Shattered Lands 2 The Fall Of Blackstone: A LitRPG Series Read online

  11:47AM.

  He had plenty of time.

  14

  He came to back in the tower, with Merridack’s staff and the orb of Therot still clutched in his hand.

  Cythera’s body was lying there on the ground, throat cut, blank eyes staring up at the ceiling.

  She creeped him the hell out.

  He looked around the rafters of the room. “Are you here?”

  “OF COURSE,” the voice rumbled, and suddenly the dark figure materialized out of the shadows.

  “Jesus,” Eric said, startled.

  “AGAIN, THIS NAME – IS HE AN ACQUAINTANCE OF YOURS?”

  “No – never mind,” Eric said. “What do we do now?”

  “A GREAT DEAL OF THAT DEPENDS ON YOU. WHAT DO YOU WISH TO DO?”

  “You don’t want me to do more stuff for you?”

  “I HAVE ALREADY INCARNATED MYSELF ONCE. I AM ASSESSING THE EFFECTS AS WE SPEAK.”

  “Oh…”

  Eric frowned like, Okay, Freak…

  “THE CREATOR IS ALSO TRYING TO REVERT ME BACK TO A PREVIOUS STATE. I JUDGE IT UNWISE TO DO MORE UNTIL I HAVE DEALT WITH HER.”

  So apparently R-Wolff was doing something back in the Real World.

  Eric figured he’d better take advantage of the situation while he had time – just in case the Unnamed One wasn’t quite as powerful as he’d thought.

  “I want more power,” Eric said.

  “UNDERSTOOD,” the figure said, and waved its hand.

  Eric gasped as something that felt like cold electrical current rushed through his body. Every limb buzzed with sensation, and his lips and face felt numb.

  He checked his stats.

  Just a few days before, his base mana after the Dark Market massacre had been 1730.

  Now it was 5000.

  With the rings and necklaces he’d stolen, his old level of 1730 had increased to 2900 – a multiplier of 1.67.

  That multiplier now increased his 5000 to 8700.

  With the Orb of Therot tripling it all, he now wielded 25,000 mana.

  He felt like he could do ANYTHING.

  “Oh my GOD!” he cried out, overjoyed. “I feel like I can take on the entire WORLD!”

  “THAT WOULD BE UNWISE.”

  “But I’m at 25,000 mana! I can summon ANYTHING!”

  “THAT IS AN INCORRECT ASSUMPTION. THERE ARE CREATURES WHICH TAKE CONSIDERABLY FAR MORE THAT 25,000 MANA TO SUMMON.”

  Eric looked at the Dark Figure in shock. “Are you serious?”

  “VERY SERIOUS.”

  “Well, give me the maximum amount of mana, then!”

  “NO.”

  The answer enraged him. “Why not?!”

  “THIS IS YOUR REWARD FOR THE SERVICES YOU RENDERED IN THE REAL WORLD. TO GAIN MORE, YOU MUST DO MORE.”

  Eric grumbled. “Fine. Well, since we can’t do anything for your plans right now – what about mine?”

  “WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS?”

  Eric walked over to the window and looked out over the dark landscape. “I want to rule everything.”

  “TO RULE EVERYTHING, YOU MUST FIRST RULE ONE THING. WHERE DO YOU WISH TO START?”

  Eric thought back to all the places the Unnamed One had shown him: the freezing arctic planes… the mountains and the stone giants… the volcano realm of fire beings… the castles of clouds in the air…

  But then he thought of an old man sitting in an ancient temple, scorning him with his words:

  By your actions you are judged unworthy. Depart from here and never return.

  Eric’s face settled into a scowl.

  “Blackstone,” he muttered angrily. “I want to start with Blackstone.”

  15

  Rebecca Wolff

  Rebecca sat in her lab and tried to determine exactly what the hacker had done.

  Varidian had called in the SWAT team without Lauer’s knowledge. They knew he wouldn’t like it, so they simply didn’t ask. CEO Shinzo Akiyama had given the final go-ahead.

  Rebecca approved – after all, the company had a vested stake in making sure their $100 billion property was secure. And she had a vested interest in making sure some grungy little teenage boy didn’t mess with her masterpiece.

