End Code: A LitRPG Adventure by Jaron Lee Knuth

Author:Jaron Lee Knuth [Knuth, Jaron Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2017-08-20T06:00:00+00:00

01101110

One week later and I’m sitting in a restaurant in DOTsoc that’s designed to sit on the top of a giant candle. The floor is made of melted red wax and an enormous flame burns in the center of the room. It all seems very pretentious to me, but it was high on the DOTsoc date night ratings, and I wanted to impress Cyren on her first visit to the domain.

Like all the Level Zeros, she has to be grouped with a Player-Character in order to travel between domains. The rest of the civilian NPCs rely on the hackers in Sektor to cut and paste them when they want to travel.

I peer across the table at her avatar, still covered in metal buckles and leather straps, as I hang my cowboy hat on the back of one of the unused chairs and slick my hair back, happy to be walking around in an avatar that feels like me again. We feel like us again.

I tap my glass of wine against Cyren’s glass and say, “I want to make a toast... to us.” Her eyelashes flutter a few times as she awaits my words. “Because there is nothing better in this world... or any world.”

She smiles and says, “You are too sweet,” before she takes a sip. “Mmm. This is good.”

“Can you actually... taste it?”

“After spending so much time in your nanomachines, I understand senses a lot more than I used to... but no. I don’t actually taste the wine. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the code. I can see what the designer of this wine was trying to accomplish with the algorithm. The complexity and uniqueness isn’t lost on me.”

“I’m glad. I really want you to have a good time.”

She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “We’re together. Of course I’m having a good time.”

A waiter rises out of the floor next to our table, his avatar appearing to be made from the same red wax. “Have the two of you made a decision on what you would care for this evening?”

I’m about to order when a group of teenagers start laughing a few tables away. One of the boys is trying to make his date laugh by pushing the waiter closer to the center flame. When he lets go, half of the waiter’s head is melted into his shoulder.

Cyren starts to stand up, but I reach across the table and grab her hand.

“They’re torturing that waiter,” she says. “We can’t just—”

“What we can’t do is draw attention to ourselves. If you start something in a non-PvP site, you’re going to raise more than a few alerts. And if they try to access your nanomachines and don’t find any, they’ll figure out that you’re an NPC.”

She sits back down in her chair, her shoulders drooping. “I wish you wouldn’t call us that.”

My face scrunches up with confusion. “Call you what?”

“NPC. Non-Player-Character. It’s insulting.”

I let out a breath, hoping words will follow it, but I can’t find any.

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