Stormbringer (5 page)

His eyes only opened to the feel of pressure and weight against his leg. When Sigmund looked, he saw the dark coils of an enormous snake.

“Hey, Boots.” Sigmund bent down, extending his hands and picking the snake up, draping her across his shoulders. Once upon a time, Boots had spent a thousand years dripping poison on a god. Now she lived in a huge, glass-free tank in said god's mortal office.

“I'm all right,” Sigmund told her. She was a good snake, and he wouldn't want her worrying. “I'm just…things are a bit…” But that road didn't go anywhere he could think to travel.

Boots, being a snake, said nothing in reply.

Sigmund spent the rest of the morning in Travis's office, playing video games on the couch. Travis's TV was huge and, more important, it was connected to a prototype alpha of the next gen Inferno console. Sigmund convinced himself playing it was testing. For the good of the company.

He was sure Travis wouldn't mind.

For her part, Boots stayed wrapped around his shoulders, half dozing, half hissing at the screen whenever Sigmund died or the console crashed. And if the former happened more than the latter? Well. The only witness was a snake. It wasn't like she could tell anyone.

Then, sometime just before lunch, Sigmund found himself saying:

“I mean, they're not bad people, y'know? Still the same gang they were before.” He fiddled with the Inferno's controller, watching as, on-screen, his overarmored space marine ran in listless circles. “I mean, Divya's still a pain, but that's not really her fault. I guess.”

Boots gave what Sigmund took to be a sympathetic hiss.

“It's just…They're all so—so
normal.
How'm I supposed to, like, relate to them anymore? Over beers at the Temple or whatever. What'm I supposed to do? Swap stories about the funny time Lain got his horns tangled up in the washing line?” Sigmund grinned, though it faded quickly. “ 'Cause, like. That was pretty funny. But not exactly something I can share with the rest of the Basement, y'know?”

On the TV, Sigmund's marine scratched his ass in eighty-inch HD.

“It's not everyone else that's changed,” he said. “It's me. I have this thing now, this…this secret.” Even if it wasn't really a secret, at least according to Lain.
Mortals don't see the Wyrd,
he'd always say.
It's not like on TV.

Or in books, even. Because Harry Potter had never prepared Sigmund for this. Had never mentioned what he was supposed to do, when the letter came from Hogwarts, but his family wasn't a bunch of dicks. How he was supposed to manage fitting back into the Muggle world between school terms, the place where cars didn't fly and no one could throw fireballs with their thoughts?

Then again, Sigmund had never read beyond the fourth book. Maybe they dealt with it later.

Maybe not. Maybe that was the trick, as Lain would say. There was no going home.

Sigmund gunned down a few more aliens, running between stacks of conveniently placed crates. An ill-timed sidestep landed him face-first on a frag grenade, and as the screen faded red, then black, Sigmund had to admit his heart just wasn't in it.

The aliens looked a bit like Lain. Tall and dark-skinned, with big claws and glowing eyes. Lain would hate the comparison, but once Sigmund had seen it, the mindless violence of their murder somehow lost its, well. Mindlessness.

“Fuck.” Sigmund sighed, flopping his arms out and his head backward on the sofa, Boots a long, firm bolster beneath his neck.

He stayed like that for a while, staring at the ceiling, listening to the death screen's music loop on the TV. Eventually, Boots's face appeared in his vision, her long, dark tongue flicking out across his nose and cheek. It tickled, and Sigmund laughed, rolling up and away to escape.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I get it. No more moping. Fuck…” But he was laughing.

It was a start.

At twelve thirty-six, he got a text from Em:

›
Where are you bro?

Then, before Sigmund had even started typing his reply:

›
Meet us at Wayne's in 10.

Sigmund's best friends, Em and Wayne, former valkyries and current goths. Wayne was over six feet tall, made of muscle and cleavage and clothes that would make a postapocalyptic Disney princess weep. Em was about Sigmund's height and weight, and wore the kind of pants that clinked when she walked. She also, between the hours of eight a.m. and four p.m., worked across the floor from Sigmund. Wayne, meanwhile, worked shifts at a comic store in between studying.

