More Than a Game Read online

  Chapter One

  A Frolicking Mammoth

  Our head editor, Mammoth, knew how to surprise everyone in the office. His real name was Semyon Ilyich, of course, but behind his back, the only thing anyone ever called him was Mammoth. He was imposingly tall, had a powerful build, was hairy as a bush, and spoke with a booming voice. Sometimes, he’d curse up such a storm that even correspondents accustomed to war zones and other hot spots were impressed by the variety and intricacy of his language. At others, you’d find him in the editorial office chatting with the Koreans in their native tongue. Once in a while, he’d even drop some breakdance moves at corporate parties.

  And every time, the wide-eyed expressions of everyone else in the office (and we’d seen just about everything there was to see) would elicit the same response, “What are you so surprised about? Back in the day, I…” That would be followed by, “…served on a submarine,” “…acted in a movie,” “…spent a year in Seoul.” The list goes on. And it didn’t matter when it looked like there might be a discrepancy in his timeline; if Mammoth said it, it was true.

  And that brings us to this particular day, as I picked up my phone to hear his voice, “Nikiforov, is that you? Sober?” You’ve got to be kidding me. Only once had I ever shown up to work drunk, and that was after a long party more than a year before. Needless to say, it was an occasion he refused to forget, enjoying every chance he had to throw it in my face.

  “Come over to my office.”

  When the boss asked you to come to his office, it meant somebody needed something—and I was never that somebody. I could do without those little taunts, but what could I do? I stepped through the door to see that something was wrong He was sitting at his desk with a thundercloud expression on his face that Genghis Khan, himself, would have been proud of.

  This can’t be good.

  “Nikiforov, it’s about time you did some work around here.”

  I was right: it looked like I was the day’s sacrifice to our fearless leader. He really was a vampire—couldn’t go to sleep until he’d gorged himself on someone’s blood.

  “You call this journalism? I call it crap. And everyone else does fabulous work! Take Petrova. She got a job as a bank teller, worked for a month, and got an inside scoop on their HR problems. They hire country bumpkins, leave them on probation, and pay them so little they’re jealous of bums on the street outside. They enjoy these young little bodies and then fire them the day before their contract is up.”

  He waved his hand. “Hell, Sevastyanov worked with the police to uncover an underground casino. So maybe he just wanted to write an article about a casino he had found, and maybe he got drunk and blabbed to an old friend, and maybe that friend worked for the police. But they figured it out. He got an official award from the cops, and that same night, the casino cracked his skull with a pipe—a bonus, I guess. That may have landed him in the hospital, but our numbers are up, and that’s the important thing. And what about you?”

  “What about me?” The defense is ready, your honor. “Petrova has her ‘Give it a Try’ column, and Sevastyanov is on the crime beat. If you care to remember, all I have is the society column. It’s one long string of nothing. What is there to write about? Who’s fighting with whom; who cursed who; which men are sleeping with which other men; how we’re all just drinking our lives away? It’s the same people traipsing from one club to another, doing the same thing day after day.” I paused as at thought struck me. “Well, sometimes they throw in a little cocaine or heroin for good measure, to spice things up a bit.”

  Mammoth grunted and said, “I’ll give you that. People aren’t who they used to be… Just take you, for instance, showing up for work straight off a bender.” He saw the glare on my face and waved it away. “Okay, okay, I’m just kidding. But really, your articles lately have been rough. No, let’s call a spade a spade; they’re terrible, and that’s why I’m giving you a story.”

  I wilted on the spot. Mammoth had decided to give me a story? Himself? Of his own free will? Up was down, black was white, and hell had frozen over. After all, he might as well have had a sign over his door that read, “Let your imagination run wild, you parasites, and don’t forget to liven up the facts. And if that’s not what you’re about, then don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” And here he was giving me a story? I looked at him warily…

  “Okay,” Mammoth said unfazed. “Do you happen to know what the most popular form of entertainment is right now?” Again, he waved any answer away. “Eh, don’t answer that—you’ll just mutter something about booze. Virtual worlds are currently at the top of the list—the latest generation, I mean, with full immersion. You know, where there’s a capsule you get into, and they attach some kind of electrodes to your skull. Then voilà, you’re transported into another reality where you’re covered in iron with a club in your hand…or a sword. Whatever.

