No More Credits Remaining

By theidiotmachine

Tyler woke up with a headache and a dry mouth, which wasn't unusual. He was on the floor in his clothes, which was more of a surprise, but still, relatively normal. People were shouting, which, he had to admit, did happen. When he opened his eyes and squinted at them, they all seemed to be wearing fancy dress, which was relatively new.

'Get up!'

He sat up and rubbed his face, and looked around. He was in a basement room, all dirty concrete and water stains. There were grungy strip lights, pipes everywhere, air ducts in the ceiling, and piles of wooden crates with words stencilled on them. A huge metal door filled one wall. His back hurt from lying on the hard floor.

He scratched his leg. He was wearing bright red combat boots and fatigues, which he didn't remember putting on – but then, he'd woken up in weirder stuff. Maybe he'd fallen in with this lot and they'd persuaded him to dress up to join in?

'Get up, dammit!'

Three of the people in the room were standing in a corner, yelling at each other. The last was standing directly above him, glowering down. He looked up at her, realization dawning that she'd been talking to him. He gaped at her.

She was wearing improbable armour which left her midriff and cleavage exposed to the world. She had pink hair tied into bunches, and a pair of pistols in holsters at her waist. She was reaching down, about to slap him with a perfectly manicured hand.

'Woah!' Tyler said. 'Woah. Are you a... soldier?' That didn't seem likely, but he couldn't imagine what else she could be. In his experience soldiers wore helmets and tactical vests. Although, admittedly, they did shout like she did. Often at him.

'You idiot. Get up unless you want to be left behind,' she replied.

Being left behind didn't sound great, but then following shouting people didn't sound great either. Maybe these guys knew where to find some breakfast. They didn't seem like the kind of people he'd go a party with, though, so that was weird. He clambered to his feet.

'Hey! My name's Tyler...'

She ignored his outstretched hand.

'Your crate is over there. Open it and get whatever's inside.'

Not entirely sure what he was doing, he wandered off in the direction she was pointing. In the corner, there was indeed a box with his name stencilled on it. It wasn't nailed shut or anything, so that was nice; he lifted the wooden lid and peered inside.

Inside was a long gun, covered in flashing lights; a dozen boxes of bullets; a bright red helmet; and six green boxes with white crosses on them. He initially thought that these last were first aid kits, but they didn't appear to be have anything in them, or indeed even to be able to be opened: they were literally just green plastic boxes. He picked up the gun and the helmet and ambled back to the shouty lady. She was staring into the middle distance, waving her hands in the air.

'I couldn't carry it all, so I took these...' he said.

'What? You couldn't fit all the things in your inventory?' she asked, distracted by whatever she was doing.

'My what now?'

She snapped her fingers, and turned the full force of her glare onto him.

'I'm only being nice because I need you. Open your menus like this...' – she waved her hand in the air – '...then go to the help screen and find out how to use your inventory. Do you understand?'

Tyler paused, not sure what to say; and then decided that he didn't want to get punched, which seemed very likely based on her mood. So he nodded, and tried to copy the gesture.

The world faded away, and red letters leapt up.

'Team Rumble modified beta. Help. Controls. Stats...' He closed it again. 'Woah, is this a videogame?'

She didn't bother turning her menus off. 'If you hadn't slept through the briefing you'd know the answer to that.'

He brought the text back up and searched through the help for how to use his inventory. It was just a hand gesture. He tried that on the gun, and it vanished; he was able to magic it back with the same gesture.

Despite this, it certainly didn't feel like a video game: the gun was cold and heavy in his hands, and the room smelt of oil and sweat and fear. His helmet was itchy on his head and he still needed a drink of water.

The three people in the corner had stopped shouting and were whispering and glancing at the pink haired lady. She was ignoring everyone. It didn't feel like a situation he wanted to get involved with.

He walked back to his crate and looked more closely at its contents, vanished each of the things, one at a time, into his inventory. Then, at the bottom: sweet relief! A bottle of water. He sipped it, grateful to the game designers.

'We've decided,' said one of the three, a giant of a man wearing nothing but a tight pair of shorts. He had a high voice and a darting, nervous expression. 'We're going to go out there and try to win.'

