Sung into the stars

On the top level of a passing parking garage, a burst of light fanned out in radial spikes and threw long shadows across the concrete. It flashed atop a fucking Toyota Hilux stuffed with dudes in dark shemaghs with a black flag waving from the bed emblazoned with some symbol Gradie didn’t recognize (and wouldn’t have had time to register even if he did) that he would later learn by scanning the post-game scoreboards was a chef hatted skull over two crossed sausages, the clan symbol for International Society of Independent Sausagemakers.

The little bird was already falling when he saw them, framed by the opening on Luke’s side, and a millisecond later another burst ripped through the cabin and sprayed him with blood and fabric and aircraft parts. The machine guns retort echoed in his head, the loudest sound in the area now that the helo’s engine had snapped off, and he could see Philip pointing to a color photo of a PKM Pecheneg tacked to the board, with a full write up and disassembly diagrams alongside.

Then another sound overtook the gun and sucked the blood out of his heart.

“Angel!”

It was not playful, not the brief reflexive panic of a surprised player, but the real agonized scream of someone who thinks they are watching a loved one die. In that instant, Nova truly believed his brother had been murdered.

Luke, or what was left of him, sailed out of the cabin. Glass and blood struck Gradie’s face. His NVGs were ripped off his head. Out the darkened window, amber lit concrete street moved towards them at a speed that made Gradie’s guts go cold.

Then they crashed through the skin of Killcity.

The sound of the helicopter breaking apart on the crumbling concrete was smeared into the sound of something like a swimming pool sized pane of glass breaking while suspended in a tiled and metal-roofed natatorium. The echo reverberated and died into silence as Gradie plunged into a darkness that shocked like invisible ice water, pushing out every last scrap of sensation left over from the world of the helicopter crash. A few seconds later, the sensation of falling vanished, and he felt himself floating in a total darkness.

The silence reminded him just how loud and constant the hum of Gunmaze had been. It had been sound beyond noise, things speaking the un-toned language of dreamknowledge a thousand times a second. Now there was only darkness and the rising fear that maybe he had finally truly died.

“Yo twins. Turn on the lights.” Luke’s voice was flat and dull in his head, like they were speaking in the dustiest carpeted room of an underground office complex.

“What the fuck. I can’t even access the squad chats,” Nova said, now fully recovered from whatever panic had taken him.

“Probably some new immersive bullshit,” Angel said. “You beta tested that other thing, so now—”

A sound as loud as Gradie’s non-ears could register vibrated the darkness, and it took a whole second for him to understand what it was, or at least what it resembled.

A roar.

The whole darkness vibrated. Fields of prismatic stars sparked dimly to life as gravity returned suddenly and dragged them down. Angel yelped and Luke swore. Then Gradie’s feet struck something like smooth marble.

The moment his feet touched the ground, light returned, though much more softly. Waves of glowing air like illuminated smoke wafted over the endless black stone at his feet as an eclipsed sun rose over the horizon and the stars became fully enflamed. The starlit sky stopped dead at straight horizons meeting at right angles around them. They were standing on a perfect square of black stone at least half a mile across.

“Shit looks like a bad album cover,” Angel scoffed.

Another roar, this one less sing song and more warning, and the four of them snapped down into a crouch.

“Fuck is that?” Luke said. “A space bear?”

It was not a space bear. A dark shape glided over the far horizon, vanishing the stars and passing over the dark sun like ink poured upward. A serpent, blacker than the space behind it, warping starlight and sunlight around itself like a black hole.

“Space dragon. Sick.” Nova said, standing back up and watching it move.

“So, what, is this gonna be some Warhammer shit?” Angel said.

“Yall mother fuckers look dressed for a beer run, actually,” Luke said, motioning towards the twins. They all stopped and looked at each other.

Nova was wearing a tank top with some kind of psychedelic skull pattern Gradie couldn’t quite see in the low starlight, basketball shorts, sneakers, and his hair hung in short braids. Angel had on a black and white [band] shirt over black cargo pants and skate shoes. His thick hair shot off his head in tight curls. Luke pushed back his wavy brown hair and stared at the twins. He had on a button up flannel shirt, blue jeans, and western boots.

Gradie looked down at himself. Light blue oxford over khaki pants and black DCs. Yesterday had been his day to come into the office, and he had worn the same thing every time since he started the hybrid job at—

“Hey are those y’all’s clothes from the Real?”

Everyone took a second look at their clothes.

“Oh shit,” said the twins.

“What the fuck?” Luke snapped, and Gradie wondered what his issue was. He sounded like a gunfight had gone the wrong way on a job.

“Damn bro chill,” Nova said.

“Fuck chill bitch. How does this place know what I wore yesterday?”

