Exsanguinate (2 page)

I
grabbed
the little card off my bedside table and the small cylinder with a chain on it. It was a little key chain container of pepper spray with tape over the label. Dakota had written on the tape,
Vampire Repellent.

After feeding Beano, I grabbed a quick glass of orange juice from the kitchen. Wonderful aromas of coffee awaited me while I walked my ten second commute into my home office.

The sun shone through the windows with true-to-form Florida intensity. Even for October, it seemed unseasonably hot for Orlando.

“Padme, could you please close the blinds and adjust the tint opacity in the infrared sensors to fifteen for the office windows?”

“Certainly. Would you like for me to adjust the internal thermostat while I’m at it?”

Padme’s program automagically closed the blinds, changed the electrocoating on the exterior glass, and blocked the sun’s infrared heat, immediately cooling the room.

“Padme, what is the current temperature?”

“The ambient house temperature is 72 degrees, Fahrenheit. Outside, it is a balmy 94 degrees with a UV index of a nine. Be sure to wear your sunscreen today, Cheyenne.”

“Thank you. No, we don’t need to lower the internal temperature. The blinds and window changes should take care of the heat. Thanks for the heads up on the outside temps. I hope it cools off before tonight.”

Padme scanned the weather forecast. “Tonight’s low is 75 degrees with a thirty percent chance of rain mid-afternoon and evening showers.”

I opened the card from my sister Dakota.

It read –

Lovely. Gotta love their sense of humor. I put her card in my in basket and attached the little canister to my keychain. I’d have to think of something equally creative to get back at her.

Preparing for beta tests with my senior programmers, I stared at the computer console. The monitor cursor blinked at me with the impatience of a toddler waiting for Santa on Christmas Eve. As I pondered which avatar to log into the ExsanguiNation gaming portal, my fingers scrolled down the vertical glass and paused over a name – Lady Cazenove. A double tap later and the database immediately delivered my shot of courage packaged in a vivacious avatar who preferred to carry a katana or a crossbow over a gun any day.

Lady Cazenove was my edge, my escape to the dark side. My alternate personality built into my virtual avatar. My Alt. Based on Casanova himself, Lady Caz gave me a sense of unbridled, romantic seduction against fear. Terror succumbed to her every whim. Just as in
Silence of the Lambs
, she ate trepidation with fava beans and a nice bottle of Chianti. Since my own uneventful life reflected the opposite, Lady Caz always delivered just the right amount of snark and kickassery against anything or anyone who threatened her safety – my safety.

Perking perfection wafted promises of consciousness as I poured the first cup of coffee. The morning schedule had four hours blocked out to complete the final boss sequence for the next roll-out in the game. Then it would be time to get the truck loaded with our gear for the night’s misadventures. If only it were as easy to load an avatar like Lady Caz in real life as it was online. I needed an avatar who wouldn’t be afraid of the crazies, the ghoulies, the monsters hiding behind the sandbag curtains tonight, because I already knew I was gonna scream like a little girl. I needed her nerve, her katana, and her ability to run in stilettos.

How do I get myself into these situations?

“C’mon Beano. Let’s get to work.” He padded into the office and lay down in his doggie bed.

One would think I was running Disney World from where I sat in my home office. Mission control had nothing on me. Several ginormous monitors hung on my walls. Two rolling, floor-to-ceiling holographic touch panel displays had helped me develop ExsanguiNation with my crack team of coding ninjas. One of my favorite toys was a 3D rendering counter which allowed me to program actual fight sequences from a green room.

I envisioned the monstrosities of horror I would need to construct on this machine after tonight. It was one thing to write code for fighting off vampires and werewolves inside a game. It was an entirely different thing to walk through a pitch black insane asylum while you knew crazy people were going to jump out at you.

Setting it atop my head, I grabbed the wireless headset and turned it on over my ears.

“Padme, please open up the group conference line and set me as the moderator of the call.”

Any time now, my virtual team would arrive to greet the virtual workday. I watched on the monitors as my team teleported into our simulated - SIM - office as their own avatars.

“Hey Caz? That you? Morning.” Tony Briggs’ deep voice resonated over the conference line. He always sounded like Barry White to me. “Mind if I run tank this time?”

“Yeah, I’m ready. Still tryin’ to wake up though. Sure, you can run tank. I’d rather run the Shaman princess today so we have a healer in the group.”

Briggs’ avatar rezzed into our virtual admin simulated office inside the game. He joined Lady Cazenove by the water cooler. Her avatar script allowed her to grab a water glass, fill it up, and drink it in a steady, natural rhythm.