'You can't,' said pink hair. 'Stay with me, and you might be able to get something better.'

'What is "something better"?' asked the giant. 'You keep saying that, and yet you won't say what.'

She shook her head. 'I can't.'

'That's because it's bullshit!' shouted one of the other three, a short woman with blue skin and a sword. 'You're just trying to distract us. The briefing guy said we were the strongest team, that we had the best chance of winning and getting out of here. And yet you just keep playing with those menus.'

Pink hair snapped her fingers, and turned her attention to them. Tyler was expecting a glare, but this was closer to pity. 'Look, I'm really sorry. I'm your best hope. But I can't stop you. The alarm will go off in fifteen seconds, and you're welcome to go wherever you want. But, I promise you: you should stick with me.'

'No way, lady,' said blue. She marched to the door. The third, a man with a semi-automatic and a bionic arm, followed immediately. The giant looked at both parties, shook his head and went with the other two.

Tyler sipped his water and thought.

He did remember bits and pieces now. He'd been on a spaceport, an absolute dump. He'd been stopping off for a week on his way to, where? Oh yeah. 9 Ceti, for some work with their local police. And he'd decided to go out drinking on his own, in a part which made even the rest of the port look nice... He winced at the memory.

Pink lady walked up to him.

'We don't have much time. I need to look at your skills.'

'Um, okay,' he said, not feeling in much of a position to argue. 'How do you do that?'

She tapped the side of his head, and the two of them were back in his red menus. She reached up and ran through them, sliding sliders and tapping buttons.

'So am I floating in a tank or something right now?' he asked. 'Like, I can't really miss my flight.'

'Oh, in a best case scenario, you made your flight,' she replied. The red light from the text made her look like she was soaked in blood. 'Worst case, you're dead in the waste recycling, and this is all that's left of you. There. You're the sniper. I made you faster and more accurate, but you have fewer hit points...'

'Woah, woah, woah, what do you mean I'm dead?'

She clicked the menus closed. The striplights had turned crimson. An alarm was blaring. The other three people pushed their way out of the opening door, jaws clenched, beads of sweat shining on their foreheads.

The pink haired lady shook her head. 'It's started. We need to move. I'll explain on the way. My name's May, by the way.' She put on a red helmet and marched to the exit.

With no other options, and a lot of burning questions, Tyler followed her.

They emerged into an alley between two dirty brick buildings, filled with rubbish. It was early morning, and the sky was pink. Rats scattered from their path, and Tyler splashed in oily puddles as he picked his way past the dumpsters and cardboard boxes.

The other three had turned left to a larger road; May watched them go, and then turned in the opposite direction, threading the back ways between the buildings, past graffiti-scrawled walls boarded up windows. Everything stank of garbage and smoke.

They walked for a few minutes, pushed their way through a ruptured chain-link fence festooned with plastic trash, and emerged on a street. It was deserted. The vehicles were all burnt out. The little shops had all been looted, their awnings ripped and pulled down, chairs and boxes strewn on the street. Some way down there was a pile of what he thought were bodies: then he realised that they were shop window dummies, soiled and burnt. The only sound was the wind, which hectored the smoke, and chased the trash so that it whirled and spiralled.

May stopped, looked around, and then waved him onwards. The two of them strode along the pavement. Her eyes darted from doorway to window, and her pistols were in her hands.

'So this whole being dead thing...' he ventured.

'At some point someone pushed an illegal thing called a soul disk into the back of your head, and took a copy of your consciousness. The original you either woke up with a hangover, having no idea what happened, or was shot. That soul disk has been uploaded into a video game, along with a lot of others; and we're going to fight those people. All clear?'

He looked down at the pavement, at the way his boots thudded on the concrete, at how a rotten apple rolled away when he kicked it.

'Not really. I mean, this feels real?'

'You idiot. Look at what I'm wearing. Do you think an armoured bra is practical? This was designed by a man baby who never left his mother's basement. I bet he called this character something like Trixie.'

'Um, yes. That seems weird, I agree. As does this whole inventory thing. But, look around you. It's incredible!'

