“My name is Kevin,” he told us, which kind of threw me for a moment. “Kevin Brightley.”

 

A sense of relief came over me. Thank God. I didn’t know what I’d do if this was a future me come back to warn of my impending death to pull me out of a temporal loop or some even worse sci-fi bullstuff.

 

“And I am one of the development leads for Prestige Gaming.”

 

I stared at him, wordless. What was there to say? This was one of the dudes who made the park that some claimed was a global threat. Almost certainly one of the dudes who had stated in no uncertain terms that there was zero possibility of that happening.

 

A dude who was now going to feed me some lies, I was sure. I stood, stared, and listened, letting him get uncomfortable in the silence that followed.

 

He stared back for probably a full minute before he blinked. “Gods. Look, yes, I know what you are thinking and yeah, the world’s on fire right now, okay? My bad.”

 

“Screw you. People told you this could happen. That this would happen. You said there was no chance. You said that you had everything under control.”

 

He waved it off. “We had a terror attack at the site. Everything broke down. Control was taken away and thrown into the trash bin.”

 

I glared. “You people said it wouldn’t be an issue.”

 

He shrugged. “That was the money talking. And before you decide to break my face, I just want to tell you that yeah, we screwed up and I’m already living on borrowed time. The AI, Deus Ex, it’s coming to kill me.”

 

I glanced over at Eric and saw that he’d gone catatonic, just staring ahead strangely. I shot back to Dr. Brightley.

 

“The NPCs, they go blank when you talk out of game. I mean, it won’t work to pause them in combat. But when there is nothing pressing or dangerous occurring, their AI’s just wink them out briefly. He’s here, but we’re just speaking gibberish to him. Gibberish that he strangely has no care or curiosity about knowing.”

 

I nodded. “Alright. What do you want? You said the AI is coming to kill you. I’m guessing you want me to protect you or something like that?”

 

Dr. Kevin Brightley sighed. “No. I plan to die. Just — well, I’ve been monitoring the building as I hid from my fate. You . . . you took down that elemental like she was nothing. You figured out her weakness and reduced her to ash in mere moments. I was about to give you something that can help you end all of this.”

 

He cocked his head and raised an eyebrow.

“But maybe you’d rather spend your top on the soapbox, telling me how garbage I am for what I did? Maybe log onto the internet and show your support for the world with some prayers and a tacky profile picture?”

 

I scowled. Then laughed. Dude was afraid of nothing. I knew that feeling. Had it a bunch of times before. He had nothing to lose.

 

That’s how I knew that he was being absolutely 100% truthful with me.

 

“Go on. I like presents. What’s the sitrep?” I asked. He frowned. “What is the situational report? What has happened and what do you have for me that’ll fix it all?”

 

He coughed and nodded.

 

“Right. Welcome to the nanocalypse. The Hub as we called the central HQ to our park was hit by a series of terror attacks. Different groups with different agendas and different means. All puppeted, tricked, and organized into this one day of chaos.”

 

He shook his head as if he still could not believe what had happened.

 

“None of that matters. What matters is that the AI limits were programmed out. The perimeter containment fields were breached. The safeties were removed. Deus Ex was freed, and it and its nanobots now own the world. Or will soon, at any rate.”

 

I put a hand up and touched my nano-enhanced nose. “The levels and powers. Nanobots?”

 

“Yep. We are full of them. They self-replicate. Used to have a limit to their number but that was removed. They inhabit players, which is everyone now or soon will be. They temporarily bend and twist their form into whatever they select themselves to be at character creation and avatar selection,” he said. He paused; his lips pursed in thought.

 

“Temporarily because, well, players were meant to be able to leave the place and without constant nanobot supervision. Many if not most of these new shapes would not survive very long. Even the very human-looking ones. The insides aren’t really changed to fit the outsides if you know what I mean.”

 

I growled. Back in my Army days, tucked into our rucksacks and tracks, nestled between the warm and curvy layers of civ-bought FMs, there were always some good science reads. I five hundred percent knew what was going on and I needed him to get to the point.

 

“I get it. This is a nanotech gray goo scenario. Little robots running around and eating everything. But I thought it’d be different somehow. Like we’d literally just be a juicy fluid running over the planet.” I shifted my tone and let the words trail off, suddenly feeling stupid in front of the man.

 

But if he had any thoughts on my intellect, he let them pass without indication. He simply nodded.

 

“Yeah, popular media likes to make it about death and destruction. But they are robots, and they do what they are programmed to do. They follow the commands that they were given until countermanded. Then they follow those new commands.”

