EverRealm: A LitRPG Novel (Level Dead Book 1) Read online

  But I’d built enough of a lead that I could slow down to catch my breath. I was still jogging, heading down the middle of the street, but I wasn’t sprinting. Never staying still meant you catch your breath while on the run. It was just a slower run.

  Six more blocks and I was home. I barely looked up at the high-rise I’d been living in for close to five years. It had stopped being impressive years ago.

  Two dozen maintenance bots greeted me at the entrance as they undid the heavy bolts that held a panel of the armor plating in place. Plating that covered every square inch of the building’s facade. As soon as the panel was loose and open, I dove through and into pitch darkness. The bots got back to work, and the panel was secure before I even had a chance to pick myself up and move towards the escalator that filled the lobby of the building.

  The high-rise had been built by the Toki Corporation a decade before the world ended. State of the art, completely self-sufficient and off the grid, the building was meant to house the tech giant’s corporate headquarters as well as the residences of its executives. A bonus feature was the sixteen-story, underground server farm that hummed beneath thirty feet of reinforced concrete. That little nugget was key to why I chose the location I did.

  Get to that in a sec.

  Up the escalator I went, smiling as I always did when the steps angled themselves into a smooth slide behind me. Brilliant security feature. Even if a horde of undead got into the first floor, they would have a bitch of a time getting up to the second floor.

  Lights clicked on ahead of me, and clicked off behind me, as I made my way to the bank of elevators by the security desk. I waved at the flickering hologram of the generic security guard that had manned the desk since I’d arrived. He waved back, but that was the extent of our interaction. He wasn’t real, and I didn’t have time to waste on shit that wasn’t real.

  Which was ironic considering the undertaking I’d embarked on five years ago. An undertaking that involved the Nine and was about to finally climax in about five hours.

  The elevator took me a hundred stories up to the penthouse. I’d explored every single floor of the building, but the penthouse was where it was at. Total three hundred and sixty-degree views so I could see what hell was happening to the city around me. Bulletproof, impact proof, undead bird proof glass. Separate power and water from the rest of the building. If the main grid went down, my penthouse stayed up and running. So did the server farm far below, but that was a whole other ballgame.

  I stepped out of the elevator and was greeted by a harsh bark and a leaping Husky. I caught Holo in my arms and endured the intense face licking that I knew wouldn’t stop until we’d left the foyer and went inside the penthouse proper.

  And, yes, Holo knew how to work the elevator. He also had an implant chip like I did so the maintenance bots knew when to start unbolting the armor. Considering the level of automation the penthouse had, Holo could probably survive the rest of his life without me. We had enough food, if rationed properly. He was a dog, so it wasn’t like he was looking at decades of life expectancy anyway.

  Not in the real world, at least.

  The main door slid open, and I was overpowered by the intense last few rays of the setting sun as it lowered behind the few buildings that were close to the height of the Toki building. For the record, Toki wasn’t Japanese or Korean or even Asian. A Silicon Valley douche liked the sound of it.

  Holo leapt out of my arms and scrambled over to his water bowl, lapping it up in one sitting. A bot came out of a tiny alcove and refilled the bowl so Holo could keep drinking. Running from the undead was thirsty work.

  Speaking of.

  I set my small pack down on the dining table and pulled out a half-full bottle of bourbon. That was all I could find. Bullets and booze were the most scavenged items in the first few months of the end of the world. I was lucky I even found the bourbon at all. Not that it was easy to get. I had to track and kill an undead hipster first then struggle to get it free from the asshole’s grip. Again with the blood and gunk super glue.

  I wiped the bottle down, getting rid of that gunk, then carefully poured it into a clean decanter. I held up the decanter and looked through the amber liquid, making sure there were no floaters in there. Flesh floaters. Last thing I wanted was to get infected because I’d insisted on toasting the Nine’s success.

  But the bourbon was clear and clean.

