Half a million people…

  If Clockwork Tyrant wasn’t lying, which it certainly seemed like he wasn’t, then he had just shy of half a million people held hostage. As much as I knew that I couldn’t fall into despair and let this shake me to my core, it felt nearly impossible.

  There was a part of me that almost, almost, yearned to turn the Acceptance Matrix back on. It was supposed to make everything easier after all… wasn’t it?

  “Don’t…”

  As I found myself starting to mentally spiral, reaching toward the switch that would at least give me the fortitude to get past all of this, it was Angie of all people that spoke up. There was a weight that permeated the air around me that was assaulting my senses and Angie’s interruption allowed me to mentally focus just enough to shove it back and away from me.

  “When you first turned your Matrix off… I was sure it was the wrong decision,” she continued. “I was sure that you were going to break down in the middle of a fight… to lose your will to go on because my… well my programming insisted that that’s what you humans would do. You’ve made some… questionable decisions in the last few days… but I’m positive turning it off wasn’t one of them.”

  “That’s… that’s a rather swift change of an opinion,” I replied cautiously, looking back down at Swansong as I felt the air begin to thin around me. I couldn’t necessarily tell for sure from the angle, but her head seemed to be shifting rapidly as she looked from screen to screen. “What changed?”

  “I think… well I think I did,” she said. “While I am still connected to the databases so that I can provide information on your skills, achievements, and any other game-related content that you need to know about, I have not actually spoken directly with Axio since your Matrix was disabled…”

  “So? You can’t talk to the fucking psychopathic computer controlling all of this so suddenly you think turning off my Matrix was a good idea?”

  “Pretty much… yeah,” Angie agreed and I found my anger welling up again as I looked toward the screens. My fists clenched and my knuckles strained as I looked for any clue that might have been left toward Clockwork Tyrant’s location.

  “And that means what, you’re a free thinker now? You’re not gonna be rooting for me to go around and kill for no reason? Because you were sure as hell gung ho about that up until then.”

  “I… I don’t know Loophole… I don’t know what I am,” Angie admitted with a slight bit of dejection. “All I know for sure is that I can’t see a reason for all of this. There’s no pinging in my system telling me to keep you focused on the task at hand either and I just… I want to know why…”

  “Well you’ll forgive me if I remain skeptical,” I shot back, looking back over at Swansong and catching as a few tears started to well in the corner of her eyes.

  “It’s like I told you before… There's nothing I can ever, or will ever, say that will make you believe I am not just one of Axio’s tools to manage the game… but if I could convince you of anything… it’s that I like how this feels better… so don’t turn your Matrix back on… and help Swansong so she doesn’t need to either…”

  While I wasn’t sure what to make of the whiplash I felt over Angie’s change of attitude, I knew that she was right. The Acceptance Matrix, as intoxicating as the idea could be to be able to suppress these responses, was necessary. Without it… even if someone like TechWarden wasn’t trying to exploit it, it was still nothing more than a bandage to make us ignore the scars that were being inflicted on the world around us.

  “I… we… They can’t be…” Swansong was stumbling over her words as she slowly drifted to the ground.

  The screens in Times Square didn’t flicker away all at the same time like I might have hoped for. Instead, only the displays with Clockwork Tyrant on them flickered, changing to rotating images of the various bunkers. I floated down to the ground next to Swansong just as she collapsed to her knees, her eyes clearly darting between the different monitors as the tears that had only been threatening to fall so far, suddenly started to roll over her mask and down her cheeks.

  “Hey… it’s okay… we’ll figure this out,” I said, placing a hand on her shoulder. I could feel her trembling as she continued to search the monitors. Although I could feel the weight of the evening, the weight of Clockwork’s ultimatum sitting on my shoulder, I was still resisting the urge to go tearing across the city to try and track him down.

  Because even if I wanted to do that, I had to be smart enough to realize how little that would do… Even worse… I had to be smart enough to realize just how many people would be hurt by that kind of rash decision. I looked down at Swansong. She had a hand raised up over her mouth as she shook her head back and forth.

  “You… you don’t understand… it’s my fault…” She said, the words barely coming out.

  “What? No, all of this is Axio’s work… More importantly, this is Clockwork Tyrant taking advantage of it… Or maybe it’s at Axio’s direction, either way, this is on them,” I said, raising an eyebrow as she continued to shake her head.

  “No not that…” She said, letting out the smallest of sobs, looking at me with pleading eyes. “My parents… my brother… I told them to go to the nearest bunker when all of this started. They… They’re not answering my texts… Or my texts aren’t going through… We… we need to go save them…”

  “We…” I started but stopped myself to make sure that I chose my words carefully. “We will save them, Swansong… but we have to be careful about how we do it… We can’t just go storming over to the bunker they are in and kick the door down… As much as I want to believe this is some sort of bluff… We have to treat it like he’s seriously holding half a million people hostage.”

