Volper Page 3

  Yes! Now I understood why I hadn’t been able to open the interface. My subconscious mind had made me feel worried, and I couldn’t identify the source of my anxiety. I’d barely started to look for the reason why when the voice of the gorgeous specialist told me:

  "It’s ready! The neurointerface has been activated; now we'll proceed to the instructions."

  She sat down on her chair and went on. "We are now in the building of the Replication Center, on the fifth level of the multi-level Alfarome city. Taking into account the problems of the past several decades, the government decided to extract a lot of spare replication prototypes from the archives, which aren’t being used at present. Thus, the aim of the government is to increase the number of people and its plan is to, with the help of these replicant copies, restore the infrastructure of the fifth level. If this project proves fruitful, then, in the future, using the same method, we will restore the other remaining lower levels. In connection to this, it was decided that we’d provide each replicant with a room in which they could be replicated for free for a period of seven days or for ten replicas. All the subsequent replication procedures are to be paid for according to the published tariffs. A thousand credits are also given to each replicant as an initial bonus. You’ll also be receiving a file in which all the main structures of our forward stronghold have been marked. Be careful: the areas highlighted in red on the map are not patrolled by our Security Service; therefore, mortal danger awaits you, should you go there. Phew! It seems to me like I’ve told you all the important information.”

  I wonder if she’s learned all of it by heart, in order to tell us this, or if there’s a service note in her neural network and she reads from it? I paid attention to the fact that the girl was looking at me sadly; I was surprised, because she’d been cheerful and chattered quite happily before, and then this dramatic change in mood happened.

  - Excuse me, but what is your name? I’m Vlad ... oh ... Volper, and you?

  - “Oh ...” - she opened her eyes wide and covered her mouth with her hand, - “I didn’t introduce myself, did I?”

  - No.

  - Litara, - you can call me Lita for short.

  - What a beautiful name! Tell me, Lita, why are you so sad?

  - Well, just like all the other replicants, you will now run away, yelling weird words!

  We keep on sitting, looking at each other. One second passed, two, five, ten; I couldn’t stand the silence and asked her:

  - Well? Have I already run away or not?

  - Apparently, you haven’t.

  - It's strange, because you, Lita, said that I would run away.

  - And why haven’t you?

  - Why would I do that? - I could barely contain my laughter.

  "I don’t know," Lita seems to have had a panic attack from seeing the "wrong" me.

  "Maybe while you're deciding on why I should run away you will answer a couple of my questions?"

  - “I will answer them with pleasure!” She smiled at me. "If I know the answer, of course…"

  "Tell me, Lita, what was the activation of this neural network for?"

  - Well, how can you do without an active neural network? After all, it fully tracks your body, providing an opportunity for you to know everything about your health status, what skills you have acquired and much more. Also, it’s necessary for the sake of convenience - it renders your actions into numerical values and you can track the progress of your body. And, most importantly, the server processes all of your actions, and the government immediately awards you with bonuses for completing tasks. Again, without a neural network, you won’t receive a level of usefulness to the community, which directly depends on the tasks you performed and the amount of work you did which is useful to the city.

  - I suppose that I won’t be able to see the level of any creatures or mutants?

  - Oh you will, for sure. In this case, the level of potential danger is displayed.

  - I see, Lita. You mentioned that it’s necessary to restore the infrastructure of the fifth level. So, do we need to do some construction work?

  - Well ... it is possible to do some construction work, but first you need to clear the territory of the threats - the fifth level became uninhabited about three hundred years ago. During all that time, various mutated creatures and gangs of criminals settled in there; in some places, Security Systems are still operating in an aggressive mode. Periodically, you can come across droids of different classes with busted settings, or else you can bump into mutated people who are hiding from the authorities. So, it turns out that in order for you to begin the reconstruction work, you’ll need to clear the territory, fortify your position there and only then can you start improving the infrastructure.

  "…And what about the militia groups?"

  “Unfortunately, they are all involved in stopping the mutant breach," Lita answered, sighing sadly.

  - It turns out that we are just “meat shields” meant to clear the territory?

  - No, you are not! A lot of replication centers have been built on the entire fifth level on purpose. The authorities provided expensive equipment for human replication, and all replication procedures are carried out at the net cost of biological material, so that you all shouldn’t have to worry about your possible death.

  - Then why can’t the government replicate the military officers?

  - Unfortunately, the technology for creating a fully-operational, replicated copy was lost a very long time ago, and now we can only make changes to the existing ones. Also, replicating several times at once isn’t allowed by the Server. What the reason for that is, nobody knows.

  - Got it! So, you can only earn money by killing dangerous creatures?

  - Not necessarily. Almost everything that you can get beyond the walls of our outpost, you can hand over to different departments. For example, the bodies of mutants that haven’t been studied much are gratefully purchased by laboratories in the scientific center; also, engineers there will buy various tools and instruments off you, whether they’re totally unknown to us or just different versions of existing things. If you get a hold of armor or weapons, you can carry them to the store and sell them. You’re sure to be offered a good price for them there. Besides that, if you’re tight on money, you can pick up all the trash around the perimeter and take it to the administrative building; they buy it cheaply there and send it for processing. There are a lot of options for earning money, even without having any professional skills.