  Mammoth paused for emphasis. “They say your real life is THERE, and you come back here just to wolf down some food and go to the bathroom. It’s ridiculous, obviously, but there must be something to it if so many people are doing it. I want you to try it, see what it’s like, do some fighting, and write an article…, actually, six or seven feature-length stories with follow-ups.”

  “Semyon,” I quickly whined. “I don’t play games! You should really have Petrova do it; she’s the one who should ‘Give it a Try.’ But no, she gets to be an animator in Turkey or work for someone on Rublevka[1]. I’m the one stuck climbing into capsules. And you know what—”

  “Oh, stop it!” roared Mammoth, shaking his disheveled, uncut, gray mane. “All Petrova knows are the letters on her computer, and sometimes she has problems with those. Just recently, she was looking for the ‘any’ key on her keyboard. She couldn’t find it and spent the whole morning crying. And don’t give me that crap about how you don’t play games. Do you think I don’t know about those office LAN battles you started a few years back? You obviously know something about games.”

  “Where would I even get a capsule?” I broke out the big guns, playing on his stinginess. “I know how much they cost. And subscriptions cost an arm and a leg. You think I’m paying for all that myself?”

  “You don’t have to pay for it,” Mammoth grunted. “Remember the people in suits who came by the other week? No? It doesn’t matter. They were from Radeon, the company that designs the capsules—and the game, of course. Naturally, they gave me a capsule and a game certificate. And that got me thinking about how I don’t do any of that stuff…”

  Then, it all made sense, the old fart. Jeans—it had to be jeans—advertisements, usually paid for in cash, that masquerade as part of an article or movie. So he was getting a cut under the table. What do you know?

  “…and a VIP account for a whole six months. I don’t think people like that would give us just any old crap, and whatever they made, can’t be that bad. So, I want you to walk around in there, check it out, and write an objective, good—let me emphasize, GOOD—article. And if it isn’t good, we’ll have another talk about your alcohol problems. Or maybe I’ll just fire you for betraying the level of trust we’ve placed in you. Anyway, tomorrow the capsule will be delivered, so make sure you’re at home starting at around two. As soon as they set it up, get in there. You have two weeks…no, make that a month. Just so long as I have a six- or seven-part series on my desk at the end of it. And write something about Radeon—the capsule is comfortable; your back doesn’t hurt afterward; it’s easy on the ass; something like that…”

  If I was logical about it, Mammoth’s stream of consciousness should have sent me off to drink my sorrows away with a drooping head—if only to maintain my reputation. Hey, if you say I’m an alcoholic, that’s what I’ll be. But
I wasn’t in the mood for booze. Instead, I quickly gathered the papers on my desk, stuffed them into a drawer, and announced to my officemates, “Ciao, suckers. Mammoth sent me on a work trip for a month, so you all are welcome to turn green with envy.”

  “I hope you’re on your way to Chechnya or Antarctica,” Kaleria Georgievna chimed in sarcastically. She wrote the “Our Little Friends” column about pets. We all called her the Rat, thanks to her toothy face, gray hair, and gnawing personality

  “The perfect place for you!” she declared.

  “Nope.” I shook my head. “It’s Sochi for a month to write about life on the beach. The velvet season[2] is coming up, so everyone who’s anyone is there!”

  “Son of a bi-i-itch!” groaned half the office, and I ran out with a wave of my briefcase. Everyone was about to go jump down Mammoth’s throat about how he paid the annoying kid to spend the month of June in Sochi instead of someone better or more decorated, and I wasn’t about to stick around for him to make life miserable for me. But really, what business did he have bringing up my drunken adventure or giving me jeans assignments? And without offering me even a tiny cut!

