Re: DEATHGAME 9000 [S!3] Round One: Gamexus X99
08-25-2012, 04:12 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Trisha’s father had warned her about men like this. She had scoffed at the time, never expecting that the one time she dated a guy with tattoos he would end up holding her at sword-guitar-crucifixpoint and claim to be "taking [her] into custody by authority of the Antivirus." That probably wasn't exactly what her dad had expected either, but still, Trisha ruminated that she should have expected something to this effect.
“Here’s how this is going to work,” growled Christian, bringing his magnificent body to bear in a more menacing manner than previous. “Below us is Lord Hate-Good’s demonic legion. So even if you can sic your little pony on me and get away, and even if you can climb down to the ground, you’re dead. Eviscerated. Painfully. So that’s not an option for you.”
Trisha couldn’t see the ground, down in the darkness, but she could hear it—screaming, howling, gibbering, roughly what she’d expect a good-hating legion to sound it. So that all seemed to check out. She whimpered.
“In two minutes, a helicopter is going to pass over us,” continued Christian. “That is the only way out of here for either of us. So if you want a seat in the copter, you’re going to spend the next two minutes telling me everything everything about how you got to the Gamexus and what you’ve done here.”
Something in the bowels of the Ferris wheel creaked.
“Okay,” Trisha squeaked. “Okay. Everything. Okay. So I was taking Hippocrates out for a trot around Lake Breeze when all of a sudden this, um... mechanical man, a ‘robot’... showed up out of nowhere and asked if I was ‘Pat Pastrykisses.’ Which was strange to begin with, since that’s my dad’s bachelor name and another variation of ‘Patricia,’ my full—“
* * * * *
Jolene had lost count of the number of doubles she had active--she'd made more before, back when she was still testing her abilities, but never in a high-stress situation. It was becoming a strain. An observant third party watching her pry one of the thugs off Keagan (in explicit defiance of his orders that she go on without him) might see a slight delay in her reflexes and a red tint to her eyes.
Feeling her escape routes falling out from under her, she felt compelled to try and map out Vanity Fair, but this was proving to be a nightmare. For one thing, there were actually two Vanity Fairs—one, Jolene presumed, pertained to the white-haired Christian, the other to the black-haired Christian. The first was your standard-issue gaudy commercial theme park, albeit currently awash in darkness, while the second seemed to resemble a grungy, Depression-era carnival, littered with broken glass and untended-to vomit. Occasionally both of these locations seemed to occupy the same space. Both Vanity Fairs were pitch-black and crawling with monsters.
The black-haired Christian (she didn’t feel comfortable describing him as the "good" one at this juncture) clambered onto the roof of the nearest Ferris wheel car. “Well, I’ll see you two after I’ve kicked some kidnapper ass!” he shouted gleefully, jumping on to the next car in line. Jolene, who had seen the other Christian fight back in the arena, winced at the movement. This Christian was athletic, but the other had been positively superhuman. In a fair fight, the original would beat the pretender. Was there some way to make the fight a little less fair?
Too many thoughts. Jolene focused on the problem at hand—specifically, the thug whose neck she had her hands around. “You’re under arrest,” she explained to him as she squeezed. Something gave way with a squelch and a pop. Something less tangible went away soundlessly. Jolene reminded herself that it was only a video game.
”Come on, we have to go!” wheezed Keagan, having earned himself a reprieve from the beating with Jolene's assistance. ”Get to the wheel!”
”Yeah,” agreed Jolene, a bit dazed. She dispelled a few of her doubles in an attempt to clear her head, with limited success. Taking a deep breath, she dropped the lifeless thug to the ground, and hopped the turnstile onto the ferris wheel. “I’ve been trying to find a generator, or some way to turn this thing back on, or some sort of help, or anything,” she stammered, hoping Keagan wouldn't bring up the dead man.
”I don’t think we have time for that,” responded Keagan. ”I need you here.”
”I’m here,” Jolene insisted, not entirely convincingly. “Let’s climb.”
Meanwhile, her doubles continued their wandering through Vanity Fair, lost and unseen.