  - Thank you, Lita, for such detailed information.

  - Not at all. I’m doing my job here, although very few people are interested in something more than just basic information.

  Given that I had a pitifully small amount of information, I didn’t even know what else to ask about. Also, to tell you the truth, I was very stressed out by this total control of the Server. The game developers had probably found a logical way for characters to be revived with this sort of setup. And so, I had to say goodbye to Litara, promising to come back to talk to her, should I have any more questions. After I’d left the room and had walked for about ten meters along the corridor, I stopped and began to study the interface layout. The map displayed a small space around me; perhaps it’s limited to my field of view. By sending a mental request, the map maximized, showing everything in fine detail.

  Almost all of it was covered with the so-called "Fog of War", which is usually used in the gaming industry to hide the part of the map where the player hasn’t been before. The only thing that I found unexpected were the level and floor switches, although it was logical from the point of view of the gaming world, in which you need to be guided not only in the horizontal, but also in the vertical plane. Minimizing the map, I looked at the icons. Here, too, everything was as I’d expected: character status, mailbox, friend list, and system menu. After opening the character menu, I immediately became engrossed in studying the basic stats, because, from time to time, some points give a clue about the possible evolution of the game in t
he future.

  Character Status:

  Name: Volper

  Current level: 0

  Experience: 0/250

  Armor (on average): 1

  Lives left: 50/50

  Hunger: 12/100

  Thirst: 17/100

  Fatigue: 3/50

  Maximum weight capacity: 0.9 / 50

  Attributes:

  Strength - 5

  Agility - 9

  Endurance - 5

  Perception - 9

  Intelligence - 6

  Reasoning power - 1

  Luck - 8

  Charisma - 5

  Skills: --

  Professions: --

  Personal account: 1,000 credits

  When I focused on the "Armor" item, I could see a detailed description of all the parts of my body. Right now, everything except for the hands and the head, had a value of “1”, which had apparently been given to me by my starter kit. The rest of the statistics, no matter how hard I tried to open those items, were inactive at this time. The lines in the upper left corner represented changing stats, for example: the red line referred to life, the gray one was for hunger, the blue one for thirst and the orange one, surely, showed my fatigue level. Of all the bars, only life was already filled up, and the rest of them were in the process of being filled.

  I got very excited about the two parameters: skills and professions. The problem was that there were hardly any descriptions of them, as well as the lines being empty. Why? As far as I could see, they were most likely going to be very important for the evolution of the character, so it’s not for nothing that they’d been included in the main statistics data. Okay, the information is all well and good, but I need to level up, and oh my, I'm still falling behind the swiftest players. Well, first I have to find a store, get some shopping done (if I have enough money for it) and then I’ll try out my skills in action.

  CHAPTER III: A HARDCORE BEGINNING? OR: DEVS, ARE YOU NUTS?

  With the help of my map, I managed to reach the store in just three minutes and then got stuck in the queue for almost half an hour. I had some time to look around while waiting to get into the store. Admittedly, I wouldn’t have minded overhearing some interesting conversations, but there were only noobs around me. Unfortunately, I didn’t pick up on anything useful from their chatting. The outpost consisted of only five buildings: a fifty-story replication center, an equally large residential complex, a thirty-story scientific center, a five-story administrative building, and a store.

  All the buildings were arranged in a ring around a specific area, and along the perimeter, the outpost was surrounded by an 8-meter tall modular fence, evidently intended for further expansion. Behind the fence was where the most interesting things were: huge buildings that were usually at least halfway destroyed, along with multi-level roads. The most amazing thing was that, directly above us, there was no sky, not even a dome. A concrete ceiling stretched out over the whole city, as far as the eye could see. Or at least something like concrete, it was similar enough to it. Only now did I understand what Lita had been saying about different levels.

  It turns out that we have at least one more city above our heads, and it’s about the same size. Going by the fact that we’re on the fifth level, there must be four more under us.

  On either side of the entrance to the store, there was a guard in some sort of mechanical armor, distantly resembling the armored suits of space troopers. However, in contrast to them, the guards had a face shield, the arms and legs had thicker external armor, and they had yellowish energy lines on the sides of their bodies.

  They all had an automatic rifle in their hands, an energy rifle at that, judging by the round module that had a uniform blue glow coming off of it. It looked impressive, but in terms of practicality and subtlety – it was just horrible. Not only could they be seen almost from space, but the most vulnerable spots were also highlighted. After waiting my turn, I finally went into the store. What caught my eye were eight coupled turrets under the ceiling, the fine-meshed gratings in front of the shelves and a huge number of CCTV cameras.