Both Em and Wayne had been to Hel and back for Sigmund. Literally. Twice. Which meant he wasn't going to ignore Em's order to meet up for lunch.

So he ditched Boots with a, “Sorry man, gotta go!” Then made his way out of the office.

Wayne's comic shop wasn't far, across the road and through the park. Down Torr Row and into Diamond Square. Metaverse Book and Comic [sic], wide and open and brightly lit, filled with neat shelves of trades and neat boxes of back issues, decorated by T-shirts and action figures.

Sigmund had been fourteen the first time he'd stepped into a comic store, trailing along behind a determined Em. Back in those days, the place had been a dingy hole-in-the-wall filled with dust and cobwebs. Sometime between then and now, comics had gone mainstream.

“Sig! Over here!”

Wayne, her dark-skinned face grinning beneath an explosion of pink synthetic dreadlocks. She was gesturing to the back of the shop, through the staff door, so Sigmund followed her. Out into a chaos of books and boxes, and Em, sitting on a milk crate and scowling.

“Where were you?” she asked.

“Playing video games in Travis's office,” Sigmund replied. Partly because lies made his teeth hurt but mostly because it was Em and Wayne.

“Where is he?”

“He went back to Asgard last night.” Sigmund took up residence against a filing cabinet. Wayne, meanwhile, had perched herself on a desk, huge boots swinging even as her hands clutched an oversized sketchbook.

Em made a noncommittal noise. “That'll end badly,” she said. Em and optimism were only the most casual of acquaintances, but, more important, she also knew more Norse mythology than anyone else Sigmund knew, Lain included. So he didn't think she was wrong so much as he was hoping for her predicted damage to be done in degrees. Small ones.

“So why the secret meet-ups in the comic shop?” he asked instead. Whatever trouble Lain was getting into, Sigmund couldn't do much about it.

Em looked up. “We have a proposal for you,” she said, “and want to hear your thoughts.”

(uh-oh)

“What are my thoughts?”

“You love it, but we'll get to that part in a minute. It's about
Gangleri
—”

“Saga,”
said Wayne.

“—whatever. It's about the game. You know the Spark goes obsolete in a few weeks, so we don't think there's much point continuing with the dev. We've got a better idea instead.”

Sometimes, less and less frequently as the years rolled by, Sigmund cut code for a video game of his very own. Em did the writing, Wayne the art, and the three of them had been pecking at it for years.

Probably still would be, if not for the fact the console they'd developed it for was about to be replaced.

“Show me your better idea,” Sigmund said, hangover scratching behind his eyeballs.

“Promise you won't freak out,” said Wayne, fingers tight around her sketchbook.

“Uh…” Sigmund said.

Wayne turned the book around.

Sigmund blinked.

Then blinked again.

“Well?” said Wayne.

“That's me,” Sigmund managed, when Wayne's wide, pink, anxious gaze got too much.

“Girl you,” Em corrected. “Rule 63.”

Except Rule 63 Sigmund already existed. Or, rather, Sigmund was already Sigyn's Rule 63. But Sigmund knew for a fact he looked nothing like his past self. Not like the way the woman in Wayne's sketchbook looked like him. She was even dressed in the sort of clothes he'd be dressed in, were he, too, an inhabitant of a dystopian cyberpunk future.

“Tell me her name's not—”

“Her name's Sigga,” Em said, confirming Sigmund's fears. “She's a mechanic, working for the Intra-Solar Mining Company. They build spaceships to ferry mining cargo between Earth and the other nine planets.”

“Pluto isn't a planet,” Sigmund muttered. He wondered when the catch was coming.

“Never said the ninth planet was Pluto,” Em said. Then, “The way the ships work is a mystery; some technobabble about the flight calculations involved being too complex for a human, blah blah blah. Everyone assumes it's an AI doing flights.”

“It's not an AI,” Sigmund guessed.

“Correct. Our heroine, Sigga, via some plot quirk, finds out what's really controlling the ships: a powerful psychic, imprisoned and permanently plugged in to the system. And, moreover, said psychic turns out to be—”

“Oh god,” said Sigmund. Appropriately, as it turned out, Wayne flipping the page in her sketchbook to reveal—

“Sigga's childhood sweetheart, Luke.”

