Murderworld Read online

  MURDERWORLD

  ALLEN WHITE

  www.severedpress.com

  Copyright 2018 by ALLEN WHITE

  To my wife, Ryoko,

  for her constant love and support,

  which makes all things possible.

  Est quaedam caedes voluptas.

  —after Ovid

  PART I:

  THE WEIGHT

  OF THE WORLD

  The instruments of battle are valuable only if one knows how to use them.

  —Colonel Ardant du Picq,

  Battle Studies, 1870

  one

  Again, he died.

  It happened like this:

  The Kamui-cho district Tanpaku-bunshi shopping mall was modeled after a complex protein molecule. Its thousands of boutiques each occupied a spherical representation of an individual atom of carbon, oxygen, or hydrogen. Parts of its massive, maddening geometry, such as topsy-turvy walkways on which visitors defied gravity by walking upside-down, were infamous for inducing near-hallucinogenic vertigo.

  A wide promenade pierced the structure’s heart. Neat rows of Japanese maple edged the boulevard, their translucent leaves in soft yellows, burnt oranges, and smoky maroons backlit by street lamps that transformed them into living paper lanterns. Such simple elegance contrasted the anarchic circus that filled the plaza, dense with players flashing chiseled flesh and rowdy shocks of hair. Many hefted hyperbolic weapons or props to accessorize bodies bulked with operatic costumes. Each projected an obtuse bubble of purest Gamer attitude.

  Perry skulked through the crowd, his plain outfit conspicuous in its restraint. He wore a three-piece suit of dark blue leather over black shirt and silver tie, a matching blue leather mask encircling his eyes, and carried a gunmetal briefcase. He’d built the look to fit his character’s jokey name: Major Lawsuit.

  He stepped through the door of a shop that occupied a dark atom of carbon. Its interior was a broad enclosure far larger than its modest shell could contain—physics-defying construction typical to every storefront.

  Katsura-ya no Goku was a well-known purveyor of outrageous coifs, and it specialized in vintage anime hairstyles now in vogue. Like dozens of other customers, Perry stood before one of the shop’s many mirrors. There he flicked through an infinite-seeming catalog that encompassed every unruly form and garish color. He’d theorized that an explosive mane, perhaps in sizzling purple or smoldering red, might render him fearsome. His current style was simple, black, slicked back.

  Yet as each bright, bushy mop popped onto his head, he curled his upper lip at his own clownish reflection. Within minutes, deflated, he turned to leave.

  Exiting the store he jostled a woman, who seemed to apport from the ether. Her bodysuit, in light-absorbing matte-black, had merged with nearby shadows.

  “Asshole!” she hissed.

  “Sorry,” said Perry.

  “Outside—now!”

  “Look, I apologize. How about we just forget about it?”

  Text burbled up into Perry’s view:

  Formal Challenge from MARI NIGHT: Accept?

  He scrambled to retrieve her record. Her stats raised his blood pressure: 287,846 kills. The number was hard to comprehend, as there were Top Ten players with far less impressive histories, and he’d never heard of her. If her rank wasn’t tracked on the public charts, it meant she was unregistered, a choice Gamers made for various reasons, most of them shady.

  Perry’s own record was 32 wins and 5,873 losses. After two years of irregular play, he hadn’t gotten better. He’d just be another notch on Mari Night’s belt.

  “Is this really necessary, I mean…”

  She stared him down as one corner of her perfect mouth moved a millimeter, her bare version of a smile. “I only use sharps. Go ahead—throw some rice, makes you think you gotta chance. One-minute lead.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  She stepped nearer, growled into his ear. “Run, fucker.”

  Perry tore out the door, onto the busy promenade. Outside trickled a steady rain, and a few umbrellas blossomed like flowers greedy to drink the falling water. Nearby, a duel ended: a Mexican luchador in sapphire blue mask and tights garnished with a yellow cape had his throat torn out by the steel-plated claws of an anthropomorphic tiger dressed in the frills and lace of an 18th century fop.