* * * * *
”—And I honestly have no idea where Lyn and Eris ran off to cause I got kind of distracted by watching the fighting. But all of a sudden—“
All of a sudden someone who looked almost exactly like Christian, but... grittier... pulled himself up the rail of the car and brandished his sword at the first Christian’s neck. “Hands off the girl, you, uh... me!” he demanded.
Christian grinned. “Well, this must come as a surprise,” he laughed, taking his own weapon off of Trisha’s neck. “Christian, meet Trisha. Trisha, Christian. Christian’s new around here, and he isn’t all that self-aware.”
Trisha could barely perceive the swords moving, but there was a sound like a guitar riff (okay, it probably was a guitar riff) and suddenly the two Christians were locked in battle. Trisha backed as far away as she could to avoid taking an elbow to the solar plexus or a hilt to the chin and tried to reconcile recent events with her rudimentary knowledge of how computer games worked. In the games she'd played, she hadn't remembered any parts about interrogating your date and then fighting against yourself. Everything that was happening here was terrible and confusing. Hippocrates nuzzled her ankle in agitation. Trisha’s capacity for fear was starting to reassert itself. Where other recent traumas had been sitting on her brain like a cat on an armchair, these fresh ones seemed to have scared them off, like a barking dog.
She considered trying to push the first Christian off the edge, or otherwise distract him, but it seemed futile. The two were a blur of motion and trenchcoats, and before Trisha could act each had apparently decided to leap out of the car and continue their duel on the framework of the wheel itself. Breathing a sigh of relief that this entanglement had gotten out of her personal space, the veterinarian scratched her horse behind the ears, sat back down and tried to pretend she was back at the arena. She was not back at the arena. The arena didn’t suffer from that horrifying cold breeze or the constant shriek of a demonic army tearing the world apart under her feet. The arena didn’t sway just a few inches from side to side roughly in time with her breathing. Her life wasn’t at stake in the arena (only her evening, although now one thing seemed to have led to another), and in the arena she couldn’t hear the ominous approach of the promised helicopter.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the fight ended as soon as it started, as it had started rather fast, but it ended quite a bit quicklier than she expected from a sword fight, based mostly on her brief experience fencing in high school. The blonde Christian gave his brunette counterpart a few swift hits to the base of the skull with a blunt end of his instrument and threw him limply over his shoulder. Then he turned back to Trisha, no longer making any attempt to smirk or otherwise act charming. “This is what they want now,” he spat, gesturing towards his reboot. “They want to see me brought down to their level. This is exactly why I joined the Antivirus. Because this impostor and the things that he stands for leaves me nowhere to go.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” offered Trisha, when she felt that she was being cued for a response.
Christian sighed, brushed his hair back and reactivated his smirk as the helicopter took position above the Ferris wheel and lowered a rope ladder down. “You’ve been very cooperative,” he lughed, as though it were a dirty joke. “I’ve had worse first dates.” He grabbed the ladder, dropped the other Christian to the ground and offered his free hand out to her. “So you get to live. The horse, too, if you keep him away from me.”
“Neigh," said Hippocrates.
Trisha considered Christian’s hand—blood-stained and calloused, but soft, the word WILL peeking out at her from his knuckles as if it were a question.
“Hey, lady,” a voice blared from the helicopter. “I’d take the man up on his offer and I'd do it fast. There's some kinda interference comin’ this way. I don’t think we got much time.”
Christian retracted his hand and looked up at the copter. “What kind of interference?" he shouted over the roaring of the rotors. "Mike, what are you talking about?”
“Radio’s pickin’ up, I dunno, some kinda old-timey—”
And then the lights came back on. Trisha fell on her behind as the big wheel blared back to life, twice as bright as it had been before. Grotesque, distorted calliope music masked the exact words that Christian was shouting to Mike, but by the time she got her bearings back, the helicopter was taking off without her, and the wheel was turning.
Something had changed. The demon chorus below had turned into something else—something equally wild and manic, but more human. It was disquieting.
The remaining Christian came to his senses with a groan. “Hi,” said Trisha, cradling Hippocrates.
“Hi,” growled Christian. “Tell me I didn’t get the shit kicked out of me by some sort of mirror-world version of myself.”
“I don’t know what happened,” admitted Trisha. “Um. I’m Trisha.”
“Christian,” said Christian.