It might have been rude, but I forgot to mute my microphone and yawned, “Who else is on the line with us?”

“I’m here.” Harris Archer, my old college roommate, popped in to the office. “Sorry, I’m a couple minutes late. I just finished my latest virtual geo-cache on the sim.”

I loved Harris; he was one of my best buds on the planet. We spent most of college together. The brother I never had. Total geek, total cutie, total cyberchondriac. If there was a new ailment to have, Harris was convinced he had it every full moon.

Enjoying the warmth from the coffee coursing through my veins I said, “Slow down. Not running a marathon here this morning, Harris. No worries, I’m still on my first cup. It’s all gouda.” I put the guys on speaker through my wireless headset. “Briggs and I were just suiting up our avatars for the roles we’re gonna play on the Battle Kroc boss sequence. I have a few new alternate endings I want to test out on you guys.”

“Hey, Briggs, did I ever tell you about that time Cheyenne and her sisters got grounded for a month because of a geo-cache?”

“Seriously? What they heck did they do? Plant the cache in a cemetery or something?”

“Bingo.”

“Yeah, all right, Harris. Thanks for reminding me of that fantabulous time. It wasn’t my fault Sheridan wanted to hold a séance at ole man Flannery’s grave. I was only a sophomore in high school.”

“That’s a story I’m gonna have to hear one day, Cheyenne,” Briggs said.

Roxas Morgwain rounded out the roll call. “Good morning, peeps. What’s the craic?”

Roxas spawned his avatar into the office. My breath hitched in my chest. Memories of last night’s virtual simulation play with Rox in the adult underworld playground sent heat up my face.

“Top of the morning, Cheyenne. Are you awake?”

“Barely. If it weren’t for a call from Sheridan earlier, I might have missed this one. She woke me up.”

It was fun dating in an online virtual simulated environment with Roxas. We had the world at our fingertips. One night we might walk through the Louvre museum in Paris, the next night we might go dancing on the bow of the Titanic. Dating in a simulator gave us freedom to explore the world and each other. He always kept me guessing as to what our next date night would encompass.

I swallowed a sip of coffee and exhaled an
Ahh
as the caffeine surged through my arteries bringing animated consciousness back. “Hey, guys. Dakota says she’s gonna be late from her editing post-production recording class this morning. Something about picking up our costumes for Halloween Scream Nights tonight.”

An “Ah, man,”sounded from Briggs. He had the major hots for Dakota and made it crystal clear to her and everyone else just how hot. She only had morning classes on Fridays, but Briggs always seemed to like it when she was available to game with us.

Roxas’ avatar walked over to Lady Caz. I watched as Roxas typed [/hug Lady Cazenove] into the public chat window. His avatar opened his arms wide and embraced Lady Caz in a huge hug.

After about five seconds, Harris started to groan. “Get a room already.”

Briggs purred in that
Can’t Get Enough of Your Love
sort of way. “That’s all right, allow the man to enjoy himself, son.”

“Harris, you’re just jealous. Get over it.” The script finished and I sent Roxas an emoticon wink in a private chat message.

In reality, none of us lived in the same city. Everything we did was virtual. Briggs lived somewhere in New Orleans. Harris owned a house in downtown Tampa, a few hours away from me in Orlando. Depending on the tourist traffic time of the year, sometimes the drive to the west coast was only a couple hours, but it seemed as of late the interstate was a nightmare to traverse unless you drove it at two in the morning.

Not exactly sure where Roxas lived, other than he was in the Kissimmee area, about fifteen miles south of me. Roxas also traveled quite a bit back and forth to Europe and Egypt from what I understood. He never talked much about his family overseas, but I wondered if there wasn’t an old flame lingering. Because of his extensive traveling, and my reluctance to get attached, we had decided to strictly keep our relationship online. It was safer that way. Especially for my heart.

Roxas and I had been dating online for two years now and had worked together for almost three. The arrangement complemented us. We each had our own real world lives, no complications, no commitments – but online we were quite the item. I looked forward to the day Roxas and I might meet in person, but for now, I enjoyed our cyber life. I could keep my heart out of trouble.

Dakota, my little sister, lived with me while she completed her graduate courses for recording engineering in game design. Only one semester left and she would be done. Dakota was the type of girl who went through guys like Kleenex, gamed hard with my team, and never said no to a great time with anyone.

Sheridan, our older sister, lived in Clearwater with our dad. She could still out-game any of us, but nowadays she was much more into running the business side of the company. Together, we loved our work, our family and friends, our fans, and our capitalistic venture based on an old horror obsession.

