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  GlitchWorld

  A GlitchWorld Novel

  Nolan Locke

  Damien Hanson

  A Nerd! Production

  Cover Design by Karen Dimmick

  Copyright © 2020 Nolan Locke, Damien Hanson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

  For more information, address: [email protected] or [email protected]

  FIRST EDITION

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9798645752224

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We would like to thank Jesus, Muhammed, Ganesh and the Spaghetti Monster for putting aside past quarrels and giving us the necessary motivation required to finish this book. I’d also like to thank my mom and Nolan’s mom and your mom and, just, so many moms. Nolan is definitely a real person, and would ordinarily say something from his real mouth, but he hates everything (and everyone), and is a thankless git and a tosser to boot.

  I want to dedicate this book to your mom. I don't regret getting that tattoo of her maiden name in Cabo those years ago.

  Prelude

  Gruesome Gary, villain extraordinaire, stumbled back under the blast, his metallic visage strained. He laughed a villainous chortle, his dark cloak billowing about him as his dark rumble shook the ground beneath them. Streaks showed over his body where bits of the villain had melted to slag. Meredith Johnston was impressed. He’d already lasted longer than any of the others before him.

  She rolled as he returned fire, doing a tight somersault to lodge herself behind the jagged remains of a ruined home. Her dark skin gleamed under the full moon’s light as she checked through her inventory, readying a level 2 gauss super rifle for her next attack.

  "What do you think you are doing back there, hero?” the villain called. His metallic robotic voice was filled with scorn. “You shall never defeat me, Masked Marauder! I destroyed every single one of your puny League of Loser friends and now I shall destroy you too. It is simply a matter of time.”

  “Or, if you want to live, I offer you mercy. Come out and bow before your new king."

  Meredith clacked her rifle, activating her super speed as she sprinted out from cover.

  Pow - pow - pow! Gary’s plasma blasts thrummed out from his cannons. He led his target with his fire, trying to guess her moves. She ducked, rolled and dove as blasts pounded into the dirt about her. But the last whinged her and sent her flying into a tall elm tree.

  Goddamn, is he good! she thought with pride. Rolling a selector in her mind’s eye she stopped at her suit’s shield generator and let it spring. It bounced out around her in all directions with a bizarre boing! Gruesome Gary chuckled darkly, focused two lasers dead center and let loose. The smell of ozone filled the air, with a sound like fzzzzz.

  I’ve only got a few more seconds before he cuts me to shreds, Meredith realized. Thumbing the selector from one to ten, she breathed out, relaxed, aimed the trunk-sized gauss rifle, and squeezed the trigger. Kadoosh! Burnt air and lead expelled out behind her as the elephantine blast struck Gruesome Gary right where she had aimed: in the two ball bearings that simulated his testicles.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! You dirty whore!” Gary yelled. The robotic parts of his metallic body glowed orange and began to melt. Some of him dribbled down his body. It cooled quickly in the night air, but the agony was plain on his partly human face.

  He fired a few more blasts, then looked up at the moon. A pained grin came to his ruined and streaked face.

  It was a trick.

  “No! No nono nononono!” Meredith yelled. Her shield failed about her, even as she tried to sprint away from the ambush she’d spotted too late. A blast pounded her in the shoulder and she spun as she fell, still yelling.

  “Oh yes, Masked Marauder,” Gruesome Gary boomed. “I don’t need to kill you in personal combat. I can accomplish the same by annihilating the whole damn city. Muahahahaha. You lose, Marauder. You lose and I win.”

  He rose up into the sky on rocket powered boots. He blazed up into the night sky. All around them flickered the lights of Cityopolis. Lights that would soon be quenched forever if Meredith didn’t do anything about it.

  She bounded to her feet, knocking her bruised and burned shoulder back into place with a hard punch of her fist. “Not yet you don’t, you metal bastard,” she called, using her suit’s interface to call up an electric grappling hook made of pure energy. It blazed and sparked to life, then shot from her hand like a python striking its prey.

  And missed.