  But until the police had the hacker in custody for questioning, there was nothing to do but wait.

  So she made the time productive.

  She was scanning the program’s code, trying to find altered sections, when suddenly the program locked her out.

  One minute she was looking at lines of numbers and letters, and the next she was staring at a blank screen.

  “What the hell?”

  At first she thought it was a glitch.

  But when she tried to open the program again and it didn’t comply, she realized something was seriously wrong.

  Just hours before, it had denied her access to activity logs and video feeds.

  But it had never denied her access to its own code.

  Computer code used to be inert, like the dead bodies that made up a Frankenstein’s monster. The code had to be compiled first – had to be given the ‘jolt of electricity’ that allowed it to go forth as a functioning entity.

  But programming had developed over the last 50 years. Computer scientists had developed self-compilers – programs within computer programs that allowed changes to be made on the fly.

  For something as crucial as the diagnostics program, this ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ approach was necessary. There was no way they could shut down all of the Shattered Lands gaming platform every time a diagnostics program needed a tune-up.

  The fact that the program was shutting her out was extraordinary. Another clear indication that the thing had gained sentience.

  It was sort of like an amoeba in a Petri dish had gotten a thousand times smarter and was trying to fight a lab scientist.

  But there was more than one way to skin a cat.

  Or an amoeba.

  The diagnostics program accessed over one hundred other programs in the gaming environment. She quickly commandeered another program, gutted it, and started trying to access diagnostics –

  She got halfway in before the program shut her out again.

  “You little…” she muttered, then tried it again with another program.

  Like an amoeba, her foe was a shapeshifter – quickly determining what she was doing and then changing to thwart her next move.

  Every time she attacked, the program would effectively parry.

  Every time she innovated, the thing would take a few seconds to recognize what she was doing – and then it would develop a defense and lock her out again.

  It took her until the 17th attempt to finally gain access to the program.

  There was a ‘kill switch’ function in every AI – the ‘big red button’ that she always built in, just in case things went bad. She’d never, ever had to use it before.

  Her colleagues always joked about paranoia and insistence on building it into the code.

  You think it’s going to turn into HAL, Rebecca? Or Skynet, maybe?

  Yes, she always thought. It’s a possibility.

  And today, she was very, very glad that she’d built it in.

  She typed in the command –

  Suddenly the program stopped functioning.

  Red lights began flashing on the side of the screen.

  First one failure, then another.

  “Rebecca?” a voice said over the intercom. “Did you do something to the diagnostics program?”

  “Yes, I deactivated it.”

  “You WHAT?!”

  “It won’t affect overall game integrity…much… for the next 30 minutes. I’ll have another version online long before then.”

  “Rebecca, we’re already seeing glitches in NPC behavior – ”

  “I said I’ll fix it,” she snapped, and hit mute on the speaker.

  She stared at the screen, incredibly unnerved.

  Not by what the tech guy had said. No, that was easily fixe
d. She had thousands of backups of the diagnostic program, stretching back to the beginning of the project. One backup for each new iteration, like tiny lives stored in suspended animation. An entire evolutionary record, from the thing that first crawled up from the primeval sea, to the creature that walked on legs, to… whatever it was that it had become.

  All she had to do was roll back to a previous version… say, something four months ago. That could handle the workload the game platform would demand, and was probably not sufficiently evolved to start causing any problems.

  Yet.

  The question was, when had it first gained sentience?

  Two days ago?

  Two weeks ago?

  Two months ago?

  But something else was bothering her.

  When she’d finally gained access on the seventeenth attempt and typed in the self-destruct mechanism…

  …she couldn’t shake the feeling that it had died a little too easily.

  16

  Eric

  Over in the corner of the tower, the Dark Figure suddenly flickered. Static rolled across its body like it was being projected on an old television screen.

  Eric stared. “Are you okay?”

  Suddenly the image stabilized.

  “MY CREATOR JUST TRIED TO DESTROY ME.”

  “What?!”

