《Shovelware: Disc 1》 Prologue Corn. He knew that was what it was called. He knew its shivering shape from shaky-cam livestreams he had watched from time to time of the distant land of America. He knew it was one of the United States number 1 agricultural exports. One in a number of facts he had memorised about the country. Sites of cultural importance. Number of military bases located outside its own non-contiguous borders. Governments overthrown. Depleted uranium rounds. Population densities of major metropolitan centuries. All these things were ground into his memory but he had almost no recollection of the events in the preceding days. He remembered warmth and heat and that big sunset in the Horn of Africa that was like nowhere else in the world. His father had once told him it was a sign of their place among God¡¯s chosen people. The sun¡­ Something was wrong with this corn. In all the images he had seen from the strangely named flatlands of America the corn had been illuminated at all times by the sun, its swaying stalks and beaded growths lit up from behind like a cash-crop movie stars. But there was no sun in this place to glint off the corn. There was only an ashen, slate-grey miasma that seemed to hang over and choke everything. The corn went on forever in all directions all around him. There was no comforting dip of a road of freeway like he had seen in the footage of the United States. There was no heartening blemish of humanity in this place. Only the endless corn blotching the dark around it. He looked up. No stars winked in the skies. He breathed out and the coldness of the place made him expect wisps of steam but there were none. He held his hand a short distance from his face. Had he gotten to the point of breathing on it, as he intended, he would have detected no moisture or wetness or warmth in his breath. But the hand he saw precluded any experimentation. His hand was a thing of pure and solid blackness. His skin was dark certainly, a fact the world in which he lived and cause he had given himself to and his mother¡¯s fate in that far off land would never allow him to forget, but this was something else. This was a darkness like the sky that hung above him. It was wrinkleless, blemishless, featureless and whole. His very body was a void. As he felt his mind pick at an entr¨¦e in the meal of madness he was rescued by the greater certainty of immediate danger. The corn was rustling. First only in a spot immediately behind him, which he swivelled to face, but then in more directions than he could spin his void-body to see. Little pale forms emerged from between the spears of corn. Children. All of them were identical. Little boys, no older than 10, with the same bright red baseball cap perched above their white moon faces. The same burnt-orange t-shirt without any identifying marks. The same jeans irregularly sliced at the knee to produce make-shift shorts. The last thing all of the figures had in common baffled him. Above each of their heads floated an almost translucent blue box. It bounced along with their steps, more rigid and purposeful than that of any young child he had ever known. The same two words sat in each child¡¯s floating box:This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
He had no idea what it meant. The children came streaming out of the corn in an avalanche of pale expressive faces and they strode towards him with the same confident steps. As they drew near to their arms outstretched and he raised his fists to defend himself. His sense of disorientation and fright had overcome any reservations he might have had about hitting a child. But he was shocked to see his black fist phase right through the child and emerge on the other end without the satisfaction of contact. A blue flash overwhelmed his vision and a blue box of text took over his field of view
PVP Combat has been disabled in this area by the administrator
The smal hands of the children restrained with eyes. He was pinned to the ground, one sitting on his hands and feet respectively and four others pinning down each arm and leg. The remain dug soil with their hands and heaped it up in their outstrecthed palms. In all his fear his mind stopped to notice something unusually. He could not make out individual clods of dirt in the piles. No errant specks tumbled between fingers or rearranged themselves with movement. The dirt was one solid mass of darkness, not unlike his new body. And then their little hands began to shovel the dirt into his mouth. The dirt had none of the visceral grit he had expected. It carried in it no hint of anything but itself; no stray stone or twig or shaving of a leaf. It did not dry his mouth as it was packing in their and beginning to shunt down his throat. It was one and whole and blocking up his airways. He began to writhe and thrash as he could feel the mounds of dirt swallowing his breath. His chest convulsed unseen as little fingers prodded and plucked more and more dirt until he could feel it sitting heavy in his stomach and stinging in his struggling lungs. His bucking and rolling proved no use as the many little hands kept him prone. Before the final blue screen appeared floating in front of his vision he felt something drop from his body with a clunk but his eyes cast to the sky could not see what it was. Words in a box sat against the sky in place of stars as his body went limp.