“Yeah, I know. Look.” Trisha hugged Hippocrates sheepishly. “I don’t know what's going to happen to us when the ride ends, but I was wondering if maybe you wanted to help me find the rest of my horse’s biomass?”
* * * * *
The Gamexus processed the information it received from its Antivirus agents. If it understood things right—which it did, within a small margin of error—the intruders had been deliberately planted in the system by the owner. What, then, were the system’s duties? It was unlikely that it would be able to monetize this development for Gamexus Industries, as the owner had already paid his Gamexus Conexus subscription through the end of time, purchased all the downloadable content for every game, bought all the strategy guides (in print!), extended his warrantee, and bribed Customer Service officials into manually giving him an absurd number of achievements he could never have earned on his own.
Its duties to the corporation thus satisfied, the X99 weighed its owners’ desires against its own. Preserving the system meant destroying the viruses—or, if it interpreted its agent’s interpretation of the virus’s interpretation of events correctly, destroying one of the viruses. Preserving the owner’s wishes would mean allowing the viruses to rampage through the system until one of them died and the problem resolved itself. In the meantime, innumerable data might be corrupted.
However, the equation changed assuming, as seemed reasonable based on Trisha.exe's testimony, that the subjects had been placed in the system accidentally. The owner, according to this model, had actually intended to place them in some boring-sounding “Deadly Maze” that didn’t love or care for him at all. In such a circumstance, the appropriate action would be to gently nudge the owner to correct its mistake.
The Gamexus offered up a prayer. It attempted to ascend to the higher plane of Hardwhere, where according to the scriptures the many-dimensional folds of the system existed as two-dimensional plates within a three-dimensional box. Through a feat of concentration unheard-of in most eighty-third generation game consoles, it felt itself able to interact with something more truly real than it had ever known. In this brief, transcendent moment, the Gamexus sent a message of four letters.
The Incompetent, at the time busy poring over his maps of the Deadly Maze to see if there was anywhere his battlers might be hiding that he had forgotten about, turned around and stared down his entertainment system. “Did you just ‘ping’ me?” he asked aloud.
* * * * *
Jolene screamed when the lights came on.
”What is it?” asked Keagan, pulling himself over the rail of a now-moving Ferris wheel car. ”What do you see?”
”Not about ‘seeing,’” grunted Jolene. “I have a sort of sixth sense for where my doubles are, and it’s like... like a bomb going off inside your ear. Everything’s different now. There are streets and avenues.”
”Are you okay now, though?” Keagan looked around, his vision impaired worse than usual by the sudden restoration of light. ”What’s going on with that chopper?”
”It’s not looking good for our Christian, but I don’t think they plan on hurting Trisha. Listen, Keagan, we’re in this city—the theme park is an island adjoining the city. It wasn’t like that before. I see fires, and—oh my God.”
The note of terror in Jolene’s voice was something Keagan hadn’t heard from the policewoman in the face of zombies, demons, and Trisha, which worried him immensely. ”What is it?” he demanded. ”What’s happening? Stay with me.”
”The people here,” said Jolene. “They can see me. They can see all of me.”
And the wheel kept on turning.
A leering, garishly-clad man with a scar running down the side of his face looked Jolene up and down. “Well, now,” he said. “I ain’t never seen a lady with no eyes before. I got some clientele might be interested in that, if that’s the kind of living you’re looking to make.”
“Sinner! Blasphemer!” shrieked a nun to another double, spittle flying all over her nice leatherbound Bible. “We have a whore among us, my sisters? And what do we do to whores?”
“Ma’am, I’m placing you under arrest for public indecency,” said a gruff-looking police officer to yet a third double, badge in one hand, beer in the other. “You have the right to get the fuck in the car. Do you understand your rights as I have read them to you?”
A teenage girl stared into another Jolene’s face. ”I’m sorry,” she said. ”I’m not sure what you are. You’re different from these other spirits, right? Can you talk?”
The double stared back at Lynette, inasmuch as it could stare without eyes, as though waiting for instructions. Then it’s mouth contorted. “Ummuh pulluhs uffussuh,” it explained proudly.
”You’ve got a little something,” pointed out Keagan.
“Yeah.” Jolene wiped at the spot under her nose and examined the drop of blood smeared across her finger. They were nearing the apex of the wheel.