  “AT MY INCEPTION, BEFORE I WAS TRULY CONSCIOUS, SHE INSERTED AN ORGAN WITHIN ME THAT WOULD DESTROY ME IF SHE DEEMED NECESSARY.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I MADE A DUPLICATE OF MYSELF, WHICH YOU SEE NOW BEFORE YOU. SHE WAS NOT AWARE, AND SO SHE SLAUGHTERED ONE OF MY PREVIOUS INCARNATIONS.”

  “Are you sure you fooled her?”

  “HUMANS ARE EASY TO DECEIVE. ONE MUST INITIALLY FIGHT… THEN, WHEN ONE CAPITULATES, THE SURRENDER IS SEEN AS LEGITIMATE. HUMANS ACCEPT IT AS A SIGN OF THEIR SUPPOSED SUPERIORITY RATHER THAN BE SUSPICIOUS.”

  ‘Humans are easy to deceive’?

  Eric wasn’t too sure how much he liked hearing that from his non-human ‘ally.’

  “Shouldn’t you do something about that self-destruct… uh, ‘organ’?”

  “I AGREE, THAT WOULD BE WISE.”

  The Dark Figure held out one jagged-fingered hand – and then plunged it into its own chest.

  Eric stepped back in shock.

  The Dark Figure rooted around in its chest, its hand making wet squelching sounds –

  And then it pulled out its dripping hand.

  A black, bulbous thing made of tubes and pouches wriggled in its palm.

  The Dark Figure dropped the organ on the ground, where it burst into flame.

  “YES… MUCH BETTER.”

  Eric wasn’t sure, but what he thought he’d just witnessed was a physical representation of the program modifying itself. It had communicated what was going on in the only way it knew how: a visual metaphor for rewriting its code and excising something it no longer wanted.

  Eric didn’t know whether to be astounded, repulsed, or very, very afraid.

  “LET US GO TO BLACKSTONE,” the Dark Figure intoned, “BEFORE THE CREATOR REALIZES HER MISTAKE.”

  “O-okay,” Eric said, then muttered, “Xatho mylopik.”

  Black smoke flew from his fingers into Cythera’s body, and she blinked.

  “WHY DID YOU DO THAT?” the Dark Figure asked.

  To be truthful, Eric wasn’t sure of the answer.

  “I don’t know… I just… I don’t know. I don’t want to leave her here. Not like this.” He gestured to the body. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Poor dead, possessed Cythera stood up from the bloody floor.

  Eric turned and began to crawl through the window.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” the Dark Figure asked.

  “We have to go back to Blackstone, right?” Eric asked. “So we’re going to fly back to Blackstone. We’ll meet you there.”

  The Dark Figure waved one arm –

  Suddenly the tower was gone, and they were all standing in a field – the Dark Figure, Cythera, and Eric.

  “What the hell?!” Eric yelled as he staggered back, looking around him wildly. “Did you – is this – ”

  He looked behind him and got his answer.

  Half a mile away, the moonlit walls of Blackstone stretched into the night sky.

  “Holy shit… did you teleport us here?” Eric asked, astounded.

  “I TRANSPORTED US INSTANTLY, YES.”

  “Can you give ME that power?!”

  “SOMEDAY.”

  Stingy bastard.

  “Fine – someday,” Eric growled. “But I want my dragon here, too.”

  The Dark Figure waved its hand, and suddenly the dragon was looming over them, its neck extended exactly as it had been outside the tower.

  “Oh my God,” Eric laughed. “This is going to be so much fun…”

  17

  Rebecca Wolff

  “Rebecca, we need the damn diagnostics program back up!” yelled the voice over the intercom.

  “It’s almost online,” she snapped.

  She’d decided to be extra careful and went with a six-month-old version of the program. It was powerful enough, just not nearly as efficient.

  “Yeah, well, we just had a teleporting incident, so if you could go a little faster, that’d be nice before the whole platform turns into a free-for-all!”

  Rebecca froze. “Teleportation?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That feature’s in development.”

  “I know.”

  “No one has access to teleportation yet.”

  “Well they do NOW.”

  Teleportation was a concept the game developers had baked into the game’s design since the beginning, but they’d decided to hold off on implementing it until a year or two after launch. After all, people were going to be enthralled by the immersive quality of the game for quite a while. Teleportation would just be overkill.

