He revved the bike’s engine to fully charge his weapons and watched to see what baldy would do next. The man was still pointing the gun up in a holding stance, staring intently into the darkness. Loki raised a gloved hand and aimed a hypersonic projector in the palm of his glove into the middle of the group. He then softly spoke words that were amplified a thousand times into a booming voice that appeared in the midst of the group. “PUT THE GUN DOWN OR DIE!”
The gunman panicked as everyone scattered. The man aimed his pistol at the mouth of the tunnel.
CRACK! A blinding beam of light projected from Loki’s index finger and the deafening sound of a bullwhip filled the tunnel.
The gunman fell dead, his hair and clothing smoking in the darkness. The other homeless men staggered around, blinded by the sudden burst of industrial lightning.
Loki shouted. “Who else wants to die tonight?”
The men got onto their bellies and covered their heads. One shouted. “Don’t shoot, man! Don’t shoot!”
Laser-induced plasma channel was a hell of a weapon. The technology used a relatively low-powered laser at a precise wavelength to cause atmospheric oxygen to form a plasma—one with an extremely low electrical resistance. It was, in essence, a virtual wire that could carry a lethal electrical shock. The thunderous clap occurred when the energy burst stopped and the air snapped shut around the vacuum that remained. It was man-made lightning. Loki could shoot lightning from his hands—the achievement of a lifelong goal. Whenever some idiot gave him a legitimate reason to use it on darknet business, he almost felt like kissing them. Thank you, tweaker.
Loki gunned the engine and came up to the men lying on the edges of the tracks. They were still blinded. “If it was up to me, I’d kill you—but I can’t unless you give me a good reason. If you’re not still lying here when I get back, I’ll follow the heat signatures of your footprints, find you, and kill you both. Do you understand?”
“Yes! Yes!”
Loki roared off into the tunnel, feeling the exhilaration of adrenaline surging through his veins.
A couple hundred yards later Loki could see a colored, D-Space object glowing in the tunnel. He closed the distance and before long came to a colorful glow surrounding a virtual portal. He killed the Ducati’s engine, dismounted, and walked toward the portal. The metal cleats on his calf-high black boots rang menacingly as he walked across the gravel in the echoing tunnel. He soon stopped before an alcove in the tunnel wall.
In real-world, three-dimensional space, this was just a dark stone archway over an alcove—a place for railroad workers to shelter against oncoming trains. But on the base layer of D-Space, laid atop the GPS grid, this was also a gate between worlds. In this case between D-Space and one of Sobol’s game worlds—Over the Rhine, a World War Two-themed online game. It was here where a level map Loki knew well intersected with D-Space. As he looked ahead of him, he could see projected onto reality a view into the Monte Cassino game map through a spiked and studded virtual portcullis.
There, standing behind the bars, was an old opponent—Herr Oberstleutnant, Heinrich Boerner, the infamous virtual SS officer in a long trench coat, with an Iron Cross hanging at his throat from the stiff collar of his tunic.
He was just a game bot. An electronic figment of the game designer Matthew Sobol’s imagination, but even so, the villainous Boerner was deviously clever. While playing Sobol’s game, Loki had been virtually killed by this bot more times than he’d care to remember. And now here Boerner stood.
As always, Boerner wore a monocle over his right eye and he clenched a long black cigarette filter between his teeth, exhaling volumetric smoke as he nodded in greetings—his voice coming over Loki’s earpiece. “Mein Herr. So gut to see you again.”
Ever since he reached fiftieth level, Loki had been receiving darknet messages from an AI claiming to be Boerner. While he initially ignored them, they had become more persistent. As Loki’s reputation score continued its decline, Boerner’s messages became more relentless. Loki recalled what a comforting refuge the game Over the Rhine had been for him during difficult times. In some sick way, Boerner was almost like an old friend. An old friend who had killed him thousands of times.
“What do you want, Boerner?”
“Ah, you haf done vell for yourself, I see.”
“You don’t see shit. Your eyes are bitmaps. Get to the point.”
“Mein Freund, I can only understant simple concepts.”
Loki simplified. “Why did you contact me, you fuck?”
“Vy?” He spread his hands expansively. “Because ve are kindred spirits, you und I.”
“You’re a 3-D model with a scripted psychosis. You’re nothing to me.”
“I cannot understant you.” Boerner wrapped his gloved hands around the bars—his fingers becoming suddenly much more real as they extended out into D-Space. “But your tone sounded . . . unfriendly. Is zis vy you are so unpopular?”
“Fuck you.”
Boerner laughed his familiar, evil cackle. “Yes. I think so. But they do not understant you as I do. Perhaps I can be of some use to you in your vorlt?”
Loki felt suddenly concerned. He remembered just how devious Heinrich Boerner was. “My world?”
“D-Space, Mein Herr. You could free me from zis tiny vorlt. I could serf you, Mein Herr. If only you vould release me.”
Loki stopped cold. Seriously? The sociopathic Boerner AI was asking Loki to bring him into D-Space—and thus, into a world where he might be able to control real-world machinery and software? Not likely. “Fuck off.”
Boerner paused for a moment, then grinned, teeth still clenched around his cigarette filter. “Mein Herr, you are all alone in your vorlt. Your mechanical servants, just stupid beasts. They can be destroyed. But I cannot. I vill always be zer for you. To protect you. To vatch over you.”
“Bullshit. You’ve shot me in the back more times than I care to count.”
“Loki—may I call you Loki?”
Loki realized that the AI was only scanning his responses for keywords, so he stopped speaking in full sentences, opting instead for simplicity. “Why me?”
“Because only vun as powerful as you can free me.”
Loki knew it would require a powerful Gate spell to bring Boerner into D-Space. He’d looked into it, and he had the spell stored in his listing. He wondered why he’d done that. Was it Sobol’s manipulation again?
Loki examined the digital Nazi’s subtle, scripted movements, swaying in place, drawing on his cigarette, and exhaling digital smoke. But Loki knew that whatever AI construct was behind this didn’t even need a body. The physical form was just a psychological hack. One designed to appeal to some base human instinct.
“Ve both know you have no one else zu vatch your back. Und your vorlt is a dangerous place.”
Boerner actually seemed to have a sincere look on his face—but he was just a 3-D model with a scripted series of actions, nothing more. But then, what were people? At least Loki could examine Boerner’s source code if he brought him into D-Space. Couldn’t he? Wouldn’t that be like examining a person’s soul—something he couldn’t do in reality?
Boerner pressed his case. “Who else could be as ruthless as you, mein Freund?”
Loki had no answer.
The Boerner avatar withdrew his cigarette filter. He also removed his officer’s hat—for the first time showing a bald scalp. To Loki’s knowledge, no one had ever seen Boerner without his hat. And then Boerner reached his spectral arm through the bars of the portcullis and into the world of D-Space—not quite reaching Loki’s arm, where Loki imagined his haptic vest would reproduce Boerner’s ghostly touch.
But more shocking was that as Boerner’s arm reached into the fabric of D-Space, the polygon count on the Nazi’s 3-D model increased several orders of magnitude. Boerner’s arm went from that of an online game sprite to a fully realized human being. The arm reaching out to Loki from beyond reality was that of a real-life SS officer, the pores on his leather gloves, and the weave in the fabric of his greatcoat sleeve all too apparent, flexing as he reached out.