  Swansong turned into me as another sob escaped and I was almost surprised as she buried her face against me. I gently patted her on the back as she heaved for a moment and I turned my attention up toward the monitors. The footage wasn’t looping and while there wasn’t any sort of [LIVE] indicator, I was positive that every one of the feeds was being aired live. The humanoid droids were moving amongst the crowds, holding up large guns at the cowering crowds. Part of me started to wonder if there was a way that we could use the feeds when I heard Jon clear his throat.

  “You guys should come back to the base…” He finally said. Swansong pulled back, looking up toward me as we listened. I slowly made my way back to my feet just as he continued. “This is too much for you guys to handle right now… you’ve been going for hours and I just… This might actually be too much…”

  It was odd hearing Jon, who I knew for being almost painfully optimistic, come off as worried, but it was as clear as day in his tone. I held out a hand for Swansong and she looked at it for a moment, stopping only to wipe her eyes with a hand before she took mine with the other as I helped her back to her feet.

  “Hey now man, it’s my job to be the doom and gloom on the team, remember…” I said with a forced laugh.

  “Just… get back to base…” He said.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I nodded up to the air. After stopping to look at the screens one last time, Swansong took a breath and nodded before she took off and I followed. It only took us a minute to navigate up to the bridge that hid the entrance to our base and we slipped into it. Luckily Central Park had mostly gone unscathed during the attack and we didn’t have to dig through rubble just to get to the entrance.

  We made our way up the long tunnel and into the main base where we found Jon pacing back and forth within his glass box at the corner of the room. The moment he saw us he let out a breath and jumped back over to his chair, dropping into it with a heavy THUD.

  “You okay man?” I asked as Swansong split off for the kitchen in a hurry. Only a moment later I heard the ding of the coffee machine as she started it up.

  “Not really no…” He muttered as he started to click across the keyboard and I looked at him curiously as I approached the glass barrier. “I’m a fucking idiot…”

  “What? No you’re not…”

  “Yes. I am,” He insisted, his expression hardening as several more opaque windows opened on his side of the glass. “I should have been listening to you from the beginning… I’ve been treating it like a game… even up until just now, there had been so few casualty reports that I just… I don’t get it… Logically, when I think about it, I can see just how fucked up all of this is, but for some reason I just can’t stop being enamored by it…”

  I let out a sigh. While this was something I had wished he would have seen earlier, I was at least relieved to finally hear a bit of sense coming from him. Even with everything that had happened with SnakeBite, Jon had continued to almost act like an inadvertent propaganda machine for the game with just how much he loved everything to do with Augments. While I didn’t necessarily like that it had to come to this to get him to break free from that point of view, it was still better late than never.

  “Look man… It's not your fault. I’m really resisting the urge to just say I told you so and move on but you have to just put it in your head here and now. It’s not just a game… it might have a name like one… the system might want us to treat it like one… but it’s not,” I said, feeling my jaw set and I looked over my shoulder at Swansong who stood as still as a statue in the kitchen. “We need to get through this… we need to figure out a way to stop Tyrant and save as many people as we can… because it’s not going to end with him.”

  Jon stopped typing and looked up at me curiously. “As many?”

  “Yeah…” I nodded. “I want to save everyone… I do… but… but look at me Codex… Look at us. We don’t even know what level Tyrant is, we don’t know where he is… But what we do know is that he’s not the one at the top of the food chain either… I know I’m one guy… I’m just a small fish in an ocean trying to fight the moon, thinking I’m being clever all while I just swim with the current… Tyrant didn’t say he was going to just kill them for the hell of it… they’re hostages to ensure that people comply…”

  “So is it a bluff or isn’t it?” Jon asked, but I just shook my head.

  “We can’t treat it like a bluff, but I think… emphasis on think, that maybe… just maybe that the civilians aren’t in danger as long as we don’t act rashly,” I said. It hurt me to admit it, because even to my own ears it sounded like I was just giving up. “Clockwork Tyrant is just as much of a fish as the rest of us.”

  “How so?” Swansong asked, slowly walking over to us with a coffee mug grasped between her hands.

  “Because Axio is the one who put him here,” I said, turning to face her. “He’s the one orchestrating all of this and it really is starting to feel like he’s the one in full control of which way the ocean flows.”

  “So he’s the moon then?” Swansong asked before she took a long sip from the steaming mug. “In your analogy that is.”

  “Yeah… he’s the moon,” I said.

  “How the hell does a fish figure out what the moon is planning to do?” Jon wondered aloud, leaning back in his chair and resting his hands on his head.

