Shepherd's Crook: Omegaverse: Volume 2 (12 page)

How to tell his friends that he’d stumbled upon a space station; an object in the game unlike anything any other player owned. Given that a player could buy a Grizzly class battle cruiser, the most expensive object in the game, for about the cost of a new mid-series BMW, he couldn’t begin to fathom how much the station was worth.

Not only that, thanks his equally rare ‘Cowl of the Wolf’ artifact, he had his treaty with the Canis Arcturus that gave him a special, if not unique, trading partnership with an alien race; he was pulling in several million credits a week from mineral trading alone. The price normalization he expected as supply and demand caught up with the anomalous situation hadn’t begun to occur, so prices were still just as lopsided as they were when he began.

His half share in Phani’s new pet venture would probably double that income. All of that combined to the point that he was making more, much more, than he was from his day job - all in a little less than a month.

He coughed, and began telling them, from the beginning.

Duncan poured the last of the bottle of Veuve Cliquot into Shannon’s glass. That was the last of the alcohol. Between the bottle of champagne for Shannon, the endless stream of Guinness for Clancey, and the two bottles of red wine and rounds of scotch for the other four, the result would be a lot of money spent on cab fare after dinner. Not for the first time, Duncan was glad he lived within walking distance of the bars and restaurants of downtown Charlottesville.

Shannon put her head down, sideways, on the linen covered table.

“What I don’t understand,” she said sleepily, “is why you didn’t tell us about the station.”

“I just did,” countered Duncan.

“Before now, poopy-head,” slurred Shannon, sitting back upright.

Duncan pushed the jus covered plate - all that remained of his monstrously huge, dry-aged, prime rib dinner - away from him. He burped.

“I don’t know,” he answered.

“But you told Phani about it,” she countered, “kind’a.”

“That was different,” Duncan replied, “he was in trouble.”

“No doubt, and it was,” she paused, hiccuped, “cool that you did. It was just kind’a un-cool that you didn’t tell us ‘til now.”

“Sorry,” Duncan shrugged, ruefully.

“Forgiven,” Shannon smiled, raising her glass. Then she drained it. Duncan never understood how such a tiny, thin woman could put away so much alcohol. He looked around at the rest of his friends, similarly inebriated. The same way we all do, he thought; practice.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked Clancey, the most sober at the table. You could always tell when Clancey wasn’t sober; his volume increased exponentially.

“Not sure I understand,” said Duncan, “I thought I told you what I was doing with it.”

“I’m not sure you see the potential,” said Clancey, wagging at Duncan with the chewed half of a breadstick, “a player owned public station, next to a colony, half-way between the two public game stations would be an ideal location for establishing your own faction. As the leader of a faction, you’d get a matching percentage of every faction member’s in-game earnings, which you can use to furthering the faction activities, namely,” he belched, “the terraforming and colonization of Shepherd’s, uhm, Cross.”

“It’s going to be a long, long time, though,” said Duncan, “before a colony is begun on that planet. We’ve,” he pointed at Jamie, who they all convinced over dinner to begin playing the real-time strategy game, “only begun terraforming.”

“Buy one,” said Clancey. “A colony, that is. Grab one of those floating cities and place it on the cloud giant, next to your station. You can have it as your first colony in the system. The first player run colony in the
game
.”

Duncan literally sobered, just a little, “How much?”

“Fifty, sixty million. Something like that. About the cost of a Grizzly.”

“I can’t afford that,” Duncan shook his head, “yet.”

“Twenty percent down,” smiled Clancey, “finance the rest in game.”

“They do that?” Duncan began to think. Ten million credits to begin a colony. He could afford that. He’d have to talk it over with Phani. He had a lot of reading to do, first, though. Duncan looked up, caught the waiter’s eye, and indicated that he wanted another round of drinks and the check.

Duncan stumbled out of the elevator and began the slow, halting walk down the hallway to his apartment. The night had gone better than he’d hoped. He’d been worried that his friends wouldn’t understand why he’d kept the station a secret. He’d been worried that they’d be angry.

