I headed up the elevator and went to my suite, grabbing a shower then cracking open a can of dog food and feeding Patches.

 

“You’re gonna have to stay here, boy. I’ve got some work to do down by the market,” I told him. He cocked his head and whimpered. I patted his head and left.

 

Down at the elevators the big screen was on, showing the latest in world terrors. A combined British-French-Spanish-Portuguese navy was blasting at the waves of gray goo rolling through the Atlantic. Concentrated fire from 180 degrees of positioning bunched up bubbled globules of the stuff, which in turn was hit by soaring dive bombers. They screamed through on run after run. 

 

The ticker on the bottom noted that The Mass, as it was now being called, had been nuked. Specifically, The United Kingdom Fires Nuclear Weapons into The Mass to Great Effect. Subsequent Attempts Fail.

 

That suggested something had happened that I wanted to see. I cast about, looking for the vidscreen remote. There was none.

 

“I just want to change the channel. Holy hell,” I yelled at the ceiling. The screen flickered and changed. Flames roared up across the screen, then the nude figure of a super-hot succubus walked from the heat, beckoning me, the viewer, to come closer. About her the words HOLY HELL burst alight then fell into ash.

 

It was a porno. I bust out laughing.

 

“Change the channel,” I ordered. “Nuking the mass.”

 

The vidscreen changed and I saw the mass from space. The thing was almost silver when looking at it through the porthole of the International Space Station, and it resembled an amoeba.

 

That was interesting.

 

I’d thought that it was radiating out like an explosion, shockwaves rippling out in an almost dartboard pattern of circles within circles. But no. This was a living organism. I could understand its movements. Its outstretched tendrils here and there.

 

It had been choosing its battles. Plowing horn-shaped attacks here and there around this place and that, then surrounding them and taking them via attacks on all sides. I saw pockets in the mass covering North America and in my mind’s eye I knew that these were places where the nanobots had been knocked about hard enough to put them to a standstill.

 

Good luck with that, I thought.

 

But I remembered my deployment, the hill combat around my garrison, year 2, in sandy rock explosion land. That had been the same situation. Thousands of screaming crusaders for their faith charging, through grenades, firing from every conceivable angle.

 

And we’d survived.

 

I gave the vidscreen a nod. Good luck to them.

 

A bright flash shot through the atmosphere and the camera went fuzzy for a second, readjusting against the powerful glare of nuclear armageddon, zooming into the place where it had just kabloomied the mess of tiny little nano-bot soldiers. 

 

I couldn’t tell exactly, but the blast looked like it must have been massive. Situated a third of the way across the Atlantic, it kicked up a mess of soot, dust and flame, a mushroom-cloud pluming up and out over a sudden missing nanopath-cleared multi-kilometer patch of blue ocean.

 

Electo Magnetic Pulse.

 

Of course.

 

I remembered the classes, the nuclear operations exercises. Those robots that hadn’t been cooked had been shorted out.

 

My eyes remained glued to the screen. What happened after that? How hadn’t the subsequent nukes been able to fix the problem?

 

“Change the channel. All nuclear attacks that occurred after this one.”

 

The same feed showed on screen but time had progressed. I saw that the patch from the first nuke was slowly filling in, but the AI seemed to be having trouble. The fact that it was able to enter and slowly take over despite the EMP was impressive.

 

But what was even more impressive was how it dealt with the second nuke. 

 

After a moment of nothing from the ISS, the camera view shifted to show water merging under the bots into impressively armed war planes. The planes rose up and shot forward, blasting at the nuke with an array of plasma autocannons and magnetic lampoons.

 

They targeted the propulsion, not the missile itself, and quickly the weapon fell into the waiting arms of the nanites, who wasted no time in cannibalizing it into a UFO.

 

I looked back at the bare patches in North America. They weren’t winning. They were just delaying the inevitable.

 

Little holes were still holding out in spots that I knew to be the larger military bases. And some of those were covered by the thin sheen of nano-goop.

 

No doubt the AI had some sort of rule about killing people during assimilation. A rule that it obviously didn’t have to follow after people became players.

 

The screen shifted, showing the third and forth attempts. I found that I could command the screen to time-lapse faster, and watched in growing dismay as the Europeans flew in nuclear missions to the same effect.

 

“Show me the EU. Show me the news, what they’re saying.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. It’d all fallen apart. Even if they weren’t admitting it yet. The world had gone to garbage.

 

When I opened them back up I saw the prime minister of England, a dumpy middle aged woman with a buzzcut and a pantsuit with patches at the elbows. She wore a grim smile and I couldn’t help but admire the stiff-lipped mentality of the people there.