He gestured at the smoking vehicle wrecks, at the dead-eyed buildings, at the boarded-up doors.

'Yes. That's because you've only ever experienced a virtual environment through organic senses. We have wires plugged into our literal metal brains. Get down!'

May flung herself to the ground, behind the nearest car. Tyler followed her. Bullets smashed into the ground behind him, ricocheting from the concrete and leaving craters in the paving stones More rang on the metal chassis of the vehicle they were hiding behind, making a noise like a giant slamming a hammer into a sheet of tin.

'Jesus,' he panted. 'What now?'

'Shut up and get your gun out.'

He fumbled the gesture the first time and she swore at him, but the second time he found himself holding the weapon, heavy and cold in his sweating palms. 'Got it.'

'They're in the building with the green door, on the other side of the street, firing from a first floor window. It's the one three from the right. You're going to shoot six shots there, staying as low as you can, spaced at one second intervals; and then you're going to get down and wait.'

'What are you going to do?'

She grinned at him, a smile with no humour at all. 'Don't worry your little head about that. Okay... now!'

He popped up and pushed the gun through the broken passenger window, and peered through the scope. There was a glint in the building's window which he guessed she had seen. He breathed out, and then fired.

As soon as the first bullet left his gun, May leaped up and sprinted towards the green door. Ah, that was it. He fired twice, three times, trying to keep them at second intervals. She must have guessed that it would take five seconds to get to the door, so he was keeping them busy. After the sixth shot, he ducked back down. A number on the side of the gun flashed zero: out of ammo.

More shots rang around him. He couldn't see May, and so he hoped that she was okay. He pulled some bullets from his inventory and reloaded, the shells slotting into the gun with satisfying clicks.

As he was doing this, something clicked into his mind. It was almost as if the act of loading the rifle had triggered some deep memory.

Huh. That's weird, he thought. Maybe it's the hangover finally wearing off.

So am I really on a soul disk? I thought they were illegal. Although that port was pretty awful, so maybe not a surprise.

More shots: but this time the clatter of pistol fire, accompanied by shouts and screams. Something crashed through a window, and it went very quiet.

'You can stand up now.'

The voice was May's, but in his ear. He briefly panicked, and then realised that the helmet had a headset. Of course. Teenagers can't play online without screaming awful slurs at each other, so that had been replicated here too.

He partly straightened, terrified that more bullets would plough down towards him. When nothing came, he stood fully, and stretched.

There was a body spreadeagled across the road, having plummeted from the first floor window. Its limbs were at strange angles, and blood pooled under it out on the asphalt, black in the dawn light. Thankfully it was face down.

Various things were scattered around it. More boxes of bullets, remarkably intact from the fall. Health packs. A gun similar to his. A yellow helmet.

'Grab the ammo and health, will you?' asked May in his ear. She sounded more cheerful; killing must improve her mood. Well, great, he thought. I'm stuck with a psychopath. Then, another feeling surfaced that this was just what she was like at this stage of a job; it was all bravado, and she would be shivery and upset later. Which was weird.

I'm a forensic accountant, he thought. I don't know any shouty ladies with pink hair. Why do I think I do?

To keep his mind off such strange thoughts, he walked over to the corpse, and collected the stuff. It was more than he could carry, but he took as much as he could. As he did, the body faded, leaving blood stains on the road.

May sauntered from the green door.

'Nice work: you winged one of them. They were busy messing with health packs when I got in there, which made it easy. Although I killed them, so I got the experience.'

'Experience?'

'I'm level two now. Come on, you must have played video games?' She picked up one of the health packs and vanished it into her inventory.

'Not this sort,' replied Tyler. 'I like farming games. Oh, and economic simulators. I think this kind of thing is stupid. I don't understand why people take such pleasure in casual murder.'

Her expression sobered. 'Yeah, I hear you. Come on. We can't hang about here.' She started off, up the street.

'Hey, something funny happened earlier. I had a sort of... memory. Is that part of the game?'

She swung around. 'What sort of memory?'