  "Muahahaha!" he cackled. The voice was artificially amplified so it echoed through the entirety of the city as thought he was speaking through a bullhorn.

  Meredith Johnson stared down at her gloved hands. The suit was cracked and charred, dark blistered skin showing underneath. Think Meredith think! There’s gotta be some way to take this bastard down.

  She peered up into the sky and watched. A fiery blaze sparked in the midnight sky and then a stream of red-yellow plasma lanced down toward her. She shook off the fatigue, the weakness and the wounds, and dove at the last second to ride the concussive wave of the blast to the rooftop of the next building.

  “Bring it!” she yelled, a bit of blood trickling out through her teeth. She rolled her hands through the air in a circular pattern, leaving glowing blue lines in her passage. Then she shoved both hands forward. “Skaddoken!” she bellowed. A tremendous blue-white glob of flame flew up at her cackling target.

  “Gaah!” Gruesome Gary moaned. She could see him sparkle as he fell from the sky.

  “Electro-Magnetic Pulse for the win! Didn’t your mama tell you the bad guys never get away with it?” the Masked Marauder said, swaggering to where the half-robot tyrant had finally fallen. “You are going to spend the rest of your days behind bars.”

  “But I’m not,” Gruesome Gary said from behind her. She barely had time to turn before she was blasted into the wall of the next building over. It had all been a Gruesome Gary copy! A facsimile! She would give him props if he weren’t about to kill her. “Let me add that watching you fight my simulacrum was tremendously entertaining. Instructive as well. But now, Masked Marauder, you die!” And with those concluding words her hand reached out and an orb of energy the brightness of the sun blasted forth to finish the hero.

  Damn, this boss might be the best one I’ve ever programmed, Meredith thought. She rolled forward, stats and mathematical equations rolling through her visor as she tested and probed the latest boss addition to the system.

  “Pause,” she called out. Everything froze. Behind her, a glitchy Gary jumped in digital stillness jerkily.

  “Someone get me a DICK, full charge. I want to run this boss battle just one more time before I take my two weeks.”

  A little ways away, the moonlit rooftop scene vanished into a large white office with a ridiculously high ceiling, populated largely with computer desks littered with half-eaten snacks, soft drink cups, and empty fast food containers. Several other women stood about, contemplating the scene or the massive panel of statistics cascading downward in code form beside the superhero sim.

  A blonde-haired intern stared at Meredith, gaping.

  “Amber, didn’t you run these noobs through the acronyms yet? Jesus Christ– dude, I’m telling you to get me a Disintegration Induction Chain Katana ASAP–”

  “One DICK, full charge. Haha, you really do need those two weeks. And some hard boning,” her friend Amber called out. She was a technician here at Prestige Gaming and she worked with Meredith on all of her designs and upgrades. They made for a hell of a team.

  “That too,” Meredith laughed. �
��So are we going to spin this back up or what?” she asked the rest of the gawping workers. “I mean, I’ve got a friend to pick up if you know what I mean.”

  “A boyfriend?” Amber asked. “I’m shocked! Does this mean you leave the house now? That you might occasionally be open to a night on the town? Meredith Johnston, Age of the Powered Mega Boss slash Party Animal?”

  “Haha. Maybe. This guy, well, he was my best friend growing up. We haven’t seen each other for a while but . . ."

  "Spill it!" Amber leaned forward and demanded.

  Meredith couldn't help but blush and giggle. Amber was the only friend she really had and she had a way of making Meredith say everything that was on her mind.

  "I always wanted to date him."

  "There it is," Amber exclaimed, doing a little dance. "Well, good luck getting your guy . . .” Amber spun around. “Alright people. Back to work! We’ve got at least another 23 cycles in us and I don’t want to be here all night doing them. Finish by ten and the first round is on me? Capiche? I thought so.”

  Meredith went to get back into position and Amber grabbed her shoulder.

  “Hey Meredith, you should come hang out with us tonight. Get out of this work work work shell you carry around yourself.”

  Meredith sighed and thought to a cute boy with long blond hair and baby blue eyes.