Except it wasn't Luke, it was Lain. Naked and thin, blind and plugged in, wrapped and chained and tied by an HR Geiger nightmare in rusty Cat-6. And for a moment—just one moment—Sigmund was back in that awful cave beneath the World Tree. A dank, dark eternity of pain and degradation, standing with trembling arms and a hardened heart, waiting for the world to end.

“He hates it.” Wayne's voice slapped Sigmund back into the present. “I told you he'd hate it.”

“I don't hate it,” said Sigmund. He looked at Em. “I just—the point of the game?”

“Rescue the prince, obviously. Free him, take down the evil empire, get married, and live happily ever after, roll credits.” Em's eyes were bright green chips behind her glasses. Watching.

Sigmund looked back at the sketchbook. There were other, smaller pictures scattered around the large central image of Luke imprisoned in his machine. Head shots showing him healthy, free of wires and cables. Smiling and grimacing. Afraid. And, in one larger image, sharing a passionate kiss with Sigga.

Sigmund swallowed. “Why?” he started. Then, “I mean…I just—”

“For her,” Em said. “For Sigyn. Because some thirteenth-century asshole didn't think she was important enough to bother remembering her stories. I can't get them back. But I can write her a new one.”

Something curled beneath Sigmund's heart, the flutter of a second beat, not quite in time with his own.

“All right,” he said. “What do I need to do?”

Em wanted to go big-screen, to move off mobile and into living rooms and into desktops.

“There's been a lot of movement in dev kits and APIs,” she said, leaning forward on her milk crate, elbows on her knees and hunger in her eyes. “We'll need to pick one, and you'll need to learn it.”

Sigmund nodded, chewing on his lip. “It's a lot of work.” Em was talking an action RPG shooter. Guns and powers and inventory and crafting. Dialogue and companions and morality choices. It was big. Real big.

“No,” Em said. “It's a little bit of work we have to do real fucking smoothly. Get one level down perfect—gameplay, story, characters—then we go pitch it to your boyfriend. Then he gives us Utgard, and we're home free.”

Utgard Entertainment, one of the most prestigious video game companies on the planet and, not so coincidentally, a subsidiary of LB.

“What makes you so sure he'll agree?” Something about Em's plan didn't sit right. It felt…cheap. Even if Sigmund was an adult and he knew this was how business was done, out in the Really Real World. Not the what you know but the who, and Sigmund just happened to be dating one of the biggest whos around.

“C'mon, man,” Em said. “It's about his fucking wife. Of course he'll agree.”

“That's no—”

“He's sentimental.” When Sigmund looked up, Wayne was twirling one long pink dread around her finger. “Well. He is, right? He has that painting of Sigyn in his office.”

“Yeah. So?”

“ ‘So'? Dooder, the painting's not for him. He's blind. It's for everyone else, for their reactions.”

Sigmund opened his mouth to argue, then shut it. It would explain why the painting was so god-awfully ugly, all soft-focus oils set inside a carved gilt frame. Totally unsuited to the rest of the decor in the room, but that would make sense. If being conspicuous was precisely the point. And Lain—Travis, whoever—couldn't see per se, but the Wyrdsight gave him a different sort of vision, one of emotion and of narrative.

“He wants people to think about her,” Wayne was saying. “Even if they don't ask and he never tells, he doesn't want her forgotten. And, if we do this”—Wayne gestured to her sketchbook—“she won't be. At least for a little while.”

Sigmund looked at the sketchbook and he looked at Wayne. Then he closed his eyes, reaching down beneath his heart to find the ice.

(“you…your life is your own. you are not beholden to my shadow”)

When Sigmund's eyes opened again, he locked gazes with Em.

“I'll do some Googling,” he said.

“See.” Em was grinning, triumphant. “I told you you'd love it.”

They left the back room about ten minutes later, Wayne showing Sigmund more of her sketches, Em talking excitedly about themes and foreshadowing and quest structure. Sigmund nodded and said “uh-huh” and tried not to think too hard about the giant wall of effort looming ahead of him, taunting him with all the things he didn't know about game programming. Art was art and story was story, meaning Em and Wayne's gear shift wasn't really much of one at all, as far as Sigmund could see. But his, on the other hand…