I didn’t have long—I could feel the lifeblood ebbing away from this body. Propping myself up on the hood of the GTO, I leaned against its bullet-riddled windshield to get a look around. Martin had died some time ago.
“Dude, that was actually pretty cool!” I admitted to the lead Comment Troll, taking the cigarette he offered. He was sitting up on the car with me. Most of his bloody forehead had been shorn away by my bullet, showing white bone underneath, but he was in a jolly mood.
“That gameworld audience went through the friggin’ roof,” he agreed. “There are already thousands of copycats.”
As he said this, an LAPD officer burst from the bushes, disheveled and bloody but intact, and ran up to me. “Mother of God, please help me, please,” he whimpered, his hands pressed together in prayer position.
Raising my eyebrows, I shrugged and gave the smoke back to my new buddy. The officer looked at the two of us and began backing away, shaking his head and making small, pathetic noises. At that moment, a giant troll burst through the same bushes the cop had come through.
“Ah ha!” the new troll announced. “There you are!”
He pounced on the officer, who managed to back away a step or two with his hands help up defensively.
The troll began methodically hacking away with his axe. I had to close one eye as bodily fluids spurted and splattered onto me amid blood-curdling screams. I looked at the troll leader, shaking my head with raised eyebrows.
He smiled back at me and nodded.
“Hey, Fred! Fred!” said the troll leader, raising one stumpy green arm.
Dripping in blood, Fred looked up from his whimpering prey. “Yeah?”
“Could you give it a rest?”
Fred pouted and frowned, then sighed. “Fine.”
Grumbling under his breath, he stuck the point of his axe through the police officer’s skull. This ended all the commotion. Fred skulked off.
My vision was swimming. “Sid? You ready?”
True to his assessment, Sid had bled out slowly, but hadn’t gotten another scratch. Sitting atop a pile of stinking corpses, he was chatting up a female troll over near our Mustang.
“Yep!” he waved, picking up his gun and sticking it in his mouth.
“Cool.”
I picked up my .357, looked at the head troll and said, “Let’s do this again sometime.”
With a smile, I opened my mouth and stuck in the barrel of my gun. Tasting the sharp tang of metal and gunpowder, I pulled the trigger. The last thing I felt was the curious sensation of my head exploding backward into space, and suddenly, I was floating in blackness.
I’m dead.
At least in that universe.
It was a funny thing. We could now die a hundred, a thousand, even a million times out in the synthetic worlds we traveled through, but in our identity world—the real world—death still meant death. Just one place out of millions where it held true, but one that remained stubbornly important.
With all the flittering between worlds and bodies, stimswitching with friends, people borrowing your body, and your body being driven around by your proxxi, you’d think it would get confusing to figure out who or when or where you were, or even how to get back into your own being.
It could be disorienting.
That was why a basic feature of pssi, hardwired at the deepest level, was what we affectionately called the Uncle Button—when you gave up and wanted back in your own body, you punched it. You just had to remember that it was there.
Floating in dimensionless black space I performed the well-worn ritual: look down to where your chest should be, reach into your chest, punch it, and whammo, I felt myself falling backward. An instant later, I was jogging through some trees near the eastern inlet.
Sunlight streamed down through a green canopy above me.
“Taking my body for a jog?”
“You asked me to, remember?” replied Robert, just a voice in my head. “Did you read the latest storm warnings?”
“Nah.” I knew they were having a hard time steering out of the way of Hurricane Newton, and it looked like we might have to battle through the edges of the storm, but what did I care? I’d just be off in the gameworlds.
“It’s gotten a lot worse,” Robert explained. “You’d better not get too dug into the gameworlds this afternoon, and stay off the pharmacologicals in case.…”
“In case of what?”
I was surprised. It was rare Robert ever asked me to do something.
“Just in case.”
I shrugged. Sure. He seemed worried.
“Do you want to transition control of your body to you?” he asked, apparently satisfied.
“Naw, if it’s getting bad, just take us home. I’m going for one more game session with Martin.” I felt bad for yelling at him, but that was just how he was. He couldn’t help it.
For the rest of the day we opted to go old school, returning to the Mongol battle. We all met up afterward at a tiki bar on the beach for some beers. It was well past nightfall, and the place was packed with tourists.
Martin loved the Mongolian battle-worlds. He was still hopped up from the fight, jumping around in the sand and howling as he aped Bruce Lee–style karate moves. Sid, Vicious, Robert, and I watched him with amusement.
“Bob, that was awesome, you ducking and diving like that. It was like, superhuman!”
Sid had remapped my tactile water-sense for Mongol battle so that I could feel arrows coming at me like eddy currents through my skin. The incoming projectiles became a part of my body, and as I quickened, I could duck and weave with blinding speed, roaring through the battle as I hacked away at the Tatar scum.
“Yeah, superhuman. That’s perfectly accurate.” I was already drunk. “We have superhuman abilities—we are, in fact, supermen. At least until the rest of humanity plugs into pssi, at which point…” I paused to take a swig of my beer. “We’ll be, well, just men again.”
Sid smiled. He leaned over and whispered under his breath, “You’re going to talk to him, right? For you, you understand?”
I rolled my eyes, but nodded. “You don’t give up, do you?”
The surf was pounding noisily as we sat there, but a truly gargantuan wave thundered in, literally shaking the party lanterns hanging off the tiki bar. We turned to look out into the blackness. Those are monster storms brewing out there.
Just then, a system of pssi-alert channels began to activate.