A silent pause.

“Oh shit,” Nova said. “It tapped your mem.”

“God damn right. Get me out of here.”

“It’s not that big a deal,” Angel said. “Your Self image is like super surface level shit. All games access it to an extent.”

“Eh,” Nova started, but Angel shot him a look. Luke was already looking around at the plain like someone who needed to be shot was gonna step out from behind a star at any moment.

“How did it know what we were wearing in the Real without prompting us? Isn’t that the definition of scraping?” Luke glared at them.

“Uh,” Nova stared at the sky like it would help him out.

“I think it was the drop in,” Angel said, staring at his reflection in the mirror floor. “The entry shook us up like a false awakening. That’s why Quasar freaked.”

“I did not—”

“So it didn’t technically scrape us, it just implied the Real then waited for us to fill in the gaps.”

“Oh, kind of like a pseudo trip-film,” Nova said. “Probably just set the Avatar projection into RR mode and—”

“All right, fuck it,” Luke waved his hands and winced at their jargon. “I’m trusting you nerds. But only because this shit looks bad ass. So what’s this one do?”

“Uh,” We’ve never seen this one,” said the twins.

“Really? Damn, Gunmaze gurus caught lacking.” Luke shook his head and sighed at his feet.

“Let me ask the guild if any of them—” Angel started.

“No! Fuck that bro!” Nova snapped. “We finally got a fresh one. We’re gonna do this shit right.”

He turned to Luke and Gradie.

“Ok, the first thing to do when encountering any new segment, or any new game or challenge in general, is to identify the variables,” He held up one finger. “And the goal.” Another finger.

“Uh, variable one, space dragon,” said Luke, pointing.

“Ah, but that’s the trick,” Nova wagged a finger. “Is it a variable? In colors, were the stars variables? Meaning, does it affect our path to the goal?”

Luke looked around. “What goal?”

“I have a feeling there isn’t one,” Angel said, with a strange weight of meaning in his voice.

“What? There’s always a goal.”

“Not if the segment is unfinished.”

“What? This shit doesn’t feel—” Nova stopped mid-wave at the scenery and jolted back towards Angel.

“Fuck do you mean?”

“I had to make sure it wasn’t the Guild fucking with me,” Angel sighed. “I can’t connect to the chat. Can’t get Gunmaze helpdesk either.”

“What the fuck!” Nova held his hand in front of his face with his thumb and forefinger forming half a rectangle and glared at it.

“So, what? Are we trapped?” Gradie hated the way his voice cracked in the darkness, full of fear. Visions of silhouettes falling into dark squares, echoes from Michael’s orientation, played in his head.

“Nothing like that!” Nova snapped. “There’s no fucking demons in Gunmaze! So what, do you think this is like a testing ground?”

“No,” Angel looked around. “Too much flair. I think it’s an unfinished segment. What are they called? An Isolation. Probably in some kind of storage.”

“Then how’d we get to it?”

Angel smiled at him. “Luck.”

Luke sighed.

“Aight, look, despite the name, I’m not actually trying to get banned. How do we leave?”

“You’re scared? Of all people?”

“No, I just don’t want any unnecessary attention, or questions, or Otherworld background checks. Last thing I need is some Gunmaze rep calling Boss—”

“The golden law of Gunmaze is if it plays its game.”

“What the fuck does that—”

“It means we didn’t break anything or use any social engineering to get here so we can’t get banned or even flagged for it. It’s on the devs for not—”

“You sure they’ll see it that way?”

“Listen—”

Gradie spaced out of their conversation and let his thoughts drift out on the strange feeling he had been getting from the place since the lights turned on, that it was all waking up from a long sleep. The stars twinkled in rhythmic patterns, like crystal corpses mimicking the random flashes of real stars with programmed fluttering. The background ambience, which upon a closer listen, revealed itself to be a distorted choir smeared into almost white noise, felt like something echoing off the dead surface of a long gone time. It didn’t feel like something unfinished, like something recently under construction. It felt like something that had been seen and enjoyed and cherished years ago, and was now out of practice being the center of attention. Like an abandoned sound stage that hadn’t held a human presence in ages.

He caught sight of himself in the mirror-stone floor, and cringed. He had spent his first day in the Other in similar clothes, and the similarities between his confusion that day and his unsettling ignorance here were mild but still unpleasant. In a kind of mental reflex, he imagined his reflection wearing his Hardworlder Spirit outfit, dark robes and mirror helmet, and his reflection began to morph.

Luckily, he caught it before it was fully formed and guided it instead into a dark jumpsuit and faceless sci-fi helmet. Before the process was finished, he had figured out the trick, and sure enough, he raised his hand and found it gloved.