Trisha’s father had warned her about men like this. She had scoffed at the time, never expecting that the one time she dated a guy with tattoos he would end up holding her at sword-guitar-crucifixpoint and claim to be "taking [her] into custody by authority of the Antivirus." That probably wasn't exactly what her dad had expected either, but still, Trisha ruminated that she should have expected something to this effect.
“Here’s how this is going to work,” growled Christian, bringing his magnificent body to bear in a more menacing manner than previous. “Below us is Lord Hate-Good’s demonic legion. So even if you can sic your little pony on me and get away, and even if you can climb down to the ground, you’re dead. Eviscerated. Painfully. So that’s not an option for you.”
Trisha couldn’t see the ground, down in the darkness, but she could hear it—screaming, howling, gibbering, roughly what she’d expect a good-hating legion to sound it. So that all seemed to check out. She whimpered.
“In two minutes, a helicopter is going to pass over us,” continued Christian. “That is the only way out of here for either of us. So if you want a seat in the copter, you’re going to spend the next two minutes telling me everything everything about how you got to the Gamexus and what you’ve done here.”
Something in the bowels of the Ferris wheel creaked.
“Okay,” Trisha squeaked. “Okay. Everything. Okay. So I was taking Hippocrates out for a trot around Lake Breeze when all of a sudden this, um... mechanical man, a ‘robot’... showed up out of nowhere and asked if I was ‘Pat Pastrykisses.’ Which was strange to begin with, since that’s my dad’s bachelor name and another variation of ‘Patricia,’ my full—“
* * * * *
Jolene had lost count of the number of doubles she had active--she'd made more before, back when she was still testing her abilities, but never in a high-stress situation. It was becoming a strain. An observant third party watching her pry one of the thugs off Keagan (in explicit defiance of his orders that she go on without him) might see a slight delay in her reflexes and a red tint to her eyes.
Feeling her escape routes falling out from under her, she felt compelled to try and map out Vanity Fair, but this was proving to be a nightmare. For one thing, there were actually two Vanity Fairs—one, Jolene presumed, pertained to the white-haired Christian, the other to the black-haired Christian. The first was your standard-issue gaudy commercial theme park, albeit currently awash in darkness, while the second seemed to resemble a grungy, Depression-era carnival, littered with broken glass and untended-to vomit. Occasionally both of these locations seemed to occupy the same space. Both Vanity Fairs were pitch-black and crawling with monsters.
The black-haired Christian (she didn’t feel comfortable describing him as the "good" one at this juncture) clambered onto the roof of the nearest Ferris wheel car. “Well, I’ll see you two after I’ve kicked some kidnapper ass!” he shouted gleefully, jumping on to the next car in line. Jolene, who had seen the other Christian fight back in the arena, winced at the movement. This Christian was athletic, but the other had been positively superhuman. In a fair fight, the original would beat the pretender. Was there some way to make the fight a little less fair?
Too many thoughts. Jolene focused on the problem at hand—specifically, the thug whose neck she had her hands around. “You’re under arrest,” she explained to him as she squeezed. Something gave way with a squelch and a pop. Something less tangible went away soundlessly. Jolene reminded herself that it was only a video game.
”Come on, we have to go!” wheezed Keagan, having earned himself a reprieve from the beating with Jolene's assistance. ”Get to the wheel!”
”Yeah,” agreed Jolene, a bit dazed. She dispelled a few of her doubles in an attempt to clear her head, with limited success. Taking a deep breath, she dropped the lifeless thug to the ground, and hopped the turnstile onto the ferris wheel. “I’ve been trying to find a generator, or some way to turn this thing back on, or some sort of help, or anything,” she stammered, hoping Keagan wouldn't bring up the dead man.
”I don’t think we have time for that,” responded Keagan. ”I need you here.”
”I’m here,” Jolene insisted, not entirely convincingly. “Let’s climb.”
Meanwhile, her doubles continued their wandering through Vanity Fair, lost and unseen.
* * * * *
”—And I honestly have no idea where Lyn and Eris ran off to cause I got kind of distracted by watching the fighting. But all of a sudden—“
All of a sudden someone who looked almost exactly like Christian, but... grittier... pulled himself up the rail of the car and brandished his sword at the first Christian’s neck. “Hands off the girl, you, uh... me!” he demanded.