Working online seemed to be a good arrangement for everyone. If we’d had to commute to a regular office and work side-by-side each day, it would be a fair assumption we would end up clobbering one another. Online we killed everyone in the game each day, and no one thought twice about it. Plus, virtual commuting gave us an extra two hours a day productivity time and nobody gave a rat’s ass if I wore a scrunchie in my hair, poured Bailey’s in my coffee, or worked in my pajamas.

“
O
kay
, gents, it’s half day Friday. Let’s get back to today’s tasks.” I clapped my hands together to get everyone on the same page. “Before we get underway with the prelims on the next boot sequence, I wanted to cover a quick review of where the gamers have been concentrating in the sims this past month. I’ve seen a huge uptake in activity across all the simulator boards. What about you guys? Are you seeing anything out of the norm?”

“That’s for damn sure,” Briggs said. “I’m stunned as hell to see what’s happening in the New Orleans sim. Seems like the dragon mafia is seriously putting the screws to the other supernaturals in the city. The ghoulies have gone on strike and dead bodies are being stolen out of the morgues. The freakin’ deaders are taking over the place. It’s chaos, man. Chaos.”

“That’s odd. We, too, have seen a huge dead uprising out here in the West coastal regions.” Harris pulled a coke out of the virtual vending machine in our sim office. The animated script for his avatar opened the can and shotgunned the cola. “The craziest things are the zombies. We’ve got hordes of deaders. They’re attracting zombie hunters from all over. Seems like no one is safe from the damn deaders. They eat anything with
BRAIIINS
. I’ve got sections of downtown LA where a human can’t walk across the sim without an annihilation of some sort.”

Lady Caz walked over to the sofa in the sim office where a couple of male and female pose ball scripts were embedded in the couch. She sat on the couch and tapped the cushion beside her inviting Roxas to come and sit. “What about you Rox, are you seeing the dead rise across the European sims?”

“Nothing more than usual, but we do have something weird happening with the werewolves and vamps. The packs are still in their ancient war with the vampires, but there’s something new. A sect of evil werewolves are trafficking humans to the vamps for their specialty blood orchards.”

“Blood orchards?” My eyebrows shot up. “What the feck is a blood orchard?”

Roxas sat beside Lady Caz on the couch in the virtual office, where I watched in my monitor. His animator override HUD – heads up display – crossed his right leg over his left knee as his arm draped across the back of the couch behind Lady Caz playing with her hair. “I guess in some vampire mythologies, they have it set up where human donors can voluntarily eat the same kind of food or drink for three days and it changes the flavor of the blood. So they have blood orchards for specific bloodwines.”

“What makes you think it’s always voluntary, Rox? Didn’t you say that the werewolves were trafficking the humans for the blood orchards? Do you mean like kidnapping avatars and stacking them up for their blood?”

“Yeah – something along those lines. They must have a permission script they agree to before the kidnapping.”

“Sounds creepy as hell to me, though.” Harris said, “I’ll never get why some third party developers design the things they do for their guilds inside the game.”

“Weird. Okay, moving on – within the past twelve months, we’ve seen an almost eight hundred percent increase in usage across all memberships. Heck, Sheridan decided to drop the thirty day free trial a few weeks ago. People are not only signing up right and left, but they’re staying, engaging, and purchasing shares of our ichor virtual currency. We make a ton of money off the virtual ichor currency exchange rate when players purchase products for their avatars.”

Lady Caz sat back against the couch and reached for Roxas’ hand. “Originally, when we created this game, it was based only on vampires and werewolves. But now, the way it has been embraced by people all over the world, folks are signing up with every conceivable and non-conceivable type creature to live out their fantasies in the game.”

I remember when you storyboarded the original simulator,” Harris said. “It’s amazing how it’s morphed into an ‘anything goes’ type of online environment now.”

“When people purchase their simulators, we don’t have any need to know what they build or do with their guilds unless someone reports them.” I took another sip of coffee. “So we allow users to create whatever environment they want and to be whatever they want – it’s all profit for us. Usually a person’s membership is only active around six months.” I leaned down to scratch Beano between the ears as he stretched out his long fawn legs, pushing against the inside of his doggie bed. “At that time, they’ll sign on for an annual membership, or drop off. Sheridan and I expected to see a sharp decline over ninety days ago with the heavy influx of new monthly memberships, but it kept rising. Let’s just say I’m glad we’re still a privately held company. It helps out in our own profit sharing program at bonus time.”

