Up to Thirteen
The room was bare concrete, with a few skeletal walls of wood walling off one corner. Stapled to the wood were blankets, making a make-shift wall. Hanging down from the ceiling was a menacing device, covered in wires and steel. It was surrounded on three sides by wires which hung down from the ports they were plugged into in the contraption above. Poking out from beneath the curtain of wires on the fourth side was the barrel of the weapon, which pointed out towards the empty space in front of it.
Off to one side was a seat surrounded by three different monitors, which sat on a simple wooden desk. The monitor on the left showed a page of code, unintelligible to the untrained eye. The right monitor showed several different vital signs, all either zero or flatline, depending on the display method. The monitor in the center displayed the Sony Playstation 2 main screen, the dance of a few ethereal lights occasionally warped as they passed behind a transparent cube that rotated slowly in place, while the words "Browser" and "System" sat just to the side.
Except for the light of these three monitors, the room was completely dark. That changed when, around the time the computer clock ticked over to 15:15, light spilled in from the doorway atop a set of stairs that led down into the room. The sound of footsteps on the uncarpeted wooden stairs echoed through the room.
A broad-shouldered boy about eighteen years old, with messy brown hair, and an all-black wardrobe, including a hooded jacket and gloves. A pair of headphones was slung around his neck. He walked over to the monitors and slung his backpack off his shoulder. Unzipping the pack, he peered inside until he found what he was looking for, several discs contained in simple white paper and plastic containers. He pulled them out and examined them in the light of the monitors. After a moment of shuffling through them, he pulled one out of its container and slipped it inside the machine beneath the desk.
The middle monitor flickered for a moment, and a few logos appeared on the screen. The monitor to the left flickered as well, and the wall of code changed to a different wall of code, no less intelligible. He reached into his pack again, shoving a few pieces of lined paper covered in half-solved equations aside to pull out a black, rolled up keyboard. He spread it out flat in front of the three monitors and pushed the button to connect it wirelessly to the machine, then went back to digging around inside the pack. He shoved aside a few papers with some random poetry he'd slapped together to make the grade (his teacher thought it was "inspiring") and pulled out a wireless mouse, flicking it on and waiting a few moments while it, too, hooked up to the machine.
He began scrolling down the code on the left monitor, looking for anything unusual. Nothing odd popped up, which wasn't surprising, given there were millions of lines of code in the thing. He ran a few searches for certain strings of code and scanned the monitor for anything out of place. Still nothing. He sighed and looked back into his pack, pulling out a large binder and flipping through it. Unlike the rest of his pack, which looked more like an artist's attempt to depict pure, elemental chaos than anything else, the binder was well organized with color-coded tabs and each piece of paper inside tucked away between laminated sheets.
He flipped through the binder for a few moments until he found the paper he was looking for. It was half-blank, the rest of it covered in lines of code as arcane as those on the left monitor. He continued searching the lines of code on the page in the binder, scanning the surrounding code for anomalies, and finding nothing until her ran out of lines of code on the page. Then he switched out the disc for another one, flipped to a different page in the binder, and started again.
This went on for about two hours until the boy was beginning to fear he would miss the anomalies he was looking for. Then, about halfway through his pile of discs, he caught it. It was something that would seem strange, but not menacing, if you didn't know the significance. It was a few lines of code designed to keep a calendar, but not the traditional Gregorian calendar. It was a countdown to the end of the thirteenth b'ak'tun. A countdown to Armageddon.
He hit the search function again, and punched in Xavier_Stone. He scrolled through the results until he found the character table, and checked to see if Xavier was activated. It wasn't, which meant that no one had taken on the archetype inside the GAME. The boy smiled to himself. This was unusually good luck. Normally, all the archetypes were taken. He began editing the archetype, changing everything from clothes, to skin color, to body build. He didn't want to end up anything like Xavier Stone once he got in the GAME, but by editing the archetype instead of creating a new one, he would take Xavier off the market. Once all the archetypes were taken, only people who knew how to create a new one from scratch would be able to enter the GAME, which limited the amount of competition he'd be facing inside.
He turned his attention to the center monitor, which was displaying the logos of Neversoft, Budcat, Activision, and Sony. He hit the tab key, and the screen returned to the PS2-GAME system's loading screen, then hit enter to bring up the browser screen. He opened up the game with a thirty second delay and then left his place by the computer, stepping in front of the barrel and closing his eyes. A few seconds later, a grid was projected onto the ground where he stood, dividing him up into dozens of different sections.