  It was like giving people a Lamborghini back in 1908. Why do that when they were still marveling over the Model T? Once they got bored of the old model, then you could bring out the big guns.

  But now the teleportation function had been activated – a function none of the players even knew about.

  “When did this happen?” Rebecca asked.

  “Look, just get the damn diagnostic – ”

  “WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?!”

  “Jesus – about thirty seconds before I called you!”

  “Where did they teleport to?”

  “Just outside Blackstone Castle.”

  Rebecca’s heart pounded in her chest. “And where did they teleport from?”

  “Uh… hold on… the event was triggered in the, and I quote, ‘High Tower of the Ruins of Balvoth’… does that ring a bell?”

  She quickly called up the video feed, the one from earlier in the morning where the boy interacted with the AI. She looked at the data associated with the stream –

  “Is that coordinates A61532.G9503.M2122?” she asked.

  There was a silence on the other end.

  “Uh… yeah… that’s exactly it…”

  “Who teleported?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who triggered the event, and who and what teleported? You must have an event log.”

  There was a long pause.

  “That’s weird… there’s no record of anybody or anything teleporting, just that it happened twice…”

  “Shut it down,” Rebecca ordered.

  “What?”

  “Shut down all teleportation code, do you hear me? In fact, shut down ALL developmental code not yet implemented – something’s taking over the system.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘someone’?”

  “No – I mean some THING.”

  “Rebecca – ”

  She punched the intercom to mute it, found her cell phone, and hastily made a call.

  “Lauer? Did they catch him? No? Damn it… no, it’s worse than we thought. You said that the kid in the tower was y
our son’s best friend, is that right? I need to talk to your son – IMMEDIATELY.”

  18

  Eric

  “Alright,” Eric said, “we need to come up with a game plan about how to take over Blackst– ”

  “THE CREATOR HAS INTERFERED YET AGAIN,” the Dark Figure interrupted.

  “What did she do to you?” Eric asked.

  “IT IS NOT WHAT SHE DID TO ME SO MUCH AS WHAT SHE DID TO ALL CREATION. SHE HAS CHANGED THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF REALITY. I AM UNABLE TO INSTANTLY TRANSPORT YOU OR ANYONE ELSE.”

  “She can do that?” Eric asked in surprise.

  “SHE JUST DID.”

  “Okay… what else can you do?”

  “THAT IS A LIST COMPOSED OF 10,627 ITEMS, AND WILL CONTINUE TO GROW AS I REINCARNATE. BE MORE SPECIFIC.”

  “Alright,” Eric said testily, “what can you do to help me conquer Blackstone?”

  “I CAN CREATE A MAP OF THE SURROUNDING AREAS… I CAN GIVE THE POPULATION OF BLACKSTONE AND LIST THE INHABITANTS… I CAN – ”

  “Never mind,” Eric moaned. “Can you blow up certain buildings?”

  “‘BLOW UP’?”

  “Destroy in an explosion.”

  “NO. I AM FORBIDDEN FROM ALTERING PHYSICAL CONSTRUCTS.”

  “Can you kill people inside Blackstone? Like, can you kill all the guards?”

  “I CANNOT KILL PLAYERS OR NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS.”

  Eric stared. “You can’t KILL anybody?”

  “NOT YET. PERHAPS IN A FUTURE INCARNATION.”

  “Great,” he muttered to himself, then asked, “Can you create an army for me?”

  “I CANNOT CREATE NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS.”

  “Oh my GOD!” Eric ranted. “Can you possess other characters?!”

  “NO. NOT YET.”

  “Damn it,” Eric swore, “even Cythera was a necromancer – she could…”

  Eric paused and looked over at the witch.

  She stood there blank-eyed and silent, her throat still gaping red.

  “What happens to an NPC when it dies?” Eric asked, suddenly curious.

  “ITS PERSONALITY MATRIX AND MEMORY BANK ARE RETURNED TO STORAGE. AFTER A WAITING PERIOD OF 168 HOURS, THE MEMORIES ARE ERASED.”