Roxas laughed. “Always nice to have a healthy paycheck.” His avatar scooted out to the edge of the couch and put his elbow on his knee. “Inside the vampire sim for Europe, it’s basically the same old, same old with the pure blood vampires fighting the rogue vampires. The queen is under the impression the Earth is going to implode or something, and there won’t be enough humans for the vamps to snack on. Seems like she has been prepping a lot and building a huge dhampir army under her.”

“What the heck is a dhampir?”

“Again, in some vampire mythos. A dhampir is the child born between a human and vampire. They are born with instincts to kill the vampires.”

“Wow – that’s … interesting.” I knitted my eyebrows together. “It floors me to hear about all the virtual worlds people build in their alternate simulated lives. I never would’ve dreamed about vampire queens, dhampir armies, and blood orchards.”

“That’s because you’re too busy building cybrators for the web.”

“Whatever, Harris. The development of my Cybrator paid off my student loans. It was well worth the dev time. Plus the manufacturers want another version. I’m planning to call it the iBrate.”

Laughter spewed forth over the headsets.

“Let me tell you what I’ve been seeing on the more domestic side of the simulators.” I walked over to pour a glass of water from the pitcher and grab cereal bar from under the cabinet. Then I stepped returned to the command center. “I never would’ve believed it, but the number of people purchasing virtual farms and growing their own food has been huge. I mean, we’ve sold more virtual third-party commodities with people growing their own food than any weapons yield. We’re seeing little outcroppings of communities where folks are growing veggies in vertical gardens, setting up organic hydroponic farms, and even bartering for supplies from other growers.”

“Seen anyone creating anything with GMOs?” Harris asked as he played with the bowl of fruit on the teleconference table.

“I don’t think the big name food geneticists are going to need our gaming platform to Frankenstein our food. They have real labs to do that.”

“Yeah, I heard that their own employees won’t eat the food from their own plants,” Roxas said. “It’s been banned in Europe quite a bit.”

Briggs leaned back in his chair, put his black boots on the table, and crossed them at his ankles. “Caz, people are paying us real hard currency money to garden in the virtual sims?”

“Yeah, pretty wild huh? It’s not just gardens either. We’ve got a ton of grass-fed beef cattle ranches, people raising horses, fish hatcheries, all kinds of sustainable living. I even found a guy who made a little farm with those goats that get scared stiff and fall over if you holler at them.”

“That’s nuts.” Briggs’ animated override HUD script outstretched his avatar’s arms and placed them behind his head as he leaned back in his chair.

“Right? I even saw this one lady making soaps and had a lot of beehives on her simulated property. I suppose they can’t do it in their cramped Manhattan apartments, so they come online and live out their dreams,” I said.

“That’s totally wild,” Harris said.

Roxas added another observation. “Oh yeah, almost forgot. There’s a new hot spot of interest down in the South American sim. Been seeing a ton of new development. It’s become a huge rage called The Super Market.”

I polished off the last bite of cereal bar, crunched the wrapper, and threw it in the recycle bin next to the door. “What exactly is The Super Market?”

Briggs and Harris cleared their throats. Beginning to get the feeling I was being set up for something, I braced myself.

“Well, it’s this uniquely cool place. My friend Torchy built it.”

“You mean Torchy, your dragon companion in the game?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

“The one who makes the cute little smoke rings around your head?”

“Yeppers – the one and only.”

I nodded in a gesture the guys weren’t able to see. “That guy’s real? I thought that was something silly you made up.”

“Nope – he’s very real and he’s got the gift of design. The Super Market is a hub where all the supernatural and preternatural beings can use their ichor virtual money and purchase anything they need for their avatars.”

Roxas’ avatar picked at a piece of lint off his jeans.

“It’s similar to the online marketplace where humans can buy clothes, hair, and skins for their avatars. But this place is a bit more custom tailored to their ‘
special needs’
clients. Products specifically made for supernatural avatars.”

We all laughed. “I’ll have to go and check it out – it sounds like a lot of fun.”

“It sounds like a hoot, Caz,” Harris said.

“I personally never would have thought about making specialty products for supes. I guess there’s a market for everything.” I stood up and stretched my legs. “We have the coolest third party developers who play in our game. One thing that’s nice is the percentage of money we make off all sales from their virtual products they build and sell. It’s almost free money to the company, since they use our platform to develop and distribute these products.”

“Indeed. You wouldn’t believe the amount of money made off werewolf conditioner and vampire fang whitener alone,” Roxas said.

I laughed. “We are – still talking about virtual products, right?”