The machine came to life, firing a blindingly bright white laser that shone through his closed eyelids which hit the topmost section, a piece of his head, and instantly vaporized it, turning it into pure data that was instantly downloaded into the PS2-GAME system. In the next instant, the next section was vaporized and downloaded, and the machine moved on down him, downloading him completely in less than ten seconds.
A few moments later, he woke up in an alley that stunk of what he assumed was beer. He'd never actually smelled beer outside of cyberspace, so for all he knew it was all an elaborate gag on traditionally underaged GAMERs, and real beer actually smelled like something you might want to consume if you had two livers and were thus willing to take the chance that your first might fail. And if being a drunken idiot actually sounded like fun.
He picked himself up slowly, spitting out the foul taste of whatever it is they throw in seedy alleyways from his mouth. Ordinarily, he would've looked around first, but this was an extremely low-heat GAME, so he wasn't really expecting any trouble. On the downside, he had absolutely no enhancements. Anything that he couldn't kill in real life, he couldn't kill here, either. And killing something would probably land him in jail, too. Which wasn't really an issue, since he could just upload himself back to Realspace, but it would put an early end to his career.
No guitar in the alley. Did he accidentally leave a line of code blank in the archetype profile? It'd be exceptionally annoying to have to go back to Realspace, change one line of code, then download himself back into Guitar Hero. He decided to poke around for a few moments to see if he could get one inside cyberspace before leaving, and left the alley to look around. Just across the street was a shop, imaginatively called Shop.
He glanced down the street. Deserted on both sides. Evidently this was one of those GAMEs that had been built with realworld scale in mind but hadn't been populated to match. He shrugged his shoulders and crossed the street into the shop. Inside, there was music playing through a speaker system which was intended to give the feeling that you were backstage and someone was playing onstage at the moment. Presumably this was because just playing the normal music at volumes low enough for business to be conducted in would've driven off the target audience of the shop.
"Hey, man, what can I get for you?" asked a tall guy with a long beard, presumably the guy running the shop.
"Crack cocaine," the hooded boy said, completely serious.
The bearded man looked at him curiously for a moment and asked "Are they new?"
The hooded boy smiled to himself. This guy was definitely a Sprite, which meant a Sprite-based economy, which meant it probably operated on moon logic. "Don't worry about it," he said, "I need a guitar."
"Oh, okay, what kind of guitar are you looking for? Because we've got a new line of Gibson ebonies that you might like," the man said.
"I'm going to need something in my price range," the boy said.
"How much you got?" the man asked.
The boy checked the pockets of his jacket, then his pockets. There hadn't been any variable for cash in the archetype, which meant that it must be a universal variable, and messing with that would've brought down all kinds of legal action on his head.
His pockets were empty, except for a small metal cylinder with a button on top. That was his exit trigger, the thing that'd pull him back to Realspace if he ever needed to leave. "I've got nothing," the boy said, "You giving anything away?"
"We got a few black Les Paul's we can give you for free," the man said.
The boy smiled. "That'll do," he said. The man stepped over to the guitars section and pulled one down from off the wall, handing it to him. "So how do you make a profit, giving these things away?" the boy asked.
"Guitarists always find gigs. Always," the man said. "So, if we get them started, they're pretty much guaranteed to make some cash and come back here to spend it."
"I see," the boy said. There was probably some hyperbole in that. Probably. Still, it meant that at the very least, a large percentage of the guitarists were GAMERs, not Sprites. "Thanks, I'll come back here if I ever need anything," he said and turned for the door.
"Wait! Don't you want to test it out first?" the man asked.
"No," the boy said.
"Can I at least get a name to put on the records?" the man asked, just as the boy reached the door.
The boy hesitated a moment, then said "Sure. George Burdell," and then headed out the door.
Burdell walked down the empty streets, thinking. He needed to find a band, and then the lot of them needed to find a gig. As he walked, he passed a newspaper dispenser. He looked down the street to make sure it was still deserted, and then began kicking at the glass case on the dispenser. After a few moments, a few cracks began to appear in the center of the glass. With the next kick, they spiderwebbed out to cover the entire surface, and then collapsed completely.
He reached in, brushed off some of the glass, and opened it up to the ads. There were four bands looking for a guitarist. None of them seemed any different from the other, so he picked the nearest address and started walking.
"We're basically the suppliers for the Society," the chubby man in the brown jacket said to his skinnier, pink-shirted companion. "It's your standard deal with the devil stuff, most of the time. Find an aspiring band, promise them fame, cash, and girls, then hand them a contract and hope they don't read the fine print. Which they never do.
