Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (room on the broom read aloud txt) 📗

his eyes. “That’s M-Michael’s gamer name. How do you know who he is?”

“I’m part of the resistance against his attempted takeover of Artana,” she replied. “So is Hector.”

I waggled my fingers at him from the doorway.

“Fighting... him?” Jacob glanced between us, uncomprehending. “Michael’s dead. Dead-dead. We purged him out of... uh...”

“ATHENA,” Suri finished. “The player database on Earth. The same one that contains you and me, right?”

He boggled at her. “Y-You’re not supposed to know that. NPCs are not supposed to know that!”

“Then what does that tell you, mate?” I was pretty sure she rolled her eyes.

“I’m n-not your ‘mate’,” Jacob snapped. “And Ororgael... Michael... he’s dead, Suri. Don’t lie to me.”

“Hector?” Suri looked over her shoulder at me. “You feel like explaining this?”

“She isn’t lying. He’s here, he’s alive, and he’s on the rampage.” I leaned against the edge of the open door and crossed my arms. “Ororgael goes by ‘Baldr Hyland’ these days. Self-proclaimed Emperor of the Hercyninan Empire. He’s trashed Ilia and is in the process of fighting his way through Revala to reach Vlachia. He’s the same the man you and my brother knew. Michael Pratt. Your coworker.”

“Your... brother?” He looked past Suri to me. “Wait... Hector. Hector Park? You’re Steve’s brother?”

“The one and only,” I said.

He scrubbed at his hair, momentarily speechless. “Holy shit. Holy SHIT. W-why didn’t you say something? You hauled me in here outta Davri’s place, but you didn’t tell me that!”

“I’m pretty sure I was too busy kicking you in the junk to remember to introduce myself.” I made a show of examining my fingernails.

“Oh god.” Jacob put his head in his hands, squeezing fistfuls of his hair. “Steve’s brother is here, Michael’s not dead... H-How do you know this Hyland guy is Ororgael?”

“Baldr was a refugee player character, like me. I watched Ororgael hijack him,” I said. “He loaded himself into a tempting quest objective, waiting there like a trojan. Baldr’s a prisoner in his own body, according to Ororgael. He’s slowly torturing him, ‘mining him for data’ when it suits.”

Jacob’s watery brown eyes were now so wide they were nearly round.

“That’s why we’re here,” Suri said heavily, turning back to look at him. “Rin says you were on Michael’s team. We want to know everything about him, Nicolas, and Steven Park.”

Jacob flicked his eyes between us. “Or what? You can’t keep me here forever.”

“You’re right. But we can keep you here for a really long time. If we get sick of feeding you, then believe me, I’ll happily watch Suri crush your head into a fine pink mist.” I stood up straight and stretched my shoulders. “Which means that when you die, you’ll snap back to your last spawn point. Right?”

“Yeah...?” He glanced between me and Suri. “So?”

“And where is that?” I asked. “Davri’s? Or Al-Asad? Because it’s either-or, right?”

“I...” Jacob opened his mouth, then snapped it shut.

“If it was Al-Asad, you are two hundred percent fucked. Because that place is completely underground, and there’s a Level 120 monster patrolling the ruins. And if it was anywhere in Dalim, then I’d drop your fuckedness rating to about a hundred and fifty percent. Ororgael’s agent, Violetta, is about as crazy as he is. She’s the head of Ilia’s Mata Argis and is in tight with the Sultir, and I would bet good money he’s going to try to capture you. Maybe you’ll let lucky, and Nick will help you out. But something tells me Nick isn’t the kind of guy who gives a shit about other people. So how about you start with him, and when you feel ready, you can tell us what you know about Michael ‘Ororgael’ Pratt.”

Jacob battled with himself for several minutes, rocking in place. Finally, he managed to tear his eyes up from the ground, peering at Suri.

“Nick is fucking crazy, man,” he stammered. “Like, maybe a psychopath. Al-Asad, the girls... I swear it was all his idea. He set it all up, the prison sandbox and everything. For most of Archemi’s development, it wasn’t connected to the main paracosm. The prison was like its own little pocket universe on Nick’s test server, just existing on its own. It didn’t use ATHENA data or DHD profiles, just shells ported in from anime and other videogames.”

“DHDs?” Suri asked.

“D-Dynamic Human Datasets,” Jacob stammered. “Organic human minds uploaded into the world via GNOSIS. Like... us. And look... I’m not trying to excuse it, but when we started Al-Asad, it wasn’t anything like what we have here in Archemi now. I swear we weren’t hurting anyone.”

I glowered at him. “It’s still fucking weird.”

“Like I said. I was... I was fucked up, man. Fucked up from the war, fucked up from losing David, fucked up from everything. I didn’t know what happened to my parents for four months, until the refugee camps finally started getting connectivity and a cousin told me they’d been killed,” he said. “Juneau Shard was sealed, and there was no getting out. Anyone who tried to escape was court-martialed and shot. Then we had an environmental breach on the mid-levels and people started getting sick, so we were quarantined in the upper suites. I was either in my office or in my apartment, watching the whole world burn down. I got sucked into Nick’s fantasy. It... I took out the rage there. The loneliness. My whole family was dead. I didn’t have anything else.”

Suri stood up and strode back toward me. I moved from the doorway, and let her take post in the open space... somewhere she felt like she could escape if she needed to.

“Fine,” I said. “Go on.”

Jacob slumped back against the wall, looking up at us. “Once HEX started tearing everyone up, Nick incorporated a version of Al-Asad into the game core. But we kept on using it like a