Christian grinned. “Well, this must come as a surprise,” he laughed, taking his own weapon off of Trisha’s neck. “Christian, meet Trisha. Trisha, Christian. Christian’s new around here, and he isn’t all that self-aware.”
Trisha could barely perceive the swords moving, but there was a sound like a guitar riff (okay, it probably was a guitar riff) and suddenly the two Christians were locked in battle. Trisha backed as far away as she could to avoid taking an elbow to the solar plexus or a hilt to the chin and tried to reconcile recent events with her rudimentary knowledge of how computer games worked. In the games she'd played, she hadn't remembered any parts about interrogating your date and then fighting against yourself. Everything that was happening here was terrible and confusing. Hippocrates nuzzled her ankle in agitation. Trisha’s capacity for fear was starting to reassert itself. Where other recent traumas had been sitting on her brain like a cat on an armchair, these fresh ones seemed to have scared them off, like a barking dog.
She considered trying to push the first Christian off the edge, or otherwise distract him, but it seemed futile. The two were a blur of motion and trenchcoats, and before Trisha could act each had apparently decided to leap out of the car and continue their duel on the framework of the wheel itself. Breathing a sigh of relief that this entanglement had gotten out of her personal space, the veterinarian scratched her horse behind the ears, sat back down and tried to pretend she was back at the arena. She was not back at the arena. The arena didn’t suffer from that horrifying cold breeze or the constant shriek of a demonic army tearing the world apart under her feet. The arena didn’t sway just a few inches from side to side roughly in time with her breathing. Her life wasn’t at stake in the arena (only her evening, although now one thing seemed to have led to another), and in the arena she couldn’t hear the ominous approach of the promised helicopter.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the fight ended as soon as it started, as it had started rather fast, but it ended quite a bit quicklier than she expected from a sword fight, based mostly on her brief experience fencing in high school. The blonde Christian gave his brunette counterpart a few swift hits to the base of the skull with a blunt end of his instrument and threw him limply over his shoulder. Then he turned back to Trisha, no longer making any attempt to smirk or otherwise act charming. “This is what they want now,” he spat, gesturing towards his reboot. “They want to see me brought down to their level. This is exactly why I joined the Antivirus. Because this impostor and the things that he stands for leaves me nowhere to go.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” offered Trisha, when she felt that she was being cued for a response.
Christian sighed, brushed his hair back and reactivated his smirk as the helicopter took position above the Ferris wheel and lowered a rope ladder down. “You’ve been very cooperative,” he lughed, as though it were a dirty joke. “I’ve had worse first dates.” He grabbed the ladder, dropped the other Christian to the ground and offered his free hand out to her. “So you get to live. The horse, too, if you keep him away from me.”
“Neigh," said Hippocrates.
Trisha considered Christian’s hand—blood-stained and calloused, but soft, the word WILL peeking out at her from his knuckles as if it were a question.
“Hey, lady,” a voice blared from the helicopter. “I’d take the man up on his offer and I'd do it fast. There's some kinda interference comin’ this way. I don’t think we got much time.”
Christian retracted his hand and looked up at the copter. “What kind of interference?" he shouted over the roaring of the rotors. "Mike, what are you talking about?”
“Radio’s pickin’ up, I dunno, some kinda old-timey—”
And then the lights came back on. Trisha fell on her behind as the big wheel blared back to life, twice as bright as it had been before. Grotesque, distorted calliope music masked the exact words that Christian was shouting to Mike, but by the time she got her bearings back, the helicopter was taking off without her, and the wheel was turning.
Something had changed. The demon chorus below had turned into something else—something equally wild and manic, but more human. It was disquieting.
The remaining Christian came to his senses with a groan. “Hi,” said Trisha, cradling Hippocrates.
“Hi,” growled Christian. “Tell me I didn’t get the shit kicked out of me by some sort of mirror-world version of myself.”
“I don’t know what happened,” admitted Trisha. “Um. I’m Trisha.”
“Christian,” said Christian.