  Perry accepted the challenge as he ran. His rank had fluctuated, but had more often plunged—and for his taste, he was already too close to the bottom. He had only once refused a match, and the resulting point sanctions dropped him several thousand places in an instant. Perry’s boss, who received a weekly Game stat report for each of his employees, had almost fired him.

  As Perry neared the building’s entrance an armored warhorse hurtled down from one of the mall’s soaring walkways to hit the floor before him, missing him by mere feet, slugging the ground with the crunch of metal and the heavy thwack of meat as it burst on impact to paint the area with gore: an instant abattoir. Perry stumbled to avoid the beast, fell on his ass as he skidded around it through a slick of fresh blood, then recovered to continue onward, his hands and pants now red and wet. From above echoed a distant rattle of semi-automatic gunfire.

  His heartbeat thrummed in his ears, his chest a prison for his lungs that crushed them within its suffocating fist. Sweat dribbled from his armpits down his ribs, and his old companion, nausea, crawled through his gut like a parasite.

  Perry wished he could just take the hit and get it over with. He knew that this scary Mari Night nyeon was going to end him, doubtless in gruesome fashion and with minimal effort. He imagined that she still waited in the store, whistling to herself as she perused pricey hairstyles that would make her even more gorgeous, the kind that calculated the movement and position of each individual hair on her scalp for heightened realism, or imparted special effects to its strands, making them glow or writhe or self-braid into ever-changing coifs.

  His head-start counter ticked down: 30 seconds left.

  Outside of the looming knot of the Tanpaku-bunshi Perry ran alongside a river dotted with boats of every size. An ancient Chinese warship was anchored in the stream, with ribbed square sails that reflected flickering golden light from hundreds of oil lamps dangling from its beams, decks laden with shouting spectators rooting for participants of a bloody tag-team sword fight amidships.

  Perry almost tripped over two combatants grappling on the stone embankment. A wild-haired man, his toothy maniac’s grin as jagged as the edge of a saw, kneeled above a regal-looking woman in a brown leather catsuit as he throttled her neck with enthusiastic vigor. Her face was hypoxic blue, yet her expression was calm as she pulled a dagger and with rapid-fire stabs, punctured her attacker’s chest with the speed of a sewing machine penetrating fabric.

  Alongside the river ran a sloped wall built with interlocking stones like the base of a Japanese castle. There seemed to be no place to hide. As he passed beneath a bridge upon which ran a high-speed rail line that connected EuthanAsia with the rest of M-world, he noticed a narrow alleyway beneath the track: a tall, gloomy cut that bisected the wall and followed the rail line. He ducked into the passage, pushing his character as fast as it could go despite the fact that the flat-out sprint depleted his waning energy.

  Behind him she came, somewhere in the dark, relentless.

  Above him a train shot past, its roar reverberating from alley’s walls like the shriek of a windstorm. Water trickled down through the tracks above in thin streams, and the alley’s floor had become a shallow brook that funneled back to the nearby river.

  Though rapid-fire guns were disdained by better players as the tools of incompetent chobo, Perry pulled his favorite weapon from his cache, a Llama Pulverizer Mark III, an ostentatious, pricey automatic rifle the size of a deck
chair that spit out .70 caliber armor-piercing slugs at 3000 rounds per minute. Its ponderous weight—now that it was no longer stored in hammerspace—slowed his movement, but he didn’t care. His entire strategy was to take cover and unleash a storm of bullets, a hot wall of death between himself and his opponent. On rare occasion the tactic had even worked.

  He reflected that the alley had one advantage: nobody was there to witness his humiliation. His recurring terror was the chance that one of his pitiful deaths would end up on some trashy recap show that highlighted spectacular failures. Such public disgrace would cost him his job.

  He sought cover, but the walls were smooth and unbroken as far ahead as he could see, and there were no natural defenses or places from which to snipe. The passage wasn’t a thoroughfare, but an architectural remnant of the railway’s design. A perfect kill box.

  And then she was there.

  Mari came at Perry, a swift blur, her wiry gymnast’s body undulating like a bat in flight. She ping-ponged back and forth at impossible speeds between facing sides of the alley, ever nearer, sneering at gravity.