“Oh yeah, guess we should get our fits in check,” Nova said, looking down at himself. After a few moments of nothing, he frowned.

“How’d you change this fucking skin?”

“I looked at the mirror, uh, floor.”

The three of them looked down at their feet in unison.

“Ohhhh, shit. Nice trick.”

“So we have to use the reflected world to make, which means,” Angel reached out a hand, now covered in black metal gauntlet, and a rocket-futurist ray gun appeared in his hand. He pulled the trigger and a green glob of energy shot out with the distinctive sound that had punctuated so many of Gradie’s late night adolescent gaming sessions.

But seeing it here, in a place that felt, for some reason, almost sacred, irritated him.

“Now who’s a soomer?” Luke said. He raised a 16-inch AR complete with M203 launcher and shot Angel’s raygun to pieces.

“What the fuck!”

“Damn, this shit really does shoot.” Luke watched the spent casing clatter across the black ground, then lowered his gun and let off a round at his feet. The bullet ricocheted and cracked right past Nova’s ear.

“Jesus fuck dude watch it!”

“God damn! This gun fucks harder than Killcity!” Luke looked it over, thumbing the safety and checking the brass of the chambered round.

Angel, who had been staring intently at the ground, held an invisible rifle in his hand until the air morphed like someone was pressing their finger into Gradie’s eyeballs and put a futuristic looking long matte rifle between his fingers. He shouldered it and shot a single burst of something that shot unseen past Gradie’s shoulder, and the retort was magnitudes quieter than Luke’s AR. He looked impressed.

“Is that from your book?” Nova asked.

“Yeah,” Angel almost whispered, in an awestruck tone.

“Holy shit, the making’s uncapped!” Nova looked at his reflection and a strange grenade, a metal ball encased in a thick translucent plastic skin, appeared in his hand. He pressed and held a button on the top until in beeped, then tossed it overhand across the black plain. It exploded with a flash and the shockwave rattled their eardrums.

“Jesus.”

Gradie looked down at his own self, and held his hands in a rifle pose. In a few seconds, he was holding an integrally suppressed AUG in .300 blk, every piece machined and tweaked by someone far more knowledgeable than him on firearm mechanics, or so he imagined. He wondered what the line would be between flavor fantasy and what the “game” would actually consider during combat.

Which reminded him.

“So what do we do? Shoot each other?”

“I told you, there’s probably not a defined—” Nova started.

“If you try and shoot me with that thing, you better watch the gas,” Angel said. “I’ve heard they can be unruly suppressor mounts.” He winked at Nova who just shook his head. Luke grinned toothily at Gradie.

“Ol’ Bullpup loving ass. You coulda made any gun imaginable, but you—”

“So could you, and you chose, what is that, a Colt?”

“KAC bitch!”

“Ya’ll are simple as fuck for choosing real guns anyway,” Angel said.

“So what’s that? Some Star Trek shit?” Luke pointed at Angel’s rifle.

“No, I created it. It shoots exotic tipped—”

“Like a stripper?” Luke cackled.

“What the fuck is that?” Nova pointed.

On the edge of the plane, above the quasi-horizon, something silhouetted against the stars rose up from below the black and shuddered. Its strange shaking movement was hard to decipher, until it righted itself and stood across from them. A human form. They had dropped, Gradie knew, from the perpendicular plane of gravity on the other face of the cube, sunk into the team’s plain, and been righted midair by the new gravity.

“Players? Oh fuck yeah let’s get it,” Luke raised his rifle, but Nova put a hand out to stop him.

“Whoa wait, let’s see if we can get a first round truce.”

“A what?”

“Usually when you find a new segment, everyone spends their first time exploring it,” Angel said. “It’s kind of an unwritten rule, or more like a custom I guess. The devs were going to –”

“Yall want a truce or what?” Luke yelled, his voice not flat or echoing, but carried as if the surface of the cube carried it through space.

There were now four silhouettes. After what seemed to Gradie like an awkward length of time, one spoke.

“Where’d you guys get the guns?” His voice reminded Gradie of a supervisor he had once, a transfer from Kentucky, and it was shocking to hear such a pot-bellied sound come out of a form that seemed ripped right from a figure drawing book.

“You look at the glass—” Nova pointed at the ground and Luke slapped him on the shoulder.

“Bro, what the fuck?” he hissed.

“What? That’s how truces work! Besides, you wanna shoot defenseless players?”

“Yes!”

Gradie pulled the AUG up to his shoulder and got ready. The four silhouettes had quickly gained a few inches of armor around their forms and four very substantial rifle shapes, one of which might have been some kind of shoulder-mounted missile.

“Oh like a mirror room and shit,” one of the other shadows said.

“Thanks bro,” said the first one.

Then they opened fire.