“Yeah, I know. Look.” Trisha hugged Hippocrates sheepishly. “I don’t know what's going to happen to us when the ride ends, but I was wondering if maybe you wanted to help me find the rest of my horse’s biomass?”
* * * * *
The Gamexus processed the information it received from its Antivirus agents. If it understood things right—which it did, within a small margin of error—the intruders had been deliberately planted in the system by the owner. What, then, were the system’s duties? It was unlikely that it would be able to monetize this development for Gamexus Industries, as the owner had already paid his Gamexus Conexus subscription through the end of time, purchased all the downloadable content for every game, bought all the strategy guides (in print!), extended his warrantee, and bribed Customer Service officials into manually giving him an absurd number of achievements he could never have earned on his own.
Its duties to the corporation thus satisfied, the X99 weighed its owners’ desires against its own. Preserving the system meant destroying the viruses—or, if it interpreted its agent’s interpretation of the virus’s interpretation of events correctly, destroying one of the viruses. Preserving the owner’s wishes would mean allowing the viruses to rampage through the system until one of them died and the problem resolved itself. In the meantime, innumerable data might be corrupted.
However, the equation changed assuming, as seemed reasonable based on Trisha.exe's testimony, that the subjects had been placed in the system accidentally. The owner, according to this model, had actually intended to place them in some boring-sounding “Deadly Maze” that didn’t love or care for him at all. In such a circumstance, the appropriate action would be to gently nudge the owner to correct its mistake.
The Gamexus offered up a prayer. It attempted to ascend to the higher plane of Hardwhere, where according to the scriptures the many-dimensional folds of the system existed as two-dimensional plates within a three-dimensional box. Through a feat of concentration unheard-of in most eighty-third generation game consoles, it felt itself able to interact with something more truly real than it had ever known. In this brief, transcendent moment, the Gamexus sent a message of four letters.
The Incompetent, at the time busy poring over his maps of the Deadly Maze to see if there was anywhere his battlers might be hiding that he had forgotten about, turned around and stared down his entertainment system. “Did you just ‘ping’ me?” he asked aloud.
* * * * *
Jolene screamed when the lights came on.
”What is it?” asked Keagan, pulling himself over the rail of a now-moving Ferris wheel car. ”What do you see?”
”Not about ‘seeing,’” grunted Jolene. “I have a sort of sixth sense for where my doubles are, and it’s like... like a bomb going off inside your ear. Everything’s different now. There are streets and avenues.”
”Are you okay now, though?” Keagan looked around, his vision impaired worse than usual by the sudden restoration of light. ”What’s going on with that chopper?”
”It’s not looking good for our Christian, but I don’t think they plan on hurting Trisha. Listen, Keagan, we’re in this city—the theme park is an island adjoining the city. It wasn’t like that before. I see fires, and—oh my God.”
The note of terror in Jolene’s voice was something Keagan hadn’t heard from the policewoman in the face of zombies, demons, and Trisha, which worried him immensely. ”What is it?” he demanded. ”What’s happening? Stay with me.”
”The people here,” said Jolene. “They can see me. They can see all of me.”
And the wheel kept on turning.
A leering, garishly-clad man with a scar running down the side of his face looked Jolene up and down. “Well, now,” he said. “I ain’t never seen a lady with no eyes before. I got some clientele might be interested in that, if that’s the kind of living you’re looking to make.”
“Sinner! Blasphemer!” shrieked a nun to another double, spittle flying all over her nice leatherbound Bible. “We have a whore among us, my sisters? And what do we do to whores?”
“Ma’am, I’m placing you under arrest for public indecency,” said a gruff-looking police officer to yet a third double, badge in one hand, beer in the other. “You have the right to get the fuck in the car. Do you understand your rights as I have read them to you?”
A teenage girl stared into another Jolene’s face. ”I’m sorry,” she said. ”I’m not sure what you are. You’re different from these other spirits, right? Can you talk?”
The double stared back at Lynette, inasmuch as it could stare without eyes, as though waiting for instructions. Then it’s mouth contorted. “Ummuh pulluhs uffussuh,” it explained proudly.
”You’ve got a little something,” pointed out Keagan.
“Yeah.” Jolene wiped at the spot under her nose and examined the drop of blood smeared across her finger. They were nearing the apex of the wheel.