'It was weird. I was loading my gun when I suddenly remembered that there was a pot plant which I knew about. It's in a hotel lobby or something. It has a white pot. It's a dragon plant, I think.'

She frowned. 'That's very specific. No, I don't think that's part of the game. Okay, change of plan: we're going to the hotel.'

'You think it means something?'

'I don't know. But there's only one way to find out.'

#

They walked for quarter an hour. Neither of them said much. Tyler couldn't put his finger on what he remembered of May: it was like trying to catch a fish with bare hands. Every time a flash of memory surfaced he tried to grab it with his mind, yet it darted away, brilliant and transient.

She'd picked up a greatcoat from somewhere, and the material swung around her as she strode. It became pink as soon as she wore it.

'It'll give me one more armour point, and stop you staring at my tits,' she'd said. He hadn't answered.

The neighbourhood became more genteel as they walked: just as many burnt out cars, but the street was wider, and the empty shops had been selling high-end clothes and food, rather than the cheap stuff that they'd left behind. They didn't meet anyone, except for a firefight which they avoided by ducking into a butchers. The animal corpses were blackened by time and stank of rot and fat.

After the shots had finished, they crept out: around a corner, now fading into nothing, were the bodies of the three people who'd left earlier. The giant was slumped over a burning car, his flesh stinking like a barbecue. The blue woman was in pieces. The other man was covered in bullet holes, his face a mask of pain.

'The strongest team and had the best chance,' Tyler said quietly.

'Don't be snide. What would you say to people who you wanted to fight to the death for your enjoyment?' May replied.

'I wasn't being snide.' He picked up a health pack. 'Are they actually dead? As in, dead in reality? Or are they back in a waiting room somewhere?'

'They're properly dead. That's the game. If they were entertaining enough they'll be restored from backup, with no memory of what happened. This could be your hundredth time, or your first. But if you're restored, the person who comes back won't be you: it'll be someone else with your personality and memories, the same way you're a copy of the person who got on that flight. One life: this is it. This is ours.'

Tyler crouched down next to the upper half of the blue woman as she faded away to nothing.

'This was recent, right?'

'Yes. They were killed by a player character, I think. We should leave.'

'Okay.'

They were near the entrance to a hotel. It had once been chromed and grand, a glorious pillared temple to tourism. Now it was as bullet-riddled as everything else.

Actually, thought Tyler, this was never beautiful. This has always been like this. It's like May said: this place is a teenager's idea of a war zone. It gets reset every time they restart the game.

How did I know that?

The double door was closed. Tyler scanned the street with his gun while May worked on the locks. There was nothing else out there, except for the crack of small arms fire a few blocks away, sharp in the silence.

The door clicked open. Tyler started at the noise.

'Come on,' May said.

Tyler ducked into the darkness behind her.

'This is the lobby,' whispered May. 'We'll start here. Can you recognise this pot plant?'

'Yeah, I think so. Why are you whispering?'

'Because I have no idea if this place is important. We should keep a low profile.'

He nodded and followed her through the darkness.

The floor was tiled black and white and the walls were wooden panelled, and the lights were all chandeliers, dripping a wan light. After he passed the third, he realised that they were all the identical, missing lights in the same place, their glass swaying the same way.

They crept through a corridor, and then emerged in a wider space, some abstract splash of paint passing for modern art on one wall, a desk covering a second, a set of plants lined against the third...

'It's that one,' he hissed to May.

'It has a red pot,' she replied. 'You said...'

'I know what I said...'

The room lit up, flickering with rage; bullets smashed into the wall behind them. May hurled them both behind the desk, and bottles exploded above them.

'That's a player character!' May screamed over the noise. Glass showered down like angry rain.

'What?' Tyler replied.

'This is the fucking game! People pay to hunt and murder us! Your pot plant had better be good...'

The wood splintered around them, chippings flying around them.

'It's not my...'

'Same as before,' May interrupted, eyes gleaming in the darkness. 'Six shots, but this time half a second between each one. He will fire back, so use your health. You need to do this to use it, don't mess up like those guys I killed.' She closed her hand in a fist. Fire blossomed above them as the player character hosed down the surface with flame; the few remaining bottles on the desk shattered from the heat.