  It was a great place for paranoid people, especially when you consider that there were no more than a couple dozen buyers in the store at the same time. The shopping area itself was roughly divided into sections of different types of goods. There were the weapons; there was the ammunition, and the armor, and so on and so forth. Coming to the armaments section, an electromagnetic rifle immediately caught my eye. It had pulse launching projectiles along with energy enriched ones, with the muzzle itself being how you switch between the two modes.

  Well damn, if you choose a matching plasma core for the weapon, you are then able to burn through even the composite armor of a combat robot. Looking at the price, I was shocked: seventeen million credits. Doubtlessly, I would have to work hard for at least six months to afford it, although I don’t know the prices of the local loot yet, so it may end up taking even longer.

  – “Good afternoon!” - I said to the shop assistant. – “What do you have for a beginner?”

  – What kind of weapons are you interested in?

  – Um ... which kind do you have?"

  – Well, there’s a general class of them – individual combat weapons and hand weapons. The individual combat ones can be: melee, energy, laser, and pulse. Melee weapons include such classes of weapons as a blade, meant for chopping and stabbing, crushing ones, meant...

  – Ok, not so quickly. Let me think. Shall we turn the question around? I need an inexpensive gun with a holster I can place inside my pants, a knife with a 15-cm blade in a hard case, and something compact, with an automatic fire mode.

  The salesman looked me over, stroked his chin a bit and decided on something.

  – As far as I understand it, you’re on a budget and you’ve only got the starter credits, am I right?

  I just nodded. He turned away and looked for something in the shop windows, and then shouted, "Levy, bring me the number 3 starter kit!"

  - What kind of starter kit is that?

  - Before the replication center started operating, we came together and agreed to offer beginners starter kits containing the minimal necessities. Also, it’s inexpensive, so you’ll be able to afford this kit. Usually, replicants like you just ask for either an assault rifle or a gun, or at least an ordinary rifle. But you are, as far as I can see, quite knowledgeable, and you’re planning ahead for different situations. Players rarely ask these kinds of questions, so we have just a few starter kits. But please, don’t be angry that the quality is low; for the money you have, it’s not possible to purchase something of high quality.

  –Thank you just the same. How much do I owe you?

  – "732," he said, noticing I was surprised by the figure. - Yes, don’t worry; all the necessities are already inside: a small backpack with cartridges, two sets of army field ration and a 3-litre water pack.

  That calmed me down. I didn’t want to face the problem of lacking any kind of armor just because of one trivial reason - lack of money. After taking the bundle, I confirmed the payment in the pop-up window and money was withdrawn from my account. Then I headed for the fitting room, shown to me by the shop assistant. After closing the curtain, I immediately examined what I had bought. I’d received short black boots with fasteners; trousers made of a leather-like material with two side and two hip pockets; a jacket with long sleeves of the same material as the pants, with eight outside pockets, located symmetrically on the right and left sides: two on the chest and two on my abdomen; fingerless gloves with reinforcement on the knuckles; a strange kind of pistol: without a bolt carrier, barrel assembly and with a small, movable part in the chamber area with a hidden trigger.

  Having fiddled with the gun, I couldn’t find the pistol’s safety, and the trigger was a single action one, without the need for pre-cocking. Next, I took out a small submachine gun, with a short barrel and skeletal stock, but to my dismay, the breech mechanism was placed far ahead of the trigger, and there
was a loading case there too. The bullpup was lacking in any way to lower the recoil, even just a little. In general, it cannot be called a real weapon, it’s just a sad excuse. On top of that, there are only two modes of fire: automatic and single. The possibility of switching out the type of ammunition doesn’t exist at all. You can literally bang your head against the wall, for all the good it would do you.

  Well, what more could I ask for at the very start of the game? Okay, enough reflecting, let’s see what's next: a simple synthetic belt, a synthetic pistol holster worn on the thigh, which has two elastic bands with fasteners around the thighs, and a hard loop for affixing it to the belt. Of course, it would be better to have a polymeric, open-wear one, but for the time being, I cannot afford it, and, unlike this one, polymeric holsters have to be chosen exclusively for the model of the pistol you’re using, so that all the fixtures will fit accordingly.

  What else do I have in my package? There’s a small backpack with a volume of twenty or so liters, with a bunch of sewn-on straps. If memory serves, this system of fasteners was used before the invention of reliable magnetic grippers. Inside the backpack, I found five boxes of cartridges, two spare magazine cases for the submachine gun and one spare for the gun. At the bottom, there were two vacuum packs of dry soup, enough for one day. In a special pocket, at the back, there was a hydrator with a tube pulled out to one of the shoulder straps of the backpack.

  The last thing in the bundle was a knife, about eleven inches long, with a straight, one-sided 6-inch-long blade and a slightly curved point. The handle was wrapped in some kind of cord so it wouldn’t slip from the hand, and all this was placed in a hard case that had a belt loop at the top parts and two elastic bands with adjustable fasteners in the middle and lower parts, which were intended, most likely, for additional adjustment on the thigh. Looking at these things, I realize that I'm an idiot, because I'm in a game and not in real life – you just need to give a mental command in here. And so I checked the info of all the objects: