? Until the end of days he and Blake will argue over whose idea the whole thing was, and that's fine. Lucius knows it was his, and Blake will always claim otherwise.

Lucius steps into an office building, an elevator, a boardroom. All the chairs are already occupied, but he's not expected to sit. Sunlight streams in through the windows, blinding him to their faces.

“Things are progressing well?” one asks.

“Very well. We're on the brink. One team has already discovered their balance, speed will only increase from here.”

“We don't understand why there had to be such balance at all,” says a different voice. “You insisted upon it, but why not simply fill the teams with the competitors you desired?”

Lucius fights the urge to roll his artificially enhanced eyes. Just because he can't see them doesn't mean they can't see him, but really, he's been over all of this with them before. First, it is unfair, and second . . . There isn't really a
second.
He wasn't supposed to be unfair, none of them were.

Couldn't and shouldn't are different things, but that's a debate for another day.

“We can't predict the decisions people will make until they actually make them,” he says instead. “What if we guess wrongly? Better to watch and see what happens. If you were unhappy with the numbers in the data banks, I presume you would have summoned me before now.”

“We are pleased thus far. Be careful to keep things moving in the right direction.”

“I'll do my best,” Lucius says, firing off a salute. None of them really understand sarcasm. Or humor. They care only about their bottom line, a tightrope they'd fall off if they laughed.

He understands that they're impatient, and why. As he leaves, he passes beneath the same clock he did when he arrived, if it can be said to be the same when it now displays slightly different numbers. Are things the same if they remain
static in essence while their details change? He'd had a long argument about that with Blake once, every Friday afternoon for most of the eighteenth century. He blames the humans for that. They'd done a lot of thinking back then, and it was contagious.

The clock isn't actually a clock exactly. It's a timer, and Lucius remembers a time when most of the numbers weren't zeros. Only the last two are still counting down. That the
number
of numbers has never changed can mean only one thing.

They've always known how long it would take, exactly how long they would need.

S
tanding in a circle, they stare at the place around them. It is at once unfamiliar and the way Chimera always should have been. The graphics are so good they make them, the humans, look fuzzy and pixelated. Like they've stepped into the next evolutionary stage but haven't caught up with it yet. Like the gods were just practicing with them and got it right with version 2.0.

Miguel doesn't believe in any of that stuff, but he can't think of another way to describe what he's seeing, and spending years in ChimeraCubes has definitely affected the way he thinks.
Let's go be gods,
Nick had said.

But even through his visor, it almost hurts to look at.

Reality—with extra everything. Lights are brighter, and he can see every color in the white. Lines are sharper, as if they'd cut skin. Sounds are loud, clear. Traffic, people, music, the endless hum of a city. It doesn't matter that it's not one he
recognizes: the strangeness cannot be ascribed to that. He glances over his shoulder; Leah is right there, close. Her open mouth seems blurred at the edges.

“Are we all seeing the same thing?” she asks. “Is it just me, or does it look—”

“More real than real does?” Josh says.

“Yeah, that.”

Miguel takes a step. A careful one, he's not too proud to admit. The street feels as if it could shatter any second. It doesn't. The sidewalk is solid, every atom sparkling individually but fusing to form dull stone.

Chimera delights in reminding you that you never know what's around the corner, under that rock, on the other side of a doorway. Mountaintops to skyscrapers, deserts to oceans, skies to depths.

He's never left his city, but he's seen the world. Maybe that's part of the appeal or part of the point. Show the players the planet they're trying to survive on.

“This makes no sense,” he says. “The Storyteller said we're playing on a damaged world, we're supposed to save it by passing these twelve levels. Does any of this look damaged to you guys? The last level didn't either, until the earth split open. It all looks perfect.” The road is completely smooth. Trees are lushly green. Mirrored buildings catch and hold the light.

“Does ours? The real world? No, and we know it is,” Grace
answers. “We know the damage is there, in the sun and the rain and the soil, but we can't see it. All they do is build more sheltered parks and erect more composite trees and clean more junk off the streets.”

“That's true, but—”

“It's human nature to cover up anything broken, anything ugly. Leah, you wake up in the morning with a zit or something, what do you do?”

Leah's eyes narrow. “Put on makeup.”

“Right. And then you catch your reflection an hour later and you can pretend the problem isn't there. You know it is, but the pretense makes you feel better about yourself. Stronger, more confident. If it didn't, you wouldn't cover it up in the first place.”

“But the whole world does it,” says Miguel. “The real one. Who are we showing off for?”

Grace holds up her hands. “I'm here to game, not philosophize. All I'm saying is that something's lurking beneath the veneer.”

“Okay,” he says. “Let's see what's waiting for us.” He moves further into the brilliance, the team following. He assumes from the height of the buildings that they're downtown, but he knows the city only as a place on a map. He can't see any landmarks he's heard of or seen pictures of online.

A station sits across the street, too obvious to be
coincidence among the towering buildings. Every time he's ever seen one inside Chimera, he's needed it.

“I think we're supposed to find out where we are, or be up high for something.”

That's why Nick's his best friend.

“Yeah,” he says. “Everyone, grab a board.”

They don't need to enter codes for these; they're meant to have them. Grace is the slowest to get hers from its dock, and when her fingers curl around the curved edge, her knuckles pop from her thin hands.

“You got a problem? You think we should be doing something else?” Miguel asks, already standing on his.

Her lips thin, and she shakes her head, turning so she can sit on the thing.

You are rising rapidly in the center of a cluster of buildings. From this height you can see most of the city.

All of them can, except Grace anyway, who can see only the backs of her eyelids.

“Heights!” shouts Miguel over the wind, stronger than it was on the ground. “That's what you wouldn't share with the rest of the class?”

She manages to sneer while keeping her mouth decidedly closed, which is probably a wise move. Puke from up here could do some damage, albeit only to a collection of tightly packed pixels below. In real life Miguel had dented the hood of
a car once, but that hadn't been out of fear.

They spread out in a circle again, about ten feet apart. Miguel has a better sense of where they are now than the overworld gave. A real city, just not his. The needle of glass and concrete in the middle distance beyond Nick is famous.

He yells. Nick, Josh, and Leah follow his pointing finger. Grace still has her eyes squeezed shut, and Josh swoops over to touch her on the shoulder. She jolts, only her iron grip on the hoverboard keeping her from falling.

What would take an hour or more on foot takes a few minutes in the air, the city whizzing by underneath them. Computer-generated people walk up and down the streets, go in and out of stores and offices like nanobots moving through veins to and from a pulsing heart.

They land on an observation deck so high it would be abandoned in the real world, the atmosphere too close. Grace grips the railing, knees knocking together. This probably isn't much of an improvement for her, though she must be glad to be off the board that is now a bullet shooting back to its dock.

“Are you okay?” he asks her. “Look, I didn't mean to . . . We're all scared of stuff.”

“I'll be better if we get inside,” she says, shaken enough to sound like a real person for once. Nick pushes open the door, and inside, the silence rings without the wind to fill it. The curved couches follow the lines of the walls and windows,
because climbing halfway to the moon to sit around like the way you could do at home is everyone's idea of a good time.

There's even a fruit bowl on a glass table.

With a golden apple in it. Nick and Miguel spot it at the same time and Nick dives, claiming the out-of-place thing. He caches it and turns to Miguel, grinning. “Well, we found the item. Any idea what else we're doing here, oh, Chimera expert?”

Leah snickers.

“No,” he says, mock scowling, “but landmarks are kind of the
point
of cities, you know? They define them. Take away the thing in every picture, and it's just . . . a place that could be anywhere. People like something to focus on. Icons.”

“So now you're our leader
and
resident psychologist?”

Oh, good. Grace is back to herself.

“You were the one who said we cover up the broken things. Follow that thought. What do we preserve for as long as we can? What outlasts the people who built it?”

“I got stuck in a pyramid for a week once, playing every day,” Josh says.

“Exactly.”

“But things like that are ruins, and we don't cover them up,” says Nick.

“No, because ruining something you made is easier to accept than ruining something you've been given. You can
always make another one.” His heart thuds a reminder. “But none of that matters now anyway. My point is . . . there is a point.” The more real than real detail of this level has wormed its way into his brain. “It makes sense that we're here, that's all. No matter where you are in the game, there's a goal, and a path to follow. It's never aimless, even if it sometimes feels that way. Ask me how I'm sure.”

“How are you sure?”

He grins at Leah. For now he can pretend that he realized this is the moment he laid eyes on the building and that it hadn't been a lucky guess borne of more game experience than he should really have. In fact, he hadn't known until midway through the flight.

“Because,” he says, blinking several times to bring the right image up on his visor, letting it draw itself in violet lines on his field of vision, “we have a map.”

The thing about being on top of the world is it makes you feel on top of the world, as long as you're not scared of heights. He blinks again to send the image to all the others, and together they inspect it. The path is marked from room to room, but there's no indication of what's waiting for them in each. That'd be way too easy.

“First one is on the thirty-second floor,” says Nick. “We're on the thirty-third.”

“Does he always state the obvious?” Grace asks.