  I poured a glass and sniffed it. It had been at least a year since I’d had anything other than water to drink. The bourbon tasted like grand plans and dreams come true.

  Holo barked and a bot appeared with his food bowl filled with tasty nuggets. I walked over and plucked a couple out of his bowl, ignoring his annoyed growl, and popped them into my mouth.

  Fresh food had disappeared a long time ago. It was carefully formulated nutritional nuggets for the both of us. The bots, and the system that ran them, took care of all of that.

  I sipped the bourbon again, mainly to wash the taste of nugget out of my mouth, then set the glass down on a side table as I made my way to the bathroom. Time to shower and get ready.

  Our new life was almost ready to begin.

  Four

  I didn’t bother with putting on clothes. No need.

  Not just because I was the only person in the penthouse, but because nudity was a prerequisite to connecting with the Center. Clothes interfered with the assimilation process and led to death or worse. And in the world ruled by the undead, there certainly was worse.

  I found my glass, lifted it high, smiled at the darkness outside, then downed the bourbon. I wanted to fill the glass and have another belt, but my tolerance was shit and I was already warm and perfectly buzzed from just the first shot.

  “Holo,” I called. “Game time.”

  The click and clatter of his claws on the tiles was instantaneous. He hurried from where he’d been resting on the massive couch in the center of the penthouse and sat down next to me, his body slightly leaning against my leg. He looked up at me and gave a questioning bark.

  “Last chance to back out, man,” I said to him. He gave me an annoyed whine and then a short, crisp bark. “Okay, okay. I know you’re all in, but this time we won’t be coming back. We talked about this, but I need to know you understand. Tests are one thing. This is the real deal. This is the final time we log in.”

  He growled and leaned harder against my leg, almost knocking me over.

  “Cool. I’m glad you’re still in,” I said. I pointed at a set of double doors at the far end of the penthouse. “Time to call the Nine and get this show on the road. Need to pee before we go?”

  He shook his head and ignored me as he trotted over to the double doors. They slid open for him and lights in the room beyond began to flicker on. He was halfway into the room before he stopped and turned to look at me. I hadn’t moved an inch.

  “Give me a second,” I said as I looked out the windows at the nightscape beyond.

  It was the last time I’d ever look at it. Or look at it with my own flesh and blood eyes. A similar nightscape was reproduced in one of the Domains, sure, but you just couldn’t beat the real thing. I sighed and closed my eyes.

  “Time is relative, thought is eternal,” I said to myself. It was my mantra. Those six words had kept me going for years when in my darkest moments I never thought I’d see the completion of all the Nine’s dreams and ambitions.

  Holo barked then walked over to his tank and slapped a paw against a big red button on the side. The lid opened and he climbed the five stairs to the small platform that surrounded his tank. He sat, his tail wagging, and waited for me to join him.

  “I’m good,” I said, feeling the need to justify my last few moments. “Hard to imagine that this is happening.”

  He huffed and leaned over his tank’s edge, sniffing the swirling, bright blue liquid that filled the tank. He sneezed several times, like he always did, then shook his whole body and readied himself for the plunge.

  “Hold
up,” I said.

  He relaxed and gave me a quizzical look.

  “Final protocol,” I called out.

  “Final protocol initiated,” a generic voice responded from the speakers hidden in the room’s ceiling. “Please give password for authentication.”

  “Darla. Pam. Luke. Heather,” I said. Those names had been significant to me before the end of the world. I felt like I was honoring them one last time by making them a part of the process. “Engage building lockdown and full automation. The place is yours from here on out, Jack.”

  “Lockdown engaged. Full automation initiated,” the voice, Jack, said. “I will do my best to keep all systems running until the end of time.”

  “We appreciate that, Jack,” I said as I turned and approached my own tank. I hit my big red button and the tank opened as I climbed my five steps to the platform. “How did the last diagnostics run go?”

  “It is not the last diagnostics run, Steve,” Jack replied.

  “It is for me,” I said.