  “Give me two weeks, my trophy man on my arm, and I’ll be there every time.”

  Chapter 1 - Revealing the TITS

  Derek bobbed his leg up and down within the monorail, looking out the windows as column after column whizzed by. On the subway the ride would have been loud, crowded, and smelly. But not here. Gone was the clackety-clack of the track below and the retching of the drunken old men with their plastic bags of booze. This was gourmet travel, a place with personal cars and a track reserved for solely the rich and the lucky, like himself. Best of all, get this, there was an attendant in a powder blue skirt giving out free drinks.

  I can’t believe that I have a chance to try out Prestige Gaming! Rich people pay like a million dollars for a two week all-inclusive stay and I get to do it for free!

  Some of the guys at his townhouse had asked him before if he’d ever wanted to try it out. He’d called them all crazy. He had told them he didn’t have time to think about things that could never ever happen and had gone back to the VR goggles in his dingy living room in the townhouse that he shared with seven others. He’d gone back to being up to his nuts in enemy verg swarms and dime a dozen henchmen, wearing shitty haptic gloves that gave him cursory shocks and buzzes to try and make him feel like he was actually in a game world.

  Some nights, though, he’d watch ‘YouStreamIt’ and pick up GoneProfessional videos from guests at the Prestige Gaming Hub. Hot chicks, tight facilities, steaming veggies next to metal trenches filled with grilled meat– and that was just the relaxation facilities. When those guys went into the game, they really went into the game. They yelled when they got shot and you could see the blood pouring through the bullet holes. Nothing glitched or got stuck in walls. Nobody could run a hack bot through to auto target or quick teleport and ruin the game. And the expressions on those gamers’ faces when they first stepped into real world game immersion was genuine. The wide eyes and laughter, the touching and prodding of snow, water, rocks, concrete and everything else - it was beyond real. It was super real. Prestige was VR Gaming but in real life.

  Ha, from what I saw on ‘YouStreamIt’ I could already be there in one of their game worlds and I wouldn’t even know it.

  Derek frowned, suspicion written across his face. He reached out and touched the too pristine white wall of the vehicle as it hummed along on its journey. It felt real but this was all so different from the rest of the world, with its dirty streets and polluted air - you couldn’t go half the week without needing a rebreather mask and goggles in the outdoors. Still, the wall didn’t shimmer or warp out, and he didn’t see any numbers or stats. He sighed.

  “Been a long time,” his travel companion said. She had her curly afro up in a kind of open ponytail, which was huge, bouncy, and impossible not to notice. Also pretty damn cool. It swished as she turned and grasped his hands.

  “I– yeah! Two years at least, right? You’re… I mean you’re a legend now.”

  Meredith blushed. “Nah. Nobody knows about us coders, behind the scenes. They’re all about the superstars, the coolest villains. Especially Dungeonworld.”

  “Oh jeez,” he said. “Everybody loves Dungeonworld. I don’t have a lot of time with my job though, you know. What’s your favorite event? I like the one where the one team designs the Dungeons and the other team has to go through everything, all the traps and monsters and stuff, without getting killed. Trick or Trap.”

  She shrugged. “Don’t have time to watch it. Too busy working and coding and all of that fun stuff.

  He nodded and smiled. “Yeah I get it Ms. Big Shot Superstar. Well us common folk hometown-bounders think it’s the best. Plus we’ve got the time to watch it,” he laughed. She slapped his shoulder and laughed with him.

  “Yeah I know. My fault. I should have just stayed back, not bothered getting a degree.”

  “Ha! I’m surprised to see that you can say that with a straight face. You used to study twenty hours a day during finals week - and you already knew all of the stuff!”

  “Hey, I couldn’t have faced myself if I had made a mistake. So how are things back in Merrington? Is the town looking good?

  He stuck out his hand and tilted it back and forth. “It’s as shaky as always. Jobs are down, people just like to sit home and blame everyone who isn’t them. Say, remember Mr. Kraus, from 3rd grade?”

  “Yeah I remember him! He was great - he let me skip ahead of the rest of you and had me doing timed periodic table tests by the end of the year.”

