Dueling Dungeons (Rogue Dungeon 5) - Chapter Eleven

Moral Dilemma

Randy Shoemaker stood in front of TeaCaravan, watching the passing cars and foot traffic for signs of Helen Rose. The Frontflip campus was only two blocks away. What was taking her so long? He should’ve mentioned it was a matter of life and death when he called her, but he’d been so thrown off by talking to the Helen Rose Douglas on the phone that he’d gotten tongue-tied and barely managed to stutter out an invitation to the tea shop. Not how a hero would’ve handled the situation. How much time had they already lost because he’d been too nervous to make this sound urgent?

Finally, he caught sight of long blonde hair with a magenta under-dye fluttering in the bike path.

Helen Rose pulled her bike up to the rack outside the shop, grinning when she saw him waiting there. Randy’s heart sped up a couple beats, and this time it didn’t have anything to do with the fate of several dimensions riding on his shoulders. He wiped his suddenly sweaty hands on his khakis in case she wanted to shake. Did people shake hands when they met up outside work? That was a thing, right?

“Sorry I’m late.” She wound a thick chain around the bike’s crossbars and locked it to the rack. “Tara caught me on the way out to talk about fall projections, and that took forever…”

“It’s fine,” Randy said. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

She unsnapped her helmet and took it off. “I was so happy you called. Nobody knew what had happened after Friday, all they said was that you’d been fired. How are you doing? Are you okay?”

It took him a second to realize she was looking at the cuts and bruises on his face.

“Oh, right, uh, yeah.” Randy absently touched the swelling over his eye. Tender, but at least it wasn’t in a position to interfere with his glasses. “Honestly, I sort of forgot about the fight with Danny. A lot’s been going on that I need to talk to you about. Do you want to sit inside or should we get our drinks and come back out?” he asked, nodding at the metal bistro tables scattered around the front.

“Let’s get out of the smog,” she said, wrinkling her nose playfully.

Randy held the door for her, then followed her into the eclectic little shop. Inside, customers tapped away at laptops and sipped chai or smoked hookahs while stringy World Music filtered from the speakers.

Helen Rose glanced at him over her shoulder. “Maybe I should’ve checked to see how much smog there was inside before I spoke. It’s like the burning season up in here.”

“Let’s take our teas outside,” Randy suggested. Unlike Helen Rose, however, he was thinking about how quiet it was in there. Even with the music, everything they said seemed to carry. A girl at a table in the back corner answered her phone, and the whole room could hear that she had a pitch meeting with somebody from a major studio next week and also that she just needed a little more money to get by until then, Dad.

They ordered—a matcha for Helen Rose, and a Turkish coffee for Randy—then headed back outside and sat at the table farthest from the door.

“That really sucks that they fired you,” she said, sweeping some salt off the table before setting her cup down. “And that Danny didn’t face any repercussions. Everybody who saw the fight knows he swung first. It’s all over the security cameras.”

Randy shook his head, disgusted with himself. “It’s my fault. I knew they were looking for a reason to fire me—” Then he realized what she’d said. “Wait a second. Did you say you’d watched the security feed?”

“Oh yeah.” She sat forward. “It’s been leaked on, like, ten different platforms already. How did you do that Forest Fire Vine Fist? That was amazing. Was it fire gel?”

“No… That’s actually part of what I wanted to talk to you about.” He twisted his cup on the table, trying to think of a way to say this that didn’t sound crazy. “So, you know the Griefer from the Cruel Citadel?”

She smirked. “Everybody knows about the modders and their flag war. I did a couple livestreams to the Citadel and the Vault for my seedFeed. Super popular. I was going to do some more, but the higher-ups in marketing said it was time to focus on the Onyx Sands.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Randy said. “They want you to shift focus for a reason. I was the dev assigned to investigate the modders and find a way to stop their anomalous code before it crashed Hearthworld. Except what I found wasn’t modders. Roark and Lowen are in a real, honest-to-God battle to the death.”

Her smile faltered. “What, is this like a Dark Web challenge or something? Does one of them have to kill themselves or go on a murder rampage if they lose?”

“No, but lots of people are going to suffer and possibly die if we don’t do something. See, Roark’s a freedom fighter from another dimension. He was trying to stage a coup on the dictator there, but when that failed, he came through a wormhole of sorts that spit him out in Hearthworld. I think that part was an accident. He was trying to go somewhere else. But anyway, Lowen is part of the dictatorial regime, sort of like the ruler’s attack dog, and he was sent after Roark. Their arrival has set off this virus-style wave that’s taking former NPCs and turning them into sentient, self-aware beings.”

Randy sighed and twisted his cup some more. “I tried to explain some of this to the board, but, as you can probably imagine, they didn’t believe me—even now that they still can’t find a way to stop the spread of the anomalous code. The only thing they can come up with is a full shutdown; dump every server and wipe Hearthworld completely. They were already planning to let me go and pin it on me as disgruntled employee sabotage, but I guess I set myself up as even more of a perfect fall guy by picking a fight with Danny. That gave them a logical reason to fire me.”

After a couple seconds, Randy realized Helen Rose hadn’t said anything. He glanced up to find her staring at him with an expression halfway between disbelief and concern.

When he caught her eyes, she looked down at her matcha.

