I pulled the key from the control box and the five of us headed further into the building. I turned to look at Voice once we had crossed out of view of the front door.
“Here?” I asked him.
“As good as any,” he replied.
“We should probably talk,” I said. “About what just happened.”
Voice positioned himself to be able to see the front door, but not be visible to anyone glancing in.
“You two…” Daisy started. “Went in hard…”
“I get it,” Sam said. “They hit you, you hit them back, harder.”
“It wasn’t entirely without thought,” Voice said. “Sam is easily the best fighter I’ve seen in the game, including the PvP beta. Kelsey’s consistently hitting those arrows within a palm of each other. Aenara’s magic is a huge force multiplier, and Daisy’s healing gave us huge sustain. A lot of them looked like they had come straight from the train station to here. I was confident the pair of us could take them out; you all joining in would have just guaranteed it. If I wasn’t, I’d have called for the others to come and join us.”
I nodded towards Voice. “This is kind of how we tend to approach these things as a group. We don’t tend to start things, but we do try to finish them hard. It was only afterwards that I realised that we acted unilaterally there, and you all should have a say.”
“My last guild took a more softly approach, and we kept getting taken for a ride until we started doing similar,” Sam supplied.
“Makes sense to me, they shot me!” Kelsey emphatically agreed.
“Seems a bit of overkill…” Daisy started.
“No such thing,” instinctively, Voice and I said at the same time, then I grimaced, it wasn’t the right time.
“...Like, could we have talked to them first?”
“Up until the moment one of them shot us and drew first blood. Yeah. Heck, I was about to suggest we try the other site and hoped we could find clues which would lead us to where we needed to go.” I said. “But once they attacked…” I shrugged.
“I get it. Your reasoning makes sense…” she trailed off.
“It just feels barbaric? Like we just killed 30 people and aren’t feeling anything?” Voice asked. Daisy nodded.
“It’s something we’ve been discussing since full dive games came about…it’s almost too realistic. The problem lies in the lack of consequences.” I said. “So for some people, their moral code goes out the window, with the game theory that death is at most a mild inconvenience, the calculations lean towards being a dick being the most rewarding position. Which inevitably fuels people taking advantage, as once someone has taken advantage of them, they are more likely to reciprocate. In the long run those people, tend to find communities start becoming closed to them, but in the short term they do well and can come out on top…”
“You are slipping into Teacher mode, El.” Voice stopped me before my inner lecturer took over completely.
“Right, right. Sorry. Habit. Long story short, it’s how we agreed to do it, but we would discuss it with any newcomers to the group, get their input and try to come to a fair agreement about it.”
“We normally try to have that conversation before we wipe out a group…” Voice said.
“And normally somewhere like a tavern…” I added.
“That’s fair… I don’t think any of us were expecting world PvP so soon,” said Sam.
“We also like to have an after-battle reflection on fights like that… just to try and make sure we stay grounded in it being a game and it doesn’t start creeping into real-world interactions. Best not to do that out in the field though…”
“We should definitely do that, Kiddo,” Sam said to Kelsey.
“Right, we should move on. Maybe pick this up again later after you have had time to think about it?” Voice suggested. “Just know, we do want to discuss it, and we want to reflect upon our actions and not become a group of murderhobos just because it is easier.”
The first door we came across was locked up pretty tight; it had a solid window and I could see into the warehouse that was on that side of the building.
The next door led to a stairwell and we agreed to finish the rest of this floor before exploring other floors.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Beyond that led to a cafeteria. It looked somewhat industrial with its stainless steel rails along the counters and certainly like it was intended to handle feeding a lot of people.
Back at the stairs, we had a choice of up or down.
“Down looks dark. Do we have any lights?” Kelsey asked. Down did indeed descend into darkness, while a skylight at the top of the building was doing an admirable job of lighting up the rest of the stairwell.
The first floor turned out to be a large open-plan office.
“Pretty generous desk allowance.” Voice commented as we looked at the way the desks were laid out. The large L-shaped desks were laid out in a cross, but behind each seat between the crosses, there was a round table. The people in that cubicle section could spin their chairs around and talk to each other using the table for meetings.
“For your office?” I asked.
“We’ve gone fully virtual, but it might be good for teams who find facing each other beneficial.”
