44 – Renegade Core

A maintenance hatch slid open with a scream of strain, the metal bending under the pressure as the sands of the Oasis were lifted and fell in a shower to the sides. From the darkness of the spartan staircase, heavy steps echoed, their sound coming to light as soft, slow booms. A figure appeared, ragged and strained, his beard drenched in sweat and his face a mask of pain and anguish under the oil stains and the bleeding metal cuts. It was as if a fierce battle had happened below the surface, a battle of man against machine.

However, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. The cuts, bleeding as they were, were all because of the effects of a mad rage that had affected the man to the point where he had inflicted himself Bleed by bashing against sharp shrapnel and splintering machines. As he was, Julian emerged from the hatch, after having left the dark lab in a state of total destruction brought upon by his mindless state and, now lucid and crying silently, walked under the blazing sun from the outskirts of the Oasis back towards the paradise conditions of the inner grove. He arrived there with barely any HP left, stomping his feet without care for the pain he was feeling. He finally stopped at the shore of the lake, popped an HP potion as he peered at its calm surface that was a perfect mirror, where the sky and the palm trees were reflected without a single disturbance, and sat on a rock. He swiped his hand in the air, and the sun quickly set and the deep blue of the first hours of the night enveloped him.

“Lost a fucking gun, great.” He said after going through his equipment. Timmy Jr. had been lost when he died, reducing his firepower considerably.

Whatever. I’ll make another.

Then he took out the Renegade Core. Once again, the voices assailed him, but this time his own inner voice cut through the noise with icy sharpness. He grabbed the core, staring at it with cold calculative eyes, wondering if he should destroy it for all the bad things it had brought to him. No. It would be a waste. I must make the most out of this shit orb, or Cal will have died for nothing.

He grasped it, feeling the power flow into him and in a flash of white he was suddenly elsewhere.

The space he appeared in was completely white. In a way, it was very much like the VR space he had constructed back on Earth, from where he managed to hack the System, two long years ago when his old life was forever changed by the arrival of the aliens. However, it was also different, empty save for a floating console a few meters away from him. He walked up to it and was about to examine it when a voice, a familiar voice made him jump in place to turn around as quickly as he could.

“Hello.” The voice said.

Julian studied the person who had just spoken for a long moment, face frozen in shock. Then he frowned, narrowing his eyes at the sight.

“Cal?” He asked, and the person smiled. Julian felt the rage build up in his brain and system, and his hands trembled. Was the system fucking with him? One hand went for the gun still at his hip, but the person spoke again.

“Yes?”

Julian was dumbfounded. “Yes? Really? Is that all you can say? Who the fuck are you? You’re not Cal, Cal is dead!” he screamed his friend’s name loudly, and his voice came out hoarse and painful.

“Oh,” the impostor made a surprised face, then pointed at himself. “This guy is dead? Well, too bad because now you’ll have to fight me. Him.” He said and laughed.

“I don’t think so,” said Julian between grit teeth, before running up to the console. It was oriented the other way, so he jumped above it and landed on the other side. He touched the screen and closed his eyes for a moment, and the projection that looked like the deceased Cal froze in place.

“Oh, smart one, aren’t we?” he mocked him. “You have figured out that the rules of the game are just an illusion.”

Julian took out his gun and shot at the impostor, but the bullets flew through him like he was a hologram. The thing began to laugh and taunt him, but Julian now tried his best to ignore him, instead reading through the text in the console. His face was concentrated, but his attention kept slipping to the fake Cal who, even now, was staring at him in a mockery of all he remembered about his friend.

Then the sheer unbelievability of what he was reading made him forget his anger, for but a moment. “What? Who the fuck leaves a sysadmin console lying around like this?” He asked out loud but did not expect an answer.

In fact, before the non-Cal hologram or whatever could even speak, the huge Massive Dynamics logo had disappeared from the screen, and he logged in with one of his throwaway credentials.

“Ah, here they are. The modifications to the code that the Renegade core applies to my System. Let’s see… raise level cap from 100 to 500… interesting.”

He spoke like a true researcher, and for a moment his mind was free of all the bad emotions that like poison clouded his mind and judgement. He was vaguely aware of this, strange but fleeting, bliss and tried his best to revel in it now that he could. He knew, now more than ever, that as soon as he was out of here things were going to go downhill for a while, before they started to get better. He wondered, could he go through this as a whole man, or would he come out of it a broken and shattered shadow of his old self?

The hologram appeared behind him. “You’re not supposed to be doing this, Renegade!”

Julian looked up in disbelief. The dark clouds of stormy rage built in his mindscape’s illusory sky.

