Headshot_Two in the Head Read online

  Lori. Without a mouth, all I could do was imagine it, and when that didn’t work, my brain shrieked it until there was nothing left in the world for me and her name had no meaning other than sound.

  12:06

  Eventually, I fought my way back to the proper side of sanity. If the game wasn’t going to let me out, maybe it would let me in. Every part of my mind that I could control wanted to hunker down and wait for this craziness to blow over, but I wrestled my consciousness into some semblance of control.

  I waited for a spark of calm to materialize, and when it eventually did I let it grow until it felt like I was as accepting of my fate as I would ever be.

  I’m ready, I thought, hoping Headshot would agree. Let’s do this.

  We apologize that you seem to have had some difficulty logging in. Would you like to send a feedback form to Deep Dive Studios, complete with anonymous user data to help us improve your gaming experience? We would like to remind you that the Terms of Service clearly state that gameplay may be affected by either slow connections or illegal aftermarket modifications to your personal Absolute Reality equipment.

  A little window with the word NO popped up on the left, and a YES one appeared on the right. There was more to the message, but before I could finish reading the rest of Deep Dive's threats the NO window lit up, and all of the text vanished, replaced by even more.

  Are you certain? Deep Dive Studios would like to remind you that all information sent is both anonymous and important to the future development of-

  Again the windows materialized, and again the NO option was selected before I could speed read through the text. There was a pause, and just when I was about to give up and accept that the game had churned to a halt again, everything seemed to flicker and pulse and then:

  Welcome, Survivor #[P@rsing err0r – {Administrative Override INITIATED}]. Please enter your unique Core Password to bypass Identity Modules.

  What the fuck was it talking about?

  The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea.

  Everything shimmered, and the lights dimmed a couple of times before reluctantly coming back up to the same level of brightness.

  Core Password [ACCEPTED]. Welcome, Mr. Redhook. Would you like to alter the preferences used in your last session?

  No.

  There wasn’t a voice answering the login program’s questions, but I could watch the exchange right in front of my eyes just the same.

  Logs of your session will not be recorded.

  And then I was walking forward, my vision fixed against my will on the door in the wall ahead of me. It was incredibly disconcerting. I’d spent a good amount of my life sitting on public transport and watching the world go by through the windows, knowing I was simply a passenger. This was a lot like that. The driver didn’t ask for my input, and I didn’t presume to give it to him.

  I’d watched a lot of streams of other people playing games, and this was a lot like that as well. It was not as immersive as the real thing, but it had been close enough before I’d saved up for the gear and gotten my Beta invite.

  There couldn’t be much denying it. I was watching Headshot through someone else's eyes as they played, and as we passed through the white door together the words Character Creation flared with so much luminescence that it hurt my eyes.

  Okay, not my eyes. His eyes. Redhook’s eyes. The eyes of the guy who had dreamed up and then created the whole of Headshot, right before Deep Dive had taken it away from him in that lawsuit. The words felt like they were being burned into our corneas, and I writhed, desperate for him to look away.

  He didn’t, not for a long time. And when he finally decided to head through the door, I was too thankful to worry about what would happen next.

  Chapter 3

  Once we were inside, I was put immediately at ease. I was a gamer at my core, and that meant that I’d crafted countless characters and avatars inside more games and I could ever categorize. Headshot had never given its Zombie player base the ability to customize the way we looked, instead creating our shells from information gleaned from the photos I had available online and, no doubt, a little bit of my own internal thoughts.

  But things were very, very different now. It was obvious to me by now that I was stuck in Blake Redhook’s head. He was playing his own game, having already logged in and run a script that would stop Deep Dive from tracking him.

  That much I knew. What I didn’t grasp was why. Why was he playing in secret? And why was I trapped in here with him, a powerless observer, an unwilling passenger in a vehicle had no chance of controlling.

  The how of it was at least a little easier to guess at. That damn brick that Sasha had wanted back so badly. Hadn’t she said that her dad had made it for her? It must have some sort of coded hook that had snared me the moment I picked it up last week after the Tank had smashed her with the light pole.

  I could be wrong of course, but it didn’t seem like anyone was going to be giving me any answers to the questions that endlessly bounced around my head. All I could do was watch as Blake Redhook created a new Survivor from scratch.

  The first thing that hit me was just how many options they had. As a Zombie I'd had none of that. We started in a stock body that was supposed to mimic our own. After that, I’d had to fight my way up the ranks if I wanted new abilities or skills. No reward came without a huge amount of risk.

  But everything was different, on this side.

  Age

  Twenty-three

  For every question the game asked in the character creation process, the options were listed below, and I watched as the information was either entered or selected. He’d obviously made a million characters before, and that let him whip through the choices.