  “He got married again. To Janet Rower.”

  Meredith’s mouth dropped open. Janet Rower had been a classmate!

  “Mr. Kraus is robbing the cradle? No fucking way!” she yelled. Derek rolled back in his seat and slapped his knee in howling laughter.

  “I know, I know. Talk of the town. She said it was true love, and Mr. Kraus, well, he made a huge speech about it all at the town hall meeting.”

  Meredith smiled large at that.

  “Hey, true love. How about that. I’m happy for them - How about you? Find the right girl yet?”

  “Ha! Absolutely not. No way. This girl Cindy and I… I’m pretty sure we’re broken up. She stormed out after I refused to buy her a bottle of cabernet for two hundred bucks for Valentine’s.”

  “She’s clearly not good enough for you. And I have to thank you.”

  He stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Mostly for high school. You were the only good thing about it.” When he continued to give her the doubtful eyebrow, she changed tack and gestured around the train. “It’s almost game time. Are you nervous, impatient, or both?”

  This was much more his wheelhouse. Feelings and Derek didn’t really get along too well. “I don’t know! I’ve seen the videos and read the articles and oh wow this is unbelievable! I can’t wait for the AR overlay. I mean VR but better? VR you can actually touch! VR all around that isn’t VR but is real stuff?!” Derek gushed.

  “Yeah, you are a lucky guy.” Meredith beamed.

  He returned the smile. He couldn’t believe he was actually here. Or his luck.

  Meredith let go of his hands and pulled some printed pages from her handbag. They were a bit crinkled from their folding but the itinerary upon them added to the gleam in Derek’s eye.

  “All you can eat, every meal. All you can drink as well. Meals made to order,” he read out loud, his cadence increasing with every word. “And, of course, lots and lots of gaming! I see in the deets that they don’t have the licensing rights to my favorite comics so I can’t jump in and be Beetle Boy, but it looks like they all have their knockoffs. Honestly this sounds so awesome. Plus it says her
e that everything is customizable to a tremendous degree– so I can be, by their example, a space cowboy! Or a caveman in the modern world! I can change my appearance, gender, and my species. How is this all even possible?”

  Meredith put two thumbs up, pointing at herself with pride. “It’s been a heck of a job but I do it well. And you know what, we have twelve game worlds running right now but ever since we did the mix and match roll out last year it’s really been one hundred and forty-four. Not to brag or anything, but this sexy gal knows what she’s doing.”

  Meredith leaned back, her tight shirt straining against her body. To her disappointment, though, Derek’s eyes were back on the paper.

  “What’s the paper for?”

  She grinned. “Girl’s got to have her secrets, right? Anything digital is fair game for my rival coders. Departments get in hack wars all the time. Do you have any idea how much hideously inappropriate porn has just appeared on my work computer?”

  He had to admit that made sense. “So why not do it in VR? I mean, I’m excited and this is awesome but some of it is still just virtual, right? I mean augmented reality isn’t just stuff magically appearing, yeah? And you’d think with all of the money poured into this place you could make a VR rig that is just as fantastic and real.”

  She stretched again, failed to catch his eye, and sighed.

  “Derek, look, I get it. VR is fine. An expensive novelty but not nearly as expensive as what we do here. And everybody uses VR so it must be good enough, right? If VR wasn’t then it wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar industry with thousands of games. What you are really asking me is what about this PRESTIGE system is supposed to make this product so much better than the rest? I’ve answered questions like these for a long time, hun, so let me blow your mind.

  “It all feels real. Like really real. We have adjustable pain settings that go up so high people have bruised ribs. We have players who’re into that. Believe it. Plus, you’ve seen the videos online. Those aren’t staged. You’ll understand those videos when you are there because that fake VR bullshit just twitches in your hands and buzzes around the goggles. The only reason it feels real now is because you’ve convinced yourself it does. All of you VR gamers have trained yourself to think that it feels real. And, of course, sometimes VR bugs out on you and sticks you in a wall or falls you through the ground.”