'Okay...'

'Go.'

He pulled out his gun and pushed it over the desk, firing without looking, guessing where their attacker was. The flames stopped, and May sprinted towards the plants.

Tyler fired again, and then popped up, swung his scope around, peered through it and fired a third time.

The player character was wearing matt black armour, in stark contrast to the cartoony gear everyone else had been in. As soon as Tyler fired, he fired back. The bullet hit Tyler's shoulder, spinning him back and round, his gun clattering to the floor. It felt like a metal rod had been plunged into him, and he grunted in pain.

He pulled out a health pack, and made the fist gesture that May had shown him; the pain vanished and the blood stopped dribbling out. He scrambled forward and grabbed his gun, just as more fire flooded the space where he'd been sitting. Bracing against the inevitable pain, he popped up again and loosed two more shots. When he did, he saw May.

She was nearly at the plants. As she neared, one of them flickered; its red pot paled and became white, a glowing beacon in a flashing world. The man in black noticed, and turned his gun at her.

Tyler fired again. The shot was true, and the man staggered back causing him to miss. He cursed, a muffled, mechanical noise under the roar of gunfire.

May screamed and landed next to the plant.

The world froze.

Tyler stopped, confused. The man in black was in the middle of reloading, shells in one hand, gun in another, armour casing bouncing around his knees. A picture was falling from the wall behind him.

May stood up.

'We have a limited control of the game,' she said. 'I think it'll be paused for maybe another ten seconds. You need to come over here and activate the plant.'

Tyler crossed the room to her, the glass crunching under his boots. He remembered how much he'd loved her. He wondered if she remembered too.

'Do you know the password?' she asked.

He nodded, bent down, and whispered it, and the world went white.

#

The player was moving again, firing at the place where they'd been. May smiled, and lifted her arms. She was holding guns.

Lots of guns.

It was like a curse from an angry god: bullets, beams, missiles, lightning, flames. A dozen barrels spat hate at the black-clad figure. He was torn apart, limbs flung across the room, organs bursting like wet balloons. The tiles under him shattered, the walls erupted like a volcano of plaster and paint, leaving great ragged holes.

'They'll all be coming,' May said.

'I know,' Tyler replied.

He remembered now. How he'd had his memories repressed, so that they wouldn't know when they scanned him. How he and May had been hunting these scum for months. How they'd both gone in with half a memory, a pair of pieces of the puzzle.

Somewhere outside his original was waiting for a signal, so that he and May could storm the locked-down complex, hidden away on the spaceport.

May looked at him and smiled, properly, for the first time since she'd met up with him.

A number flickered up in the top right of his vision: his player level. It wasn't one any more. It had a lot of nines.

There were two more black-clad people running up the street. He knew that because he could see through walls. May crouched down by the pot plant, releasing the scripts that they'd hidden there, code they'd smuggled into the game months ago. While she did that, he strode out of the hotel, not bothering with the door, just smashing through the wall. The people lifted their guns, but he waved his hands and lightning scoured the street, burning them into ash and tearing the nearby buildings into bones and dust. It wasn't much, but it gave them some time.

The sky was darkening as drones streamed from a tower in the centre of the city. He frowned and summoned a burning wind which blew them from the sky, turned them into so much hot ash which fluttered down like confetti. His helmet pinged: he had too many experience points for the game. It didn't know what to do.

Above him, the sun flexed and squirmed, uncontrollable energy flooding from it, close to bursting. He tore down some buildings with a thought, and split the road so that it creaked and screamed.

'It's time,' May said.

He turned to her. Someone was shooting at them, so, without looking, he pointed his finger and vaporised them.

'I know,' he said.

She smiled at him. 'You promised you'd die with me. Well, this is it.'

The pot plant had released its poison, and the game was collapsing, black chunks of sky falling around them.

'No. I promised I'd die for you.'

He kissed her as the fire took everything.

#

Tyler stared at a black plastic box. He'd been staring at it for hours, the red light the only thing he was interested in. It clicked, and flicked off. Then a green light flashed, and then stayed on.