“Okay, wow,” she said. “This isn’t what I expected we’d be discussing when you asked if I wanted to go get coffee. Maybe the latest photos from Pluto, or how crazy all these conspiracy theories are about aliens killing people in LA… Not craziness about alternate dimensions…”

“But it’s not craziness,” Randy said, scooting to the edge of his seat. “Those conspiracy theories…” He pulled out his phone and searched for the latest video. “Just look at this.” He turned the screen toward her.

With her hand, Helen Rose shielded the screen from the sun and squinted at the video. The ring of steel on steel and the grunt of fighting came from his phone’s speaker.

Randy had already seen the footage from several different angles. Lots of people had been on hand to witness and record Roark’s pitched battle with the beautiful raven-winged Herald, right in the middle of a dirty alleyway somewhere in Alameda.

He tapped Pause. “Tell me what those creatures remind you of.”

Helen Rose leaned back. “They could be Hearthworld cosplayers larping. This whole thing was probably staged.”

Instead of arguing, Randy skipped the video ahead to the moment both the Jotnar and the Herald launched themselves into the sky.

“Jetpacks,” Helen Rose said.

Randy waited. Whoever was recording this, turned to watch the winged creatures soar across the sky.

Helen Rose frowned, snatching the phone out of his hand. “Lateral flight?”

Randy nodded. “It’s possible that someone came up with the technology for horizontal propulsion and is just testing it…”

“But not probable,” she said. “Not when there’s nothing to exert pressure against. The physics don’t support it.”

Randy chuckled weakly. “Literally.”

Slowly, she handed the phone back to him.

“Think about what you’re saying, Randy. If this is true, then we have to accept that at least one of the multiverse theories is accurate. Multiple dimensions? Wormhole crossovers?”

“The math is there.”

“The theory is there. The math is shaky at best and rests on the presupposition of parallel dimensions.”

“But Roark’s travel to this dimension proves it. Until he set foot in our world, he could’ve just been some ultra-advanced bit of coding that I hadn’t seen yet.” He adjusted his glasses. “There were a lot of points where I questioned my sanity, right up until they crossed over to Earth.”

“Okay, say this is all true,” Helen Rose wrapped her hands around her matcha cup like she suddenly needed the warmth—while sitting in the sunshine in the middle of summer in Southern California. “Why come here? It’s like the theory of intelligent extra-terrestrials contacting Earth. Why bother? What’s the motivation?”

“In Roark’s case, it’s obvious—escaping execution.”

“So, political asylum?”

“Well, not really, because he’s pretty gung-ho about getting back to his homeworld and finally taking out the dictator. The problem is Lowen, the Herald who runs the Vault of the Radiant Shield. He was sent after Roark to get back a pendant he stole from the Tyrant King. It’s either a magical artifact or a piece of technology we don’t understand yet, and it somehow became soulbound when Roark crossed into Hearthworld.”

Randy took a big swig of his now lukewarm coffee. “That’s part of why I needed to talk to you in such a hurry. He—Lowen, that is—is on his way to Frontflip. He’s planning to launch an attack on it and get one of the devs to take the soulbind tag off the pendant. If he does, if he can kill Roark and take the pendant, then our whole world might just be one more check box on the Tyrant King’s To-Conquer list.” He frowned out at the traffic. “Roark showed me the aftermath of what happened in his world. It’s terrible. We can’t let the same thing happen here on Earth.”

For several long seconds, the only sound was the tire roar and honking of passing cars. Helen Rose stared down into her matcha cup, processing the information. Randy waited. This was a lot to catch up on. He’d basically just briefed her on an entire project with an unknown any-second launch window.

“I can’t see a way around it.” She blew a strand of long hair out of her eyes. “The most logical move is what Frontflip’s planning. If our goal is to protect Earth from an invading force, the fastest way to stop them is to cut off their entry point, then kill the ones that have already come through. It would take too long to explain to the public at large, and they wouldn’t believe anyway if the shutdown was successful, so framing you even has its place.”

“But this isn’t just Earth on the line anymore,” he insisted. “It doesn’t even matter if I take the fall or not. We’re talking two whole dimensions. Hundreds of lives in Hearthworld and potentially millions on Roark’s home world.”

“If we’ve got to decide between supposedly self-aware code and living, breathing human beings…”

“That’s a false dichotomy,” Randy said. “What we’ve got to do is whatever will save the most lives possible—digital included. I’ve talked to these mobs and NPCs. They have emotions and are self-aware and engage in peer review and make faulty decisions that aren’t hardwired into their code. They’re not artificial life anymore. They’re as real as you or me.”

“But what if the course of action that saves the most lives possible is to sacrifice the digital lives? If what you’re saying is true, and you want to weight each life as equally important regardless of whether it’s organic or digital, then we have to look at nothing but numbers. Altogether, the NPCs and mobs in Hearthworld barely add up to a fraction of a percent of the humans on Earth.”

Randy did the math and felt the air go out of him. He slumped in his seat. A soft hand squeezed his. When he looked up, she was regarding him with concern.

He shook his head, determination sweeping through him.

“There’s got to be a way to save everybody,” he said. “I know it’s not a logical assumption, but a hero would find a way—”

His phone started vibrating, shaking the whole table. PwnrBwner’s name flashed across the screen. Randy grabbed it up and answered.

“It’s on, nerd,” PwnrBwner said without wasting time on the social niceties. “They’re here.”

Randy locked eyes with Helen Rose.

“We’re out of time,” he told her. “We’ve got to get to Frontflip then you’ll see the indisputable proof for yourself…”