  The heaviness that I had been feeling in the air was still lingering, but it did seem to be retreating slowly and I once again found myself wondering about that as I noticed the easing of tension in the two others in the room.

  “I mean… a game has to have people who made it, right? Wouldn’t they have to be around somewhere and wouldn’t they know what Axio’s goals are?” Swansong asked. Jon and I met eyes before he sat up and leaned back toward one of his keyboards.

  “I’ve done some digging in the databases I have access to but I’ve never actually been able to find anything, does the game even have a name? Maybe if I had that I could at least get us somewhere,” He said. This time, I found myself looking at him in confusion.

  “Huh? The name’s been listed a few times already… it’s Infinite Ascension,” I said, reaching up and scratching my head. “I sorta assumed you had already-”

  “Wait what!?” Jon nearly shouted, perking all the way up as he looked over at me. “You’re fucking kidding me, the game is called Infinite Ascension?”

  “Yeah… I swear this has come up a few times, hell there’s a logo and everything on the nightly announcements…”

  “I haven’t seen any of that, and the logo is just a star with some weird swirls on it. How the hell was I supposed to get Infinite Ascension from that?” Jon shot back before his hands started to dart across the keyboard like a concert pianist.

  “Um… Am I missing something?” Swansong asked, genuine confusion in her tone. “Why’s that name matter past this game?”

  “It’s…” I started before looking from her back to Jon. “You want to explain?”

  “It’s a game that Loophole and I both actually donated money to for a Kickstarter like, 12 years ago,” he explained, his attention completely focused on his monitors. “There were like, maybe two hundred backers before the page charged us and disappeared. Basically just vanished like it never even existed. It basically became a mix between an Urban Legend and a Conspiracy Theory within some communities on Reddit.”

  “Oh… yeah I was a bit more of a Polly Pocket girl growing up…” Swansong said awkwardly. “But… why does that matter exactly?”

  “Because it’s as you said. It means that there is a developer out there,” Jon said before I could even get a word in. “It means that we have a place to start looking for them and if we can find them, maybe that will give us somewhere to start on what the hell the point of all of this is.”

  “It’s not much, and it sure as hell doesn’t exactly help us right now, but it’s something,” I agreed before I fully turned my attention to Swansong. “We are going to figure out a way to save every single person we can, including your family, but in order to do that… we have to take this slow… This is your family at risk… If we have to we can try to bust them out… but-”

  “No… you’re right,” Swansong said, swallowing hard as her eyes watered. “I want to save my family… I need to… but I can’t risk hundreds of thousands of others just to do that…”

  “Talk about a Trolly problem,” Angie said in the back of my head. It was an unfortunately apt analogy.

  “We can’t go rushing in to try to save everyone… but that doesn’t mean we have to sit on our hands and do nothing either,” I said, looking from Jon who had become fully engrossed in whatever he had started to dig through and back to Swansong as she looked down and into her coffee. “Let’s take that break, open some loot boxes… and then let’s come up with a plan.”

  “Why does that feel like it’s the wrong choice?” She asked softly.

  “Because there’s no right choice in this… we have to do the best with the options we have right now,” I said. “I’ll try to coordinate with Hydramental at least a bit to make sure he’s not about to do anything stupid, and we can check in with Duskbreaker here-“

  Although we had split up with the intention of taking a break, I hadn't even considered what he, or really any of the other Augments, were doing in response to Clockwork Tyrant's announcement. Even Hydramental's sudden disappearance seemed unimportant given the stakes at hand, but we had to remember that we weren't alone in this.

  “Hey Duskbreaker, are you okay?” I turned my attention to the internal team chat as I eyed the still formed raid group. His name was lit up just enough to suggest he was in range.

  “Yeah… I… this is crazy… right?” Duskbreaker replied quickly.

  “Yeah it is… but I think we have to just listen for now, can you do that? We can risk all those people,” I said.

  “No, I agree… if we make the wrong move he is going to hurt or kill a lot of people…” he said. “But what can we do then?”

  “We are working on a plan, just… maybe do some scouting if possible? Is that in your wheelhouse with all the shadowy stuff?” I asked.

  “Sort of…”

  “Cool. Just be careful out there and if you fall out of Comms range, maybe try to keep us posted on where you’re going so that we can respond if we need to, okay?” I said.

  “Sure thing,” Duskbreaker said. “I’m actually just heading north now, I’ll message if I find anything.”

  Not even five seconds after his voice faded, his name on in the Raid Group and our team faded. I briefly looked at the greyed out names of Pinneedle and Miss Mist, thankful that they were at least still displayed before I turned my attention back to Swansong.

  “Okay… now let’s get to work.”

  Happy Wednesday! If you're enjoying the story, don't forget to leave a Rate, Review, or Comment!

  Come on over to my Discord to talk about the story, see advanced news, and just talk nonsense!