  Height - Short, Medium, or Tall? (Offers no statistical game advantage)

  Short

  Build -

  Wiry, (+1 Agility)

  Athletic, (+1 Endurance)

  or Muscular? (+1 Strength)

  Wiry

  Education -

  High school, (1 Additional Trade Skills)

  College, (+5% to Skill progression)

  or Advanced Degree? (+20% to Upper Echelon Skills)

  Advanced Degree

  Drive -

  Gifted Slacker, (Untapped Potential: provides +5% chance of Skill Success)

  Content, (Happy with my Lot: provides +3 increase to Healing Rate)

  or Ambitious (Driven to Dominate: provides +1% increase in Skill Mastery)

  Ambitious

  Would you like to change any of the current choices?

  No

  I barely had time to read all the bonuses met before the next options were jumping up in front of my eyes. Or his eyes, I guess, since I was a hostage throughout the entirety of the process.

  Pre-Apocalypse occupation – (More added every week!)

  Soldier

  Doctor

  Scientist

  Engineer

  Police Officer

  Lawyer

  Politician

  War Correspondent

  Athlete

  That was it. Blake didn't hesitate as he selected Engineer, but the game gave him one last chance to change his mind as it explained exactly what that meant.

  Engineers are equipped with the knowledge to rebuild society, at least in part. In the Apocalyptic Future, you are about to enter, with the world falling down around your ears, the population will look to the Engineer to restore all manner of technological wonders. Also, skilled Engineers will find that this archetype may grant access to blueprints that allow them to construct objects once thought lost forever.

  He acknowledged the prompt, and the choice was made. Blake Redhook was an engineer in his own world, ready to rebuild a world he alone had constructed in the first place. I let the irony wash over me a little. I liked it. If the guy wanted to feel powerful in his own game, what harm was there in that?

  But we obviously weren’t finished yet.

&nbs
p; Debugger accessed. Blake.Redhook.exe paused

  Substitution in progress – authorized by

 

  Substitution complete – Sasha.Redhook.exe session parameters reinstated.

  Message from system B. Redhook– Have fun, Sash! If you see something in there that doesn’t work as it should, please let me know. Headshot goes into Alpha in a couple of months, and there’s no way it’ll be ready unless you help me stomp all of the bugs out of it before then! For that, you have the ETERNAL thanks of your dear old Dad. Remember that the black box you’re using as a middleman between you and the server is hacked together, at best. If things start getting weird in the game, come see me, and we’ll try and fix the damn thing again. ;)

  It didn’t matter that I didn’t have a body. I felt like someone had yanked the rug out from under my feet. If I could have reached out to support myself against the blank white wall of the character creation room, I would have, but I still wasn’t in control. All I could do was let the confusion run its course.

  As it did, my brain was fighting through the fog, trying to present me with enough facts to drag me toward some level of understanding.

  Headshot hadn’t been in Alpha for at least six years.

  I’d just read a message from Blake Redhook to his daughter, Sasha.

  That was whose eyes I was looking out of…

  Chapter 4

  I knew I was right. As soon as I realized that it was Sasha’s mind I was riding around in, the floodgates opened. The knowledge was a key to a deeper level of her consciousness, and I drowned in a swirl of clawing, catching, snagging, images that-

  Sasha didn't know if she was dreaming or playing the game. It was often hard to tell.

  She found herself once more drifting through a world that could have been either constructed by her sleeping mind or simply fed to her waking one. One moment she was secure in the knowledge that she knew exactly what would happen next because she’d played Headshot so often and the next she was terrified that this time everything would be different. Last week she’d run the risk of ruining everything by bringing the servers down before she was ready to deal with the fallout, but she hadn’t had much choice.

  Sasha wasn’t tired, though she knew that she should be. Maybe that was the first real clue she had that it was a dream after all since when she was awake, she was always exhausted. She used this new information like a flashlight, shining it around her dream and looking for inconsistencies. Everything that had seemed normal a moment ago now looked generated, convincing and yet patently fake.

  Sasha had grown up playing Headshot. She knew what made it tick. Below the surface of the game world, she could practically see the algorithms and wildly fast processing cycles responsible for making this false world such a realistic copy of the real one.

  Everything lurched. Was she dreaming about the game, or dreaming while inside it?

  Sasha rubs at her eyes with the back of one of her hands. She’s in a building, searching for something though she doesn’t know what. There is a flashlight in her hand. She has a sense that it was dangerous to reveal herself like this, but Sasha can’t turn it off. Her fingers won’t listen.

  The scratched countertop gleams in the light. The linoleum shines. Every surface glimmers at her in one way or another, teacup and spoon and plate and the bowl with its buzzing iridescent green-jacketed flies buzzing around the remains of a dead man’s soup.

  She knows that even though this is most likely a dream, she can’t trust it anyway. The Actual Reality rig she uses to access Headshot is a one-off prototype, modified first by her father and then by herself.

  I can hear her thoughts in her own voice. It is the strangest, oddest and most embarrassingly intimate thing I have ever been a part of, and I listen to her reassure herself that the parts of her brain she’s let her custom rig hijack are working as they should be. She’s overclocked the rig, forcing more of her mind to interact with the server and yet somehow restricting Deep Dive’s access to her with the middleman unit her Dad’s message had alluded to.

  It’s dangerous, foolhardy and extremely effective. The extra resources this lets her throw at the game bring with them a lot of benefits, more than enough to let a brash young woman like herself ignore the eventual destructive repercussions.

  In the cold light of day, when she can’t hide from the truth any longer, Sasha has convinced herself that the ability to be a little faster in the game, to have even that slight advantage on her side while she tries to take the game apart from the inside. Well, if her health is the price, she’s willing to pay it.

  Because if there’s one thing she’s sure of, it’s that she isn’t interested in a long and happy life. That’s no longer an option, anyway. Not after what they did.

  What did they do? I find myself asking, surprising myself when I could hear my own voice in my ears. I wondered if Sasha could hear me too. What did they do to you?

  No answer. Maybe I was asking the wrong question…

  What did they do to your Dad?

  She flinches, and I have the feeling that I’m reaching her. I’m not exactly getting through, but this vision is happening in real time, and I might be able to push hard enough to let her know I was in here with her.

  But she’s stubborn. That defiance lets her push my intrusion aside. She’s good at ignoring things, and I’m just one more stray thought that she doesn’t want to focus on. Instead, she wrestles her attention back to the dream or vision or whatever the hell is playing out in front of us, and I can’t help but do the same.

  She’s still lighting up the dark room, and a couple of seconds later the flashlight finds a rat in the corner. It wasn’t there before, but it’s sure there now. It freezes for a moment, pinned in the center of the light before fixing her with a baleful, red-eyed glare and going on about its business.

  It doesn’t hurry. It doesn’t hide.

  She knows that both hurrying and hiding would be better options for her than standing in the middle of the diner with a flashlight in her hand and an unsurprised look on her face as the Zombies on the freeway notice her and begin to move in her direction. But instead of panic or fear, she finds only acceptance.

  I know that none of this is happening now, and so does she. It's in the past. She can't change it.

  She was obviously looking for something, and the blip in the code she’d been searching for was harder to find than it had been in the past. The Zombies weren’t far away, and for a couple of seconds it was touch and go as to whether or not she’d find it before she was surrounded. Sasha glanced out the window of the diner.

  She’ll be safe if she works fast, and that’s just what she does. Sasha takes a familiar device from her backpack and runs her finger over the power button. There’s a crack running up the rectangular cutout where the short order cooks would put platefuls of grits and eggs over easy for waitresses named Mable and Trixie and Velma to trot out to hungry customers. Sasha wedges the thing she’s affectionately called a brick into the crack, still uncertain if there will be time for it to do its work before she has to flee.

  The Zombies are closer than they should be. Instead of staying up on the freeway they way they should have, a few of them have decided to take a detour down the offramp. Sasha has escaped them a hundred times before. More. With her modified gear, they aren’t much more than dangerous scenery to her, background props with sharp teeth and jagged claws that would love to tear her up but never have.

  Sasha is playing a game, but it’s not against the Zombies. Deep Dive is the enemy, and she doesn’t know if she’ll win. If she’s honest with herself, she doesn’t even know what winning looks like.

  But they’ll have to kill her to stop her from trying.

  The rifle slung across her back is a swift, sure weapon. In her hands, it’s a force to be reckoned with. She's got good reflexes and a hunter’s instincts, and she's literally played Headshot mor
e than anyone on the planet. All of that, combined with the fact that she's using more parts of her brain then the system should allow has always let her outrun, outthink, or outplay whoever has gotten in her way before.

  The Zombies are almost in the parking lot now. Sasha doesn’t need her Heads Up Display to vomit the details of them at her, but it does anyway. By far the biggest threats were a couple of Tanks and a Runner. She’d be wary of them, but she was faster than the powerhouses and accurate enough to fill the speedster with holes before any of them could do too much damage. She noted some Starters coming down the ramp as well, Zombie players either too inexperienced to access the higher archetypes or to hold out for something better than the two upgrades already coming in her direction.

  The brick is almost finished with its scan. It’s working as fast as it can, searching for anomalies in the program that she can later exploit. Her dad’s code was bulletproof, but Deep Dive had added a lot. The new software never fit seamlessly with the original work of art they’d used as a foundation, and that was where she wormed her way in and took things apart from the inside.

  This is her sixth stop of eleven, and Sasha doesn’t want to leave before the brick finishes but the Zombies aren’t going to leave her alone.

  She presses a button on the brick and calls her guild for backup. The Eternals all have bricks too. They’re only pale copies though, crude devices she’s cobbled together over the last few months using scrap and salvage picked up throughout her exploits. They aren’t anywhere near as powerful as the one her Dad gave her, but they’re still invaluable tools.