  Perry whipped the Llama’s nose up and fired. The gun buzzed like a lawnmower, muzzle flash licking the darkness as it strobed the walls like lightning. Red-orange tracers pinged and whizzed into the distance, the jingle of ejected brass as cheerful as the chimes of a slot machine.

  She eluded Perry’s sloppy fire with sinuous ease, twisting between bullet trajectories as if mirroring a dance partner. Then she was next to him, as intimate as a lover.

  Perry glimpsed a blink of cold light on steel, heard the wet splat of penetrated meat, followed by the zipper-hiss of the small blade across his torso. The tickle of the knife as it ran through his flesh gave him chills. His liver flopped out before him, almost festive, decorated with a pale loop of intestine and enhanced by a gush of blood.

  The Game didn’t create actual pain, but real adrenaline pumped through his veins, and his own biochemistry blended with electromagnetic brain patterns of dread and anguish generated by his interface. It was a bitter cocktail that set his teeth on edge, clever sensory hacks that created the illusion of being killed minus the suffering. Some players got off on dying more than murder, but Perry was no deathslut.

  The sight of his innards paralyzed him. The clash of negative feedback cracked the Game’s illusion, made him realize that not only was he dying on the ground of an alley looking up at drops of rain falling straight into his eyes but that he also reclined in a comfortable chair in his living room. Ambaesthesia, noted medical literature on the subject: the disorienting sensation of being in two places at once.

  His display flashed the standard, understated notification in the center of his vision:

  You’ve been murdered.

  Below, in smaller text, a countdown began:

  Re-spawn in: 10…9…8…

  Mari Night loomed over him, her face hooded by shadow, faintly haloed from behind by distant lights beyond the alley’s mouth. She yanked the blade from his chest, flicked his blood from it with a snap and spun it back into a hidden sheath.

  “Waste of my time,” she said, her voice just above a whisper.

  …3…2…1

  In his living room, Perry ripped the game interface from his head just in time to lean out of his lounger, next to which he’d placed a trash can. He vomited into it, as violent and repeated spasms squeezed his belly like muscular hands.

  two

  Two twentyish hosts: Sage Six (pink pixie-cut hair, oversized manga-style eyes, transparent floral cheongsam, pink leather bandolier lined with small knives, shuriken earrings), and Punch Kick (square-jawed, crimson mane exploding from his head, diamond-studded brass-knuckles, red leather body armor sprouting rows of gold spikes, pointed teeth).

  They sit in an enchanted forest clearing, at a translucent table placed atop a pile of fresh corpses. Adorable woodland creatures surround them—dozens of rabbits, a few squirrels, a deer, various bluebirds—and all nibble the flesh of the brutalized bodies with cartoonish cheer.

  Sage: [Perky and plastic] Welcome to Snuff Party, your one-stop shop for all things Murderworld! I’m Sage Six.

  Punch: [Clownishly manic] And I’m ya big, bad befu, Punch Kick!

  He gestures with both fist and foot as impact sound effects follow.

  Sage: Fat news today, as the M-world hacking scandal finally saw its day in court.

  Arrest video: Two terrified teenagers surrounded by 50 gun-toting cops. The cops brutally take the boys down like lassoed calves, and cuff them.

  Sage: Defendants Daniel Choi and Antonio Stracelli were indicted this morning in federal court as ringleaders of an international group of underground programmers who created advanced cheatware designed to give Gamers an unfair edge.

  Punch goes scarlet as his eyes burn like coals and fat veins pump at his forehead.

  Punch: Fucking jokkah cranked out aimbots, speed boosters, stat pumpers—you name it. Way to jank up the Game. Yumago, madarchod!

  Lasers shoot from his pupils to scorch a burning angry face into the news desk.

  Sage: Well, they’ll have a long time to think about it—in jail.

  Punch displays a huge grin, his face all sharp teeth, voice pitched up two octaves into an elfin squeal.

  Punch: Rapey, rapey jail!

  Sage: Lawyers for Outlandish Ventures, the makers of Murderworld, had this to say.