He giggled.

Maybe they
were
angry, he thought, but a few gallons of alcohol and a belly full of top shelf beef, or lobster tails in Shannon’s case, had helped their mood.

He giggled again.

He pulled the receipt from his pocket, squinted through wine and scotch soaked blur swirling around his head, and read the bottom line. He’d spent, with tip, a bit over twelve-hundred dollars that evening.

“I’ll have to make a few more mineral runs to pay for this night,” he laughed, steadying himself against the wall. He arrived at his door, pulled the keys out of his pocket to open the door. They slipped out of his hand and fell; but didn’t sound like they hit the floor.

He looked down.

His keys lay on top of a cardboard box, about knee high, sitting in front of his door. He grabbed the keys, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. Holding himself upright with one hand on the doorsill, he bent over and pushed the box into his apartment and walked in after it. After he closed the door, remembering at the last second to retrieve his keys - it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d ‘lost’ his keys only to find them still hanging in the lock after a night out - he bent and picked up the box, carried it to his couch and put it on the coffee table.

Duncan tried to read the return address, but found it too blurry. He covered one eye, then focused, hard. He was able to make out, at that point, who it was from.

Omegaverse, Inc.

He grunted, dropped prone onto the couch and passed out.

Chapter 20

Duncan lifted up and pulled back the bolt on the Winchester Model 70 that lay nestled in the crook of his left arm. The first of his three .300 Winchester Magnum cartridges gleamed as it lay, expectantly, at the top of the rifle’s internal magazine. A sheen of gun oil glistened on the bullet in the noon sun, which beat over Duncan’s prostrate form as he lay on top of a berm next to a calmly babbling stream. The heat from the star was warm, but not uncomfortable.

Duncan reached, with his right hand, and pulled one finger along the length of the cartridge; the cleaning oil - no doubt residue transferred from the gun to the bullet when it was loaded - felt greasy on his finger tip. He rubbed the tip and thumb together, spreading the oil, then lifted his hand to his face and smelled them. The scent recalled countless hours spent cleaning and oiling his guns after a day on the range.

“Good old Hoppe’s Number Nine,” he muttered.

He reached out with his right hand and began to run his fingers through a small patch of the short, blue-gray, grasses that spotted the berm and covered the open, thousand meter long, field in front of him. The pointed, prickly little stems - stiffer than most of the grass he knew from Virginia - served to remove most of the gun oil. He finished cleaning the slickness off on his left shoulder; rubbing the coarse canvas of his camouflaged hunting shirt between the fingers.

After the clean, metallic-tinged, smell of oil no longer lingered, the mustiness of ancient decay and rot of countless years worth of decomposing plant matter once again assailed his nostrils. Powerful, yet somehow pleasant. The smell of death, but of fecundity and rebirth. The humus also provided the yielding, comfortable bed on which Duncan lay.

Duncan once again gripped the rifle’s bolt in his right palm, curling his fingers back over the black-metal, ball-tipped, rod. He drove it forward, which caught the top cartridge and seated the bullet into the Winchester’s barrel. Then he pulled the bolt down, locking it into place; the metallic click adding to the soft, soothing, gurgle of the waterway behind him.

The forest behind, on the other side of the brook, as well as the field in front of him, were oddly quiet. Used as he was to the constant hum of insects and calls of birds and wildlife, the silence of the area was almost palpable for Duncan; the lack of ambient noises shouted out their absence. The day was as still as the meadow, with only a barely detectable breeze that brushed his right cheek as he looked into the cloudless sky for any change coming in the weather. There was none indicated.

He lifted the rifle, pulling it tight into his right shoulder and put his eye to the scope mounted on top. His left elbow, supporting the weight of the Winchester, pressed into the soft, giving ground; his left hand lightly gripped the knurled burl of the rifle’s wooden forestock. With his right thumb, he clicked the safety to the left-most, firing, position. Then he peered down the sight, bringing into sharp focus the bull elk eight-hundred meters away, happily munching on some kind of vegetation in front of it.