 

She carried a file folder under one elbow, a three ringed binder that screamed authority and data. 

 

Standing behind her was the one-hundred-and-forty-year old monarch King Charles the III, not looking a day over twenty-seven. I’d heard about his use of nanites and bionic replacement joints, but I’d never bothered to see the results.

 

They were impressive.

 

“We are on the precipice of annihilation,” the prime minister said, “but in the immortal words of our forebears, we will never surrender, never give in. We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the streets, we will–”

 

Her words cut off suddenly, as behind her the British monarchy belched loudly, and his eye bulged in his head. He dropped to a knee, clutching at his stomach.

 

People in the audience began to murmur, and a pair of security agents rushed to his side.

 

That’s when it became obvious that he was weeping blood. I stared, a premonition of doom beginning to ride over me.

 

He’d put nanites in his body. And the PRestige Gaming AI Deus Ex had hacked them. I was sure of it, despite how much I hoped it wasn’t so.

 

The prime minister froze with a concerned frown, then turned back to the king. The king jerked back upright like a puppet whose strings were being run by a child. His eyes were bugging out of his head, and the blood was now spraying out at high pressure, drenching her from face to pelvis.

 

He belched again, a sound that sounded mechanical and had definitely been amplified.

 

“WELCOME TO PRESTIGE GAMING,” he deadpanned.

 

I sighed. Had definitely called it. 

 

King Charles was heaving, gasping deep breaths. Several people on stage had backed away from him, casting worried glances all about as they did so.

 

The prime minister, crimson dripping all over her, turned to the audience and screamed. 

 

And the king, he started gasping, muttering a series of guttural noises. “Hurr, hurr, hurr,” he repeated, the noise echoing over the crowd.

 

I saw my hand shaking and I realized that I needed a beer. This was way too much.

 

Luckily I’d had a refrigerator, a little mini-box self-contained unit, moved here. It made sense since I so often seemed to be coming in here now.

 

I jumped up and headed for the fridge, still staring at whatever the hell was unfolding. Calamari appeared, but I was just blindly reaching for my beer.

 

“Greetings, DIRK STONE! Are you enjoying your television program?” He chuckled and I frowned, but I quickly judged his words to have been without malice or ill intent. I was pretty sure he was his own AI, independent of the monster that was taking over my world. 

 

“It’s hard to watch. But definitely need to know,” I told him. “Just give me a beer.” 

 

“We have several specials right now–”

 

“Whatever lager is popular, yes authorize.”

 

“But–”

 

“Calamari, cut it short, okay? Gimme a beer.”

 

A beer appeared in my hand, while on screen the king threw his head back, screaming out in tremendous pain. His mouth was open, and he was making choking noises. People were shouting at each other, and the assembled crowd was in retreat, pushing and trampling anyone who couldn’t keep up.

 

“It appears that he has come under attack,” Calamari observed. “I am unfamiliar with the card involved, but that is not an enviable position to be in. Please be careful DIRK STONE.” 

 

I stared. Could he actually be a real ally, despite having been created by Deus Ex?

 

That was something I was going to have to figure out.

 

“Thank you, Calamari. I appreciate the sentiment,” I said, pounding the beer and buying another.  

 

Onscreen the nanites came pouring out of the King’s mouth. A thick cloud of sentient cloud that swarmed over the mess of them, turning to goop and melting everything non-sentient that it came into contact with.

 

Soldiers and security men began shooting at the swarm, but it was obviously a done deal. Especially since the king didn’t stop. Nanites just kept pouring out of his mouth, an infinite cloud of them.

 

And everyone they touched dropped to the ground in a stupor.

 

Character creation. I shook my head. What a way to enter the system.

 

People were screaming and running. Weapons were firing. And the whole country was inevitably gone.

 

I pounded my second beer and got a third.

 

Doctor Kevin hadn’t been lying when he said that card was the only help. Me, the savior of humanity. A short wave of terror swept through me, but I tossed it aside.

 

This was too much. I had the card and I was going to use it to fix everything. Because this was a nightmare.

 

The broadcast cut out after a good two more minutes of vomitous mess: the king leaping over the crowd with incredible agility and seizing people by the shoulders, tossing their unconscious bodies to the ground in the pursuit for more quarry. Swarming hordes dropping all the rest.

 

It’d have been a massacre if the people there had actually been killed.

 

And I was rather certain that it would become one rather quickly, after they’d been processed in the game. 

 

I turned away from the vidscreen and hit the button for the elevator. That was a different world out there. One that I’d bring back through covert ops.

 

But before I could do anything, I needed to get out of this place. And for that, it was time to load up and see what the markets had to offer.