  Press conference. Speaking, James Oberst, lead counsel for OV.

  Oberst: The Game only works if everybody has an equal chance to improve their skills, without players worrying if the other guy’s got an unfair advantage. Cheating tarnishes the Outlandish brand, and erodes consumer trust. So we take these issues very, very seriously. The company continues to do everything in its power to strongly protect our intellectual property, to further the enjoyment of its players, and to eliminate the public’s concerns about game security and integrity. That’s why we’re demanding that these lawbreakers be tried as adults, and serve hard time.

  Punch’s voice goes deep, as one of his arms morphs into a nightmarish tentacle that wraps around both Sage and himself.

  Punch: Jang as fuck, neh? Feel the long, veiny, throbbing arm of the law, my manky, muppety meowjellies!

  The tentacle whips back into place and reverts to an arm.

  Sage: Exactly why the Game’s still number one. OV’s got our backs!

  Graphic: The Social Darwinist logo—a rattlesnake wrapped in an S-shape around a vertical flaming sword, which together form a dollar sign.

  Punch: Sage, it was also a fatty-fat-fat day in America for my sweet brus the Social Darwinist Party. They held an intense convention at the Mare Imbrium Convention Center in lunar Gamespace. Only two weeks to Election Day and they finally picked a Presidential candidate.

  Sage: Some say the SDP’s initials actually stand for “Slow Decision Process.”

  File photo: Richard Dancyger, the steely-eyed SD Party Presidential candidate.

  Punch: Democracy takes time, chickie-lickie! That limp-dick centrist Dale Pierce had his ass ka-ka-kicked by man-of muthafuckin’-action, Richard Dancyger.

  Sage: Dancyger’s the former chairman of the Outlandish board of directors—not exactly an experienced politician.

  Punch: Yeah! Fuck those pabajay Washington insiders!

  Sage: Seriously? His big idea is a Mandatory Carry Law that would require every adult citizen to pack a loaded gun.

  A wide cowboy hat appears on Punch’s head and six-shooters pop into his hands, which he fires into the air. Dead animals fall from above: a duck, a bat, a flying monkey, a plump dragon—all followed by a stealth bomber that crashes and explodes behind him.

  Punch: Yee-hah! Time for Gamers to dominate the American political process. Shoot that through your skulls, bangers!

  Sage: When Dancyger advocates carrying swords, that’ll really be sugar. Speaking of weapons, the murder rate’s up 13 percent over last week; nice work, killers! The most happenin’ pops are still with guns
—I’m lookin’ at you, chobos—but edged weapons are still hotty-hot-hot, as the biggest killstars accessorize with knives, swords, axes, and projectiles. Learn to cut, rice-throwers, ‘cause that’s where the bonus points are.

  Punch, dressed as a sushi chef, yanks an adorable dolphin onto his desk from off-screen. With expert speed he uses kitchen cleavers to dice it into sushi rolls, which squeal and wriggle, then he gobbles them up and chews with vigor as he continues with his mouth full.

  Punch: Chop, chop, jaggy monkeys! Speakin’ of slice-and-dice, time to flash today’s Sugar Pop, a righty-right-righteous example of sword technique with a weapon you just don’t see too often, a Scottish Claymore. Bloodlusters—suck down this juicy beheading!

  Punch scissors off his own head with both cleavers, and it floats above his neck on a geyser of blood, grinning.

  three

  Thule was considered by most to be a hardship posting. Its technicians often spent their free time in-Loka to socialize, play, and experience vistas other than bare tundra, murky ocean, or sheets of ice. Nature here was dramatic, but it was also unforgiving. Going outside, into the bleak but beautiful landscape with its subzero temperatures, was often not an option.

  Bernhard Holzknecht worked at the very heart of the massive Thule server complex housed on a former American Air Force base at the northwestern end of Greenland. The reasons for its remote location were several: the region’s low temperatures meant that the facility required much less energy to keep its gigantic servers cool, the area had convenient access to cheap and plentiful geothermal power, and it was much easier to secure such an isolated spot.