“Almost, yes,” says Miguel. “Ready?” This landmark is old enough to have an elevator instead of a tile; he leads the way to doors that open at the push of a button.

The other thing about being on top of the world is that it's a long way down.

Nobody ever complains about treasure hunts, but he's not going to lie, he was expecting something more exciting.

It's harder to be democratic in an enclosed space; last time they were out on the street and with more real estate, opportunity felt correspondingly more expansive. After the first couple of rooms and Grace being what he is rapidly learning is
Grace,
he makes a choice.

“We can take turns. Leah, take the next one.”

“It's another map,” she says a moment later, emerging from some kind of storage room. “Not sure where to, doesn't look like a building.”

“Keep it,” he says.

“Don't you mean she should send it to you?” Grace asks.

“Oh. Yeah. Send it to me,” he tells Leah, silently and probably unfairly cursing Grace. Between them—to put it democratically—they've found the map, a bulletproof vest, another gun, and a parachute. “Nick, you good with the elevator shaft?”

“Hell yeah. Gonna need a rope, though, unless you want I should just parachute down and hope I get lucky.”

“I've got a rope,” says Leah, rummaging in the backpack she brought with her from their cache. “What? Never know when it might be useful.”

He helps Nick rig a harness while Josh sends the elevator to another floor and pries the outer doors open, muscles bulging. “Don't look, Grace,” Josh says.

“Don't you dare fall, I don't know how I'd explain that to Anna.”

“Three simple words: I dropped him.”

Miguel laughs. “Get down there.”

Nick lowers his voice. “You okay?”

“I got you. Go.”

The rope burns Miguel's hands. He holds it as tightly as he can, and it's not so bad with Josh and Leah taking some of the weight. They're almost up against the opposite wall, unable to see Nick after his head disappears below the floor. Clangs echo up and down the shaft as Nick's boots strike metal. The rope stretches tight, Miguel leans back, knees bent, toes curling inside his socks like that will help his feet grip better.

“Damn,” pants Leah. “Why'd they have to hide something down there?”

“It's not like this is an office building or some shit,” says Grace, leaning easily against the wall beside them. “It's a giant phallic ‘look what humanity can do, look how special we are' piece of crap with no actual use. It doesn't need to be filled with
convenient rooms to hide things in. It only needs to be tall.”

She might not be wrong, but Miguel is too breathless to agree with her even if he wants to. Something sharper than a blade is stabbing his chest, the pain searing all the way up to his jaw, cracking like electricity between his gritted teeth.

“Got it! Let go!”

“What?”

“I can drop down to the top of the elevator from here.” The echo sounds like several Nicks. “Take the stairs and meet me on, uh, fifteen.”

“Roger that,” says Miguel, dropping the rope.

“Who's Roger?” The laughter of many Nicks fills the air.

“Your friend has a terrible sense of humor,” says Grace, just in front of him on the stairs.

“He knows. It's kind of intentional.”

“Oh, well, that's all right then.”

Nick has the stairwell door open, waiting. “A first-aid kit,” he says, preempting the question. “Filled with all kinds of stuff.”

“So any damage is real but can be healed?” Leah takes the kit from Nick, rummages through it.

“Good to know,” says Miguel. He bets he can test that theory, and for a second the walls of the building close in, narrow and narrower, to squash his thudding heart. Keep playing and maybe die. Don't play and definitely die. Black
spots burst across his eyes, he gulps the air quietly as he can. Don't panic.

“I am curious how this game even works, like, the code parts. In the normal game, you get hurt or die, you wake up just fine with LEVEL FAILED flashing at you, and I get that. It's never game over. Now they're saying the injury or whatever goes with us, if we make it out alive, but we can be healed inside the game. And outside of it, I guess. I wonder what actually happens when one of us gets really hurt,” Leah muses.

He suspects they're going to find out sooner rather than later, but he doesn't say so. For one thing, Leah's probably guessed the same, and for another, expecting it will only make it happen faster.

He blinks. The violet map flickers to life. The next thing is a dozen floors down.

Elevators are better than stairs, but Miguel still has to stand in the corner trying to hide the pain, the wheezing breaths that won't calm. Nick squints at him, one eyebrow raised, and Miguel shrugs. He's okay, it happens.

“There's no third floor on here,” says Grace. “Goes from four down to ground.”

“Ground,” says Miguel, unsurprised to step into a huge, open atrium when the doors open. It's his turn, but he can't see anything obvious. The walls are flat, smooth. There are no nooks in which something could be hidden. Maybe a secret
panel? But the map says the thing is on a nonexistent third floor.