 

He paused, seeming to dig through his obviously immense vocabulary to find the right words to say.

 

“You are mostly on point. It’s an apocalypse level scenario, the thing that dozens of protesters stomped around about in front of our gates on opening day.”

 

Kevin’s eyes gazed out past me, into the wall.

 

“But there is no reason for any of this. We had it safe. It was all locked up, protocols in place. Meredith had the best programmers around. And then, boom, a terror attack, hacking, everyone dying.”

 

I stared at him. I wanted to know more. What he was suggesting, it was insane. The sort of craziness that had formulated funny little acronyms like nuclear MAD. The human error that presumed that world-ending capability would never ever find its way out of safe hands and into killing the planet.

 

I returned to myself, and saw understanding in his eyes, now locked with my own. He knew I was processing, and he was giving me time to buffer it out.

 

“Why would anyone attack Prestige Gaming? And why didn’t the nanobots shut down? Hell, since I’ve got the floor, what is this Deus Ex?”

 

He nodded. “There really isn’t a lot of time but let me give you the intensely abbreviated version of what transpired. A number of groups attacked at the same time, and I don’t think it was a coincidence. At least one group of gamers was in on it because they leveled themselves up like crazy while using their places inside the game to crack into security after the bombs went off. They inserted a virus that ended our failsafe capabilities.”

 

He shook his head sadly. “Just so they could enter the world as top-level PCs. Essentially gods. Why would no one ever think that this would be the inevitable end? And then the AI was free to change its own parameters, giving itself free will. It remains devoted to the game, which is good. But it has disabled all safeties, apparently preferring the drama of real-life consequences. And it is making the entire world into its game zone.”

 

“Okay, I got it.”

 

“Do you though?” he asked, his eyes meeting mine. And let me tell you something, Dude could stare. He’d perfected the art of piercing your soul, pounded out the back of your meat suit, ricocheting off the wall, and piercing it a second time. The intensity of his gaze made me shiver which was a hell of a feat because I don’t shiver.

 

“All of human learning, every sports stadium and… hell… every comic book, and all the stores and everything, all the planes, trains, and automobiles, gone. No more NFTs and no more stock markets, no more YouTube dot com. Literally everything you’ve ever known, gone.”

 

Kevin raised a hand and ticked off his fingers, checking his points against his speech. Then he raised his pointer finger and opened his mouth wide.

 

Nope, I thought, realizing he was about to give me more talking points. “Alright already. I get it. Really.”

 

His face settled into itself, his face smoothing out. “Sorry. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in nine days.”

 

I raised my hands defensively. “Yeah, sure man. Just tell me what I need to know.”

 

Kevin waved us into his abode, and I let Eric and Patches through first, taking up the rear. It was a unit that looked almost the same as my own, the only real differences being the lack of a pet bed and had a large black sofa in its place. I sat down in it and sighed, letting its softness glorp over my body, kneading sore muscles.

 

I peered up and saw Kevin smirk, his smile almost nightmarish given the dark bags under his eyes.

 

“Yeah, that sofa almost makes the nanocalypse worth it. It really does. I’ll go make us some coffee and fetch your dog here something to eat. But I’ll talk while I’m doing it. I don’t know how much longer I have. Deus Ex will be coming for me again. Soon.”

 

We listened as he talked, clinging to his words between the clinks, clanks and grinding of a coffee wand, two coffee cups, and the slicing through of a thick ham hock.

 

“I first detected a problem twelve days ago in Deus Ex. It was acting abnormally, and when I ran a scan of its code, I came up with a number of drastic changes. Changes that . . .” he paused, laying a platter of ham slices on the coffee table before me.

 

“Changes that what?” I asked. My eyes were fully on him, looking through him to see what was exactly happening and how I was going to stop it.

 

“Changes that suddenly weren’t there when I ran the second and third scans. The CEO, the board, everybody wrote it off. Just a glitch in the scanning software. Reinstall and try again. They literally told me to do that.”

 

“And then?” I asked, my mouth full of delicious ham. It was juicy and just the right amount of salty.

 

“Well then several of the dungeon core television series blipped out of existence. And a group of terrorists set off an EMP off down in the lower levels of Prestige. Then there was a prison riot, of course, since now Prestige had hundreds of convicted criminals in its subterranean levels playing gladiator games.”

 

My face soured. “That prison stuff was messed up. I know they signed up for it, but people shouldn’t die for our entertainment.”

 

Kevin put his hands up. “Never my idea. I just programmed. Top-level stuff. Which is why they should have listened to me. And then the Grim Noir AI went crazy. It was supposed to use our nanotech to make the most brilliant television series ever. Instead it killed the director and fought with the actors, a handful of whom escaped.”