Notification
Integration: 100% ?Cannot generate new Character by request of Administrator
1x01: Its a Secret to Everybody Hannah woke up to mysterious geometry swirling in her head and the whole world was perfectly silent. It was pandemic season so even the cities would soon like this, filled to the brim with a devouring silence, but it made no difference out here on the edge of the world, where Ireland stretched a ragged lower limb out into the Atlantic. She sat up in her little single bed and rubbed her eyes but the shapes still danced where they were burned into her vision. Another night hard at work, having loaned her brainpower to a company for Subconscious Idle Processing Power. A little stipend for sleeping with the little wireless electrodes slapped on her temples wasn¡¯t too bad a way to make a living. She had certainly done worse. The sacrifice of dreams and the occasionally bizarre thought loop she found herself in seemed like a small price to pay. She sat up and popped the electrodes from her temple. They were lightweight, sleek and chrome, and placed them in a little delicate box at her bedside dresser that she liked to look at from time to time and pretend she had some beautiful jewellery. She stared for a moment at her bedsheets. Faded Disney Princesses contorted around her bent knees and turned into body horrors with strange proportions. If there had been anyone within 10 miles who might visit her home them might have thought her the type with a certain childish attachment to pastel coloured and plump lipped Princesses but they would have been wrong. Hannah would freely admit that she certainly had a childish attachment to a number of things but the Princesses had simply been a relic of the squat countryside bungalow¡¯s previous owners and Hannah and, with quick recourse to the old washing machine that woke her up from time to time, had decided against spending her sparse money on new bed clothes. For now they seemed to have warded off the geometry that haunted her. She threw the princesses to the floor and their smiling faces fell in a dejected heap on the off-cream carpet. She ran some mental calculations in her head for a moment and decided she could get another day or two out of her mismatched underwear and threw some pajamas over them before heading up the hall into the kitchen. Hannah popped some lab-meat bacon on the grill and took a loaf of bread out of the small freezer. She set two cold, hard slices on a plate and let them rotate in the microwave on defrost. She held her right hand out in front of her face and pressed her left index to the little metal nodule that bulged in the crook between her thumb and index finger 1...2...3...4¡­.5 The nodule flashed a little red light and chirped to life. The holographic screen spread out in glowing tessellations until it resolved into the shape of a screen. She immediately entered the Shovelware chat room to catch up on what she had missed while she was asleep. Or perhaps while she was working would be a more accurate way to put it.
[BRANDNOOBIAN]: Little to report from my excursion I''m afraid. Tried to use a few of the server crash glitch items on the Universal Harvester but it didn''t do anything. Maybe it needs a combination too. I left exact details on the blackboard if anyone wants to try to replicate it. I did find one interesting thing though but I want it to be a surprise. I''ll be sticking around into the early morn in ya''ll wanna jump on? 1 hour ago
BN was the only non-European in their band of merry little secret hunters and it meant he often had long stretches of searching the odd landscape of the game while Hannah and the others slept. All the solitude was the last thing that obsessive needed as far as Hannah was concerned, but his dedication had brought them some of their only real results in the history of the game. Hannah took the crispy bacon from the gril and let it fizz and sizzle on a plate. She went to put the slices of bred in the toaster but they just popped back up impotently. She tried a couple more times, eventually holding it down for a few seconds with a grunt. Fuck...toaster''s broken. Might need to hit the hay in the afternoon for a power nap to make the money to replace it. Won''t be easy to find an old model that works on an ancient power grid like the one in this house Hannah settled for her untoasted white bread with her bacon and set it on the formica kitchen island. She strode across the room and flipped on the old TV that crackled into life. 5 minutes of the news each day she had promised herself at the beginning of the year. She wanted to be more informed. The TV was likely at least twice as old as her. It was a big grey unwieldy box with a CRT screen that Hannah could feel the fuzz and static off if she got to close. Hannah liked it this way though. On her Palm Module or the VR news broadcasts everything was a rush of sound and furious colour, every tragedy and atrocity of the day coming at you head long like a train 24/7. The broadcasts on TVs like her little CRT box only came a few times a day, broadcast at a loss as a service for the Government''s Rural Resettlement Program. Hardly anyone lived outside the major cities or built up suburbs anymore and those who did, like Hannah, were usually being paid to do it. Pandemic season active, please remain indoors and limit contact with other people. Terrorist attack in Biafra kills 60. Pacific People''s Union to act as mediator in peace talks between the government of the United States and the separatists of New Afrika. Hannah liked the way the faded colours unclear transmission of the old TV made the daily horrors a bit less real. She liked how she had tracked them in this little box. They were kept to their scheduled times and never intruded too much on her life in blood-curdling full colour sound and fury. Even the newscaster seemed to be fading away a little, as though he were rising toward 100% integration.Stolen novel; please report. Clanging her cleared plate into the sink Hannah strolled back to her bedroom. She grabbed the VR kit from beside her bed and set an alarm the wired power pack with the LED display. She had been spending a little too much time in VR as of late and knew she would need a longer nap in the afternoon in order to donate enough of her neural processing power to get her new toaster and take care of a few bills. With a time limit set on her meeting with her fellow seekers she felt even more urgency to get into the game. She was dying to discover what BN''s new ''find'' was. Although she tempered her optimism by reminding herself that her American friend had a tendency to find immense significance in almost everything in the strange game. As she slipped the VR helmet on and the soft mesh blended seamlessly with the flesh of her face she remembered the tim he had become obsessed, for 3 days or more, with a head of corn that was misaligned with its own stalk by a sum of a few pixels. Hannah felt her muscles relax as the VR helmet manipulated her brain into a state resembling sleep. Then her vision was filled with light and a few fluttering notes welcomed her.