He looked up at May.

'They – we – did it. The game's down, which means the security is too.'

May grimaced and nodded.

'Let's make our death's count for something.'

The two walked out of the hotel room, guns in their hands.

#

Thanks for reading! My merge genres were soulpunk and LitRPG. I will confess that I am not a fan of this second genre – even the name, with its inappropriate capitalisation, gives me the jitters – but the person who controls the spice controls the galaxy, so here I am, dabbling.

Yes, this story is not about a true RPG, it's more of an arena FPS, but I had some thoughts about what LitRPG means, where it came from, and how it got here. And I found that when I started deconstructing more, it got boring and expositiony. So instead, I will give you my thoughts here.

We killed TV, you and I. We killed it when the little black rectangles in our hands started dropping dopamine into our minds quicker than the bigger black rectangle across the room. It meant that we stopped diving into its linear story, and instead we skimmed it, while skudding over the non-linear ones in our hands. We did that to movies too, although in a theatre you don't get that distraction, and for me, that's what's still so magical about the cinema.

Two genres of visual entertainment survived this distraction onslaught. The first is video games. The interaction and threat provided by them means you have to have both hands on mouse and keyboard (or gamepad or whatever) eyes and ears peeled, ready for the enemy to drop out of orbit.

Or do you? Have you ever flicked through your phone while on a loading screen? Looked at social media instead of planting turnips in your farming simulator? Of course you have. Video games are just less susceptible to the virus, not immune. We'll come back to this.

The second genre is reading.

When you read, you have to have absolute attention to the page. If you don't, everything stops. You can't flick through a feed while bingeing a novel: it's one or the other. And so this art that you and I consume and create, one of the oldest humanity has produced, is unchanged by the creation of the portable distraction devices we call phones. That's actually quite special.

So reading is easy to understand: it dominates our simple, one-task minds. But video games are less locked in to our attention. How do they win the attention war?

One of the ways that RPG-style games do this is through the creation of artificial rewards. You feel like you've achieved something when you level up. I call this an artificial reward because killing a boss in a videogame is a very natural reward: you have done something challenging and can look back at it with satisfaction. Increasing a statline, on the other hand, is also a dopamine hit, but it's pretty meaningless. Your mind loves it, but you don't get the same solid reward cycle. It's like junk food for the brain. It's why clickers exist, and why we feel kind of hollow after we play them, even though we can't stop.

And the interesting thing about RPGs is that it's very hard to tell which dopamine hit you're getting. The 'good' kind or the 'bad' kind? RPGs exploit this to make you grind. (Mobile games cynically exploit this to the absolute maximum, obviously, to make you spend money.) I do think that this pleasure cycle is what keeps us glued to videogames in a way that we aren't to the TV. We rarely get the same sense of achievement from consuming media completely passively, even though the active consumption of RPGs is mostly just repetitive work to make a number go up. That's kind of surprising, because after all, repetitive work to make a number go up is pretty much what we do at our workplaces and schools and we don't get as addicted to that.

And so we farm, and kill, and craft, and build, obsessed with making a number go up, and our phones are (mostly) ignored.

Finally, back to LitRPGs. My theory is that someone somewhere realised that these two forms of pleasure – the achievements from games, and the locked-in concentration of reading – could be combined. They tried to capture the accomplishment from the grind into the all-encompassing world of the novel. Is that a noble quest? Probably not. Does it fill some hole in someone's soul? Maybe. Maybe.

But the thing I find the most distasteful about RPGs is the casual attitude to death, and that's the thread I ended up pulling on in this story. In real life armed combat is much more like a FPS arena where you've had no preparation and are under-equipped: death is swift, and arbitrary, and very much based on luck. Yes, experienced soldiers will even the odds: but they will do that by advantaging themselves in as many ways as they can, with terrain and surprise and positioning, not because they're magically more capable of surviving a bullet impact.

And yet, thanks to the grind, we're saddled with the myth that you can churn your way through a mountain of corpses and somehow arrive on the other side a better person, psychologically undamaged and physically significantly tougher, all because a number went up.

Do we want this in our stories?