“What? Didn’t you just say that rules don’t apply to me or something? Also lose that fucking face, you freak, you disgust me.”

The hologram shifted, and it became a mirror image of Julian. He stared at his own face, then at his long and white beard that hid his whole neck like a lumberjack. For a moment he wondered if it was the stress of the last year that had made his beard turn white, but then he decided that he was better off not knowing.

“Better?” His twin image asked.

“Sure, I don’t care.” He said deadpan.

“You’re a weird one, Renegade. But this is not the way to use one of our cores. You--” The hologram said, but stopped when Julian raised his hand.

Julian inhaled, eyes closed, until he felt some semblance of calm. Even then, when he opened his eyes, the tension was showing as a web of veins surfacing at the level of the skin in his neck.

“Shut the fuck up, freak. I do it however I see fit unless you have the power to stop me. Is that clear?” His voice was arctic.

The mirror image threw his hands up and shrugged. “You do you.”

“Of course. So, level cap is fine. What else? Let’s see…” He scrolled through the code. “I become an F+ rank human, alright, cultivation base cap increased to 80, fine, after cultivation 20 is… how many F+ cores? Let’s change that number a bit. Let’s make it 3 cores per stat. yeah. Then… woah, this is nuts!”

“What have you found?” His clone asked.

Julian eyed him with suspicion. Then he shook his head and exhaled. “This is like… the source code of the whole fucking system! Unbelievable.”

“Is it similar to the console you found at the second floor?” his mirror image asked, as if trying to fish for information.

A finger went to caress the handle of the sole gun at Julian’s hip. “How do you know that?”

He shrugged. Julian relaxed his hand, remembering that shooting the hologram was not going to help him.

“No,” he then said, “this is much more than that console. This is the whole system basically.”

“Ah, about that.” The hologram said after a while. It might have been minutes, or even hours, Julian couldn’t tell. “You might want to be quick about what you’re doing.”

Julian noticed that the clone was looking around, trying to spot something.

“Why? Is the System watching?” he asked.

“Not yet. But it can sense the intrusion. I don’t know how much longer I can hide us.”

“Alright, I’ll be fast. Add in just a little tweak here and there so I don’t get caught. Look, I found the math the system uses to calculate the level ups! It’s… it’s crazy. It basically determines the level-up prices on a case-by-case basis. This is unacceptable. Let me upload a new math. Here.”

The hologram was scared now, genuinely scared. “Julian, they’re almost upon me! Quick!”

“Yeah, yeah.” He said lazily. He did not respect the thing enough to grant it more than just a cursory remark. However, it was clear that something was not right.

Then, as he was still typing furiously, he asked: “but who are you really? And why are you helping me now, after the sick little game you played earlier?”

“I’m a…” he paused, looking for words, “an ally, you could say.”

“Hmm…” Julian replied, but he got distracted by something he saw.  “Wait, what is this? This is familiar.”

He tapped furiously, pressed by the fact that he could see the other guy practically drenched in sweat at the corner of his vision. The lines of text scrolled past almost as fast as he could read them, but he didn’t need much time to interpret them. They were very familiar to him.

“This is my AI. I built this code. What’s it doing in the System? It looks… dormant. Let me activate it.”

“No!” his mirror image cried out. “You changed too much. You need to let something go. The system has noticed!”

“Fuck you. I don’t trust you.” He said, but an error code told him that the hologram was not lying. “Okay, okay. Fuck the skill selection then, let me activate this new code.”

His mirror stammered. “Is it really worth it?”

“Man, this looks like a custom quest system, powered by my AI! Of course it’s worth it!”

The white space began to collapse. From the edges inwards, streaks of darkness of a black so dark it seemed to be infinite began to creep towards Julian and his mirror copy. The thing tried to dodge the incoming darkness, but barely after a few moments the encroaching void was already too widespread. It touched the creature, and it began to wither and disappear, screeching and changing shape until it was only a formless mass. Then the void swallowed it. Julian frantically finished inputting the code and pressed enter, not having the time to check for errors, and was thrown out of the inner space of the orb and back into the Oasis in a violent explosion. The Renegade Core was no more, leaving behind only shattered dark crystals, but in its place there was a floating orb of energy. It flew into Julian’s chest, disappearing inside.

>BEGINNING ASCENSION PROCESS…

>WARNING: EXTERNAL TAMPERING DETECTED.

>APPLYING CONTINGENCY MEASURES.

>Rerouting…

>Rerouting…

>Custom Quest System initialized. Rerouting to Special Quest Line: Path to Power.

“Wait, wait, wait… what the fuck?”