“Master, we are sorry, but this is an open gameworld, and we have the right to express our opinions here.”
I nodded my head.
“Yeah, this an open gameworld, but only if you’re coming to get laid and get paid,” I explained in a sing song tone, smiling to expose my two gold capped front teeth and holding a West Side finger salute near my chest. “Look if you want to join the Bloods or the Crips I’m down with that, but don’t be a bitch and mess up our game, homie.”
I shrugged and held my hands up, wide eyed, shaking my head.
“Who are you to tell me what to do?”
“I’ll tell you who I am, my brother,” I said, bringing my .357 Magnum up between his eyes and pulling the trigger.
Curiously, it didn’t result in his brains blowing out the back of his head as it should have, but the bullet seemed to glance off his thick skull and ricochet in a splatter of oily blood and hairy flesh. I guess I’d never tried shooting a troll in the head at point blank range with a .357 before.
As I considered this, my left forearm exploded in pain. The troll standing next to him had swung his axe to lop off my left hand which I was lifting up to give the lead Comment Troll the finger with.
Blood spurted out of my severed appendage as I backpedalled away from the threatening horde, blasting away indiscriminately with my firearm. Sid was covering my retreat, picking off trolls and vampires as they advanced. They were tough sons-of-bitches, and we wouldn’t have made it except for the suppressing automatic weapons fire that Vicious and Willy added as we ran back.
Breathlessly we all rallied behind the GTO, and I ripped off my t-shirt and mashed my severed forearm stump into my leg, trying to wrap a tourniquet under my armpit. Sid leaned over to help me as Vicious and Willy continued to let go with their M-16’s.
“Where the hell is Martin?” I managed to pant out.
He should have been manning the rocket launcher. That would give those assholes something to think about. Sid ducked up to look inside the car.
“Aw man, I think Martin is dying,” he replied. He tightened up my tourniquet.
I wrenched around to take a look myself. Martin was writhing in the back seat, soaked in blood and whimpering.
“Goddamn baby,” I said, shaking my head. “Martin, what the hell?”
I turned back to Sid.
“Those guys were miles away, they had tons of cover. How the heck did he get so messed up?”
This was going to get a lot trickier with one man down, Sid barely functional and me missing an arm.
“You’re useless, you know that?” I yelled at Martin.
He whimpered back between the pain, “Sorry Bob, I didn’t mean to...”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re always sorry,” I muttered under my breath.
Sid stared at me disapprovingly. He was shaking his head.
“Dude, you shouldn’t be so mean to him all the time,” Sid reproached. “Talk to him, okay?”
I said nothing.
“Okay?” demanded Sid between the bursts of automatic weapons fire. “You promise?”
Rolling my eyes I sighed, “Okay, yes. You’re right. But let’s just get out of this first, okay?”
Looking back up over the GTO, I could see the trolls were reassembling and advancing by holding up their bloodied comrades in front of them as shields. They were fast too. This wouldn’t be easy. I looked around for the rocket launcher as Sid picked up an Uzi from the back seat and snapped in a clip.
We looked at each other, starting to enjoy ourselves. I was awkwardly trying to slide the launcher from the back seat, with my one remaining hand, to balance on my shoulder, when all of a sudden a massive burst of gunfire erupted from both sides of us.
The LAPD had finally arrived, and pandemonium erupted for a while as it turned into a three way pitched battle. By now, the vampires had taken wing and began swooping down on the hapless police officers who just screamed in disbelief.
A few of the braver cops continued to take some pot shots at us, but their overall enthusiasm for taking out gangland members seemed to dissipate after the first few were hacked to pieces by foul smelling demon spawn wielding their skull topped axes. Sid and Willy laid off a few more rounds at the trolls, but then just gave up, laughing.
I didn’t have long to live and I could feel the lifeblood ebbing away from this body. I propped myself up on the hood and leaned against the bullet-ridden windshield of the GTO. Martin had already died some time ago.
“Dude, that was actually pretty cool!” I admitted to the lead Comment Troll, taking the offered smoke from him to have a drag.
He was sitting up on the car with me. Most of his bloody forehead had been shorn away by my bullet, showing white bone underneath, but he was in a jolly mood.
“That gameworld audience went through the friggin’ roof,” he agreed. “There are already thousands of copycats going on.”
As he said this, an LAPD officer came running out of the bushes, disheveled and bloody but intact, running up to me.
“Mother of God, please help me, please,” he whimpered, his hands pressed together in a prayer position.
I just raised my eyebrows and shrugged, giving the smoke back to the troll. The officer looked at the two of us and began backing away, shaking his head and making small pathetic noises. At that moment a large, muscular troll burst through the same bushes the cop had come through.
“Ah ha!” the new troll announced. “There you are!”
He pounced on the officer, who managed to back away a step or two, holding his hands up defensively.
The troll began methodically hacking away at the officer with his axe. I had to close one eye as bodily fluids spurted and splattered onto me amid blood curdling screams. I looked at the troll leader, shaking my head with eyebrows raised.
He smiled back at me and nodded.
“Ah, Fred, Fred!” said the troll leader, raising one stumpy green arm.
Dripping in blood, Fred looked up from his whimpering prey. “Yeah?”
“Could you give it a rest, Fred?”
Fred pouted and frowned, and then sighed.
“Fine.”
Grumbling under his breath, he stuck the point of his axe through the police officer’s skull. This ended all the commotion. The troll skulked off.
My vision was swimming.
“Sid? You ready to go?”
True to his assessment, Sid had bled out slowly and hadn’t gotten another scratch. Sitting atop a pile of stinking corpses, he was now chatting up a female troll over near our Mustang.
“Yep!” he waved back, and picked up his gun and stuck it in his mouth.
“Cool.”
I picked up my .357, looked at the head troll and said, “Let’s do this again sometime.”
With a smile I opened my mouth and stuck in the barrel of my gun. Tasting the sharp tang of metal and gunpowder, I pulled the trigger. The last thing I felt was the curious sensation of my head exploding backwards into space and suddenly, I was floating in blackness.
Dead. At least in that universe.
It was a funny thing. We could now die a hundred, a thousand, a million times out in the synthetic worlds we traveled through—we just couldn’t die in our identity world. It was just that one place out of millions where we couldn’t die, it was a solution set approaching zero.
With all the flittering between worlds and bodies, stimswitching with friends, people borrowing your body and your body being driven around by your proxxi, you’d think it would get confusing to figure out where or when you were or how to get back into your own body, and it could be disorienting. That was why a basic feature of pssi, hardwired at the deepest level, was what we affectionately called the Uncle Button—when you gave up and wanted back into your own body, you punched it. You just had to remember that it was there.