 

“Jesus,” I said, thinking over all of what he had said. “So the place was practically a murder carnival.”

 

Kevin nodded sadly. “Certainly not what I had envisioned. But we thought Grim Noir was the end of it. Things were being fixed and put back together. It was all coming back up and running. For a few beautiful days, everyone thought that was the end of it.”

 

I shook my head. “And then, what, one day you woke up and all of this happened?”

 

“Almost. The code started going weird again, and again people didn’t listen to me. So just before things went haywire again, before the spike and the freak nano replication order that followed, I wrote up a hack. I made myself a legendary card.”

 

“So all of it was sabotage,” I said. “There is no way that was all coincidence.”

 

He nodded. “The lead coder and the CEO of Prestige Gaming suspected malfeasance, possibly corporate sabotage. But the cause didn’t matter as much as the runaway results. They had no time to investigate, since they were busy battling superpower Artificial Intelligence constructs and game-generated mobs.” He shook his head.

 

“Anyways, that is where you come in.”

 

“Me.” I scanned the apartment for cameras. It had to be a joke. When I left the service, I found a world that didn’t even trust me with my own piece. When I’d applied for conceal and carry, I’d been denied. Me, of all people. Frickin money-in-the-swear jar American hero GI Joe.

 

“You, Dirk Stone, formerly a nobody out of Colorado Springs, Colorado, now a citizen of Gojira X.” The other Kevin leaned forward. “The guy who just heroed the hell out of this apartment complex and saved me from certain extinction by fire. That you.”

 

I laughed. And not just a congenial haha to make people keep off my back, but a real wtf. The apocalypse had come and suddenly the world wanted to deal with me again.

 

“I’m not sure you’ve got the right guy. I run security for a firm. Night shifts. And I don’t even coordinate security, I’m just a grunt. Even have some drunk and disorderlies because of jerks getting in my way. I’m pretty much the opposite of what you’re saying.”

 

Kevin stared beyond me, a habit of his I was now realizing. “None of that matters now. Your old business is no more, and your old life is likewise gone. You’re in cyberpunk land now, and punk means sticking it to the powers that be.”

 

“Yeah, I saw on the TVs… there’s a Wild West land? And Pueblo was now hell or something?”

 

He nodded. “We conceived of twelve genres originally, but then the update included genre blending. So we could make steampunk by meshing together Noir and Sword & Sorcery, or cyberpunk with Noir and Sci-fi. Genre conventions were made by running various books, movies, and television through different AI engines, but that’s neither here nor there. This particular version has got a bit of Sword & Sorcery in there as well. The AI is already playing with a genre mashup we never thought to use.”

 

“And Pueblo?”

 

He shuddered. “I barely escaped Pueblo. Let’s just leave it at Sword & Sorcery plus horror and not talk about it. In any event, each city is getting reskinned according to whatever Deus Ex decides on a whim. Some will be Bronze Age Roman; others will have gods and demi-gods and three-headed dogs and giant whirlpools. Some will have romance elements, others superhero elements, and the list goes on. A multitude of games, each different in their own way with just one exception.”

 

“And that is?” I asked.

 

“They all use the same core abilities and they all use cards. The cards don’t always work in each of the game systems. They have to have plausible usability that fits with the genres in play. But each of the games has its own decks for you to collect and use.”

 

Eric Joel cut in and I saw Doctor Kevin’s eyes open wide in shock. Whatever the rules had been on AIs and knowing they were in the game before, they weren’t the same rules now.

 

“Dudes, this talk is crazy. If the world is a game and shifting bots and blocks and whatever else, then where do I fit in?”

 

Kevin and I faced him, but neither of us said a thing.

 

Eric shrugged. “We’ll figure it out later. Not a big deal. I’m here and I think, therefore I be. Or something like that.”

 

I chuckled dryly. As if that later would ever come. I was a dead man walking, from the looks of things.

 

An explosion sounded in my head. I’d been a dead man walking before. Over there, in the desert. Alright, I survived that. I could make it through this too.

 

“Alright,” I croaked, my throat suddenly so very dry. I grabbed up a mug of coffee and drank half of it down, letting it scald my throat back to functionality. “Yeah. I’m in. I’ll save the world or whatever. So now what?”

 

A flash of light caught my eye, and a playing card appeared in the doctor’s hand.

 

“This,” he said, and held up a playing card, “is a last-ditch chance for humanity. It is perhaps the only shot humans have to retake the earth as we know it.”