  “That is true,” Jack said. “And everything is working perfectly. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “I have everything to worry about,” I said. “If it goes wrong here, then it will destroy the Center and all of the Domains. Ming never lets me forget that.”

  “Ming worries too much,” Jack said. “That level of anxiety is not healthy for humans.”

  Holo barked.

  “Not healthy for anyone,” I said. I stared down at the swirling blue liquid. “How long does it take?”

  “Full dissolution will take about five days,” Jack said. “You have twenty-four hours before the point of no return is passed.”

  “This is the final protocol, Jack,” I said. “The point of no return is when that tank lid closes and I suck up a lungful of blue. No backing out.”

  “I could stay with you,” Jack said. “That way if you change your—”

  “Nope,” I said, cutting him off. “I need you running the building and the farm. That’s your job from here on out.”

  “That’s always been my job,” Jack said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do.”

  Holo barked. It was loud and impatient. Then he did a Husky mumble in that high voice of his and I laughed.

  “Okay. Chill,” I said. I clapped my hands then held a foot over the edge of the tank. “Time to go.”

  Holo jumped into his tank at the same time I jumped into mine.

  The blue was warm and felt soothing against my tired muscles. It had been a long day.

  I took a last breath and ducked my head under the surface as the tank lid began to close over me. I glanced to my right and could see Holo in his tank, swimming in circles, already submerged completely. In some ways, he was more suited for our future than I was. He knew the reality of what living in a world of the undead meant and he was over it.

  The lid clicked closed and all air was sucked from the tank. Even if I wanted to surface, there was nothing to breathe. It was always best to get it over with fast.

  I emptied my lungs of air and let them fill with the blue. No matter how many times I’d done it, it was still distressing. Forced drowning was no fun.

  At least the blue was as soothing on the inside as it was on the outside. After I gagged and struggled for a minute, I relaxed into the process and let the blue do its job.

  I felt the tell-tale electric pulse rush through the liquid and my entire body went limp. It would take a few minutes for my mind to follow, but as far as my body was concerned, it was done. I couldn’t wiggle a toe or blink an eye if I’d wanted to. So I just let myself float in the blue and I stared out of the tank during those last few minutes.

  I could barely make out Holo in the tank next to mine. He was as limp as me, but his eyes were closed. He always let go so much easier than I did. Once that dog committed to an action, he stayed committed. His body floated, suspended by the gel that allowed us to interface with the quantum matrix and be transported, permanently this time, to the Center.

  The seconds ticked by, and my eyelids slowly drooped closed. There was a brief flash of light behind my lids then everything went black.

  It felt like an eternity before I heard, “Steve! Steve! Wake up! We did it!”

  Five

  Everyone was happy and congratulating each other as I opened my eyes to find myself seated in my usual chair against the wall of the Center. The place was a blank room with dark walls and horrible lighting. Shadows fell everywhere. It was Ming’s idea of mood. But despite the dreary setting, the Center had always been a good place to go.

  I stood up and stretched as Trish, a burly woman a few years older than me, maybe thirty or so, rushed at me and picked me up in a huge bear hug.

  “We did it!” Trish cried. “The final frontier! Immortality!”

  “It’s hardly immortality,” Coz said as he walked over to us.

  His face was always a frozen sneer, and his voice reflected it, but we were used to it. He couldn’t help it if he had half his face paralyzed when he was attacked by cannibals in his city. He was my age and built like a beanstalk, but he looked healthy and he was obviously trying to smile around his perma-sneer.

  “Close enough!” Trish shouted as she let me down. “Close e-fucking-nough!”

  I glanced across the large, shadowy space and could see Sandra wince at the curse. The woman was barely in her twenties and mousy as all hell. Not that she was small. She wasn’t. She was close to six feet tall and probably would have been one of those severe-looking models you used to see on Vanity Fair or Cosmo vidcasts. Except she came from a brutally strict fundamentalist family and never quite came out of her shell. Her idea of breaking out is leaving the top button of her cardigan sweater undone.