Four black arrows, one each on the top, bottom, left and right of the scope viewfinder, pointed toward the hulking beast in their center. Duncan adjusted the rifle, barely, bringing the center-point of the scope directly onto the center top of the elks body - just behind its left front shoulder. It raised its head, chewing contentedly.

Duncan rocked a little, to the left then right, settling his body further into the ground. Then he lifted both feet and drove them back down, hard, to anchor himself firmly into a firing position. His toes curled under, forward, as his boots bent through the force of Duncan pushing himself into a rigid platform.

He took a deep breath, then let it half-way out; trying to settle his nerves. To minimize any movement that would throw his aim off. He waited a few seconds, until he could feel his heartbeat; he knew that the best results would be for him to pull the trigger in between them - even the slight body movement caused by the heartbeat could move the gun slightly off target.

He slipped his right index finger through the trigger guard and, gently, placed the tip on the bottom of the trigger. He began to squeeze, pulling until he was sure that the next micronewton of force would trip the sear, sending the firing pin into the cartridge. Then he squeezed, just a little more.

The rifle bucked in his arms, slamming painfully through his right shoulder. His right eyebrow exploded in pain, and his ears were pummeled by the sudden onset of thunder. As he fought to bring the rifle back into line, to see the results of his efforts, his nose was assaulted by the cordite smell that enveloped the knoll.

As he, expectantly, put his eye back to the scope, he was rewarded with a perfect view of the elk once again bending to take a mouthful of tasty grasses.

“Not even close,” said Clive. “You were still sighted at one-hundred meters. Your body position was way off. And hopefully that crescent moon scar on your forehead will serve as a reminder of what happens to people who don’t know how to properly hold a scoped rifle.”

“Whatever,” muttered Duncan as he stood. “End the training mission.”

Duncan pulled the new virtual reality helmet off of his head and placed it on the coffee table. He leaned back in his couch and reached for the stack of papers that had come inside the box from Omegaverse, Inc. He began reading the paper on the top of the stack, again; the third time since he’d opened the package.

He’d been picked, randomly apparently, to participate in a beta-test of the next version of the Omegaverse helmet, touted to bring new levels of realism and immersion to the players of the game.

“That’s an understatement,” he mused. The first helmet had been immersive. The new helmet was something else. He felt like he was actually there. The neural interface didn’t, as in the first unit, just display sight and sound, with a few examples of force-feedback through the gloves; the new helmet hit - overpowered, in some cases - every sense.

While the addition of full body touch sensing was amazing - he could still feel a twinge from the kick of the rifle and he ran his fingers, gently, over his forehead, half expecting to feel a bump or a scar where the kick of the shot had punched him with the scope - it was the smell that had truly put him in place.

Even when he’d first logged on with the unit, a little over an hour ago, and entered the bridge of the Shepherd Moon, the first thing he’d noticed was the slightly musty, institutional smell of the ship.

The updated neural-net interface didn’t just provide added smells and additional, full-body sense of touch. The visuals were sharper. Whereas before the graphics were crisp, fast and clear, it was obvious that they were computer generated graphics. To describe the new version as photo-realistic would be a disservice. It was no longer as though he were in the middle of an environment, viewing it from all possible angles; now Duncan felt a part of the environment. There was no disconnect. No beginning and end between himself and the surroundings.

The user interface, too, had completely changed. There were no longer any metaphors representing aspects of the environment. No longer did he bring up an inventory overlay in order to manipulate objects in the game - if he had to find something in his backpack, he needed to take off the backpack and root around in it. In order to read or answer an email in game, he pulled a PDA from his pocket instead of having a translucent text box overlay his vision.

Clive, too, had transformed. Before he’d been as a voice over a radio. Now he was Duncan’s in-game subconscious. Duncan no longer had to subvocalize to interface with his assistant; he thought a question then received answers from a voice in his head - but it was no longer Clive’s voice. It answered in Duncan’s own inner voice.

Duncan began to wonder.

“If the voice in my head answers in my own voice,” he said to himself, running his hand through his hair, “who is answering me?”