Chapter 3: It Feels So Good!

  Memories are funny things.

  Fragments of a life. Tiny, fleeting details that paint a person’s story.

  Some remain, most fade.

  Others are buried on purpose.

  Guided by the steady hand of the UE, our implants were more than tools.

  They kept us safe. Stable. Sane.

  But now, with mine offline—replaced by something alien—the truth was revealed.

  The memories were never erased.

  —

  I stood frozen as confetti and digital sparkles rained around me.

  For just a moment, my hands trembled as realisation struck me. I stared at the ichor on my knuckles as the red of my blood mixed with yellow.

  I’d taken a life. A sentient soul.

  Then a wave of the most incredible, sublime pleasure I had ever experienced swept through me, rolling my eyes in my skull and curling my toes.

  I watched the wounds on my forearms knit closed. Feeling in my dead arm returned with a wash of pins-and-needles and I clenched my fist a few times experimentally.

  Good as new.

  I felt euphoric, powerful and alive as never before and grinned when no rush of drugs was released to dampen the sensation.

  The frenetic drumming began anew, but this time, it was almost drowned out by the roar of voices cheering.

  Spectators.

  “Congratulations on reaching Level 2! Wow! That was fast." The alien presenter practically trilled the words, sounding absolutely and hideously, ecstatic. “You must be some kind of bloodthirsty monster to find, and kill a living, sentient being less than a minute from the end of the tutorial speech! Good job! Seriously, there are almost 80 billion of you on here and a little less than 1500 deaths have occurred.” She giggled again. “And of those, more than half were from falling somewhere unfortunate! Oops!”

  The afterglow of pleasure still tingled in my fingers and toes and I fought to wipe the wide grin from my face. I knew I should feel bad about killing. I should be sick to my stomach… but damn, it just felt so good.

  I wondered if it would be this way every time, and to my horror, realised I was already looking for my next enemy.

  The thing had attacked me, that Gosporian bug.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  It had deserved what it got.

  The UE told us that violence was a disease of the past.

  That we’d been cured of it.

  I chuckled at the memory. I had a funny feeling that I might have just caught myself a bad case of it.

  “For this exceptional achievement, and showing some true go-getter behaviour you receive the following rewards.”

  They appeared in my HUD as she spoke.

  1. Early access to the Inventory function.

  2. Basic Identify Overlays, upgraded to Basic+.

  3. 3x Red Balls & 3x Blue Balls & 3x Green Balls.

  4. The ‘Hatchling Predator’ Perk.

  I had no bloody idea what any of that meant. After a moment though, a memory rose to the surface.

  The UE had banned video games when I was nine years old. Claiming it was a necessary step to improve productivity and unity. Either way, I’d been a freshly implanted youth and hadn’t been capable of caring.

  I used to play this game, right before the ban. Though I couldn’t for the life of me remember its name. In it I’d run around, collecting materials which I would store in an inventory, return to a home base and build whatever I could imagine.

  At night, creatures would come to destroy what I had erected.

  I picked the dead Gosporian up by one of its limp forelimbs, and with a thought it blinked away in a puff of displaced air. A haptic buzz in my brain accompanied its departure. A little suitcase icon now blinked beneath the human body in my HUD and I mentally clicked it. A table of perhaps 24 boxes expanded, but only the first four were populated.

  The first three each showed a different coloured ball. As I thought of them, a description popped up beneath each.

  Red Ball: Restores 10% HP

  Blue Ball: Restores 10% MP (Locked)

  Green Ball: Restores 10% Fatigue

  The last slot showed the mangled corpse of the Gosporian Drone along with the modifier: ‘Edible’ which I thought was pretty fucked up.

  The announcer seemed content to wait for me, and I realised I could still hear her faintly, humming that damn jingle. I’d thought this was either all prerecorded, or general announcements to large groups.

  Now I wondered about that.

  I still needed to figure out what the Hatchling Predator perk meant. But though I searched, I couldn’t make anything else appear.

  All this tech and gamer stuff was beyond me, I preferred the real world.

  So I closed my menu.

  For the first time since I’d been whisked away from my planet, nothing happened to me. No pain, no being teleported in a crack of lightning, nothing attacked. I took a deep breath of the hot, rotten hamburger scented air and waited.

  How long could this last?

  The drums still thundered and I could hear the humming of the announcer as well as a muted conversation.

  Giggles.

  Hair rose on my arms.

  I bent down and pried the custard-yellow coated rock from the dirt, holding it ready in one hand.

  A tingle of excitement, a memory of that pleasure coursed through me. Let them come.

  “Well?” Asked the announcer. “Are you going to use it? We’re waiting, Allan.”

  Her voice was low and breathy and I nearly jumped out of my damn skin as she spoke.

  “Uh, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  A small icon on a bar at the very bottom of my HUD enlarged, wriggled and flashed a few times. Had it been there before?

  I knew what they wanted me to do, but was loath to give them the satisfaction.

  What new horror could they have in store for me?

  It wriggled some more, and the movement reminded me of the way Gazpacho, my parent's French Bulldog shook its arse whenever he smelled cheese.

  I sighed, braced myself, and clicked the button.

  The music changed abruptly.

  Heavier and full of rip-roaring guitar.

  My cousin Fabien and I had found some illegal pre-unification music on a datachip when we were teenagers. The composer’s name had been Mick Gordon and the music he made sounded a lot like this.

  It had given Fabien a headache, but I’d liked it.

  Hatchling Predator Perk Activated

  My vision changed, the colours inverted and bizarre, almost as though I saw in infra-red. A tiny wire-frame silhouette appeared, flying through the trees in the distance.

  Tiny green text floated above it.

  Rahn-Mi: Swarm Host Drone. Level 1.

  Civilisation: Gosporian.

  The announcer squealed in delight.

  “That’s right viewers, the human has figured it out. What a smarty pants!

  The Hatchling Predator perk lets you spot Level 1 participants at 500 feet—and that’s just the beginning.

  What will he do with this?

  Run and hide?

  Hunt and harvest?

  I know which I’d prefer to see!”

  The soaring guitar and frenetic drums reached a fever pitch.

  And I set off at a run.