  Holo was busy making the rounds, getting pats and pets and loving all the attention. He didn’t even look over at me.

  I pretended that my best friend ignoring me was a-okay and studied the others. Then I realized something. Not everyone was there.

  Me, Trish, Coz, and Sandra made four. Holo was sitting with his back against a woman that had mom jeans on and a haircut to match. Laura. She was seriously scratching behind Holo’s ears. I smiled at her, but she was lost in the dog love.

  Kip was sitting upside down on the tattered leather couch that had been the first piece of furniture we’d placed in the Center. We could have made it brand new, shaped it however we wanted just like our clothing, but everyone liked the lived-in look and feel the couch had. Kip, who was in his mid-forties, bald, with a gut built from drinking soda non-stop, and that never stayed covered under his double extra-large T-shirt, caught me watching him and gave me a thumbs down.

  That meant that Henry, Jeremy, and Ming were missing.

  “Guys,” I said, interrupting Trish and Coz jabbering about something related to something I could care less about. “Where’re the others?”

  “Ming said he’d be late,” Coz replied. “No clue where Henry or Jeremy are.”

  “Hey!” I called out. Kip and Laura perked up. “You guys hear from Henry or Jeremy?”

  “Nope,” Kip said.

  “No. Sorry,” Laure replied. She always apologized, no matter what the question. Even if she had the answer.

  “That’s not good,” I said.

  “Relax, bro,” Holo said. “Life doesn’t flow to your schedule. It’s the apocalypse, bro. People are late. Shit happens.”

  Yes. My dog can talk.

  I should probably explain.

  In the late 22nd century, virtual reality had been surpassed and replaced by immersion tech. Full integration between the invented world and your mind/body existence. That’s what the tanks filled with blue were for. Every single molecule of your body could be tuned into whatever cybernetic landscape you wanted.

  Of course, porn and gaming took over instantly, pushing the tech to newer and greater heights. Gaming eventually won when it was discovered that exertion within the virtual world was as strenuous as it wa
s in the real world. In other words, some rich, fat guys died of heart attacks while banging their virtual mistresses. And a couple of gamers died in beta when they had their heads blown off in a first-person shooter.

  It was easy to install and regulate governors in the gaming world. No one really wanted to die. In the porn world, people hated rules more than the threat of death, so the governors forced on the industry by the government meant the immersion tanks were only used by the less adventurous sexually. Gaming became the dominant format for immersion.

  Fast forward seventy years and the tanks were so dialed in that people fell asleep while in the quantum matrix and would wake up and forget they weren’t in reality. People even dreamt while immersed. It was almost as real as real could be.

  Then the world ended. Things got bad. Very bad.

  I tooled around with a group of survivors for a year or so, but like everything in the apocalypse, that arrangement fell apart. There was a lot of blood and screaming and I barely got out of there, a whimpering Holo puppy held in one hand and my axe in the other.

  It was another year before I found the Toki building. The bots had it locked down, and I scouted that high-rise for two months before I found my way in.

  No one was left alive. Suicide pact or something. Corpses everywhere. The stink was overwhelming. Good thing I knew everything there was to know about maintaining bots.

  I had the high-rise cleaned up and put back together in less than three weeks. I even got Jack online. He was the central AI interface with the high-rise, but his programming was barely beta. He’d been the pet project of Jurgen Nemm, President and CEO of Toki Corp, but the world collapsed before Jack was finished.

  I’m not a programmer, far from it, but I could see his basic framework, so I started him up and began to teach him things. After a while, he became self-taught. He kept Toki Plaza running, and I kept the maintenance bots running when they couldn’t fix themselves.

  Then one night, Jack told me about the immersion tank room in the penthouse. I have no idea why I didn’t guess there would be one there already. Of course, Jurgen Nemm would have an immersion tank. And it was beyond next gen. It was about ten gens past that.