Chapter 8 #2
After nightfall, I sat at the old metal desk in my top-floor office, Casino windows black beyond the glass.
My feet were bare, stretched out, and crossed at the ankle on the battered crate that passed for a footrest. The Harbor was quiet, lights at the docks reflected in the chop like a row of watchful eyes.
Salt air drifted in through the cracked pane, cold enough to raise goosebumps on my legs.
Above the desk, the yellow glow from the salvaged string lamp pooled in slow, dying circles, turning the printouts in front of me the color of old teeth.
I was in boxers and a clean shirt, still warm from the shower I’d taken aboard Horizon.
Real soap and shampoo, even a chance to trim the beard that had started getting away from me.
Joy would notice. She’d been after me about it for days.
She was on her way up, and she’d said she was bringing someone with her as a reward, someone on the list. She wouldn’t say who.
She said the girl’s turn wasn’t due for a while, but Joy decided she deserved to jump the line and that inviting someone was allowed.
So I read.
Four digital folders sat open on the wrist-com display: MEGA SPACE, MEGA FANTASY, MEGA APOCALYPSE, and the one I kept coming back to, MEGA EARTH.
Taylor had pulled everything from Horizon’s internal memory and cross-referenced it with whatever Stingray Arms files she shared.
Her notes were sharp and layered right into the files.
I started with the system comparisons. My first impression: they all shared a skeleton.
Stats, dice, levels, the rest. I never played the game, but having played Dungeons later books filled in more regions and detail, but nothing pointed to me or anyone I knew.
Still, the disasters lined up too closely for comfort.
And the other universes? If Taylor was correct, and she was, then the Blue Wave didn’t just break the planet.
It punched holes into countless universes: Games, books, movies, and every other medium that held a story.
Some idiot in a bathrobe writes a short story about cat-women with six breasts, and then, next thing you know, you’re on the run with a crew of them, taking turns at the helm of a real-life pirate ship.
Someone else hacks their game to add “improved fairy magic” or “big tiddy elves,” and two years later you’re hosting a tribal council where they’re actual delegates with actual demands.
The full, existential horror of that had not yet reached the population.
I didn’t know what to do with the thought. Was the Wave a game artifact? Was this all some recursive meta-joke? I’d killed real men and loved real women and watched real people die. It didn’t feel like a game, but then again, the stories I’d read never did to the characters.
I flipped a page and found the section on player agency.
Two highlighted lines: “The GM is instructed not to railroad PCs, but to let their choices reshape the story.” Below that, Taylor had written, “The universe may self-correct to allow player-driven outcomes. See test cases: Trazzor, Mechanari, ‘Horizon’ phenomenon, Earth timeline.”
I heard her voice in my head: “You are the PC, James.” She meant it as a joke, but the thought got under my skin.
I set the printout down, stared at the edge of the window, and let my eyes drift out over the channel.
Out there, under the invisible line of the horizon, two hundred women and eleven men trusted me to keep them from turning into a footnote in some alien campaign.
I had sex with several of them. A normal night on post-Wave Earth.
The floorboard outside the office creaked. Once, then twice. I didn’t move, didn’t call out, I waited to see which of my regulars it would be.
Akia came in sideways, her head ducked under the lintel, both ears at full mast and tail rigid behind her.
She wore a faded pink pleated skirt that she had scavenged from Avalon High School a few days ago, hem frayed but stitched clean at the waist. It hung low on her hips, revealing the patch of bare skin where her sand-colored fur met the flat of her belly.
No top. Six small breasts, conical and tipped with perfect brown, were the only thing between her neck and the elastic waistband.
They were set in three rows, each one smaller than the last as they moved down.
I’d seen her topless a hundred times. Still, my cock twitched.
She saw the stacks of printouts, sniffed the air, and padded over. Her feet made no sound, but her tail knocked over a loose folder, and she bent to right it, ass in the air. The motion was automatic, done without show. I caught myself smiling.
“Alpha,” she said. Her voice had a faint buzz, like a radio tuned slightly off-channel.
“Akia,” I replied. “Do you need something?”
She perched on the edge of the desk, her legs dangling and her knees angled open. She locked her eyes on mine, then did a slow survey of my bare legs and the bulge in my boxers, then up to the stack of paper again. Her nose twitched.
“I’m here for the nightly update,” she said, tilting her head. “Status of the Ci Dyn. Also, a supply matter.”
I set the paper aside. “Go ahead.”
She rattled off her list with the speed of someone who’d rehearsed it all the way up the stairs.
Two crews had finished the south pier. The new head of maintenance for this building, she was calling it HQ because Joy had told her that it meant Headquarters, the place the boss works, had taken the job and asked for a “favor” from some of the Fatu Hiva survivors.
Akia thought it was more funny than serious, but she wanted the policy to be clear.
“If both parties agree, I see no problem,” I said, wondering what she meant by “favors.”