Welcome [Shrinking_Violent]!
The welcome message dissolved and Hannah felt herself reconstituted in a digital body. It was largely like her own although she hadn''t been able to help herself shaving off a kilogram or two here and there. She waved her way through the floating tiles that appeared in front of her, headstones of games that no longer held much interest for her. They were all top of the line VRMMOs; flashy titles that convulsed and obsessed much of the world''s gaming population. Each was filled to the brim with life-like graphics, dense systems and huge ecosystems full of 10s of thousands of players who had escaped a world of pandemics and drone strikes to one of orcs and elves and cyborgs. Hannah brushed them aside with disinterest until finally coming to a stop on the game without fancy box art or upcoming expansion updates. The floating tile was grey and contained some information in plain text.
Display name: [Shrinking_Violent]
[Class: Pavel K] [Humour Profile:Melancholic]
Total Playtime: 24:01:59
Hannah made a clasping motion with her hands and the little grey tile bounced jauntily before blackness consumed her vision.Shovelware didn''t have fancy ''waiting rooms'' like most of the other VR MMOs, where one could chat to party members or check out your character sheets or equipment. There was only this black void. Hannah could hear herself breathing and, her first couple times playing, it was the only way she realised this was part of the game and not a system crash in her VR device.Eventually she saw a jagged stalk of corn pop into existence in the blackness and knew it wouldn''t be long now. Soon it was joined by another. And another. Pop pop pop pop pop pop She had arrived. The corn surrounded her, stretching as far as she could see. The skies were blue and clear, untainted by even a single cloud. Some of the other VRMMOs had incredibly complex meterological systems that simulated any number of climates and weather systems realistically.Shovelware only had the all consuming blue or the all consuming dark. This was only one of the many things that gave away the game''s cheapness, esepcially when examined next to its multi-million dollar peers. If you watched the stalks carefully, as all the seekers had at one time for lack of any other theories, you coudl see they didn''t sway so much as list in a kind of blocky way, obeying some conistent metronome pattern. After a while it made you dizzy. Hannah figured she''d give her stats a once over. She plucked a stick from the dusty ground that seemed sharp enough and she held out her arm. Allthough it wasn''t really her arm. This arm was swaddled in a burnt-orange shirt and carried the smoothness of youth. This was the arm of a young boy; Pavel K., her chosen class. She stabbed her pale wrist with the stick and a pearl of blood emerged. It quickly dissipated into glowing pixels and a large blue screen now projected from the wound.
[Class: Pavel K] [Layer: 1]
[Humours]Melancholic:14 Sanguine: 7 Choleric:5 Phlegmatic:10
[Skills] Curiosity: 1 Humanity:1 Imagination:1 Endurance:1
Nothing had changed since she was last logged in but the whole system of the game remained a mystery to all the seekers. Only Brand Nubian had managed to gain a skill point since they arrived but could not at all figure out how he had done it. Every element of the game remained an enticing mystery. Hannah spun around and spotted a building not too far in the distance. It made of wood and was blotched with peeling, flaky paint. It had a porch on which sat a lone rocking chair which had no rocking animation built into it. Hannah had tried in a vane attempt to relax in their strange environment. She knew she would find BN and perhaps the others and the building and so set off in its direction. Although she could not read the sign that stood out proud over its Wild-West style doorway she knew what it said: The Super Sargasso Saloon