  On my way out of the building, I contemplated my profession. The work of a journalist is something like that of a detective. First, you collect information, then you mull it over for a while, and then… Well, then you finish the job. Detectives use the information they gain secretly against a specific person or group of people, so long as they had an agreement ahead of time. For journalists, the opposite is true. We put the information before the public, and in so doing, earn ourselves a reputation and enough money to put food on the table.

  Although, hold on a second, I thought, maybe “reputation” wasn’t the right word. From then on, I’d talk about the “experience” or “XP” I got from beating quests, killing monsters, or going through whatever else there was to do in the game.

  I’m a gamer now. Phew boy! Although, maybe you have a reputation in the game, too? That doesn’t matter now. Time to collect information.

  On my way home, my mind wandered back to the RPGs and MMORPGs I’d played umpteen years before. I hadn’t been hardcore or anything. I had been a normal kid growing up in the age of computers, so I spent plenty of time browsing social networks, paging through forums, and sometimes even looking up porn. (And don’t give me that “only perverts look up porn” nonsense—everyone does…it’s just that not everyone admits it.) And, of course, I played games. Shooters had taken up most of my time, though I played enough RPGs to know my way around them. Everything was different now: capsules and virtual reality that felt, well, real.

  Incidentally, let me take a moment to introduce myself. I haven’t told you anything, which isn’t right, though there isn’t much to tell… I’m 36 years old from Moscow. I’m divorced and don’t have any kids. I live alone, and I’ve spent my 36 years much as anyone else my age has. I’m a typical big-city guy, who grew up in a typical home, and I have a typical life ahead of me. I was born, went to school, went to college, and enlisted in the army. (Okay, so it’s a little out of the ordinary to enroll in the army after getting a degree…) I served out my contract, found a job, got married, got divorced, and here we are.

  I joined the army because I had nothing better to do. You know, sometimes that’s how it goes. You’re living a full, satisfying life, and then one day, something happens, and you’re left with nothing. That’s how it was for me. I had a degree, a girl, KVN[3], a sweet ride (it may not have been new, but at least it was a Chrysler), and a best friend. Then I graduated, my KVN fell apart, the chassis broke on the Chrysler, and it would have been cheaper just to buy a new car. Then I caught my girlfriend with the guy I thought was my best friend. So that’s how it went, almost like in a movie—one minute I was on top of the world, and the next I had nothing.

  Then I did something I’d never done before. I unloaded the whole mess to my dad, who downed a shot of rum and said, “Go join the army. That’ll clear your head. When you spend all your time hungry, people yell at you all day long, and you wonder if you’ll be given a rag or your toothbrush when it comes time to clean the toilet, you stop caring about everything else. It’s just in the movies that soldiers think about their girlfriend back home. There, you just care about finding more food and getting out of extra work. Well, and you try to get hit as little as possible. Or you could join the navy—they’ll make your life look like a fairytale. It’s brutal.”

  So, I headed over to our local recruiting office, where the shocked blockhead of a recruiter almost signed me up for the psychology division. From Moscow? With a degree? Wants to join the army? Came and volunteered because he wanted to learn something useful? The poor guy’s head almost exploded.

  Off I went for a year and a half. Marines? Paratroopers? Nope. I went for the military engineers. And wouldn’t you know, my old man was right. When you’re always hungry, your most valued possession is a roll of toilet paper (newspapers make your butt itch), and your ribs are sore from the punch Sergeant Poletaev gave you the day before (those hillbillies sure do love city people, and especially Muscovites…they love them straight into the hospital sometimes), everything else takes on a different perspective. My KVN fell apart—no problem, we were never all that close to begin with. The car broke down—no worries, the subway was built to weather a nuclear war, so it would be there until the end of days. Your girl ran off with your ex-friend—is that really that big a loss? Ah, though a helping of mom’s borscht and a few of her tiny cupcakes…