We split up to cover more ground and see if there was anything here. Most of the cubicles had been empty; the only ones which weren’t turned out to be in the corner. Unlike all the other desks, which looked like someone had just set up the office. The ones in the corner, which offered views out of the two large windows to three of the desks, had paperwork strewn across them. We all grabbed chairs and started going through a desk each. With Kelsey, after a few moments, offering to explore the floor some more.
On my desk, I found some maps of the region with a number of locations marked on them. Landing was marked and easily located. From there, I was able to follow the road south and found Central services. There was another location marked ‘Storage C’, which was further west on the road we had come down. Further south, there was Delta Comm Hub, which aligned with the same location we had for the antenna. I moved the map to the table, for the others to see.
“I’ve found a log; the ink is faded somewhat and from the way parts are scribbled out and rewritten, I think the author was drafting their reports on it…” Daisy trailed off. “Ohh, I think there was some kind of disaster caused by Nanite control. The majority of the population has been ordered to evacuate… this guy is moaning about how their team has to remain to fix the mess others caused…at least in the scribbled out parts…”
“Scribbled out parts?”
“Yeah, he was pissed. I think he got his ranting out in here, though, before typing in his actual report.”
“I’d do that.” Sam and I said.
“Give me a few to read it, and I’ll give you all the abridged version,” Daisy said. “There is a lot of ranting, but some of it is revealing.”
“Find anything?” Sam asked when Kelsey reappeared, pulling another chair.
“Some Binoculars.” She held them up for us to see. “And these useless, pointless pieces of plastic.” Then brought a bunch of keycards out, with a big grin.
“Good find!” Voice congratulated her.
“I also found this underneath them, but I’m not sure what it is.” She pulled out a folded-up piece of paper. Opening it carefully, it turned out to be a schematic for some kind of generator.
“Mark 4 emergency generator.” I read from the top of the schematic.
“Where does it say that?” Voice asked.
“There,” I said, pointing to the title.
“Looks like random squiggles to me.” Voice said.
“Me too,” Daisy confirmed.
“All of you just see squiggles?”
“Yeah.”
“That must be the ancient’s language snippets I have…”
“Can you share?” Voice asked.
“If I can, I don’t know how,” I said. “If it is something obvious, I’m going to kick myself. Share Knowledge.” I tried. “Might be something we need to unlock, like quest sharing.”
“That said…why are the plans in ancient, but Daisy’s log is in English?” Voice queried.
“Oh.” Daisy said, looking up from the log, having not been paying attention to the conversation, “I’ve also unlocked the ancient’s language. Before… I got talking to the librarian and he introduced me to the primer. I’ve still got a copy.” She deposited a book onto the table between us. Voice looked between Sam and me.
“I’d like a look to see if it adds any more to mine, but you two…Three,” I said, including the teenager who looked like she wanted to escape something so similar to homework. “Need it more than me.”
“Alright.” Daisy's voice brought our attention. “With the caveat of reading between the lines. Something went catastrophically bad with the nanite control system. Something got patched in and it started killing people. EMPs got used to wipe out infected nanites, but it didn’t take. They evacuated the population to the western continent, which wasn’t on the network, clearing out their nanites. This guy’s team were tasked with trying to fix it all. They found a way to do it…but it was going to take nearly a thousand years to propagate through the infected nanites. They worked on improving it for six months, but the last note was about how their evacuation would be brought up if a swarm moved in their direction. Which I guess is what happened and why they abandoned their work…”
“Any idea why they couldn’t speed it up?” I asked.
“Something about any quicker on their tests would trigger an anti-interference protocol.”
“We should take that log back to the Explorators. I think it’s the sort of thing that will get points.” I commented.
“Agreed,” said Voice as he and Sam finished the last page in the primer.
On the expedient of not knowing what was the most valuable of the documents. We took everything and then headed for the stairs up to the top floor. There was a boardroom directly opposite the stairwell, and on either side of it were executive offices.
To my complete surprise, we also found a working computer terminal.
And the login details on a post-it note under the keyboard.
“Executives everywhere seem to think the rules simply do not apply to them…” Voice muttered as he used them to log in. It didn’t work, but then he changed the last character of the password from a 1 to a 2 and we were in.