"Now, we're putting you in charge of a new club opening up. Haven't got a name yet, so feel free to name it after yourself. Wouldn't be the first," the chubby man said. "Now, if you think you can take a band by yourself, go ahead and do it. But if they're too much for you, just call up Lou. He'll take care of the hard ones for you. Any questions?"
"Yeah," the pink-shirted man said, "How exactly do we fit into the greater plan for the Society?"
"Look, the army needs food, alright? Everyone in Realspace thinks that Mayan prophecy magic is going to undo the world without any of us lifting a finger, and all we have to do is wait. That's not how it works. The prophecy is really just sayin' that we're all set to take over on a certain date, and if no one stops us before then, which they won't because it's less than two years to the end times, but we can't just sit around and wait for Realspace to conquer itself! Army needs food. Demons eat souls. So we gather souls for the army. On top of that, every Human we pull down to Inferspace through one of our contracts is a Human that won't be fighting us in Realspace when we break through. Got it?" the chubby man said.
"Yeah, alright, I got it," the pink-shirted man said.
"Great," the chubby man said, "You need to start scouting for bands for your club immediately. Your club fails, and you're out of a job."
The streets were deserted, but the local high school was fully populated. This was a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, the empty streets were beginning to give him a Silent Hill vibe. On the other hand, of all the places that could've been populated, it had to be a high school. The only place filled with more pointless, systemic cruelty was middle school, and he could've intimidated his way past the locals there.
But of course, the entire economy was built around music. And who consumes music? The high school and college students were necessary, because without them, no one buys CDs. On the bright side, Burdell thought to himself, maybe they'll suck. Maybe this band will be horrible, and he'll have to go chasing after one of the others. The first band he'd tried had turned out that way, working out of a garage.
He took a left through the crowded hallways. Either it was lunchtime or they never had classes. It was hard to tell in cyberspace. Either way, the music room was just ahead. Just before Burdell reached the door, a circle of big guys wearing team jackets surrounded him. Burdell sighed in frustration.
"Hey, new kid, where're you going?" the lead jock asked.
"Get out of my way," Burdell said.
"Oooh, you think you're tough, do you?" the jock asked.
"I said, get out of my way," Burdell said.
The jock was irritated now, shoving Burdell into the lockers. "You sound like you want a fight, emo freak," he said.
"Are you...Reading from a book of cliches?" Burdell asked.
"Huh?" the jock asked.
"Seriously. Who's writing this? Have they ever been to an actual high school, or are they just writing based off of the movies?" Burdell continued.
"That's it!" the jock said, grabbing Burdell by the collar and pulling one fist back. Burdell grabbed the hand on his collar with one hand, placing his thumb over the jock's artery and squeezing to cut off circulation, and swatted aside his fist with the other. A moment later, the jock's grip weakened to the point where Burdell was able to wrench himself away, and he slipped through a gap in the circle around him and into the music room.
The band inside sounded good even without a guitar. They stopped playing when he entered, immediately locking the door behind him. Burdell breathed a sigh of relief. He doubted his two-odd months of martial arts training was going to be enough to go toe to toe with a half-dozen meatshields. "Hey, what's up?" the bassist asked.
"Uh, sorry," Burdell said, "My name's Burdell. I'm here for the band. I play guitar."
The jocks were banging insistently on the door behind Burdell, who glanced around the room and saw there was another door leading outside, and another that lead to a storage room. He already had his escape plan worked out. He just needed a few minutes. "Uh, we might have to do this another time, man, you should clear out," the bassist said.
"No, just give me something to plug into, I only need thirty seconds," Burdell said, pulling off his gloves and shoving them in his pockets.
"Uh, here," the lead singer said. Five seconds later Burdell was hooked up to the amp and began hammering out the best solo he could come up with on the spot. In Realspace, he would've botched it horribly, but here in cyberspace, he was like a god of rock. Thirty seconds into the solo, while he was banging out chords not because they were technically impressive but just because he thought they sounded awesome, the jocks came in through the back door.
"Hang onto this for me," he said, handing the lead singer his guitar and sprinting into the storage room. He slammed the doors shut behind him, but didn't bother locking them. A moment later, the jocks burst in to find the room empty of human life.
"Where'd he go?" the lead jock asked his friends. He turned around and shouted back to the band, who were squinting into the darkness, trying to see what had happened to Burdell. "Where'd he go?" the lead jock repeated.
"Dude," the bassist said, "I have no idea."
A few seconds later, Burdell finished uploading to Realspace, laughing maniacally from adrenaline.