“Heh. Well, why don’t we help the County by patching things right now?” Jerry held up a thumb-sized greenish object. He handed it to Mike.
Three antenna fins sprouted from the top, a typical ad hoc node.
The dead ones were more trouble than bird poop. “You’ve perv’d this thing?” The node had Breaklns-R-Us written all over it, but perverting networks was harder in real life than in games. “Where did you get the access codes?”
“Uncle Don gets careless.” Jerry pointed at the device. “All the permissions are loaded. Unfortunately, the bottleneck node is still alive.” He pointed upwards, into the sapling’s branches. “You’re small enough to climb this, Mike. Just go up and knock down the node.”
“Hmm.”
“Hey, don’t worry. Homeland Security won’t notice.”
In fact, the Department of Homeland Security would almost certainly notice, at least after the localizer mesh was patched. But just as certainly they wouldn’t care. DHS logic was deeply embedded in all hardware. “See All, Know All,” was their motto, but what they knew and saw was for their own mission. They were notorious for not sharing with law enforcement. Mike stepped out of the comm shade and took a look at the crime trackers view. The area around Pyramid Hill had its share of arrests, mostly for enhancement drugs… but there had been nothing here-abouts for months.
“Okay.” Mike came back to the tree and shinnied up to where the branches spread out. The old node was hanging from rotted velcro. He knocked it loose and the twins caused it to have an accident with a rock. Mike scrambled down and hey watched the diagnostics for a moment. Violet mists sharpened into bright spots as the nodes figured out where they and their perv’d sibling were, and coordinated up toward full function. Now point-to-point, laser routing was available; they could see the property labels all along the boundary of Pyramid Hill.
“Ha,” said Fred. The twins started uphill, past the property line. “C’mon, Mike. We’re marked as county employees. We’ll be fine if we don’t stay too long.”
PYRAMID Hill had all the latest touchie-feelie effects. These were not just phantoms painted by your contact lenses on the back of your eyeballs. On Pyramid Hill, there were games where you could kick lizard butt and steal raptor eggs-or games with warm furry creatures that danced playfully around, begging to be picked up and cuddled. If you turned off all the game views, you could see other players wandering through the woods in their own worlds. Somehow the Hill kept them from crashing into each other.
In Cretaceous Returns the plants were towering gingko trees, with lots of barriers and hidey holes. Mike played the purely visual Cret Ret a lot these days, in person with the twins and all over the world with others. It had not been an uplifting experience. He had been “killed and eaten” three times so far this week. It was a tough game, one where you had to contribute or maybe you got eaten. Mike was trying. He had designed a species-quick, small things that didn’t attract the fiercest of the critics. The twins had not been impressed, though they had no alternatives of their own.
As he walked through the gingko forest, he kept his eye out for critters with jaws lurking in the lower branches. That’s what had gotten him on Monday. On Tuesday it had been some kind of paleo disease.
So far things seemed safe enough, but there was no sign of his own contribution. They had been fast breeding and scalable, so where were the little monsters? Maybe someone had exported them. They might be big in Kazakhstan. He had had success there before. Here today-nada.
Mike stumped across the Hill, a little discouraged, but still uneaten. The twins had taken the form of game-standard velociraptors.
They were having a grand time. Their chicken-sized prey were Pyramid Hill haptics.
The Jerry-raptor looked over its shoulder at Mike. “Where’s your critter?”
Mike had not assumed any animal form. “I’m a time traveler,” he said. That was a valid type, introduced with the initial game release.
Fred flashed a face full of teeth. “I mean where are the critters you invented last week?”
“I don’t know.”
“Most likely they got eaten by the critics,” said Jerry. The brothers did a joint reptilian chortle. “Give up on making creator points, Miguel. Kick back and use the good stuff.” He illustrated with a soccer kick that connected with something running fast across their path. That got some classic points and a few thrilling moments of haptic carnage. Fred joined in and red splattered everywhere.
There was something familiar about this prey. It was young and clever looking… a newborn from Mike’s own design! And that meant its Mommy would be nearby. Mike said, “You know, I don’t think-”
“The Problem Is, None Of You Think Nearly Enough.” The sound was like sticking your head inside an old-time boom box. Too late, they saw that the tree trunks behind them grew from yard-long claws.
Mommy. Drool fell in ten-inch blobs from high above.
This was Mike’s design scaled to the max.
“Sh-” said Fred. It was his last hiss as a velociraptor. The head and teeth behind the slobber descended from the gingko canopy and swallowed Fred down to the tips of his hind talons. The monster crunched and munched for a moment. The clearing was filled with the sound of splintering bones.
“Ahh!” The monster opened its mouth and vomited horror. It was scarey good. Mike flicker-viewed on reality: Fred was standing in the steaming remains of his raptor. His shirt was pulled out of his pants, and he was drenched in slime-real, smelly slime. The kind you paid money for.
The monster itself was one of Hill’s largest robots, tricked out as a member of Mike’s new species.
The three of them looked up into its jaws.
“Was that touchie-feelie enough for you?” the creature said, its breath a hot breeze of rotting meat. Fred stepped backwards and almost slipped on the goo.
“The late Fred Radner just lost a cartload of points,”-the monster waved its truck-sized snout at them-“and I’m still hungry. I suggest you move off the Hill with all dispatch.”
They backed away, their gaze still caught on all those teeth.
The twins turned and ran. As usual, Mike was an instant behind them.
Something like a big hand grabbed him. “You, I have further business with.” The words were a burred roar through clenched fangs. “Sit down.”
Jeez. I have the worst luck. Then he remembered that it was Mike Villas who had climbed a tree to perv the Hill entrance logic.
Stupid Mike Villas didn’t need bad luck; he was already the perfect chump. And now the twins were out of sight.
But when the “jaws” set him down and he turned around, the monster was still there-not some Pyramid Hill rentacop. Maybe this really was a Cret Ret player! He edged sideways, trying to get out from under the pendulous gaze. This was just a game. He could walk away from this four-storey saurian. Of course, that would trash his credit with Cretaceous Returns, maybe drench him in smelly goo. And if Big Lizard took things seriously, it might cause him trouble in other games. Okay… He sat down with his back against the nearest gingko. So he would be late another day; that couldn’t make his school situation any worse.
The saurian settled back, pushing the steaming corpse of Fred Radner’s raptor to one side. It brought its head close to the ground, to look at Mike straight on. The eyes and head and color were exactly Mike’s design, and this player had the moves to make it truly impressive. He could see from its scars that it had fought in several Cretaceous hotspots.