The way this all worked was a mystery to me. In real life, I was still sitting at my drum kit, sticks in my hand, not moving. I was supposed to be lying down in a bed or reclining in a chair with a dozen environmental safety sensors floating all around me. I knew some of the streamers had actual coffin-like devices they used.
It felt like I was in a dream. I moved my virtual hands in front of my face. I wiggled my fingers. I touched my virtual hands together, and the tactile buzzing centered on my ghost hands kinda broke my brain a little. They said you got used to it all, but it was still really, really weird to me.
I had multiple buttons floating at the top of my HUD. The first one read,Stream Connected. One viewer waiting. Go live?I reached up, and I clicked it.
It took a tremendous amount of bandwidth for my signal to bounce off theForlorn, pass through the gate, and hit some server on Earth, which in turn shot it all back from Earth to the main transfer gate hub, then to their ship, and then to my mech.
Which was why we needed to be streaming our concert like this, sending it off to multiple networks. It taxed our connection, but the noise also camouflaged what I was doing the best we could.
The moment they suspected what I was doing, they’d start blowing everything out of the sky. They might start doing that anyway, especially once Rosita’s movies started to play in the background between our songs.
“Okay, I’m in,” I said. I felt a clap on my shoulder, probably from Sam, but I couldn’t hear anything.
I clicked “Pass-through Audio.”
Thethump, thump, thumpfrom the drum looper continued to pound. Lulu was still shrieking into the microphone. I drilled down into a menu and tried to keep her voice slightly quiet.
“If you said something, I couldn’t hear it. I can hear you now,” I said.
“I said you look like you’re sitting on the toilet with everyone watching,” Sam said, shouting at me. “You’re sitting very rigid. You need to relax.”
I used my real finger to flip him off.
“We’re gonna need you in a minute,” he yelled. “I hope you can pull it off.”
“Very good,” Roger said in my ear at the same time. “Your private stream is up and running. Look to the left and right and then look down and up…. Very good.”
Loading now. Please review your armament.
In front of me, a door opened, and my mech started automatically walking down a long hallway surrounded by printing cubes. I turned my head, looking toward a door and a window in the distance of the massive hold of the ship.
“Hold that shot,” Roger said. “Interesting,” he said after a moment.
I was now standing in a queue. Directly in front of me wasn’t amech, but an altered Peacekeeper. I knew that was an option for tonight only. It was a nine-foot-tall humanoid-robot thing with four arms. It had twin swords over the back and was encased in power armor. The thing also wore a massive fuzzy wig, a mullet. It had a gold chain around its neck, but I couldn’t see the front. I had no idea how the driver was going to control all four arms at once. It was hard enough with just two imaginary ones. Sam had told me there were some immersion games where you were in the form of animals. I imagined that had to be really weird.
I could swivel my head three hundred sixty degrees, which was another strange sensation, and I had to remember not to move my real head too much. I looked behind me, and it was a Heavy, but instead of the massive Battering Ram gun, it had a flamethrower attachment. Several round devices dotted the top of the mech. I knew from looking at the catalog what these were. Gunship drones. I had one attached to my own back. The mech was painted hot pink with neon purple squiggles on it. It had a big X at the very front and it read, “Serial Killer,” under the X. I had no idea what that meant.
“What did you see?” I asked Roger.
“I just saw your mom,” the Serial Killer mech said. It had a young female voice. “What a stupid build. What are you going to do, kill them with flares?”
“Oliver, turn off your voice projector,” Roger said.
I found the button and turned it off for in-game voice projection. “Shit,” I said. “Roger, what did you see?”
“Did you see that window? There was a human behind it, but they weren’t in an environment suit. The deployment bay is built similarly to the deployment bays in the original generation ships. This was likely to keep some of the systems working as cheaply as possible. There is both gravity and atmosphere in the bay. That is good to know. We also know there is a human crew on the ship.”
“It couldn’t have been a Peacekeeper?” I asked. “Or one of those robot RMI guys?”
“Negative. If you look at the bottom right of your screen, you purchased the advanced zoom and heat vision. Besides, you just used the external speaker to talk to Sadie Wilkinson from District 62. Atmosphere is required for sound. The moment you enter the deployment unit, I will call her mother and tell her how Sadie was caught dismembering a cat in school today and recommend that she immediately contact an attorney.”
“Jesus, Roger, how are the other calls going?”
“As expected. Unfortunately, I do not know the information on more than half of the players, as they are not streaming or advertising their presence on the net. I am cross-referencing screen names as I learn them, but there is no single list of active players, so I must rely on other streams to see the names of the nearby players.”
We stopped. The floor under the first mech in line, a regular Cheetah, rose up into the air, rapidly and forcefully ejecting the mech upward through a door in the ceiling. I looked upward to see the Cheetah disappear into what appeared to be an air lock, which meant the ceiling of the giant room was the hull of the ship. I wasn’t an expert with spaceships or physics like this, but I did note that this was the opposite of what I’d been expecting, that the artificial gravity for thePinnacleseemed to focus downward through the center of the ship. This was different from how it’d been with the large, rotating generation ships that had brought us here. I knew they’d had some sort of fancy technology to make artificial gravity, but it took a tremendous amount of energy, and for our generation ships such as theForlorn, it’d only been available in the bridge and some of the other small, important sections. Everything else used the rotation of the habitation ring to create gravity. My grandfather used to talk about how gravity could change dramatically when one moved to different sections of the ship.
The door in the ceiling closed, and then it opened again quickly. The modified Peacekeeper in front of me stepped onto the square. I automatically stepped forward so I was next in line. I looked up, andon the ceiling surrounding the large air lock was a mural of a skull. And above that skull, it read, “Save true humanity. No mercy. Kill them all.”