  Still, six months in, it got a lot easier, and nothing lasts forever; everyone’s contract is up sooner or later. Eventually, I was back home, bedecked in ribbons, commendations, and a shiny service record. My dad took one look at me, told me I was a man now and handed me the key to the apartment he had gotten from my grandfather. I celebrated with a healthy helping of vodka, made the night better for a healthy helping of girls, and heard the good news that my ex-friend had already had time to both marry and divorce my ex-girlfriend three months after the wedding when he caught her under a neighbor.

  I spent some time wondering if she was then passed on to the neighbor like just another hand-me-down. Then, I dug up my old journalism diploma, blew the dust off it, looked for a job, and found one at a newspaper called the Capital Herald. And so, there I was, waiting for the capsule. Actually, I did more than just sit there; I also collected information. The day before, after I left work, I had decided to just grab some food and hit the sack, but today, I dove into the game forums.

  So there it was: Fayroll. It had a ton of players, swords, magic, and a bunch of races, specializations, and crafting. There were four enormous—absolutely gigantic—player zones with lots of locations on a single-player continent. A newly discovered second continent was being developed and wasn’t as densely populated. There were extensive quests, a fully nonlinear process, and myriad NPCs (non-player characters) built into the game to give players quests, help them, hurt them, or simply create a fully immersive atmosphere and ambiance. The main thing that had changed since my gaming days was that, instead of a monitor (and later a neuro-helmet) and third-person view (or sometimes first-person), the game featured 100 percent immersion. In other words, the only difference between it and the real world was that it wasn’t real.

  I glanced at the clock and shook my head. Already three o’clock, and still nobody. Maybe they won’t come? I thought. What then? Maybe everything had changed, the certificate had been canceled, and I was off the hook? And, of course, just when I started to hope for the best, the doorbell rang. I opened the door, and two glowering, uniformed men tramped into my apartment, one older than the other.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked gloomily. They didn’t cheer me up.

  “Of course there is,” answered the older one. “You live on the seventh floor, and your elevator doesn’t work. We had to carry this monster up here ourselves, and it’s a beast.”

  And with that, they carried in a box about five feet tall in whi
ch, it appeared, a fairy-tale steed waited to rush me off into a magical world of swords, magic, fatal beauties, and daring adventure. My only comfort was that it wouldn’t be for long.

  An hour later, the furniture had been moved around (it turns out that the capsule had to be set up just so in a certain area), swear words had flowed freely, and the capsule was in place. My new friends left, and I circled the novel object that had taken over my apartment.

  A few turns, and I had a grasp of what, from the outside, looked something like a bathtub and something like a small boat with wires and other attachments sticking out of it.

  “Well, waiting won’t change anything. Let’s see what this guy can do.”

  And I sat down at my computer.

  Before the installers left, they explained what I needed to do and press. According to them, during the first launch, the machine read your subcortex, aligning the equipment to maximize player comfort. I asked them if it was possible to get overly engrossed in the game, and they told me it had a feature that disabled player activity when the system detected that the player’s brain was at its limit. The player was forced into a dream state where his vision was blurry and he lacked coordination. Basically, it made it impossible to play the game. I thought that was a smart way to do things. I remembered friends back when I used to play games that would get so involved that they went for 12 to 16 hours without eating or drinking. I’ve seen junkies who looked better…

  The whole monstrosity (the installers called it a “neural bath,” though I stuck with “capsule”) was hooked up to my computer, where I first registered and created an account. My first surprise was that I could only play one character. Back in the good old days, I could have five accounts per server, and many more characters, and there were almost unlimited servers.

  But not here. Pick something and play. Level-up; develop skills; and accumulate things, friends, and enemies. And if I didn’t like the result or got tired of it, I could delete it—with everything I had accumulated and my entire backstory—and get a new one. Those were my only choices.