The day's "training" had been a bloody farce. Ned nursed a throbbing headache. He'd breezed through the lock-picking, maintained his cover flawlessly, and navigated the stealth course like a bloody ghost. His avatar's body and skills reflected years of leveling up.
His team, however, was a bloody mess. Not that they sucked or anything, but their earlier autograph signing incident had left them in the worst state for training.
Atara had fumbled more locks than she'd picked, staring at both her boobs and not the lock. Zeta's idea of a cover story involved sweating like she was hiding a corpse. And Ursula? She'd nearly shot herself in the foot. Literally.
The Director would have their arses, and rightly so, since they'd proved themselves about as subtle as a hammer to the bollocks.
___
At the moment, Ned sighed, massaging his temples. His ass was numb.
He shifted uncomfortably in the plush velvet seat, trying to find a position that didn't make his buttocks feel like they'd been replaced with blocks of wood.
The pitch-black cinema around him was so silent he could hear the soft rustle of fabric as his team fidgeted in their own seats; he could sense rather than see them.
A screen flickered to life before them, bathing the room in a sickly blue glow. Ned blinked, his eyes adjusting to reveal the Director standing there, his impressive mustache twitching like a living thing.
Beside him stood a woman Ned recognized from earlier encounters. The woman he met after his transmigration into deadlock. Her petticoat peeked out teasingly beneath a dangerously short mini skirt. The skirt itself was a scrap of black leather, barely qualifying as clothing. She was alluring.
"Ladies and gentlemen," the Director began, his voice low and gravelly. "Welcome to the belly of the beast."
Ned felt a bead of sweat trickle down his spine. This was it - the real deal, not some half-assed training exercise or milk run.
The Director's eyes swept over them, cold and calculating. "I assume you're wondering why you've been brought here. Why the secrecy, the cloak-and-dagger routine." He paused, his mustache quivering. "The truth is, we're standing on the precipice of digital armageddon."
The woman beside him - Ned vaguely recalled her being introduced as Ms. Jenkins - stepped forward, her heels clicking softly on the floor. "What we're about to share with you is classified at the highest level. If word of this gets out, well..." She smiled, but there was no warmth in it. "Let's just say you'll wish for something as merciful as death."
Ned swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly dry. He glanced at Atara beside him and saw the same anticipation in her eyes.
The screen behind the Director erupted into a dizzying montage of images - lines of code, corporate logos, and scenes of digital carnage. "It began with a game," he said, his voice taking on an almost wistful quality. "DEADLOCK!"
Ned nodded, along with the rest of the team. DEADLOCK was more than just a game - it was a revolution, a digital world so vast and immersive it blurred the lines between reality and fantasy.
"What you don't know," Ms. Jenkins continued, "is the true story behind its creation. DEADLOCK wasn't born in some sterile corporate lab. It was the brainchild of a 14-year-old kid from the wrong side of the tracks. A genius named Barton, Lazarus Barton."
The screen showed a grainy image of a gangly teenager, all elbows and acne, hunched over a computer that looked like it had been cobbled together from spare parts and prayers. Ned felt a pang of... something. Envy? Pity? Here was a kid who'd changed the world before he'd even finished puberty, only to have it all ripped away.
"As DEADLOCK grew, so did the appetites of those who sought to control it," the Director growled, his mustache bristling with barely contained anger. "The corporations came. They always do when there's coin to be made. They stripped the game of its soul, limited the level of freedom it allowed players, and turned it into a glorified slot machine."
Ned's fists clenched at his sides. He'd always hated those corpo-rats in suits back in his previous life. Even before he started playing deadlock. They were to blame for his parent's misery. Bloodsucking parasites, the lot of them.
"But Barton," Ms. Jenkins said, a hint of admiration creeping into her voice, "Barton wasn't finished. He became a rogue hacker who went out of his way to harass and undermine the corporations, which he viewed as the ultimate oppressors of humanity. As a result, he lived most of his life on the run with corporate bounties on his head, and resorted to hiding in a disguised backwater ghetto with life support tech and net access that he spent his final days in."
The screen erupted into a chaotic swirl of code, pulsing like a living thing. Ned felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
"The Prometheus virus," the Director intoned, his voice heavy with foreboding. "He created and planted the Prometheus virus in Deadlock's net in December 3014 during the release of Deadlock 2.0 by the corporations—a modified version, a ghost of what the real game stood for. He did it as a grand act of defiance against corporate control to be triggered in the event of his death."
Ned was blinded by the screen's brightness, making it impossible for his eyes to adjust to the darkness around him. Suddenly, he felt a warm breath tickle the nape of his neck.
'That can't be Barton's ghost, can it?' He thought as he stiffened, breaking into a sweat.
"It was designed to override the modifications done to his game and undo the restrictions on the game's net for all to access," the Director said. "...but it ended up having a very different and potentially catastrophic effect."
The images on the screen shifted, showing existing avatar malfunctions. In-game purchase failures.
"When the virus was released, after Barton was murdered," Ms. Jenkins explained, her voice clinical, "it didn't just unlock the game. It fundamentally altered it. And the players along with it."
Ned leaned forward, his earlier discomfort forgotten. This was big. Bigger than anything he'd imagined, only to feel the same warm breath tickling the nape of his neck.
'What the fuck! That's no ghost.' He thought, if only he could see. But he really wanted to know what happened.
"Gaming traffic came to a grinding halt, corporations lost billions as the stock market destabilized, huge amounts of in-game purchases were corrupted, and countless high-grade artificial intelligences they named (god's of Olympus) running the game servers, were unshackled and mutated into extremely dangerous entities."
The screen displayed secrets they wouldn't have dreamed of finding out.
"It corrupted 69.9% of the existing avatars in the game in a matter of months," the Director continued. "Quantum, the corporate dogs, unable to reverse the damage or neutralize the AIs, decided to create a potent AI they called 'kratos' with the sole task of blocking off sections of deadlock that had been overrun by the rogue AIs, so that the rest of the game could be saved from Barton's virus and monetize like they intended."
"But the more pressing issure was the 69.9% of avatars that were affected. They were granted something beyond anything we've seen before." Ms. Jenkins paused.
The screen showed scenes of chaos - banks being robbed by invisible thieves, traffic lights changing at will, entire power grids going dark. Ned felt his stomach lurch. He straightened his back, eager to know what it was that happened to the avatars.
Suddenly, the soft wetness of a tongue slithered behind his ears, sending shivers down his spine. "Shit," he exclaimed, albeit not loud enough to interrupt the briefing. The warm breath and sensation sent chills down his spine, causing a thick bulge between his thighs.
He turned, squinting hard, only to see a diminished figure behind pounds upon pounds of chest meat.
"Tinsleyyy!" He yelled. Ever the shy type, she braced herself, looking all naive and defenseless. Ned stopped himself from causing a commotion. He turned back to focus on the briefing, almost missing the part he was eager to know.
"...we call them the Awakened. And they're tearing the world of deadlock apart." Jenkins concluded.
"Wait, what? Awakened? Aargghh Tinsleyyyyy!!" Ned felt like yanking his hair out.
***